Well, this is not 'distinct from the sounds and effects of the music'; those are fundamental. That said, the sounds cannot really be separated from the whole 'package' in the case of the Spice Girls, and in the case of Sorabji, at the very least all of the allusions given by the titles surely inform the listening experience. But conclusions on Sorabji (which I don't really want to pursue further) do come primarily from listening to the music.
The extent to which the sounds and the listener responses thereto can be "separated" from the "whole 'package'" is surely a matter of individual decision based on the extent or otherwise of anyone's wish to do this. In more general terms, I am inclined to agree that the sounds and the "whole 'package'" are more closely linked in the case of the Spice Girls than in those of Sorabji or other "classical" composers, but I remain puzzled by your statement that "in the case of Sorabji, at the very least all of the allusions given by the titles surely inform the listening experience"; titles such as Sonata No. ×, Toccata No. ×, etc. offer no such allusions, whereas even those such as
Le Jardin Parfumé,
Gulistan,
Djami,
St. Bertrand de Comminges, etc. which offer more specific literary ones that may or may not "inform the listening experience" do not of themselves appear obviously to prove anything negative about those pieces.
I also find it difficult to understand your position on what you call the "high/low culture debate" (not that I was knowingly engaging in such a debate at the point where you responded thus); it seems to me almost as though your avowed preference is to deny that there is any such thing
Do you mean there's no such distinction between different forms of culture, or there is no such debate? I believe both exist, though in the case of high/low I would use commercial/less commercial instead (which in no sense should be taken to imply that the 'less commercial' can't generate as many problems (though distinct ones) to the commercial).
No, of course not, in either case. Indeed, that was the very point that I sought to make (or at least imply); my reason for so doing was that you seemed to be using the terms "high" and "low" culture as pejoratives (but perhaps I misunderstood what you meant).
and that there is accordingly little or no difference in such terms between Sorabji and the Spice Girls, of neither of whose work you approve.
No, they are wholly different - just think both are comparably unexalted, which doesn't mean they are similar in other senses.
Well, that's rather what I hoped you'd meant and, even though I think that it's sad that you find the former unexalting, that is at least a matter of personal opinion as distinct from fact.
Again, my concerns are far more with what the music sounds like and what effects it has than I am in talking about "high" or "low" culture, although I might be curious to hear what you would have to say on this topic using examples of music from both categories of which you DO approve, rather than those of which you don't.
Well,
sometimes the very thing that makes something appear as 'art' or 'high culture' is little more than contrived aura. And contrariwise, highly commercial music ('low culture', if you like) frequently necessitates a degree of high standardisation.... These are both questions of 'what the music sounds like and what effects it has'.
That's what I didn't understand and still don't understand. When you write, as you now do, of a "contrived aura" and of "high standardisation", you seem to be referring to phenomena that are somehow pasted on to the music itself (for marketing purposes, or to create a convenient definitional categorisation, or for whatever other reason), since I don't believe that you are suggesting that the "classical" composer him/herself "contrives the aura" or that the pop group "highly standardises" itself; this is why I still fail to grasp your assertion that these are nevertheless "questions of 'what the music sounds like and what effects it has'". Perhaps I'm just being abit dense, but...
Now in both cases the music can amount to a lot more than that;
Ah, that's better!...
it's a question of whether the conditions under which it is produced make this more or less likely.
To what kind of "conditions" do you refer here? and how might you see them as directly affecting the nature of the music that emerges therefrom?
And, all things told, I do think that is marginally more likely under the auspices of the institutions that support and maintain 'less commercial' music than with music produced entirely as a commodity.
Whichever way round you happen to see it (and, as far as it goes, I see it the same way that you do), the problem that I have with this notion is that it's not the "institutions" that actually compose the music that they may or may not support; I do believe that it's important to draw the relevant distinction between the music and its composers on the one hand and the institutions that from time to time may or may not support it on the other.
To go into specific examples would of course require a lot of space.
Not necessarily; after all, you've already "gone into" your chosen example of Sorabji (albeit only briefly) and that didn't take up any more space than you needed in order to throw yet another of your brickbats at him!...
Happened to be thinking of Kramer after being at a performance of Ravel's Daphnis last night, seeing the now obligatory reference to Kramer's tired old essay on the work in the programme note;
Then I'm sad for you; I'd have been thinking of Ravel.
Certainly was, but the performance was awful - it was a reading of the piece that seemed to penetrate no deeper into the music than Kramer does. All just an array of surface novelty (and even that not done with any particular refinement), little in the way of a sense of dramatic pacing, feeling for the long-range harmonic progressions, or more fundamentally how much expressive content can be conveyed just through sound. Kramer portrays
Daphnis as 'surface without depth' (typical Baudrillard stuff about the simulacra - bear in mind Baudrillard is also the person who said the Gulf War didn't happen), but there he makes the characteristic mistake of those who have grown to associate 'depth' exclusively with its Teutonic manifestations (not that there is anything wrong with that). Ravel's music certainly has emotional depth of the highest order, but he uses different means to convey it (which of course affect the nature of what can be conveyed) - timbral interplay and acutely judged orchestral balance, rhythm, fleeting melodic and harmonic inflection which nonetheless serves unique strategic purposes. The flute solo in the second suite (Fig. 176) can be absolutely breathtaking when the strings and harp play a genuine
pp and
ppp, with careful balancing of the harmonies, also given that vague edge by the muted horns, and the flute can then play with a degree of rhythmic freedom and stylisation (
expressif et souple) whilst remaining somewhat hushed. And these relationships can be continuously renavigated as the harmony progresses. When (to give a supreme example) Monteux conducts this work (anyone who doesn't know that recording should definitely hear it), there is such a wealth of unique and complex emotion contained within those pages, achieved by a variety of musical means exercised simultaneously. This is much, much more than just an exotic moment, as Kramer portrays most of the piece. In this performance the work really did seem like a tired old array of superficially exotic goods, just as he describes.
Oh, dear me! I understand fully now what you meant. I hadn't previously appreciated that the performance itself was on a par with that article on the piece. I'm now considerably sadder for you for having to sit through an experience like that! I agree wholeheartedly with your remarks about the Ravel itself and of the Monteux recording (which you may or may not care to know that Sorabji absolutely adored, by the way!). As a matter of fact, I remember on one occasion discussing that very score with Sorabji and bemoaning the fact that I'd read it being described as a "piece of orchestration without music" (rather as the same composer's Bolero has been dubbed a "crescendo without music", although this remark is ascribed to the composer himself at his self-mocking best); Sorabji retorted that, however wrong such an assessment is to anyone who knows the score, it's no wonder that some people nevertheless believe it when one considers how it sometimes gets played as though that's just what it is. It seems to me as though he'd heard performances rather like that which sullied your own ears yesterday...
If one wants the latter, and a very real example of 'surface without depth', go to Knussen or Adès....
Unfair - especially in the sense of comparing either to Ravel at his best and most subtle (not that you were necessarily doing that)...
Oh, absolutely they [populists and old-style aristocrats] do have each other - each one exists in large measure as the negation of the other.
Does that actually constitute "having each other"?
I think so, yes.
Well, I guess that we'll have to agree to disagree there, then - not that I think that it matters all that much, since I belong to neither group...
As to Sorabji being "no more than image", I think that this would have been abit difficult for a composer whose work was hardly in the public arena at all until he was in his 80s...
Being aloof and out of the public eye itself generates an image. But I really don't want to pursue the Sorabji question any further here.
That's true to a point, but do bear in mind that, in his early days, Sorabji wanted to have his works performed just as would any composer and that, even when those four decades of almost complete public silence had taken hold, Sorabji would have been as amenable to its being broken at any time had performers come along who could (and wanted to) perform his work, just as began to happen later in his life (an exception to this arose in the 1960s and early 1970s when he'd unfortunately allowed his self-protection to fester into entrenchment). Given also that he wanted his personal privacy in order to get on with a lot of work uninterrupted, I'm not sure that he generated an image by dint of any aloofness, really - still less did he "contrive" to do so, nor would it have benefitted him if he had. I do think, however, that the sheer extent of his lack of contact with other performers was in some ways unhelpful to some of his work; indeed, I've always thought this ever since I got to know some of it.
No, but the whole culture of classical music appreciation in the UK (less so in some other countries with less of a legacy of feudalism) derives from the upper classes, the public schools, etc.
So is it utterly damned forever - is it eternally irremdiable - just because of this?
The music isn't, that particular culture in the UK is heavily tainted by all of that. Which is not to damn everything about it.
Good; it's only really the music itself that I was referring to here...
In other words, must this historical background (to whatever extent or otherwise that it may be found credible) hold good indefinitely, with the effect that "classical" music can never escape, or be made to escape, from this straitjacket?
Never said that, nor would I. But I don't see that happening at present - no will (except on the part of a few radical composers) to try and move music beyond all of that baggage. On the other hand, there have been older British composers who have made some serious attempts at such a thing (Birtwistle and Ferneyhough being obvious examples).
Whilst I'm glad that you "never said that" nor would say it, you immediately continue by suggesting that a lot of music needs to be moved "beyond all of that baggage", which in turn implies that you believe that, at present (with but a handful of exceptions), most "classical" music carries this baggage. Even allowing for the possibility that you may never have heard a note of mine, are you able and willing to explain to me how it is that my work might carry such baggage, given my lack of "upper class" "public school" background? And do you think that Birtwistle's and Ferneyhough's mighy have carried it, or some of it, had they each happened to be the offspring of landed gentry and attended Eton, Rugby or Harrow? or would you contend that their respective courage and conviction would have enabled them to develop pretty much as they have done regardless of such a background?
I just don't believe that; it makes no sense. Why? Well, to start with, like many others who are involved in such music, I am not "upper class", nor did I attend a "public school" (by which you do not in any case mean a good, bad or indifferent school in terms of educational standards but a fee-paying school as distinct from one subsidised by tax on capitalist profits).
I'm talking about a musical culture in a country where class divisions still hold very powerfully, and all that entails, not simply about single individuals' particular educational background.
OK, but how do you perceive that this affects the way that those single individuals' music sounds? (as your remarks appear to imply). Yes, I don't disagree that there are still class divisions of a kind in Britain and that these may well impact to some extent on its "musical culture", but do you really extrapolate from those facts that the sound of almost all British composers's music and the effects that it has on its British (and non-British) listeners are wholly governed and determined thereby?
And more broadly, classical music per se is historically associated with the aristocracy and the churches up until the late 18th century,
We're in the 21st one now, Ian...
Yes - that was the
first part of a statement, not the complete thing!! Sheesh....
OK, I noted that, as you will see below...
and with the new bourgeois ruling classes after then.
Whoever they may or may not be, or have been. Anyway, I'd not realised that I was a member - or even supporter - or "the new bourgeois ruling classes"; one learns something new every day (albeit not that!)...
See other threads for definitions in that respect. It shouldn't be too contentious to suggest that newly dominant classes in the 19th century were the primary patrons of classical music.
But what about the past 100 years or so? Haven't sources of patronage for "classical" music changed and broadened quite abit since then? (albeit not necessarily for the better in every single case, one might argue - or not!) - and don't more composers compose without patronage than was the case before, say World War I?
It's a matter of which redeeming factors can be salvaged from this context (and many can).
Well, that's a relief! - but in admitting that, you are surely undermining at least some of the importance of the principle on which you base the rest of this...
No, I think you're misreading what I'm attempting to say - I don't subscribe to crude base-superstructure reductionism.
Perhaps I was and, if so, I accordingly apologise, but I still don't get where you're coming from here; I imagine, therefore, that, I'll simply have to stew in the juice of my own ignorance here...
then when it comes to your trenchantly inflexible view of the indelible historical association between "classical music" and "the upper classes", etc., you seem to conclude that what held good centuries ago still applies today, so where's the difference and why?
Because the situation as regards popular culture and the marketplace has (at least arguably) constituted a much more through-going and total transformation than that which appertains to the classical sphere.
[/quote]
I'm sure that it has done so, but by mentioning this do you mean to suggest that, just because the situation you describe here has embraced such change, that which may once have pertained in respect of "classical music" and "the upper classes" has never moved on therefrom? I'm still really struggling with this concept. You refer briefly to British music. Let's skim the surface of three clutches of 20th century British composers born with 6 years (or less) of one another:
1900-1906
Bush, Rubbra, Walton, Berkeley, Tippett, Lambert, Cooke
1933-1939
Goehr, Birtwistle, Maw, Payne, McCabe
1943-1946
Ferneyhough, Matthews (D), Holloway, Tavener, Finnissy, Matthews (C).
Even though you've already extricated Ferneyhough and Birtwistle and may do the same with Finnissy, I'd still be having major difficulties with the idea that all the others' music might in any aurally definable sense be seen as determined by "upper class" "public school" institutionalism of some kind. I suspect that you'll tell me that I'm missing the point and, if so, I guess that I'll have either to give up on it and accept my lack of understanding or simply try harder...
To return to the topic(!), I suppose that it might be said that the amount of time you have given to writing about these things in the past few hours may have meant that you've been able to smoke even fewer cigarettes than otherwise you might have done! - in which case even those things in my responses that don't work for you might nevertheless have served at least some useful purpose!...
Best,
Alistair
