But bands that play in pubs etc. don’t do so because passing a hat round allows them to keep going. They keep going because they enjoy doing it - money or not. This doesn’t seem so true of ‘contemporary’ music groups.

In which case I have no objection! I'm certainly no fan of 'developing audiences' etc.

I was wondering about this point:


Supposing the advertising industry threw all its weight behind some of the more 'difficult' contemporary classical music - would it really end up selling as much as its commercial counterpart? After all, for all the successful commercial ventures in any field, there are many others which failed despite being fashioned and promoted in a similar manner. I don't really believe one can 'sell' absolutely anything to a mass market.

Dare I suggest that a contemporary music group should try the same thing? I'm sure I heard of a pub or cafe in London (possibly I saw it on the 'Classic Britannia' programme) which hosts contemporary music nights, in much the same way my local pub puts on garage rock bands, and managed to attract a large and demographically-varied audience. Maybe the audience for this type of music does exist and is just waiting to be catered to.

That's Rational Rec, in what used to be Bethnal Green Working Men's Club.

But while they're successful in their own terms, I'd say the range of what they do is evidently constrained by the context and mode of presentation. You won't get an orchestra in there playing Elliott Carter, for example.

That sounds like a challenge.  Anyone in the advertising industry reading this?


Something about "critical" or "interrogative" music occurs to me.  It seems we're being a bit sloppy in distinguishing (1) the composer's intent in writing a piece, (2) the reaction and analysis of so-called experts and (3) the general audience's perception.  (Not to mention how a performer's role fits into how something is written or received.)  What do you do about interrogatively-written music that the public sticks on as background music? What about non-interrogative commercial music that is treated with rigorous academic analysis and hailed as something groundbreaking, when the intention behind its creation was just to write a nice tune that might shift some records?  Which of these categories is most important in deciding how public funds are distributed?

It seems to me in the current climate of fear of "elitism" (which seems to lead to contempt for knowledge and expertise), less and less importance is given to (1) or especially (2), and an overwhelming concern expressed for (3).  To some extent it's fair enough that the general public's opinion is taken into account when allocating funds from the general public's purse.  But only focussing on (3) is going to have a direct effect on (1), isn't it.  And that smacks of social/cultural engineering to me, in a way that's going to eventually give us the so-called lowest common denominator.  Except for cases of independently wealthy composers/groups.  Is that really the route we want to go down?  Talk about elitism.

I hope this isn't unclear - I'm trying to cut back on coffee and feel a little slow-witted.

Certainly not (1), (2) is difficult to avoid when you inevitably have to have individuals determining such a thing (as you always do when some people administer funding); I suppose I'm thinking of (3) but as something that has roots in properties of the work. And the performer's role is very important - as a HIPster, do you not think there are modes of performance that aim to render something more of a 'wash-over' type of experience, smoothing over various complexities, edges, or whatever (without necessarily saying that the dichotomy between this and other approaches can be directly mapped onto HIP and non-HIP)? And also in terms of styles of recording and the like - as when in the 1950s American radio would deliberately reduce the dynamic range of recordings in order to make them more amenable to background listening?

Well, the fact that it's 'interrogatively-written' doesn't necessarily mean it amounts to something interrogative, unless compositional intention is seen as primary. But I do think that the reasons why some things seem to work better as background music than others are not entirely arbitrary; there may be some people who would choose to use Ferneyhough or the Grosse Fuge as background music rather than Mantovani, but I reckon Mantovani will continue to score trumps on that front more often.

That's an interesting case, though I think 'rigorous academic analysis' may be a bit of a red herring. It may happen in particular with archaic or historical popular music, which seemed basically just like entertainment at the time, but from a different vantage point becomes something of a historical document, that may reveal all sorts of aspects of the time which then seemed 'natural' but no longer do so.

Well, it's possible to consider (3) without the primary aim being that of pleasing that very group. Could there be something to be said for music that produces a reaction, not necessarily a positive one (or, perhaps better, not necessarily one that accords with the motivations many have for listening to music), but a reaction nonetheless, over and above that which easily blends in with the furniture? Thinking of the audience and appeasing them aren't the same things, I feel.

I’m willing to bet that even Hello magazine only sells to small percentage of the population, so in what sense does this represent a norm? There are so many minority interests that I feel fairly confident that the majority enjoy at least one or more minority interest.  Do most people feel themselves to be weird, eccentric and ghettoised?