|
SPANKED!
February 27, 2010, 08:01 AM posted by Maria Choban A dear friend of mine, one of my favorite writers (who also did a stint as a classical music critic for a local paper) and one of the smartest people I know, brought me up short on my need to fight seemingly losing battles (I have a good track record for taking stuff on and turning the ship around......eventually....with a LOT of help). I've quoted the entire email because .......well...... I'm so damned proud and impressed to have smart friends like him, even though I don't agree and I'll go on immolating myself in my own flame. Below is his email: Maria, I imagine I'd check out music blogs if you sent me a direct, working link, but I don't have the interest or energy to seek them out. It's not exactly a field where "the latest" has a lot of value, and I certainly can't imagine why you'd expect to find useful ideas on how the music should break out of its narrow audience niche. Of course, I've always been ambivalent about the energy you've expended within classical circles ragging on them for complacently pushing the same dead composers. Niche performers and their fans have a perfect right to enjoy whatever they enjoy. That they smugly dismiss fresher and more exciting music just because it's more recent is mostly their own problem. The bigger problem of classical music is that it manages to be omnipresent and anonymous at the same time. It isn't the fault of musicians that I could watch the entire women's final in ice skating last night--the concessions I make to having a teenaged girl in the house--and spent the whole time playing "name that tune" without ever having the commentators tell me whether I was right or wrong. It was all stuff a classical fan would know, although I found myself discomfited at times because, say, I couldn't remember whose familiar romantic piano concerto it was that inserts the Dies Irae at a couple of points, or because something I first thought was Tchaikovsky ballet music might just have been the "Dance of the Seven Veils" from "Salome". But if I'm not in the room there's no one to tell Cyrano that the "song" he liked was the Gershwin Concerto and the one he didn't care for was from Bizet's "Carmen," at least in part in the Sarasate adaptation. The only "modern" music used in accompaniments was the theme music from the HBO series Rome (used by the Japanese skater who was costumed as Cleopatra) with its eastern music elements and lively percussion; it's eclectic but well within the main stream of classical film composition, which industry is, of course, where you go to work if you really want to get paid to write orchestral music with full Mahlerian resources. From a writer's standpoint I was always frustrated by being ghettoized with the other so-called "Arts" genres, theater and dance. They're all what in biological terms might be called "relic species" survivors of eras when they were major forces in the entertainment industry, still hanging on and doing their thing after new genres have taken over large swathes of the ecosystem. I could push the analogy further, I think, and compare those arts to the perissodactyls, which is to say, the big herbivores with an odd number of toes, of whom the surviving groups are the tapirs, rhinos and horses. Once upon a time they were widespread, but the bovines and sheep and deer and camels and such squeezed them out. I think you could argue that the problem for classical music isn't that it's threatened with extinction, but that, like horses, most of what survives has been domesticated. There aren't many wild horses left, just as there aren't a lot of classical composers earning a living by their music, and almost all of them are in Hollywood, which probably counts as domesticated. Of course, domestication isn't necessarily bad; domesticated animals are still at the center of our food industries, but our favorite perissodactyls, who were once a productive part of everyone's daily life, have been pushed to fringes. A hundred years ago we were still at a point where horses and mules were a key part of the economy, pulling plows and carriages and delivery wagons even a few streetcars in towns that hadn't yet gone electric. They were already past their peak and were headed for a huge crash. Classical music was in the same position; people still wrote symphonies and attended concerts, and everyone who could afford it owned a piano, but recordings had recently made professional music available in the home, ragtime had unleashed the first major wave of popular music, and the flood of new tunes from Tin Pan Alley, and the emergence of jazz were barely over the horizon. Today a lot of people still love horses, even though they now cost a lot more money than you can hope to make from their work. People who are rich enough ride them and sometimes buy them to race, and people do still pay to ride or to watch them run. In a similar fashion, symphony orchestras and operas are no longer viable as economic entities; they simply require too many skilled workers for the audience to pay back the investment. They are kept going as the stables are, by the people who can afford to indulge their love. An awful lot of great art was created to please rich patrons, so we can't complain too much about the donor-based structure that keeps the big institutions going. It is frustrating that visual artists have created a cachet for their fringe experiments that allows people to earn a lot of money on their marginally-comprehensible creations, while no similar device has been found to keep classical composers in the money. I guess that's because music isn't a part of decor, something that can signal one's wealth and up-to-date taste to anyone who walks into the overpriced room, and because a composition is a replicable art that doesn't go up in price over time the way one-of-kind objects can. Composers of innovative modern music are writing to impress their peers and tenure committees. Anyway, I think we would argue that classical music deserves a bigger niche, because it's still capable of giving people pleasure and excitement, and the chamber and solo genres that aren't trapped by modern economic realities can still earn money, could in theory double their market share and make possible a living for many more performers. And show riding could in theory steal some market share from stock car racing--I don't care for either, especially, but at least the prissy show jumpers don't destroy my eardrums--but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Horse-lovers are certainly as passionate about the object of their interest as piano players are, but they're both fighting their way upstream against history. There was a time when you needed to ride a horse (or at least drive a team) if you wanted to get anywhere reasonably quickly that wasn't on the rail lines, and in that same age you'd jolly well better know how to play piano if you wanted to enjoy much music in your home. Nowadays you can accomplish both ends without the investment of time and money. People still learn to ride, because they enjoy it, and they learn to play piano for the same reason, but the fan base of people who ride or play and will come watch the professionals show their skills in those fields is much smaller now that there's not such a compelling reason for people to learn those skills themselves. Writers have a different task in promoting the two fields. Modern children see horses a lot less than they hear classical music, but children's books still show the pictures and teach the kids to say "horse"; only a small minority of parents can say "Rossini" when a commercial uses the "Barber of Seville" overture for the umpteenth time. Maybe there are fewer children who grow up today reading "National Velvet" or "The Black Stallion" but I imagine they're also less likely to read stories about young Mozart playing for Marie Antoinette ("I'll marry you when I grow up") or Bach's long trek to hear Buxtehude play, and his crucial decision not to marry that composer's daughter. (I think I read stories like this in "Highlights" when I was young; does that even still exist?) Anyway, I guess I got carried away there by my analogy; sorry about that. I'm glad your cat trauma is behind you, and I'm sorry you feel obliged to haunt blogs even when it drains your energy. Hope you sort out what's going on with Brent Weaver. I look forward to seeing you on Sunday, but right now I have to tear myself away and get to work. I need to find the narrative links to glide from the Duke of Spoleto pillaging Rome during the new pope's inauguration ceremonies and his replacement by Engelberga's relative, to the pope's rejection of Teutberga's forced confession, and his meeting with Greek clerics and prayers for the success of Louis' holy war, the bogging down of that war, the revolutions dividing the Moslem world and the resurgence of Byzantine sea-power, the raid from the Moslems of Palermo on Gaeta, the papal forgiveness of Waldrada, the crimes against the pope's wife and daughter I told you about many days ago, with discussion of why the killer's father entrusted his treasure to our heroine, and finally provide background for the proposed alliance with the Greeks that was to be sealed by the betrothal of Engelberga's daughter with the oldest son of the new Byzantine emperor. I'm pretty good at transitions but this will be a challenge. I thought 868 would be a quieter year than that before I looked at it closely. Oh yeah, I need to check again and see whether that's also the year of the secret conference between Charles the Bald and Louis the German when they agreed to divide up their nephew Lothar's kingdom when he died. On bathroom breaks I'll follow the French siege of Tarragona in 1811, afterwards I'll see how the Blazers do in Chicago and then rejoin the travails of Vince Chase and his entourage in the aftermath of losing the "Aquaman" sequel. (I love the inside joke that years before the release of "Avatar" the HBO series' fictional Hollywood was shown as abuzz about James Cameron's new box-office smash with a blue-skinned hero and a one word title starting with "A.") Good luck with Irving Berlin and poor depressive Franz. |
Latest Albums:  Back In The Building  Greek Rapture  Gifts from three kings  American Piano Duets  |
Copyright © 2008 Alitisa Records