Unpopular Opinions

[Karl Henning]

I assert no such thing. My perspective is that of an audience member.

That is fine, but exactly as you would resist the idea that you are like all audience members, everywhere, the Audience is not a monolith.  As Alan Arkin reproaches Peter Falk in The In Laws, "Don't underestimate the man in the street, buddy."

That's the flawed premise of all the second (and first!) -tier US orchestras who claim they need half the annual program to be Beethoven, or they won't sell tickets.  (A rhetorical exaggeration, yes.)


Audience members everywhere still have the resources (more resources, arguably) to acquire depth of perception in music.  I suppose the terrible, terrible thing about our day is, this opportunity resides in the freedom of the individual, and is not collateral to a variety of social limitations which used to be the rule.

[Madiel]

I'm actually quite surprised at the reactions to Florestan's post. To me there's no doubt that the ability to passively consume music in the home has made a significant difference to our relationship with music.

Whether it's all to the worse or the better, I'm not sure, and that's why I found the remark thought-provoking. But I can well understand the view that music offered more when it was an active pursuit.

[Karl Henning]

I should say it is neither all to the worse, nor all to the better.  But probably I have yammered enough.

[Florestan]

I'm actually quite surprised at the reactions to Florestan's post. To me there's no doubt that the ability to passively consume music in the home has made a significant difference to our relationship with music.

Whether it's all to the worse or the better, I'm not sure, and that's why I found the remark thought-provoking. But I can well understand the view that music offered more when it was an active pursuit.

Thanks.

I should say it is neither all to the worse, nor all to the better.

I agree, and I alluded to this indeterminacy myself. I just dissent from meliorism.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

At first, I thought you were proposing that this as (per the thread) an Unpopular Opinion  0:)

Take it however way you will

[Karl Henning]

Take it however way you will

Why, I take it simply as, you enjoy Andrei's particapation. So do I.

[Karl Henning]

I'm actually quite surprised at the reactions to Florestan's post. To me there's no doubt that the ability to passively consume music in the home has made a significant difference to our relationship with music.

Whether it's all to the worse or the better, I'm not sure, and that's why I found the remark thought-provoking. But I can well understand the view that music offered more when it was an active pursuit.

How do you mean was?   

Actually, I'll yammer just a bit more, in case my response is part of what seems puzzling.

Andrei's suggestion is not an idea new to my ears (I'm not saying it is not thought-provoking).  Apart from what strikes me as unprofitable (in a spiritual sense) longing for a different social milieu (liberally endued with a nostalgic haze) – talking about the idea as it has more than once come in across the transom, not making Andrei responsible for all this – this suggestion appears to me as a kind of companion piece to . . .

. . . at regular intervals we see (from celebrity bloviators like Lebrecht, among others) someone wringing his hands in print or pixels over The Death of Classical Music.  I finished a new arrangement for voice and piano (with optional flute or violin obbligato) three days ago, so The Death of Classical Music is not any part of my experience, and I have to wonder why those people need, so deeply, to allege such a dire cultural catastrophe.

I make music, regularly, and in the present.  So I mean our dear Andrei no ill, but you understand why I do not much indulge the doomsayers and the nostalgists.  If others wish to indulge them, that's their time, energies, and bag, and I wish them joy of it.

There:  Now I have done yammering 

[Karl Henning]

I agree, and I alluded to this indeterminacy myself. I just dissent from meliorism.

Very well.

[Brian]

I will also chime in in support of Andrei, on a different point. He does make a bit of a straw man about all classical concerts being stuffy and dark and user-hostile when a huge number of performers and orchestras are trying to change that. But I agree with him that they can change that stuffiness and that formality without taking away the sense of wonder, or harming our ability to hear & enjoy.

One of the coolest concerts I've been to in the last year was when two Dallas Symphony violinists (one the concertmaster) presented a set of violin duos by Handel, Mozart, and Halvorsen...inside a cocktail bar...for free. Let me tell you, the bar was so full it was barely possible to move, everyone was in their 20s and 30s, we were all drinking wonderful things, and we all listened in respectful silence (no chiming phones), and everyone loved it!

[Jo498]

The supposed "stuffiness" of the concert hall has nothing to do with the easy technical reproduction and omnipresence of recorded music, though. There are about 100 years or so between these two phenomena: the bourgeois concert being established in the 1830s and recorded music becoming a mass phenomenon around/after WW II. 
I think that the opposite could be true: Because we are so used to background music from records, radio etc. and to casual listening in our underwear we find it "stuffy" to dress up and put the music on "center stage" in a classical concert.
One should keep in mind that the stuffy mores of the classical concert evolved precisely because guys like Beethoven threw tantrums when people kept talking through their playing, or more generally when music evolved that demanded the full attention of the listener so musicians and devoted listeners demanded an environment where one could focus on the music without distractions.

[Madiel]

I make music, regularly, and in the present.

Yes, you do. But surely you are aware that the proportion of people who make music regularly is vastly lower than it once was. Your own life isn't evidence of a popular trend. Pointing to oneself as an individual and declaring that you regularly ingest cat's milk would not make it a common activity.

And as far as I'm concerned this has nothing to do with "the death of classical music" or any such thing. The genre of music matters little. Whatever type of music one is talking about, people used to make a lot more music themselves because it was by far the simplest method of hearing music. Nowadays the simplest method is to spend 10 seconds typing a search term into Youtube.

In terms of what I've been investigating recently, nothing illustrates this better than choral music. It seems to have been pretty ubiquitous in a large chunk of the 19th century. Certainly, a lot of major composers produced it. And they did it because singing in choirs was one of THE most common ways that people participated in making music (above all it was cheap), so the demand for new songs to sing was high. But recordings now are uncommon compared to something like orchestral music, and the output has a far lower perceived status. Joining choirs is much rarer, especially for adults. People just don't sing in that way in large numbers. They most likely sing along to professional performances of popular music.

[Jo498]

You might be correct about the trends but I think you underestimate how many laypeople sing in church or other choirs in countries with strong traditions of such choral singing, particularly parts of Britain, Germany and Scandinavia (but probably elsewhere as well, it's just that I am pretty sure about these).

[Karl Henning]

One of the coolest concerts I've been to in the last year was when two Dallas Symphony violinists (one the concertmaster) presented a set of violin duos by Handel, Mozart, and Halvorsen...inside a cocktail bar...for free. Let me tell you, the bar was so full it was barely possible to move, everyone was in their 20s and 30s, we were all drinking wonderful things, and we all listened in respectful silence (no chiming phones), and everyone loved it!

That is already a different quality of experience than an utter waste of the music which was a "Cabaret" event as part of some three-day new music festival in Buffalo, my final year at UB.  The acoustics were lousy, and the patrons were not there for the musical event (so, some mismanagement/miscommunication . . . sort of iconic for Buffalo, really).  My worst experience as either performer or composer in my life.

[Madiel]

You might be correct about the trends but I think you underestimate how many laypeople sing in church or other choirs in countries with strong traditions of such choral singing, particularly parts of Britain, Germany and Scandinavia (but probably elsewhere as well, it's just that I am pretty sure about these).

Yes, I'm aware it's remained stronger in some parts of the world than others. But I wouldn't cite church as a great example, given the way church attendances are falling. It's true that church is one of the few social settings where people frequently sing, but it's less and less true that people are turning up to church beyond weddings, funerals and Christmas.

[Karl Henning]

Yes, you do. But surely you are aware that the proportion of people who make music regularly is vastly lower than it once was. Your own life isn't evidence of a popular trend. Pointing to oneself as an individual and declaring that you regularly ingest cat's milk would not make it a common activity.

And as far as I'm concerned this has nothing to do with "the death of classical music" or any such thing. The genre of music matters little. Whatever type of music one is talking about, people used to make a lot more music themselves because it was by far the simplest method of hearing music. Nowadays the simplest method is to spend 10 seconds typing a search term into Youtube.

In terms of what I've been investigating recently, nothing illustrates this better than choral music. It seems to have been pretty ubiquitous in a large chunk of the 19th century. Certainly, a lot of major composers produced it. And they did it because singing in choirs was one of THE most common ways that people participated in making music (above all it was cheap), so the demand for new songs to sing was high. But recordings now are uncommon compared to something like orchestral music, and the output has a far lower perceived status. Joining choirs is much rarer, especially for adults. People just don't sing in that way in large numbers. They most likely sing along to professional performances of popular music.

To be sure, I do not represent myself as the norm 

I don't deny that things have changed and are changing;  I have been either a church chorister or church music director for most of my life, so I have been a close observer of the great changes in that corner of the musical world.  (There was once a flourishing organ-building industry in New England, too;  it was terribly symbolic when the New England Conservatory chloroformed the organ department.)  There remain many opportunities for people who want to sing as volunteers in choruses, in the Boston area, at least;  but it is not the staple of practically everyone's week, which it was at the turn of the 20^th century.

I see the change.  I only question the certainty of what the changes "mean."  And I have my musical work.

And, no, my behavior is not normative 

[ritter]

My exception with our dear Florestan's position is that yes, of course domestic, amateur music-making is (proportionately) less widespread nowadays than it was in the mid-18th century (even if the proportion of households that today can own (or, actually, do own) a piano is infinetly higher than that of households that could afford a harpsichord then). But if we look at the art of music as a whole, music of extraordinary quality that in no way whatsoever is suitable to that domestic setting (the examples are too many and too obvious to be even mentioned) is avaiable to the masses thanks to the 2stiff" concert hall or opera house, the LP, the CD, YouTube, Spotify, etc., etc.

Or does anyone seriously believe that a "communal" performance of Tristan und Isolde is feasible and worth pursuing?

[Karl Henning]

Yes, I'm aware it's remained stronger in some parts of the world than others. But I wouldn't cite church as a great example, given the way church attendances are falling. It's true that church is one of the few social settings where people frequently sing, but it's less and less true that people are turning up to church beyond weddings, funerals and Christmas.

There is the downstream effect of US public school choral programs shrinking, either in number or size, or in musical vision.  American Idol is a poor model here.

[Madiel]

My exception with our dear Florestan's position is that yes, of course domestic, amateur music-making is (proportionately) less widespread nowadays than it was in the mid-18th century (even if the proportion of households that today can own (or, actually, do own) a piano is infinetly higher than that of households that could afford a harpsichord then). But if we look at the art of music as a whole, music of extraordinary quality that in no way whatsoever is suitable to that domestic setting (the examples are too many and too obvious to be even mentioned) is avaiable to the masses thanks to the 2stiff" concert hall or opera house, the LP, the CD, YouTube, Spotify, etc., etc.

Or does anyone seriously believe that a "communal" performance of Tristan und Isolde is feasible and worth pursuing?

I'm pretty sure that Florestan made that exact point: the nature of the music has changed as the nature of the available musicians has changed.

The question is whether sitting in a seat for Tristan und Isolde is a better experience than making music with your friends and family. Suggesting that it would be the same music rather misses the point.

[amw]

The main thing I've noticed about choirs these days is no tenors.

To extrapolate seriously from that, though—choral singing these days, particularly amateur choral singing, is a pretty female-dominated field. At the time when lots of major 19th century composers were writing choral music, the reverse was true; it was male-dominated, with heaps of men's choirs acting as social clubs and such across European capitals. It seems like for whatever reason, at some point, women became much more interested in choral singing, and men lost much of their interest in doing so—I have no idea in what order. In any case though, once men stopped singing in choirs so much, the activity lost most of its prestige, something that seems to happen to a surprisingly large number of fields (e.g. the social sciences). But there are still a lot of amateur choirs around—my city has a quite sizeable number—and as far as I know, almost all of them struggle to find tenors. The exception being ones based in Otahuhu/Manukau/Otara/other areas with large Pacific populations, where singing is much more culturally important and part of education from an early age.

Thus endeth the dissertation.

I do sometimes wonder what our musical culture would look like if communal music-making was the norm and concert performances the exception, rather than the other way round. Most likely very little of the music we listen to now would have ever been composed, but I don't think we'd have wanted it, anyway.

[ritter]

The question is whether sitting in a seat for Tristan und Isolde is a better experience than making music with your friends and family.

No problem there, as the answer is soooo easy: YES!

And yes, I have sung in a chorus in my youth (not a church choir, but an amateur group that perfomed Bach cantatas, Vivaldi's Gloria, that kind of thing--with a professional orchestra), and I have played the piano--poorly, but enough to tackle some Ravel, some Busoni, some preludes from DSCH's op. 87). But the musical "high points" of my life were not those, but rather seeing Parsifal in Bayreuth, seeing Boulez conduct his Répons, that kind of thing...