Too pretentious?

[Ivan]

OK, Not one for Spotty...

Honestly, having a mentally disabled person in the audience or listening to Keith Jarrett improvise (along with his piano improv!?), for a second or two your blood freezes if you're really listening but then you get over it and get on with the listening again. I'm serious, it's just another aspect of the performance. I went to see Bjork a few weeks ago at the Hammy Odeon. No Bugger would sit down all night!! Why do these people pay £50 for a ticket and then talk/walk through the gig??? But you don't let it spoil your evening...

Two weeks before, I went to see the Dufay Collective at Snape and sat near the back. Two hours of solid concentration from the audience! Bliss! It can happen and does in Classical gigs regularly... The rest of them usually involve alcohol, bit like my posts actshooally...

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by Despina41

I didn't mean that the music should be drastically CHANGED in its presentation (however, Swingle Singers Bach is fun). I meant other aspects of presentation such as what the performer is wearing or how they do their hair, audience dress codes, CD covers, etc. Do these aspects alienate people because they're different? I don't think so.

The biggest problem is the way we talk about and REVERE classical music - that was my original point by mentioning art religion. We are so caught up in being preservationists that we forget the best way to preserve is to get fresh followers. Consider how classical music (in the U.S. at least) is stereotyped as the music of eltist snobs. The tuxedos, the silent awe with which you must attend the concerts, the actual amount of money have you to spend to go(!!) probably conspire to scare off young people. And they learn through pop culture to associate this music with unpleasant characters (politically right now, it's a negative to be in the upper class and/or be elitist -- "latte-drinker" is a derogatory term).

I don't think you can successfully present classical music as something to be treated with awe and reverence simple because of some vague notion of its grand cultural value. Kids don't want to listen to cultural artifacts in the same way they would go look at Rembrandts in the museum on a school trip. They want living music that's relevant for them now.

There are inroads! I've played Mahler for people (non-classical fans) and they love it. "It sounds like movie music" "You know why?!" and I explain how German/Austrian refugees came to America and wrote movie music and they are interested.

I try to get people interested based on the music itself. I agree that they aren't stupid. I'm not advocating dumbing things down for them. I'm just for helping them discover what they like about the music without the underlying message "you're stupid if you don't understand this" or "you're culturally deficient if you don't appreciate this." That can turn them off. Some people will find the music because they DO feel obligated to listen to it because "it's great art," but this younger generation is growing up with a lot of cultural relativism in the air, and they won't necessarily buy that old argument anymore.


Perhaps some of you heard about the experiment the Washington Post paper conducted with Joshua Bell playing Bach in the subway last year. He played in jeans and baseball cap at the head of a subway station on a workday at morning rush hour. Not just any music, but the Bach D minor chaconne. Only a few people recognized him or stopped to listen.

Gene Weingarten went on a huge rant about Philistines in America having no appreciation of good music; naturally this is based on the assumption that great art is so great that it should A) stop people getting to work on time and B) speak universally to people even if they have no experience with that form of art. What is the purpose of such an article? If you already like classical music you probably sigh and agree that it's dying. Or if you're a musicologist (Richard Taruskin) you complain that the experiment was set up to fail. If you're neither perhaps you feel guilty about it and pick up a Bach CD. Or perhaps you shake your head at those classical snobs lamenting how no one appeciates great art again.

I hope classical music does become less pretentious in the popular imagination. People now have more chances to just open a youtube video and hear a great performance of a great piece of music. I agree that the education resources need to be there, but what's the best way to learn? from other people. But if they don't want to associate or be associated with us...

Brilliant post.

I noticed teaching flute in an English market town how the parents of students could be appallingly snobby towards each other. Most were solidly middle class - nice people who wanted the best for their sons and daughters. But one or two were lorry drivers or used car dealers (one gave me a good deal on a motorbike) and some of the middle class parents looked down their noses at them. They wanted to keep the activity - classical music lessons for their offspring - exclusive. They felt the presence of a working class parent, perhaps in his work clothes, waiting with them for his daughter to finish her lesson, reduced the value of their own child's experience. That's the purpose of the tuxedos and ticket prices: to maintain the activity as an exclusive class-based club - like a golf club or country club or freemason meeting or exclusive private school. They're barriers designed to keep the proles out - like a security estate. People inside the wire then moan about how 'barbarian' and 'uncultured' the proles are, and feel morally superior.

How to solve the problem? The obvious answer is the Jesuit one - "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." You inject classical music into kiddies' brains before they're infected by the snobbery - like an antivenin. Which means state funded music lessons/subsided instruments. Which I suspect is impossible in the US because of your small tax-take (c. 25% of GDP in the US, c. 45% in Britain).

[Philidor]

The Gene Weingarten article mentioned by Despina41, including vid clips of Joshua Bell playing in the metro:

Clicky

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

LOL......... QED

[Florestan]

Despina -

I think classical music does have a somewhat different image in the UK to the US. One reason for this, as philidor mentioned, is that here the arts are heavily subsidised with taxpayers' money. In the US they are funded by the rich and ticket prices prohibit anyone who isn't at least reasonably well off. For most concerts it is not required or expected that people should wear formal dress - not even the perfomers. Female musicians often wear trousers!! They are clean and smart, of course, but not dressed up to the nines. If you go to see a baroque ensemble, for example, the beardy recorder player is more than likely to be wearing a Fair Isle sweater his wife knitted for him out of twigs. So live classical music is arguably more accessible in the UK.

I don't think classical music should be treated with awe. Quite the opposite. But saying 'this is a fantastic piece of music/composer and it had a huge influence on what came after' is really not the same as saying 'you should revere this'. The difference is in how the educational process is carried out.

I hope you'll have noticed that we take a pretty irreverant tone here and in that respect we are coming from the same place as you are with the composers' sitcom. That ability to laugh is actually part of people's love of, and genuine respect for (rather than reverence of) the music.

I love the bit in the film Baghdad Café where the stressed hotel owner snaps at her piano prodigy son to stop practising Bach because "It sounds like a goddam sewing machine". She's right. And I find that funny because I love Bach. And whenever in our house we hear a piece of Bach that sounds like a sewing machine, we laugh about it.

Any sociologist or statistician would point out immediately how fatally flawed the Washington Post experiment is. It assumes that people who like classical music either own their own business or are high ranking enough in their organization to be able to afford to stop and listen. I’ve worked in New York; I know how rabid the US work ethic is. If someone came into work and told their boss “I am sorry I am late for work – I saw Joshua Bell playing Bach in the subway” they’d get bawled out – or sacked. And if they have to drop their kids off at the nursery before they go to work…. same thing. The whole experiment is massively biased in favour of wealthy, privileged people.

I would not know Joshua Bell if he bit me on the arse. But I love Bach, as I said. Am I a philistine? (Don’t answer that! ) Do I have to know what celebrity performers look like not to be a philistine? Does the celebrity of the performer matter more than the music? Of course not.

I am lucky in that I have learned a huge amount from philidor over the past few years. Not everyone has the good luck to have friends who can teach them – which is why education is so crucial. Got to go now – work calls!

[Vic]

Originally Posted by Florestan

If you go to see a baroque ensemble, for example, the beardy recorder player is more than likely to be wearing a Fair Isle sweater his wife knitted for him out of twigs.

I resent that remark.

[The Sparrow]

and the sweater will be too short, and 1 part of his shirt front will be hanging out

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by spotty

and the sweater will be too short, and 1 part of his shirt front will be hanging out

Exactly. And it will have some egg on it.

[Herzeleide]

I revere classical music!

And I love to scare toffs and snobs when I arrive at concerts with my long hair and suspicious image and odour.

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by Herzeleide

I revere classical music!

And I love to scare toffs and snobs when I arrive at concerts with my long hair and suspicious image and odour.

They probably think you are the ghost of Liszt.

You should pose for a pic for Despina's Composer Sitcom site. You're a ringer for Franz. Have you got a frock coat?

[Herzeleide]

Originally Posted by Florestan

They probably think you are the ghost of Liszt.

You should pose for a pic for Despina's Composer Sitcom site. You're a ringer for Franz. Have you got a frock coat?

You mean what he's wearing here?








I do have a coat which is about as long as middle image above. I'm wearing it in one of the recent pictures you've seen of me, but you can't see how long the actual coat is.