Another cool orchestral 'flash mob'

If you haven't already seen this, it is worth a watch:

What is cool about this sort of thing is that I think the orchestra plays a bit differently and certainly people listen a bit differently than they would in a concert hall. The surprise of it is a factor, but also the freshness of it, for both orchestra and listener. The only reason these people stopped, listened and applauded was because they were enjoying it--it was a pure musical experience. When I was much younger I spent a summer as a classical busker in Europe playing mostly in Florence and the magic of classical music is very real when you just stumble across it. We were just flute and guitar, but when we played certain melodies, crowds just gathered. Some nights we had easily five hundred people listening and they stayed and stayed. It was just the quality of the music...

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Hayley Westenra and "Classical Music"

I just read this article in the Telegraph on Hayley Westenra. I have to admit that I have never heard of her before--I often lose touch with current events in music. Apparently she was the last instant-child-singer-star to be discovered/invented by the biz, a few years ago, before the current one. This article is plainly a puff piece designed to create interest in a new album about to be released. And since we live in the World Oprah Made, there has to be something revealed, some confession to be made. Alas, in her case all it seems to be is a mild eating disorder. The article is rather coy, but it sounds like she was anorexic for a while, followed by overweight for a while and now she's just perfect!

OK... What interested me, though, were some of the comments on the article. Some raised the question, is this classical music? If you will recall, I have a couple of working definitions. One is: music of the historic period 1770 to 1827. Another is music that has stood the test of time. That is, we might expect to see a concert of 'classical' music that might include anything from good medieval music to The Beatles. Indeed, I have played concerts with that kind of range myself. In other words, while 'classical' often seems to mean just music for orchestra or string quartet, it can also mean music for Medieval vocal or instrumental ensemble. Or a harpsichord recital. Now I admit, my inclusion of the Beatles is problematic, but that's just my personal crusade so you can ignore it. Besides, I don't like most arrangements of the Beatles' music.

Let's have a little listen to Hayley Westenra and see what sort of thing her music is:

Just off the top of my head, that is not classical music in either of the definitions. And neither is anything that Morricone has done (this album is a collaboration between them). What we are hearing are some of the 'accidents' of classical music without any of the substance. Here is what Wikipedia says about the philosophical concept of 'accidents':

Aristotle made a distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a thing. For example, a chair can be made of wood, metal, or plastic, but this is an accident: it is accidental to its being a chair. It is still a chair regardless of the material it is made of. To put this in technical terms, an accident is a property which has no necessary connection to the essence of the thing being described.

 It is not necessary to classical music that there be soft flowing strings and no drum track. It is essential that there be something going on that is not a cliche, that there be some musical substance. Music that takes us somewhere, that has significant structure, that is beautiful is probably 'classical' music. Music that goes nowhere, just contains harmonic and melodic cliches, that evokes sappy melodrama or benumbed tranquilized stupor, this is not classical music. It is however Hayley Westenra and Ennio Morricone. Their music apes some of the superficial accidents of classical music. Agh! Let's wash our ears out with the real thing, shall we?

Notice that you don't need an orchestra, you don't need digital editing and sound processing or any other gimmicks. All you need is a real singer, a pianist and, very important, a real composer. Why would anyone listen to Hayley Westenra trudge her dreary way through the morass that is Morricone when they could listen to Cecilia Bartoli sparkle her way through the delight that is Mozart?

Here's my theory: the people that buy recordings by Westenra and her ilk don't actually listen to them. They put them on as background music and enjoy the tranquilizing sounds they make. I had to listen to that recording a couple of times and I was ready to jump off a bridge. I suspect that all the economic players in the biz these days try very hard to make sure that no-one does what I have just done: put the bad and the good side by side so you can tell which is which. Everyone seems to think it is unfair or illegitimate to compare anything. Why is that? We go to a wine-tasting and compare different wines and pick our favorites.

Go back and listen to both pieces and tell me what you think. Can anyone actually listen to the first one?

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Different Flavors of Classical Music

I said in a previous post that the term 'classical' music is a back-formation, meaning that until popular music became an economically huge force, there was just music with different flavors for different purposes. For listening, you went to the symphony or a chamber or lieder recital, for dancing you had Viennese walzes--just to choose a couple of examples. But once recording technology and television came along, popular music grew to dwarf what we now call 'classical' music. My view is that any music that has long-lasting value, of whatever genre or style, will sooner or later become 'classical' in the sense of "the best that has been done". As you may have noticed, I place the oeuvre of the Beatles in that category.

That aside, people new to classical music notice that it comes in different flavors. The repertoire of symphony orchestras roughly spans the period from when the symphony was invented, mostly by Joseph Haydn around 1770, to the present day, though in the current environment most composers do not choose the symphony as the main focus of their work. But we can divide this repertoire into phases. The Classical phase includes Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven--and possibly Schubert. But between 1820 and 1830 a new spirit came to be: that of Romanticism. This is a bit confusing because we use the word 'classical' in two senses. In one sense it is all that music that is not popular. But in the narrower sense it means music of a particular historical period: from 1770 to the death of Beethoven in 1827. The Romantic phase of 'classical' music starts from then and goes to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Composers like Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Bruckner, Mahler, Liszt and Wagner are all Romantic composers.

Another interesting thing happened in the 19th century: there began to be more interest in the music of the past than ever before. This really started in 1829 when Mendelssohn organized a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in Berlin one hundred years after it was first performed in Leipzig. Even though composers like Beethoven had studied the works of Bach, he was not well-known among the general listening public. This changed radically during the 19th and 20th centuries. Bach is from the period known as the Baroque, or what we might call pre-Classical classical music. It was not just Bach that was re-discovered. He brought along with him a host of other Baroque composers like Rameau, a couple of Couperins, Froberger, Corelli and, that bane of background music, the Vivaldi Four Seasons. After that, it was easy to develop an interest in pre-Baroque music and today we have lutenists and madrigal groups that go around playing Renaissance music. There are also ensembles that go further back to the Middle Ages. The wonderful thing is that we have discovered outstanding pieces of music going right back to the beginnings of Western music around the year 1000.

I won't talk about the discovery of non-Western music here, but that has been a trend for the last fifty years or so. But I should mention what came after the Romantic period. In the early 20th century there was a great paroxysm in Western Civilization. One symptom was World War I, followed by the sequel, World War II. Some have called this a "suicide attempt by Western Civilization". There were similar events in music as well. The organization of music in terms of the modes or scales was overthrown with the development of atonal music and the incorporation of percussion, noises and chance procedures. The names to note are Schoenberg, Berg and Webern on the one hand and Cage, Stockhausen and Varese on the other. The first group followed the traditions of using ordinary instruments but in an atonal context; the latter group incorporated new instruments, electronics, noise and chance procedures. It is still an open question whether much of this music will become 'classical' in my sense of the word. I'm sure that some will, but much won't.

So there you have a quick march through several different flavors of classical music. Now for some listening. Here is a piece from the early 20th century that I am fairly sure will become a 'classic' if it isn't already. The Lyric Suite for string quartet by Alban Berg, completed in 1926:

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