Have You Ever Experienced Radical Changes in Your Musical Taste?

[AnotherSpin]

I don't remember promoting him. You claimed that any music more complex than ringtones is elitist these days so I gave you an example of a man who become hugely popular precisely by performing music more complex than ringtones, thus refuting your rhetorical statement. That is all. But as I said in a previous post, forget about Rieu. How about The Three Tenors? Yo-Yo Ma? David Garrett? Montserrat Caballe? They all become popular worldwide precisely for, and by, performing music more complex than ringtones, and they all give the lie to your claim.

All of this hugely popular musicking is perfect for ringtones.

[steve ridgway]

All of this hugely popular musicking is perfect for ringtones.

I have mine set to 4'33".

[DavidW]

"Blessed are [those who do not know AR]; for they shall be comforted".

Yes but if they don't know Wendy Carlos or Victor Borge they've really missed out!

[Florestan]

I'm not particularly a fan of Andre Rieu, but I don't hold him in the contempt that seems to be the norm here. He is a competent violinist (although solo violin lines in Strauss Waltzes are not tests of virtuosity) and he knows how to ham up a Waltz. I don't see his performances any less appropriate than a stuffy concert in the Großer Musikvereinssaal packed with wealthy people in tuxedos.

Excellent post, especially the bold part.

[Florestan]

All of this hugely popular musicking is perfect for ringtones.

Ah, yes, I forgot: if it's for everybody it's not art and if it's art it's not for everybody; moreover, whatever is popular is automatically low quality. I'm sorry but I don't buy this snobbery.

[AnotherSpin]

I'm not particularly a fan of Andre Rieu, but I don't hold him in the contempt that seems to be the norm here. He is a competent violinist (although solo violin lines in Strauss Waltzes are not tests of virtuosity) and he knows how to ham up a Waltz. I don't see his performances any less appropriate than a stuffy concert in the Großer Musikvereinssaal packed with wealthy people in tuxedos.

The very first time I went to the Musikverein at early 90s. I got cheap admission tickets that allowed to enter the carpeted space at the back of the hall. At first everyone was standing there, but then some sat down and some, like me and my friends, laid down on the carpet. The Boston SO with Seiji Ozawa played Beethoven's 4th and Mahler's 4th. No tuxedos, jeans most probably.

[AnotherSpin]

Ah, yes, I forgot: if it's for everybody it's not art and if it's art it's not for everybody; moreover, whatever is popular is automatically low quality. I'm sorry but I don't buy this snobbery.

You don't have to.

[Karl Henning]

Let's end the conceit of not knowing who Andre Rieu is. He's a classically trained musician who has taken to playing Strauss Waltzes and related repertoire with his own orchestra, consisting mostly of ladies in ballroom gowns. He says he decided to do this because he saw how happy the music made his audience (well, and because he made a mint).

He found a way to be happy and to make a pile of money doing it. In a real sense I admire him.

[Spotted Horses]

The very first time I went to the Musikverein at early 90s. I got cheap admission tickets that allowed to enter the carpeted space at the back of the hall. At first everyone was standing there, but then some sat down and some, like me and my friends, laid down on the carpet. The Boston SO with Seiji Ozawa played Beethoven's 4th and Mahler's 4th. No tuxedos, jeans most probably.

I don't know what goes on at the Musikverein on any given day. I was thinking of the new years concert where the WPO puts on a concert of Strauss Waltzes. I don't see any jeans or people laying down on the carpet during the TV broadcast.

[AnotherSpin]

I don't know what goes on at the Musikverein on any given day. I was thinking of the new years concert where the WPO puts on a concert of Strauss Waltzes. I don't see any jeans or people laying down on the carpet during the TV broadcast.

Vienna is very expensive and rather prim city, like other old world capitals. Nevertheless, even there one could, if desired, find ways to enjoy music with rather low cost. This is what pensioners, students and occasional tourists took advantage of.

[Opus131]

Depends on what you mean by classical music. Music written in the Classical Era proper was most emphatically not a kind of religion. Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Boccherini, Cimarosa or Paisiello or indeed any of their contemporaries can hardly if at all be mentioned on the same page with mysticism.

Actually, the turning of music from an entertaining and edifying art into a religion of art was initiated and propagated not as much by musicians as by literati, especially the German ones. The pseudo-mystical, pseudo-religious twaddle that such overexcited people as Tieck and Wackenroder wrote about the music of their time is incredible. They had mystical raptures and spiritual revelations while listening to Johann Friedrich Reichardt's Macbeth overture (this being the only composer and work mentioned nominally by Wackenroder). Please read the description of the way the fictional musician Joseph Berglinger listened to music and then tell me which secular music from around 1797, when the book was published, could have really warranted this kind of religious ecstasy. Their work was continued and expanded by another feverish writer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, with whom the deification of Beethoven was set in motion full speed (together with the devaluation of Haydn).

It's interesting to note that the musicians proper were much more sober and cool-headed than their literary counterparts and succumbed to the music-as-religion, composer-as-demigod nonsense only gradually and partially. All throughout the 19th and early 20th century, lots of composers, greater and lesser, were no mystics at all and regarded music through the balanced and businesslike lens of the previous aesthetics rather than through the mystical haze of full-fledged Romanticism.

Needless to say, only in an age when the genuine religious sentiment of the musicians and their audiences was weakened and diluted could music have been seriously regarded, proposed, promoted and accepted as a substitute.

I don't think classical music as a form of mysticism was something that was artificially created, as you say.

I agree that in the absence of a real mystical path, many "spiritually" oriented individuals sought to carve their own way, which is often a recipe for distaster, but the attempt was genuine. I'm not convinced by this notion that some "literati" just decided one day that classical music ought to be reguarded as a kind mysticism and everybody just accepted this notion blindly, without there being an actual mystical element in the music itself or a genuine mystical expression (or the attempt at a mystical expression anyway) on the part of the composers themselves.

Bach probably had a big role in elevating classical music to a kind of means for spiritual expression or realization, and then of course there's late Beethoven as well, which seemed to reflect a real spiritual state of being Beethoven had reached in his later years and many of the composers that followed were clearly quite receptive to this change in his expression. 

Now, granted, i'm of the opinion that any attempt to create a spritual path outside of Revelation is invariably always going to end up badly, but i think the attempt was there, it was real, and it explains quite a few things not only in terms of the kind of music many composers sought to make but also in terms of the technical developments that went along with that. For instance, it's clear to me that modern music was the result of an attempt to escape the confines of relativity. The error of modernism in music (as well as in modern art in general) is that you cannot transcend form from without, only from within, but still, from Wagner to Scriabin, one can definitely see that this attempt to "free" oneself from form did not exist for its own sake but stemmed from a desire to touch the infinite in some way.

I mean, even in jazz we see some parallels, like in the music of John Coltrane, which eventually culminated in free jazz because Coltrane was using music as a sort of spiritual or mystical realization.

As for music as a form of entertainment for the general public, i find that was part of the issue as well. European culture after the Renaissance and the rise of Humanism sort of became a bit "too human". The attempt to turn music and other arts into a kind of mysticism was likely a kind of reaction to music becoming too trivial, too "bourgeois" if you will. I'm not a great fan of Nietzsche but i will say what he was reacting against, this lack of any sense of "grandeur" in the culture of his age was a real problem.

I'm not saying music as a form of entertainment is necessarely bad, but i can see how after a while this "bourgeoisie" aspect of 18th century and 19th centry culture became quite oppressive to individuals who aspired for something higher. Religion itself too seemed to have become victim of this "bourgeoisie" mentality, as it is today. Catholicism in the middle ages was profoundly mystical as well as being rigorously intellectual. It was considerably less so by the time Mozart came into the fore (his father, who was a "bourgeoisie" Catholic through and through, couldn't understand why his son wouldn't just accept his position as Church composer at Salzburg) and it is FAR less so today.

With all this said, i'm not remotely suggesting one should start to worship the music of Wagner as if it was an actual genuine mysticism, i'm just pointing out there may have been a genuine reason for why so many composers went into that direction.

[Jo498]

Rieu is a TV superstar in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
It's the last remnant of "light classical" being broadly popular. As late as the 1980s real opera singers would be guests in TV game shows in Germany and for a while Anneliese Rothenberger was a show host on TV (probably in the 70s, Sergeant Rock remembered more about this in another thread, I am bit too young and barely remember the 70s).
It's ambiguous of course, because it also perpetuates the idea of Classical as kitschy music for Grannies but I think a presence of (light) classical in mainstream media as it was until the 1980s also helped to get people interested in classical music beyond operetta or other light stuff.

[Opus131]

Never heard of this Andre Rieu fellow either. I checked on youtube and found a concert of his. I skimmed in the middle and had to chuckle at the camera continuously cutting to the audience to show crying or overjoyed faces.

[Opus131]

He found a way to be happy and to make a pile of money doing it. In a real sense I admire him.

Isn't this what Brahms actually said about Strauss?

[Opus131]

Ah, yes, I forgot: if it's for everybody it's not art and if it's art it's not for everybody; moreover, whatever is popular is automatically low quality. I'm sorry but I don't buy this snobbery.

I wouldn't say that whatever is popular is automatically low quality by virtue of being popular in and of itself, but i WILL say that whatever is popular today is likely to be very bad given the sordid state of modern culture.

[Florestan]

He found a way to be happy and to make a pile of money doing it. In a real sense I admire him.

He also makes lots of other people than himself happy (his audiences, for instance, or his orchestra and technical staff).

[Florestan]

I wouldn't say that whatever is popular is automatically low quality by virtue of being popular in and of itself, but i WILL say that whatever is popular today is likely to be very bad given the sordid state of modern culture.

This complaint is as old as the recorded history itself.

[Florestan]

Sorry for the belated reply to this but in the flurry of exchange, some posts are easily overlooked.

One of my favored composers of the early 20th century for instance is Bela Bartok. Now, it would be unfair to make a comparison with German composers like Beethoven or Bach because even if one were to argue that Bartok belongs to the same order of "greatness" the stylistic difference alone may still tip things in favor of the earlier German composers, provided one prefers their style over that of a modern composer like Bartok, which i think i do, and the fact Hungary didn't produce a "major" composer until Franz Liszt (to my knowledge anyway) means Germany wins this contest but it does so for purely relative reasons.

I'd say Bartok's greatness, mutatis mutandis, is not lesser than Beethoven's. Consider: he was a versatile composer who wrote in every genre available to him (just like Beethoven; about a dozen of his works are famous and have become a staple of the concert repertoire (just like Beethoven); he influenced many great composers (just like Beethoven; his music is appreciated both by audiences and musicologists (just like Beethoven's); he was a prominent and seminal figure of modernism (just as Beethoven was of late classicism/early romanticism). Why shoudl he then be regarded as a lesser composer?

I also think the privileged position Germany occupies in the history of music

Germany occupies such a position only for those historians of music, or those music lovers, who privilege the German approach to music; for all others it has no such special position.

is likewise similarly relative. At some point in their history, music became important to them in a way it wasn't in other countries. Why this was the case is hard to say. It could be that Germany experienced their Renaissance except in music and not the figurative arts like in Italy. It could be an indirect consequence of Luther's predilection for music (i believe he said music was second only to theology in terms of expressing the Word of God, or something along those lines), which may have steered the German psyche to look at music with an interest that other cultures didn't share even beyond the original Lutheran context.

You seem to suggest here an idea which in another context you rejected, namely that the writings of one or several persons can influence the subsequent thinking of a whole category of artists or even of a whole people. The context in which you rejected it is my mentioning the writings of the Tieck/Wackenroder duo as being seminal for  initiating and propagating the German romantic mysticism of absolute music. But you can't say they couldn't have done that while at the same time maintaining Luther did.

If i had to compare my country of origin, which is Italy, i say Germany-Austria come out as the winners.

I beg to differ. Italy is not musically inferior to Austria-Germany and it can even be argued that without Italian music and influence there would have been no Austrian-German music as we know it; when Italy was busy inventing music (both instrumental and vocal including opera) and music notation/theory, the German lands were far behind. But actually such comparisons are rather moot. Music and musical aesthetics have developed under different, sometimes radically different, conditions in Italy and the German lands; it's interesting, though, that in those German lands which were the closest to Italy both geographically and spiritually (Roman Catholic Austria and Bohemia first and foremost) the Italian influence was greater and more profound than in others.

But even here we find questions of a purely relative nature. For instance, i do not like opera as much as i like symphonies or chamber music, and opera just happens to have been THE premiere musical genre of Italy for the longest time.

Why, this proves one of my earlier points. As the symphony and the chamber music were genres to which the Germans were particularly devoted from the Classical era onward, it's only natural that you privilege German music over Italian one. A devotee of opera or of Baroque instrumental music may differ greatly in their evaluations.

I'm also of the opinion the Catholic Church held a kind of monopoly on "serious" thought in Italy anyway which might explain why the arts tended to focus more on the entertainment of the masses rather than become a kind of substitute to religion like it happened with music in Germany.

This is a good observation. Indeed, it can be argued that the strongly social and popular character of the Catholic Church translated in the music of Catholic countries being itself social and popular (like in Italy, Austria, France, Spain and Bohemia) while the strongly individualist and intimate character of Protestantism produced music of a more individual and cerebral kind.

Lastly, considering the number of "great" artists in a given country is always infinitesimal compared to the general population, and considering how decisive cultural changes seem to be (how many "great" composers did Germany produce during the middle ages?) it almost feels like the only reason a certain country produced a great artist and another one didn't is because the first flipped the right coin (personally, i don't think it's so much a matter of chance but "destinity" but i don't want to go there for the moment). Whatever converge of factors are involved in the flourishing of a genius they appear to be so rare, so precarious in nature to try to draw lines on national grounds seems like a waste of time.

I'll modify that: the reason why Italy did not produce a Beethoven is that Germany flipped not the right coin but a different coin. True, there is no Italian Beethoven and there could not have been one; but then again, there is no German Rossini and there could not have been one. The German culture in general and their philosophy of music in particular were very different from their Italian counterparts and valuing one (far) above the other is simply a matter of personal taste and preference. There is absolutely no objective criteria on which such a value judgment could be founded; saying that German music is superior because "profound and mystical" while Italian music is inferior because "light and sensuous" already presupposes that profundity and mysticism are higher artistic values than lightness and sensuousness, and by which irrefutable authority has this been established? (valid also for the reverse case of valuing Italian music above the German one).

IMO, Beethoven is not the right coin nor is Rossini the wrong one --- they are the two sides of the same coin.

The question becomes even more obvious when you start comparing entire civilizations and not just countries. Where are the non-European "geniuses"? I know some people try their hardest to look under ever nook and cranny in foreign civilizations to "prove" there's Beethovens and Mozarts there as well, forgetting that the only reason Europe produced so many individual geniuses is that it developed individualism while other civilizations didn't (and didn't need to i might add).

This is yet another good observation.

[Florestan]

I don't think classical music as a form of mysticism was something that was artificially created, as you say.

It was artificially created in the sense in which all art (as its very name implies) is artificially created.

I'm not convinced by this notion that some "literati" just decided one day that classical music ought to be reguarded as a kind mysticism and everybody just accepted this notion blindly,

If this is what you inferred from what I wrote, either I was not clear enough or you misunderstood me.

without there being an actual mystical element in the music itself or a genuine mystical expression (or the attempt at a mystical expression anyway) on the part of the composers themselves.

Bach probably had a big role in elevating classical music to a kind of means for spiritual expression or realization, and then of course there's late Beethoven as well, which seemed to reflect a real spiritual state of being Beethoven had reached in his later years and many of the composers that followed were clearly quite receptive to this change in his expression.

Wackenroder&Tieck's book Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders which is where they first formulated their mystical theory of music was published in 1796. By that time, JS Bach's music, while not forgotten as it is often claimed, was known only to professional musicians, and Beethoven's late music was almost a quarter of a century ahead. So I ask you again: which publicly performed, contemporary instrumental music from around 1796 warrants the kind of mystical approach promoted by Wackenroder&Tieck?   

For instance, it's clear to me that modern music was the result of an attempt to escape the confines of relativity. The error of modernism in music (as well as in modern art in general) is that you cannot transcend form from without, only from within, but still, from Wagner to Scriabin, one can definitely see that this attempt to "free" oneself from form did not exist for its own sake but stemmed from a desire to touch the infinite in some way.

You've lost me here. I have no idea what you are talking about.

As for music as a form of entertainment for the general public, i find that was part of the issue as well. European culture after the Renaissance and the rise of Humanism sort of became a bit "too human". The attempt to turn music and other arts into a kind of mysticism was likely a kind of reaction to music becoming too trivial, too "bourgeois" if you will.

Right. "If it's for the bourgeoisie/the masses/everybody, it's not art and if it's art it's not for the bourgeoisie/the masses/everybody". 

I'm not a great fan of Nietzsche but i will say what he was reacting against, this lack of any sense of "grandeur" in the culture of his age was a real problem.

.
Nietzsche was clinically mad. 

I'm not saying music as a form of entertainment is necessarely bad, but i can see how after a while this "bourgeoisie" aspect of 18th century and 19th centry culture became quite oppressive to individuals who aspired for something higher.

Sure. Hence the rift between "serious/high brow/profound/artistic" music and "light/low brow/superficial/commercial" music which first appeared in the 19th century and became greater and greater as time went by, reaching its climax in the decades immediately following after the WWII. IMO this development has been extremely prejudicial.

Religion itself too seemed to have become victim of this "bourgeoisie" mentality, as it is today. Catholicism in the middle ages was profoundly mystical as well as being rigorously intellectual. It was considerably less so by the time Mozart came into the fore (his father, who was a "bourgeoisie" Catholic through and through, couldn't understand why his son wouldn't just accept his position as Church composer at Salzburg) and it is FAR less so today.

"Profoundly mystical" and "rigorously intellectual" are rather contradictory notions. I don't think Thomas à Kempis (incidentally, a German) and Thomas Aquinas (incidentally, an Italian) are interchangeable.

Be it as it may, do you suggest that Middle Age Catholicism and art (music included) should be revived?

With all this said, i'm not remotely suggesting one should start to worship the music of Wagner as if it was an actual genuine mysticism, i'm just pointing out there may have been a genuine reason for why so many composers went into that direction.

That was the Zeitgeist especially in Germany, and since that young country was in full and steep economic and military ascendance in the late 19th century, it was only too natural for her to try to extend her superiority in the cultural realm as well, or for intellectuals and artists in other countries to take them as a model.

After WWI, though, musical mysticism was on general retreat and the rising waves of Neoclassicism and  Serialism kind of swept it away. Reaction and counter-reaction.

[steve ridgway]

After WWI, though, musical mysticism was on general retreat and the rising waves of Neoclassicism and  Serialism kind of swept it away. Reaction and counter-reaction.

And now that Progress itself has been swept away we are free to pick and mix from the music and ideas of any period that take our fancy.