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time_is_now
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« Reply #15 on: 19:11:52, 17-12-2007 » |
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As tinners points out, the pace of life for most people has changed: I'm not saying that one loses the skill of concentration, what I am saying though is that if so many people hardly sit down to have something as essential as a meal, is it really likely that they'd take to sitting down and listening to music for protracted periods? But that's exactly the point I was making, Ron! I hardly ever sit down for a meal, but I do have extended periods of concentrated listening, although at odd hours and not as part of any sort of comfortable or even semi-regular 'routine'. You may say that I'm exceptional, and that the majority of my age-group don't do the 'proper eating' part or the 'proper listening' part, I don't think you can make those sorts of assumptions without hard sociological evidence. And the existence and even the high sales levels of 'crossover' and 'easy listening' don't prove much at all, except maybe about how people feel less need to 'look respectable' in the music they're seen to be buying/listening to. I have a strong suspicion that as many people were using music as background/'lazy listening'/whatever you want to call it 30 or 50 or 80 years ago, they just might have done it with something ostensibly classier-looking than Il Divo or the Classic FM Best 100 Tunes. |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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increpatio
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« Reply #16 on: 02:23:08, 18-12-2007 » |
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I don't think you can make those sorts of assumptions without hard sociological evidence.
I agree with that myself very strongly (though maybe I wouldn't use the word 'assumption'  ). |
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #17 on: 10:41:12, 18-12-2007 » |
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tinners and inko, This is a difficult one, because it's a generational thing: it's much easier for us who were born (well) over fifty years ago to see how much things have changed, because we've lived through the changes and can see the difference, whereas you were born into what to us was already a changed world, and a world that's been changing ever faster since. The whole pace of life and its priorities, commercial and educational, have altered utterly. If you look at the demographics for R3 listening and classical concert attendance, you'll surely be aware that the average age in each case is rising: there are fewer younger people becoming involved than older ones departing. I'd still maintain, difficult though it might be to prove statistically, that the way that most people access, process and use music has changed radically over the past fifty years: there's so much more of it everywhere that its currency has become devalued, to the point where all music can be used as background, aural wallpaper etc., almost indiscriminately. I find this recent post very telling: I think one of the problems is that most people are so used to noise they appear to be able to tune it out - they simply don't notice it, whereas if you've been involved in music (the real sort) you've been taught to listen. I sometimes see people at concerts blithely rustling paper, turning programme pages noisily and so on, clearly unaware that the noise is disturbing, or even there. I suspect most of the Tesco shoppers are hardly aware the "music" is playing.
At the other extreme, I have a very musical friend who accuses her less musical husband of breathing too loudly at concerts!
I'm sure Mary's onto something here: not everybody is 'taught to listen' in the first place, any more than they are taught to 'see'. There can be an active as well as a passive constituent to both activities, and I'm not convinced that the active side of listening is anything like a universal accomplishment. |
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #18 on: 11:06:57, 18-12-2007 » |
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It is indeed a difficult point. And the point Mary made (and Ron just quoted) is an extremely important one (and for me it's what Hewett missed a chance to say something useful about) - the inability to listen isn't confined to yoofs on buses but is just as likely to be found in the concert hall. Which I know quite well because I know my use of Mahler or Ravel or Schütz or whatever on the bus is just as much an abuse of it and usually just as inattentively consumed as what someone else on the bus may be playing from their phone...
I've lamented elsewhere on the board that I find attentive listening extremely difficult, and increasingly so. For that reason I'm not sure it's entirely a generational matter (perhaps my generation might be less steeped in attentive listening habits and find it easier to break them?) - I'm actually a little worried I might be forgetting at least a little how to listen. What to do?
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Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #19 on: 11:24:34, 18-12-2007 » |
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the way that most people access, process and use music has changed radically over the past fifty years: there's so much more of it everywhere that its currency has become devalued
Or revalued? Long ago on "The Beatles" thread I mentioned my experience as a nine-year-old in 1969, going to a record-shop in Norf London with my cousin Lynne (on whom I had a terrible crush at the time...) to buy a Beatles single. She didn't even have a record-player on which to play this 45, of course (playing-time had to be agreed in advance with her parents, and very limited it was too). But by buying the "music" (which she couldn't play) she had bought-into a culture that freed her from humdrum life in a council flat in Haringey. And this was before the days of picture-disks - this was just a lump of black vinyl with an ejectable spindle-wheel in the middle of it (remember those, pop-pickers?). I'd say this is a classic case of synechdoche - the music (or even its mute software) has become emblematic of a cultural statement made to the world - and as typical with emerging generations, it holds-up a middle digit to the generation before. I think we all did it, didn't we? I don't think my mother's ever forgiven me for cutting those trousers and fastening them with safety-pins... It's the quintessentially intangible nature of music itself that makes it so potent as a symbol of cultural dissent... you can be "someone else" (or "who you want to be", or "who you dream of being") at the flick of a switch.... and if The Headmaster's Had Enough Today, a second flick removes all the evidence at once, as if the music had never been there. The music turns-on the anarchy instantly - assuming you wanted some? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJOLwy7un3U |
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
- Leon Trotsky, "My Life"
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IgnorantRockFan
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« Reply #20 on: 11:44:03, 18-12-2007 » |
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Even if we leave 'classical' music aside for a moment, and look at what has happened to mainstream popular music over the last forty years, I'd argue that the same holds good; what sells in volume now is rarely the finely crafted attempt to engage the mind, but rather more likely the mass-produced commercial music with a short shelf life. Much as I would love to be able to argue for a "golden age" 40 years ago in which pop fans eagerly embraced the finely crafted attempt to engage the mind, such a golden age never truely existed. Many bands of the late 60s and early 70s attempted to create intelligent music, but what did the masses actually buy? Mass-produced commercial music with a short shelf life. Historical sales figures support this. "Intelligent" (I use the term with cautious reluctance) music was a minority, underground genre within mainstream pop, and still is. New bands are still writing or playing it and people that can appreciate it will still seek out those bands and listen to it. For everybody else, there's Radio 1. Nothing has really changed in 40 years in the "pop" world. Maybe not in the classical world, either. Hasn't there always been a "Classic FM"-type audience? |
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Allegro, ma non tanto
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roslynmuse
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« Reply #21 on: 12:49:50, 18-12-2007 » |
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Quote: "Hasn't there always been a "Classic FM"-type audience?"
Yes, IRF, it used to be for Radio 2. Radio 4 put on a weekly concert or two (Sunday evenings and Tuesday, later Thursday, simultaneous broadcasts with Radio 3) for the slightly more 'highbrow' (nothing too adventurous though) leaving Radio 3 in its 17 broadcasting hours to put out a fairly well-balanced mix (I'm sceptical of there being a Golden Age of R3 listening too - except that niche markets such as brass bands, organ recitals etc had a fairer crack of the whip then; the main difference for me was the intelligence of the programming and presentation.)
Going back to the original point of the thread, I'm inclined to agree with Ron and others, particularly having sat through an opera and a concert at the weekend surrounded by talkers, sweet bag openers, sneezers who make NO attempt to stifle their noise... Maybe I'm just over-sensitive/ neurotic but I do find this distracting and quite quickly upsetting. My perception is that the dreadful ubiquity of music (a phrase, or one very like one used by Constant Lambert in Music Ho!) deadens the senses to a need to contemplate, meditate whilst listening to it, and even those of us (like Ollie, perhaps?) who desperately want to listen attentively find it difficult to do so. Not everyone wants to contemplate or meditate whilst listening, of course, which is perhaps why perceptions of a 'problem' vary so much even amongst contributors to this MB; but it doesn't invalidate my perception (or should that be my perception)with or without evidence to back it up!
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time_is_now
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« Reply #22 on: 17:24:27, 19-12-2007 » |
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I've lamented elsewhere on the board that I find attentive listening extremely difficult, and increasingly so. For that reason I'm not sure it's entirely a generational matter (perhaps my generation might be less steeped in attentive listening habits and find it easier to break them?) - I'm actually a little worried I might be forgetting at least a little how to listen. What to do?
I worry about that too, a lot - my posts to this thread shouldn't be taken to imply otherwise (the point is just that I'm really not convinced that makes me different from any listener 50 years ago: indeed, perhaps what's changed is our ability to be honest about and acknowledge the extent to which our attention is, as Louis MacNeice might have said, incorrigibly distractable). But it's a funny thing: normally when I worry I'm not listening hard enough it's in the context of hearing contemporary music, and my worry is that I haven't followed the analytical goings-on of the piece. But there's another part of me that really doesn't believe that listening ought to be about following the analytical goings-on of a piece. And indeed last night, sitting in the Barbican listening to the LSO play the 'Enigma' Variations, it occurred to me that I have no idea what would constitute attentive listening to that piece in the terms I've constructed for myself. In other words, I couldn't possibly feel guilty about not paying attention at every single moment to the structural processes of the piece, because the music actually moves so slowly in relation to its in any case relatively simple formal manoeuvres that there simply wouldn't be enough to keep one's attention engaged in those terms. So what is it I'm supposed to be listening for? Mood? Self-communing? The reflection of my own soul, or the echo of my heartbeat? ... Fair enough, if so, but I can get most of those things by simply sitting in a silent room. And yes, Ron might say that even that would be a valuable exercise and something that not enough people do often enough these days, and I might be inclined to agree with him, but that does rather leave this supposedly oh-so-important music in a bit of a funny place. doesn't it? |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #23 on: 17:39:40, 19-12-2007 » |
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But there's another part of me that really doesn't believe that listening ought to be about following the analytical goings-on of a piece. And indeed last night, sitting in the Barbican listening to the LSO play the 'Enigma' Variations, it occurred to me that I have no idea what would constitute attentive listening to that piece in the terms I've constructed for myself. For me in older music there are often various levels to pay attention to and the challenge is to keep them in balance. At least there should be various levels etc. - structural, harmonic, melodic, (micro-)expressive unfolding, that sort of thing. What Maxwell Davies might once have referred to as images on parallel sheets of glass that you can't actually keep all in view at once. (Or he might not have, but I think he did, in the programme notes to Vesalii Icones if I remember right.) But actually for me the problem is less one of paying attention once I'm in the concert hall - that more or less takes care of itself as long as there isn't a neighbour doing something distracting. It's more one of giving music my undivided attention when I'm listening at home. Far too often I have music playing and realise that its most important moments have passed me by because I've relegated it to the background. Quite often I'll be doing some domestic task or other and think it needs some music on to make the time pass. Once or twice it's happened that I think something needs musical accompaniment and I've realised when I've gone to the CD player that there's already something playing because the action I thought needed musical accompaniment was the action of listening to a CD. These moments are not invariably altogether pleasant. |
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #24 on: 18:11:40, 19-12-2007 » |
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Pat answer division here: But if music is a structured invasion of silence, in the same way as painting might be said to be the constructive invasion of a blank space, then perhaps the appreciation of music is richer for understanding its absence, too. (Maybe that sentence requires a "Glasshopper" at the end.)  Listening in a concert hall is a strange experience in any case, isn't it? Not only is it full of distractions, but because it's a live moment-by-moment one-off event, don't you find it requires more of a 'surface' listen than a recording you can return to over and again? That if you let yourself become dragged down into the deeper layers, there's a danger that all the moments which usually have a magic effect on you can just slip by? That it's up to the performance to move you almost imperceptibly while you're concentrating elsewhere? In a strange way I have a feeling that this is where I really wanted that article to start... |
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #25 on: 18:30:49, 19-12-2007 » |
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I'm afraid silence is usually not an option for me... otherwise I might start thinking and who knows where that would lead? (I would call it a kind of musical bulimia except, well, it's not remotely as serious as that...)
Certainly as far as the concert hall goes I don't know what I would call the 'surface' and what layers might be 'deeper'... are the moment-to-moment details on the surface or is it the 'grand span' that's on the surface? For me obviously it's a risk to get caught up too much in the struggle of the musicians (especially if I can see too clearly what they're doing!); and certainly little things like microscopic phrasing don't interest me too much in the concert hall because what the concert hall experience provides better than anything is the sense of a piece as a whole, something I've had so rarely listening to recordings (and when I do it's generally been when listening in company - I don't think that's an accident). But to say that the feeling of experiencing a piece as an entity is on the surface wouldn't make sense to me; to me that's where the greatest depth of musical experience as a listener can lie.
In any case - yes, that's certainly something Hewett didn't touch on.
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« Last Edit: 18:33:04, 19-12-2007 by oliver sudden »
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