Did anyone else hear Osvaldo Golijov's Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind in the R3 lunchtime concert today?

This is a 40-minute piece for clarinet and string quartet in which the clarinet plays throughout in a "klezmer" style, while the string quartet does a bit of that kind of thing too, also a bit of viol-consort-like stuff, much postromantic emoting and a bit of Bartók-derived chugging. Composing as supermarket shopping.

You'll have gathered by now that I didn't like it very much. It did provoke one thought though - that music like this (and, to take a somewhat different example, Gorecki's Third Symphony) has much of the appeal it has because its audience (which of course is large) needs expressive gestures to be lengthily reiterated and fluorescently underlined before they take on any emotional significance. To me this makes the music expressively "monotonous", but then I'm used to taking on the emotional subtleties (and unsubtleties) and ambiguities which attend almost every bar of say a Mahler symphony, which for the average CFM listener would probably seem disjointed and confusing. I'm not saying anything against CFM (that's another argument) and certainly not its listeners, it just seems to me that what's lacking (eg. in education and in our culture in general) is a sense of what the possibilities of listening are, and into this vacuum springs the vapid music of Golijov and the like. R3 should put "Discovering Music" on every day.

I'm no fan of anything I've heard of Golijov, but I'm certainly interested in Górecki (I confess I blow cold and a bit warmer over the Third Symphony, but it seems to take its place respectably enough within his 'oeuvre' - certainly people whose Górecki expertise I respect such as David Drew and Adrian Thomas don't seem to find it problematic in that respect). I know it's tempting, and I certainly do it myself at times, but is it really a good idea to make presumptions about what other audience members might happen to like (or even to 'need') in music that does nothing positive for ourselves? ...

I think you're probably on to something there, Richard, although I'd suggest that the historical period in which music was an object of 'close listening' rather than 'a "soundtrack" to other activities' was relatively short, and moreover that the 'close listening' period may itself already have been a step on the slippery slope away from what in many other cultures around the world is still the norm, viz. music as performative engagement, with very little concept of listening of any kind that's not the kind of listening done by people who are part of the performance.

Oh, erm, yes, well ... so I do. Maybe!

I seem to have speared myself on the horns of a Benjaminesque dilemma.

I need to go off and think about this a bit. ... I'm not sure your second sentence would have to follow even if that is what I was saying, but, erm, I'll try and get back to you.

Thoughts from other members more than welcome in the meantime. I may need some help to clarify my thoughts here!

I'm not sure that this is about the technologisation of society - but possibly more about the way in which a society relates to the rituals that define it (of which music was certainly one).  There's a point at which the mass populace ceases to participate in a direct sense and takes a role as a spectator (I'm thinking of religion here, and the way in which a priestly caste comes to direct and limit public participation in ritual).  Now of course in religious observance the audience is participating, but doing so in a rather indirect way which seems to be quite analogous to sitting in a concert hall.  So I don't think it's about technology per se.

What technology does do is take us further out of the public sphere - if I want to hear a Mahler symphony  I can do it on demand, in the privacy of my home, through headphones; the entire experience can be privatised; the same is true of all types of music, not just performances of the classical canon.  Of course quite a lot is lost that way, but for many people and in a fair number of circumstances it will be enough.  And the fact that I can do that depends in part on the fact that there is a live music scene in which the performers can learn and develop.  It's also the environment, crucially, in which one can develop one's listening skills.

And I think that is part of the issue with the repetitiveness of some music - I don't know the Golijov, but I did recently sit through a performance of Tavener's Extasis, which is essentially ten minutes of the same musical gesture being repeated, and I think my reaction as a practised listener (one with a well-honed enthusiasm for long-haul Teutonic music drama) - which was frankly to find it as tedious as Hell - was probably not the same as that of more casual listeners for whom the repetition was less of an issue (I'm not claiming any special status here - I suspect listening is one of those skills like swimming or riding a bike that in principle anyone can master).  There's a breakthrough point that, in a culture less attuned to pure listening than that in which the traditional concert developed, is more difficult to reach.

Sorry if this is a bit disjointed - I really need to dash and be somewhere else, but I'd like to reflect on some of this!

Yes. I used the word "technologisation" as an alternative to "civilisation", which for obvious reasons is a word I prefer not to use to describe the kind of society we live in. I could perhaps also have said "economisation". What I am wondering is whether the first step, from participation to listening, necessarily leads to the second, which we could call "marginalisation" of music. I find Reiner's "counterrevolution" hard to imagine happening with the commodification of music (and everything else) having reached the stage it has, and I'm inclined to think that we're stuck with the marginalisation unless and until more deep-seated changes take place in society (which is not to say they won't).

I understand that distinction, but I'm not sure how you think it relates to my point that in most cultures it's not a case of listening carefully or listening less carefully, but of being present at the performance (whether it be music as ritual, music as theatre, music as social bonding) or not.

I wonder how the idea of music-as-wallpaper versus music full of changes of mood which demand constant closer attention to keep up maps on to Benjamin's distinction between different modes of communication and between two different kinds of 'experience':

The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter's hand.

[...]

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be on the alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one's life (Erlebnis). Perhaps the special achievement of shock defence may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents.

(from 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', in Walter Benjamin, tr. Harry Zorn, Illuminations, Pimlico, pp. 155-159)