Musicians and the Media

Pop musicians have become masters at exploiting the mass media in order to promote themselves. A lot of this comes down to exploiting their own sexuality, which, since their sexuality plays a similar role in their music, makes a kind of sense. Lady Gaga's or Rihanna's public persona in the media and the one portrayed in the music videos are essentially the same thing.

But when it comes to classical musicians, there is an uncomfortable gulf between the musician and the persona crafted for or by the mass media. As an example, have a look at this interview with the British violinist Nicola Benedetti in the Scottish Sun. Nicola does everything she can to preserve both her own dignity and that of classical music in the face of an unending stream of insinuating questions about sex, drugs and pop music. In between quotes from Nicola, the writer inserts gratuitous comments about her "washboard tummy" and long legs. But her message about hard work, discipline and dedication comes through despite all this. Her message is exactly 180 degrees away from the message of popular culture, but she still gets it across.

It is popular culture that is in a state of free fall these days and a look at the typical behaviour of young Britons--the binge culture--confirms it. Nicola is trying her best, even in an interview trying to drag her into the midst of this popular culture, to communicate the message that all things worthwhile take hard work and discipline--and to promote her own career. More power to her.

A while ago I put up a post looking sardonically at how some violinists promote themselves by using semi-nudity. This was meant to be a kind of critique, but from the statistics, that post keeps getting a lot of hits. I'm sure this is due to the title "Naked Violinists". So, since that sort of thing is NOT what this blog is about, quite the opposite, and so as not to disappoint those people who google "naked violinists", I am going to delete that post!

Now let's hear Nicola Benedetti play something. Here is some Vivaldi:

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Music and Cultural Icons

Over at Greg Sandow's blog there is usually a lively discussion going on about classical music and how it is doing in the culture today. Here is his latest post. I made a few comments and the last one was lengthy enough and possibly interesting enough for me to want to put it up here. In the original post Greg is worried that classical music cuts itself off from the mainstream culture and ends with this:

I’ve run into a lot of what I’d call classical music exceptionalism, the belief — so often passionately held — that classical music is special, that U2 may be fine, in its place, but that classical music is something people have to like, that it’s superior to the dross (musical and otherwise) of current culture. Etc., etc., etc.

We can believe that, if we like, but the people we’re trying to reach don’t believe it. To reach them, we’ll have to let them see that we value — not just understand, but value — who they are, and what their culture is.

In response to one comment he said:

speaking now from my experience as both a pop and classical music critic — it’s generally a lot easier, and quicker, to take the measure of a new classical piece, even a long one (40 minutes or more), than it is to absorb a new pop album. The classical piece shows its spots fairly quickly. 

Which I responded to:

Without citing any particular piece of new classical music, it is hard to know how to take this argument. If you are talking about some minimal music, well, maybe. But it seems as if this is a straw man. An anonymous piece of new music, perhaps by a minimalist, versus a classic by Bruce Springsteen. Oooookkkaaayyy.

Let me offer the contrary argument: it is generally a lot easier, and quicker, to take the measure of a new pop piece by, say, Katy Perry, than it is to absorb a new classical piece by, say, Thomas Adès or Osvaldo Golijov. Katy Perry usually shows her, uh, ‘spots’ rather quickly. Isn’t what I just said a truism? 

Greg also made the point that classical music has no "iconic cultural figures" equivalent to, say, Bob Dylan, which I attempted to disagree with, citing Shostakovich among others. While agreeing with me on Shostakovich, Greg responded with this:

But, Bryan, I don’t know that you understand what I mean by an iconic cultural figure, of which there are innumerable examples in the pop music of the last 50s years, and many before that. I can’t blame anyone who loves classical music for — no doubt without meaning to — inflating its depth and importance more than any reasonable logic (and available facts) would warrant. But if you understand the meaning of Dylan, and so many others in pop, it’s hard to say that just because someone is a great classical musician, they’re playing in the same league. Musically, they might be. But culturally, they most likely aren’t.

After some thought, I wrote this comment:

Greg, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to this sooner–very busy these days! But the discussion is fascinating because, as always when people disagree, there is a lot to be learned. What I’m picking up here is a couple of things. First, I usually try to avoid getting too far into sociology and politics. I like to stick to ‘the music’. But, of course, you can’t really do that completely because music, all music, is in the world and has sociological and political aspects–often crucial ones. To go back a bit, yes, you are quite right, I did not understand what you meant by “iconic cultural figure” or, rather, I was ignoring that aspect because it is not purely musical. I do see what you mean. Well, I could pick around the edges a bit. I was around in the 60s, listening and playing music (in the second half of the 60s, at least) and for me the Beatles and Cream were the big cultural icons. Dylan, not so much. My point is just that there might not be universal agreement as to who the big cultural icons actually are. Society is no monolith.But that aside, another way to describe what you call iconic culural figures is to say that around certain figures in music history a mythology has grown up that idealizes and otherwise alters the reality a bit in order to fit a cultural need. Possibly the first figure in music of whom this is true is Josquin des Prez, whom the 16th century idealized. Another was Beethoven, whom the 19th century idealized. Now we have Bob Dylan, whom, out of our own cultural needs, we idealize. As you say, “a great musician isn’t necessarily an iconic cultural figure.” And vice versa, I suppose. Absolutely! Sometimes a great musician may become an icon, or develop mythical aspects, because he or she fulfills a cultural need of the time, sometimes not.Now here is where I come to something that you might find interesting and even useful: in the past, what we now call ‘classical’ music often performed some crucial roles in the culture. For example, Palestrina’s music was a kind of ars perfecta that was a model for the transcendent truth of the Catholic faith against the objections of the Reformation. It was in some ways at the heart of the great tensions in the society of the time. Beethoven’s music, with its revolutionary energy, was entirely in the ferment of the great changes that were happening in European society at the end of the 18th century. And so on…From all indicators, the music that is at the heart of the, well, if not great issues, then certainly the prevailing sensibilities, of the 21st century is pop music. No disrespect intended; by pop music I mean all that music that is not classical or jazz or world music: Katy Perry, U2, Radiohead, Lady Gaga, the whole bunch. This music is the music of our time in a way that Thomas Ades or even Philip Glass cannot be.The reason for this is that there was a revolution in music in the 20th century that you could trace just by record sales. At one point Van Cliburn could outsell Elvis. But very soon the sales of, eg, Beatles albums dwarfed classical music sales. This is important because where the money flows tells us something about where the social interest is. In the past, music was driven, not by commercial sales, but often by the needs of the most powerful figures in the society.In the 15th century certain composers were intimately involved with events central to the culture. In 1453 Constantinople fell, the last bastion of the ancient world and heir to the Roman Empire. In response to this Philip the Good of Burgundy vowed to go on a Crusade. A great banquet, the Banquet of the Oath of the Pheasant, was held and music was a central part of this event, probably including a lament written by Guillaume Dufay. Also associated with Philip the Good and his successor were a number of masses built around the song L’Homme arme written by a host of composers including Antoine Busnoys, an important member of the court. This ceremonial music was hugely important in the culture.

My point is that, if there were a true equivalent today, someone like Philip Glass or John Adams would be writing ceremonial music that would express the central issues and events our our time and culture. Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer and Steve Reich’s 9/11 certainly make an attempt to do so, but while they are artistic statements, they are ones that are contested rather than accepted. I suspect that the reason for this is that contemporary art, including music, has long adopted the posture of being at odds with the mainstream culture. It is hard to imagine a composer now being associated as closely with the powerful figures in society as many were in the past. Perhaps the closest might be the role of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the European Union. One thing we do apparently agree on is that Shostakovich was indeed a cultural icon in the Soviet Union. The interesting questions are why and how. The issues are enormously complex, which is why I usually just try and focus on the music!

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Satisfied With Less

There is a lot of discussion of the plight of classical music these days. Here's a story from NPR about cutbacks in the Classical section of the Grammy awards. Greg Sandow has a continuing series on it on his blog. I think I would like to take a different tack here.

First let's get a little historical perspective. Possibly the greatest composer of all time, J. S. Bach, was cantor and musical director at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig from May 1723 until his death in 1750. As music director he was responsible for the music at all four of the churches in Leipzig. The city fathers regarded the appointment of Bach as an important factor in boosting the attractiveness and reputation of Leipzig as a center of learning and culture. One of the major results of his tenure was the cycle of cantatas in which he provided original compositions for voice and instrumental ensemble for most Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year. It is safe to say, therefore, that for the ordinary citizen of this prosperous German city, the music of Bach was central to their musical experience. What made this possible was partly the religious context: most people went to church and Bach was the consummate church musician. Therefore, the cultural context of the time predisposed listeners to his cantatas as settings of texts that were predominantly religious. That they are widely appreciated today, even though that particular context is largely lost to us, is a measure of their high quality as compositions.

Perhaps the lesson to be derived from this is that most listeners are not predisposed to the abstract appreciation of sheer aesthetic beauty in music, but need, as it were, a helping hand in the form of religion or some other contextual factor. What cultural factors are present today that predispose listeners to particular forms of music? One major one is the growth of popular culture. In Bach's time there was probably little (folk-dancing?) that we would recognize as popular culture. But now we have an enormous cultural and economic force in society ranging from Hollywood movies, to video-gaming (now larger economically than Hollywood), to popular music to television and so on. The music of these various realms is mostly popular. Whereas cinema used to use a lot of classical music, it does so less and less. Ironically, the more sophisticated video games such as the recently-released Skyrim seem to be using vaguely classical genres.

In general it is safe to say that today's listener is used to popular music as the soundtrack of her life, and unused to classical music. Classical music has become the outlier, the rare, the unusual. In the 18th century, I don't think that was the case. Popular music is ideally adapted to the usages of our lives at present. It is crafted to be played through electronic systems of reproduction and does not suffer from so doing, unlike a lot of classical music. It is brief and easily absorbed. It is about the typical themes of people's lives, love, identity, repression, whatever.

What it is not, or mostly not, is of very high aesthetic quality. If I were to take a guess at where the popular music of today ranked aesthetically, I would equate it perhaps with 17th century French ballet music. At best.

Perhaps, in the future, our current pop music will look just as odd and musically constrained as this does to us. Imagine how this will look and sound to viewers two hundred years from now:

Before the tsunami of popular culture in the middle of the last century, however, there was an earlier movement: the scholarly historic developments of the 19th century. In 1829 Mendelssohn began the revival of the music of Bach with a performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. This was followed by a widespread revival of Bach's music, a complete edition, complete recordings and so on. In other words, a sense developed that great artworks were important and could be appreciated not only by their immediate audience, but by modern audiences. So now, we 21st century listeners can develop an appreciation not only for Lady Gaga, but also for Bach, Guillaume DuFay, Leonin and even Balinese gamelan music.

Here is where the notion of quality comes in. The music of Bach, for example, is of extraordinary aesthetic quality. Composers to this very day study how he composed and listeners are still astounded at the richness of his music. But for many listeners, their milieu of popular culture hampers their ability to appreciate Bach or other classical music. The juggernaut of popular culture is so pervasive that many may grow up hearing little or no classical music. It is disappearing from the public space. Classical artists used to appear more often on television than they do now.

The solution? I'm not sure I have one except that it would probably be a good idea for parents to ensure that their children get some exposure to classical music just in case. After all, if the bottom line is quality, classical music really can't be beat. Today's audiences seem satisfied with less, but individuals don't have to be.

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Popular and Unpopular Culture

I was browsing around the interwebs and found a fascinating piece on post-minimalism and this brief clip of the composer John Adams talking about popular culture:

There is a scathing rebuttal to this, also on YouTube, but I'll do my own. Now I don't have anything against John Adams' music, nor am I a big fan--I'm pretty much neutral. So I'm just responding to what he is saying here.

• "Popular music and popular culture in general has enormous prestige" This is just silly. Popular culture, by definition, has popularity which means revenues. Popular music has lots of money. Classical music does not. But classical music does have prestige--much resented by people who don't much like it, but do like popular and jazz musics.
• "If Barack Obama ... had said [he] liked Beethoven, the poll numbers would have dropped through the floor" There is this tradition in American politics of portraying yourself as a 'man of the people' so this might be a kind of half-truth. But mostly irrelevant, I think. If we turn it around, we see that an awful lot of people detest, for example, Sarah Palin partly because she does not make a pretense of appreciating high culture. You can't actually have it both ways, can you?
• "We have this suspicion about culture, that there's something vaguely subversive and morally lax about art." That suspicion may indeed be floating around, but if so, it is largely because every 'progressive' out there is saying that serious art must be subversive! That's the whole point of putting a crucifix in a glass of urine, is it not? So this suspicion would seem to be well-earned, but only if we are talking about 'progressive' art.
• "So that's why we really glorify pop culture." Say again? This follows directly on the previous quote as if there were some logical connection. We glorify pop culture (we don't, we just spend a lot of money on it because it's popular) because high art is subversive? Um, isn't pop culture actually more subversive? Had a look at a Lady Gaga video lately?
• "We were a country founded by religious zealots and venture capitalists." The history is just wrong and he is going to try and prove something that is not going to follow.
• "that lingering anti-intellectualism" Let me just sort out the hidden assumptions here: religious zealots and venture capitalists are anti-intellectual. Really? Tell that to the guys writing those intricate computer models that run Wall Street these days. But the most remarkable buried assumption here is that classical music is intellectual. Is it? Well sure, a piece by Beethoven is longer than a piece by Katy Perry but a listener doesn't need to understand the structure to enjoy it any more than he or she needs to understand how digital sound editing and synthesized drum tracks work to enjoy the Katy Perry. Maybe Beethoven just needs better videos?

Then he meanders on complaining about how people want to be initiated but don't have access to all that wonderful classical music. Well [expletive deleted], has he never looked at YouTube? Everything is out there. You can listen to anything you want any time you want. If people don't want to listen to classical music there is obviously some other reason and it has nothing to do with the ones he mentioned:

1. pop music has all the prestige
2. classical music is perceived to be subversive
3. we glorify pop culture
4. we're anti-intellectual

Wrong, wrong, wrong, irrelevant. Does he really believe any of this tripe? Or is he just going through the motions of saying the things a composer is expected to say? Bowing in the right direction?

Here's what I think. Before the downfall of the aristocracy, their taste and money supported the art they liked. We got a lot of good art out of that: all that great Renaissance painting and music, for example. The glorious French Baroque. Even most of the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Towards the end of Haydn's life, he started to make money from public concerts and Beethoven was making money from sales of his music, but they still were for the most part, supported by upper-class patrons. Through the 19th century this slowly changed so that now government takes over the function of the aristocracy and supports various institutions that commission composers. For a look at the kinds of commissions a successful composer receives, have a look at this page on John Adams. How government chooses depends sometimes on political considerations, but often it is based on the opinions of cultural leaders in the media and academia. That is really who John Adams is talking to in the clip. The possibility of composers making a living from sales of their music is remote these days because of the rise of popular music. I've written about this before, but the enormous sums of money that can be made in popular music don't go back too many decades. Classical records pre-Elvis actually could out-sell popular ones. But not now.

But all this talk about popular and unpopular culture misses the point. I keep coming back to the sage words of Duke Ellington who said there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. There are a few good pieces of music in a vast landscape of dull, boring, annoying crap. But it has little to do with the labels. There are good and bad classical pieces, good and bad popular music, good and bad bluegrass, good and bad jazz and on and on. Isn't that obvious?

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Rebecca Black

Ok, I can't resist. Here is a new song/video from Rebecca Black of "Friday" fame:

Someone already plucked the low-hanging fruit: Hey, it's no "Friday". Eeewwww, cheap shot. Sure, it's vacuous and cliched, but it's interesting nonetheless. She's singing that it's her moment. Ok, sure. The question I want to ask is, why would people want to listen to it? I guess there is the vicarious feeling, "it could be me"!  But I'm seeing a host of narcissists all in their own worlds with nothing to say to anyone else. It's cheery and upbeat, but it's her moment, not that of anyone else. Weird world we live in... Is all pop music this self-involved now?

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The Case of Lady Gaga

I first ran across her about a year ago when Ann Althouse posted "Bad Romance" on her blog. Odd, I know, to make pop discoveries on a law professor's blog, but Ann is special. Here is "Bad Romance":

I also discovered this version:

That's worth listening to just to separate the elaborate video production from the music. You might have noticed that I usually pick clips that have no video, just a still photo or perhaps the score. That's the reason. I'm assuming we want to focus on the music. Of course, with pop these days, it isn't usually possible except by not watching. At first I thought the song and the artist were quite interesting--talking about the Lady Gaga original. I was struck by the baroque framing: it starts and ends with electric harpsichord. True, in the middle it's all latex, teasing and hip thrusts. But it's an original look and I think it's not a bad pop song. The bar is pretty low these days! But as I saw other of her videos like Telephone I started losing interest. I like this cover better than the original. When in doubt, send in the Marines!

And one of these days I'm afraid that an item of clothing is going to eat her, ending a promising career...

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