Yet another plan to save classical music

[Chaszz]

http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=58vw01

The magazine itself is an attempt at a gathering place for 'younger', listener- friendly, post-serial new music, or so I gather. Perhaps easy to criticize for certain things, but at least they are trying...

[Peter]

Very interesting article and I think on the right lines, the problem is the new music that is presented - although this links up to the other thread about modern classical music, the truth is that modern avant-garde CM has an even smaller audience than the mainstream classics. This wasn't the case when Beethoven was composing, the hunger for contemporary music was very real and composers such as Bach and Handel were considered old hat - no one but a handful of specialists would have been interested in going to hear the Brandenburg concertos in 1800! Obviously I don't advocate that, but modern classical music has failed to stimulate young people in the way that the Eroica did.

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'Man know thyself'

[Joy]

I guess that just goes to show you that whatever is contemporary at the time (no matter what time it is) reaches out to more of the mainsntream audience than whatever the music was that went before. Interesting article though.

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'Truth and beauty joined'

[Steppenwolf]

An interesting article, although I may not agree with it entirely.

When it comes to classical music, I consider myself a fundamentalist, or, perhaps it would be better to say, a protestant. To take a religious analogy (and it is only an analogy ... I am the polar opposite of a religious fundamentalist!) - the protestants of the reformation stripped Christianity bare of all its frills and superfluous embellishments - removing golden decorations, incense, ritual and stained glass windows from churches, for instance - in an attempt to get to the core doctrine, the spiritual kernel, without distractions. I feel the same way about music.

Classical music does not need any 'package' in order justify itself. The merits of the music itself are enough. The feeling and emotion generated by a great piece of music is all that matters. Therefore, if the trappings of the classical music world are off-putting to people - the solemn and serious concert halls, the dinner suits and pretensious clothes, and general air of stuffiness that many people associate with CM - then get rid of them! Strip classical music bare of its aura of stuffy snobbiness and aloof academia. If people are put off wearing a lounge suit to a symphony, then let them year jeans and t-shirts. If the concert hall seems to much like a church, let's have concerts in public parks, or let's have chamber music in restaurants and bars. The quality of the music is enough - it doesn't need any superfluous embellishments, especially when they are out of fashion and off-putting to many people.

However, having removed CM from one package, it would be a mistake to wrap it up in another. So I resist attempts to 'market' classical music as the latest cool, trendy thing - for example, by getting scantily clad babes to frolick about on the beach playing violins, getting a soloist to dress up scruffy like a rock-star and play his oboe at a rock concert venue, establishing a classical 'charts' with a top-ten countdown, making a Beethoven video clip and playing it on MTV, or replacing concert halls with mosh pits, all in a misguided attempt to adopt the trappings of modern-pop-youth culture. Such gimmicks do injustice to the nobility and self-sufficient excellence of the works of the great composers, and unbeknownst to those who 'study' from afar (rather than live amongst) pop culture, such desperate attempts to attract the young are treated by the young with derision and scorn. It is akin to the misguided attempts to promote Christianity or sexual abstinence in the language of pop-youth-culture - Jesus rock bands, 'Abstinence Rocks' bumper stickers (which display an amusing, ironic and oxymoronic ignorance of the origin of the term 'rock n roll'), and tackling the drug ploblem with slogans like "Just say no to drugs!" - the plain facts will do, not a trendy logo, not a message of conformity with authority dressed up in the trappings of a culture defined by defiance of authority. You cannot curry favour with 'youth culture' by crawling to it, and adopting its trappings (with none of its substance), thereby tacitly acknowledging its superiority to the thing you are trying to promote. Bach, Beethoven, Handel et al. are not 'cool' - the concept didn't exist back then. Their music is neither 'cool' nor 'uncool', it is something else entirely - it doesn't exist in that two-dimensional world in which so many young people seem to be trapped.

Great art can only triumph by revelation of its own superlative merits - just as they are, without embellishment and packaging. I still believe that the only way the decline in CM can be halted is by education. CM requires an initiation, it is not immediately comprehendable in the same way as the simplistic, repetative tunes in pop music. The same is true for all high art. It must be LEARNED. If Shakespeare disapeared from the curriculum, then eventually he would not be read, except by a tiny few, who would form an onclave like the CM onclave here on this forum. If the education system does not start to take music seriously, then MTV will continue to fill the gap.


One more thing - modern classical music is itself largely to blame for the seperation of CM from pop music, a distinction which did not exist in the past. It has, throughout the 20th century, become more and more academic, rarified, exclusive, abstract and pretensious. It has stopped being entertainment (who on earth wants to listen to some ghastly cacophany of atonalism?), as it used to be originally. By ceasing to be entertainment, it has cut off its own audience. It is like a man hacking away with an ax at the trunk of a tree, a branch of which he is sitting on.

[This message has been edited by Steppenwolf (edited February 26, 2004).]

[mrfixit]

I think all old is being killed off. I see it as a conspiracy to keep the masses ignorant. If you teach people culture they might think about other things as well. So instead people get trashy tv and other crappy things to distract them. Also it doesnt help when you got art becoming more and more abstract. I never bother going to see modern art at all. I been put off of late 20th centruy music as well . So i see it as two seprate problems. I dont think there really is a will to spread classical music, also i think the modern stuck franky isnt up to scratch.