The Lifespan of Classical Music

Back when I had enough free time to take an active part in other peoples' blogs, I posted occasionally on Daniel Wolf's Renewable Music, a fine example of a composer's blog.  Recently I rediscovered his  Thanatophiles which he originally posted over four years ago.   I responded to it at length but I never cross-posted my essay here.  Now's as good a time as any.  I added a bit of highlighting if you prefer to skim.

First, read Daniel's concluding two paragraphs (although I urge you to read his whole piece - considerably shorter than my response - here):

While it's clear that much of 20th century classical musical life can be characterized by the active rejection of new composition in favor of the interpretation of older work, we desperately need some smarter ideas about the ways in which repertoires integrate or reject innovation, and perhaps we can get some ideas from religious and literary scholarship about the ways in which communities for whom the canon has been closed still maintain a creative life.

We still understand very little about the impact of the various technologies for "fixing" a music -- from oral transmission, to notation, and onto sound recording in its changing modes of exchange. A bit of music may or may not have some platonic ideal behind it which these various technologies reproduce to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, but these technologies raise all sorts of questions about both liveliness and morbidity and further questions about how to distinguish between these two states in an environment in which a parasitic attachment to past liveliness is -- for better or worse -- a substitute for getting on with real change.

Although I agree with some of your observations, I cannot agree with your conclusion. I think classical music is quite dead. It's easy to overlook this fact because many people still enjoy listening to it and there are many healthy organizations providing performances and recordings. I would argue that's not enough for the music itself to be "living".

Classical music has had defined, unchanging, largely immovable boundaries for many decades. Allowable performance practices have a small acceptable range. When you talk about "classical music" I, and everyone, know exactly what you are referring to. Since the advent of authentic baroque and renaissance performance decades ago not much has changed. Oh, there's more flash and more marketing these days. "Classical" music isn't changing. There's a lot of "new" music asking to be let in. The audiences are not terribly thrilled by it. Chilled would be a better description. Exceptions are so rare you cannot claim they are a revitalizing influence.

You point out that an active academia codifies the practice. Absolutely. Music schools are filled with people who have devoted their lives to finding newer and newer things about a fixed body of knowledge. They teach the "proper" way of playing. Teachers and students may know history but they are still being forced to repeat it.

You point out that other parts of the world have growing classical music "scenes". Doesn't this mean that people are still finding the meaning and elegance which the classics has always provided to anyone who cares to partake? More cynically, it also might mean that other societies are attempting to find some equality with the European musical homeland. There is still class distinction in classical music.

Of course composers continue to suggest paths for a possible future of classical music. They (we) attempt mostly to evolve from what was there before. The performing and recording companies promote a painfully small subsection of these possibilities, based, in my opinion, more on importance than on talent. But few pieces have been accepted by the general audience. Most of the audience prefer to pay to hear their old friends Beethoven or Schumann or Wagner or Brahms again and again. And it's not clear if any of the new "pledges" to the composer pantheon will be allowed to really join the "fraternity". Who since Bartok has really been awarded decades of repeated performances?

I suggest that we would be better off to accept that musics have lifespans - they come and go, they are born, they flower and then they die. We can still enjoy the dead ones, preserved for us in elegant museum-like concert halls. But the formative, creative, socially relevant periods of dead musics have passed. We can honor the fact that they've had a huge influence on our culture and provided great beauty and meaning and challenges to anyone who cares to take advantage of them. As a culture we have concluded that these musics should be preserved and that knowing them is an essential experience of our time. So is experiencing Shakespeare, but I hope no one would suggest Elizabethan theater is not dead.

We should all look to the future with the realization that something new is coming, something that will reflect our present without a restrictive obeisance to the past, something that will mirror the hopes and dreams and fears of a whole lot of living people, who will anxiously wait to find out if their most wonderful dreams or most horrible fears come to pass, who don't have much time to think about music but will know absolutely which organized sounds resonate with their thoughts and hopes and feelings. And which don't.

Those of us who appreciate and revere what came before may not like the new stuff. That's too bad, but there's nothing forcing us to listen to anything in particular. Everyone seems to listen to something. And everyone seems to know what they like.

Finally, the search for new metaphors to describe the death or life of this or that music is itself a living art. Newer and stranger comparisons and analogies are regularly found to prove the same points over and over. The problem is that any music - whether classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, take your pick - encompasses a vast sweep of society, a long history and varied aspects of culture as to be indescribable as a whole in any simple manner. You could say classical music is an elephant beset by countless blind men and women, each trying to describe their small corner of the beast and each finding a unique descriptor. Yes, that's another metaphor. Oops, I did it again.

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Other Mixed Meters attacks on Classical Music's mortality (plus teaser quotes):

If Music Be The Food of Love "Hip Hop, as the magazine cover says, is not dead. However Hip Hop has recently discovered its own mortality."

A New Rhapsody in Blue  "It occurred to me that if many (or even a few) performances of classical music had this level of creativity in them - of even a small fraction of the creativity in this performance - I would not think of it as such a dead art form."


Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)  "it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels."

Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest  "I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears."

Could Terry Riley's In C be Accepted As Classical Music?  "Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a "minimalist classic" into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it."


Lifespan Tags: classical music. . . death of classical music. . . concert halls are museums

Could Terry Riley's In C Be Accepted As Classical Music

Minimalism, as a musical style, has produced a clubby group of composers. Earlier this year some of them held the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music. In blog posts from their conference I learned of a new book about one particularly classic piece of minimalism: In C by Terry Riley.

This thin book, Terry Riley's In C by Robert Carl, is interesting mostly for the information about the composer's early life and the events surrounding the creation, performance and initial recording of his famous 1964 work. Carl's musical analysis and reviews of various recordings are less involving.


In C is a genuine classic piece of music of our time. By "our" I mean baby boomers. In those days when many of us encountered this style of music for the first time ("minimalism" wasn't the default term yet), it seemed like an endless open vista wherein anything might be possible.

In C was hugely important in my own personal development as a musician. You can no longer hear this in my current music but it was quite obvious back in my "first compositional period" (before I temporarily gave up writing in the early 90's).

In the 70's, when I was studying weird new music at CalArts, I used to come home at night exhausted from music by the likes of Stockhausen, Cage or Carter and relax by listening to the original Columbia recording of In C with the little electronic whoosh marking the split between side A and side B. Some evenings I listened to it all the way through twice or three times, all 40-some minutes of it.

Of course being a little stoned didn't hurt - but wasn't required. The music had a positive, heady power; so much energy. It carried me along. It was completely different from the dry new music which dominated my graduate education. More importantly I was totally amazed by two important qualities of In C: its structural simplicity and its social egalitarianism. I still am.

SIMPLE

In C is actually a kind of orchestra piece. Riley suggests about 35 players as the optimum number, although it has been done with many fewer or many more. In an interview he said that it might be played solo if the right player could be found. Good luck with that. It works well as a chamber piece for seven or eight very busy players.

With big ensembles In C challenges the notion that large symphonic works need huge over-notated scores filled with inaudible precision. The entire score fits on one letter size sheet of paper. A conventional orchestra score of similar length might have as many as 200 densely packed pages.

Obviously this seems more important to a person who has spent his entire career dealing with printed musical notation than it does to you. If such simplicity had become the norm rather than a single exception I might have had to find myself a different line of work.

Riley's composition allows only a few written notes to produce a highly complex texture every bit the equal of more precisely written pieces. It comes out differently every time - but it is never so different that you can't identify it immediately. This simplicity is a worthy and all-too-rare quality of contemporary music.

Originally the instructions on how to play that one small sheet of music were handed down verbally from musician to musician. Years later Riley added some text instructions codifying the performance practice - although he still seems pretty loose about the rules.

Here is the full orchestra score of In C. You can download a better looking pdf along with the instructions from Otherminds.


EGALITARIAN

The other important, mind-blowing idea which In C represented to me is its complete revolution in the social structure of the orchestra.

In a conventional orchestra the most-important person (i.e. the "conductor") dictates behavior from above. He stands alone, elevated on a podium. Meanwhile, down among the players, there is a formal pecking order. For example, the principal players, the ones who get the solos, are ranked higher than the garden variety section players. They get paid more too.

Of course this hierarchical arrangement is endemic throughout our society. Most people experience it constantly - at work, in school or in a family. Orchestra hierarchy bothered me a lot when I was a student. It still does, but not so much.

Riley has constructed In C so that the artistic responsibilities of the conductor - plus a large chunk of the composer's job as well - are distributed among all the players. His simple rules allow great freedom to be spread among many equal participants.

The performers stay together by listening to a steady pulse instead of by watching a conductor. This is not unlike playing with a metronome. Each player makes a continuous stream of artistic choices, unprecedented freedom for an orchestral musician. Riley stresses that all the players must listen carefully to properly fulfill their responsibilities. Their decisions matter to the final result.

Using only musical notes and musical structures In C eloquently speaks against the orchestral chain of command. It's my hope that performances of In C preserve and promote these laudable political and social principles.

These days In C has a certain dated sixties aura of utopian hippy anarchist communes about it. Cool, huh? There's no reason that feeling can't invade the world of classical music once in a while.


Very large ensemble performances of In C, which are often the very high profile ones as well, seem to lose this political message. The argument is made that some hierarchy must be introduced to avoid cacophony.

A recent celebration at Carnegie Hall celebrated the 45th anniversary of In C's composition with a large ensemble (about 70 players) which, according to the N.Y. Times, was led by a:

“flight pattern coordinator,” [who] used flash cards and hand signals to shape the sprawl.

Mark Swed, in his review of a performance by 124 musicians from CalArts (at Disney Concert Hall in 2006) wrote:

David Rosenboom, the violist on the historic first recording of the piece, conducted. ... Rosenboom more carefully molded it, indicating when sections should begin changing figures lest so large an orchestra seem chaotic. ... When the longest and most harmonically complex figure (No. 35) dominated, Rosenboom emphasized the brass, and the score sounded like the end of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" writ large and Postmodern.

In 2000 Michael Tilson Thomas conducted a performance by the San Francisco Symphony to which anyone could bring an instrument and join in. Sarah Cahill, in her review of the concert, wrote:

His actions were absolutely antithetical to the democratic concept of the piece.

Instead of using conductors or flight controllers or referees to control a too-large group, wouldn't it be simpler to find a solution which respects the essential "every player is equal" theme. You could tell all the players to limit their playing by a certain percentage. If the number of musicians is double the optimum number, tell them to play only half the time. Simple. Even simpler: if you insist on doing this piece with too many players, you should be prepared to accept chaos. What's wrong with a little chaos? Either way, the decision of who-plays-when remains an egalitarian one. Each member of the ensemble gets an equal say and the social statement of In C, the part I find meaningful, is preserved.

I fantasize that someday In C will be programmed on regular orchestra concerts. Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a "minimalist classic" into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it.

A chamber orchestra would be just the right size. Before the intermission the program could be, maybe, a Rossini overture and a Mozart concerto. And the second half would be a 35-minute performance of In C employing all the performers from the first half. Great concert! Of course, during In C the conductor should sit in the ensemble and play an instrument, provided he or she is capable. Otherwise tell the conductor to sit in the audience.

Now in 2009, with the history of minimalism nearing an inevitable end, conventions held, books published, courses taught, I can see how unique In C really is. Other orchestral music of recent decades has remained complex and hierarchical by comparison. No tradition of ultra-simplicity has appeared among other composers. Quite the opposite. Nothing about orchestra music - or music composition in general - challenges the structure of society. Quite the opposite.

By its very uniqueness and originality, In C deserves to be widely performed and discussed. It could easily be added to the classical canon. That revered list of works would benefit from adding this bright spot of sixties counterculture to the morass of 19th century romantic orchestral muck.



Here's an LA Weekly interview with Terry Riley.

Listen to WNYC's New Sounds show, interview with Terry Riley and David Harrington.

A print interview entitled "A Stoned Mozart?" with Terry Riley and David Harrington

You can read chapter one of Robert Carl's book here.  For me, re-reading it made me want to relisten to the original recording of In C. I hadn't heard it in a very long time. But I couldn't find my LP from back in the Seventies. My friend Paul Bailey once told me that it wasn't a good performance. I scoffed. I ordered another LP via the Internet, an LP rather than a CD so I could hear the whoosh - the electronic sound which abruptly reminds you to turn the record over. I listened to it once. Paul was absolutely right - the performances sucks. You can listen to two recent chamber performances led by Paul here.

I performed In C many times, including at one particularly memorable I.C.A. concert in 1978 with the composer himself in the ensemble.

Other Mixed Meters attacks on the classics:

• Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably) - a classical composer name recognition poll
• One Goldberg Equals Twelve Abbas - a scale to measure how interesting music is
• A Fine Line Between Classical and Parody - Musical Offsets; Wanted & Unwanted Music; Glenn Gould on Petula Clark
• Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa - How I outgrew Mahler's music
• Combining Four Letter Words: Oboe + Blog - Dies Irae and Hip Hop
• A New Rhapsody in Blue - yes, with actual improvisation
• If Music Be The Food of Love - which musics are dead, which are just dying
• David Ocker, Boy Music Critic - can't get enough Domenico Scarlatti
• The Docker Award for Mainstream Avant Garde Music - BBC Orchestra plays Cage badly
• Paradise, Pomp and Puppets - the LA Phil, Hungarian Radio Orch. and Berkeley Symphony perform music by Frank Zappa
• Mingus Epitaph - how jazz became classical one night at Disney Hall
• Sonata Heaven - about sculpting music out of the sounds all around you
  

Finally - I've added In C to the left-column list of David's Favorite Music, a long since forgotten and still incomplete feature of Mixed Meters. There are a number of my absolutely favorite composers who deserve to be included. Someday.

A Harvard Business School study looked at job satisfaction. Orchestra players came just below prison guards. Chamber musicians came in at number 1. What’s the difference? The presence of a conductor. Conductor Ben Zander quoted here.

Classical Music Sells Out

Here's a list. Go ahead, take a guess what it is.

1. Josh Groban
2. Andrea Bocelli
3. Il Divo
4. Charlotte Church
5. Sarah Brightman
6. Yo-Yo Ma
7. The Baby Einstein Music Box Orchestra
8. Luciano Pavarotti
9. London Symphony Orchestra
10. Bond
11. Russell Watson
12. Andre Rieu
13. John Williams
14. Paul Potts
15. Joshua Bell
16. Mormon Tabernacle Choir
17. Sting
18. Renee Fleming
19. Hayley Westenra
20. Placido Domingo
21. Amici Forever
22. Richard Joo
23. Daniel Rodriguez
24. Celilia Bartoli
25. Ronan Tynan

Yes, this is Billboard's Top-25 Classical Music Artists of the Decade 2000-2009. There are seven names I don't even recognize.

If you're the sort of classical musician who isn't bothered by this I suggest you watch Bond (a high-heeled string quartet, #10 above) perform this excerpt from a well-known classical warhorse. Be sure to listen at least until the drums enter.



Sales Tags: Billboard charts. . . top classical artists. . . death of classical music

Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest

A Los Angeles Sunday Times "Arts and Culture" article gave me pause. It's called Alexy Steele, Classical Underground Impresario by Scott Timberg. In the print edition it's entitled "Mad for Classical".

Here's the story ...

An artist, Alexy Steele, a person who creates new art to earn his living, holds classical music concerts in his loft. He calls the series "Classical Underground". People flock to them. And these events are held up as a way to save classical music.

We are told ...

The Classical Underground series was inspired by Steele repeatedly being told that classical music was dead. "Whenever I get to this point," he exclaims, wheeling back on his chair as he pours more beer, "my ears would pop!"

What bothers me, of course, is that the music presented to these gatherings of creative people is all from the classical canon. Nothing mentioned in the article seems very current or adventurous. The article did refer to one piece by Prokofiev (d.1953) plus some improvisations on Bach.

I'm reminded that one principal reason people love classical music is that it helps them relax. And maybe they need to network at loft parties. All that is easier with familiar, comfortable classics; music which barely changes from one performance to the next. I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears.

I remember a story told by Dorrance Stalvey, for many years director of the Monday Evening Concerts back when they were sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of (what else?) Art.

Dorrance programmed a concert of music which living artists played while they worked. He asked them "What do you listen to while you work?" and they told him. He was dismayed how the result was mostly from the baroque and classical periods.

Apparently these contemporary artists - some of them cutting edge - had no clue about contemporary music. I guess that they didn't find any inspiration in modern music. More charitably, maybe listening to something of actual relevance would distract their creative process. It's easier to ignore familiar things when you need to concentrate.

The fact that visually creative people, who I would have thought ought to have an interest in other forms of contemporary creativity, instead prefer a solidly unchanging body of old music, fills me with wonderment. How would they react to musicians who only cared to view paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries?

Thankfully, the world of creative music persists even without visual artists. Another article in the Times, just one day before, outlines local activities of creative music here in the LA area - all of it improvised. Read Finding Jazz in a Cool Place. (The title is "Jazz at a cool spot" in print.)

Alas, nothing in that article speaks about creative classical music either. The words "creative" and "classical" are ideas which aren't mutually supportive. Competing against the classical favorites is not easy.

Maybe we could have a moratorium on the classical warhorses - just stop playing them for ten or fifteen years. There are plenty of other classical-style pieces for people to listen to. Audiences need a chance to catch up.

Meanwhile the words "jazz" and "creative" certainly support one another these days. I wonder if there are visual artists who would like listening to cutting-edge improvisations in their lofts. There are plenty of creative musicians looking for places to perform.

=-=-=-=-

Alexy Steele's Website: High Art Forever

Other Mixed Meters attacks on artists:
Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things
What's on David Hockney's iPod?

Other Mixed Meters attacks on the classics:
Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)
One Goldberg Equals Twelve Abbas
A Fine Line Between Classical and Parody
Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa
Combining Four Letter Words: Oboe + Blog

Underground Tags: Alexy Steele. . . loft concerts. . . underground music

Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)

Timothy Mangan, the last full-time newspaper music critic in O.C., has a blog. (which is not true of the last full-time newspaper music critic in L.A.)

Tim posted an excerpt written by H.L. Mencken at the time of the Scopes Trial, 1925. It's about Beethoven. Go read it now: Beethoven and the Scopes Trial. Reading it is important because Tim's bosses probably peg his salary to how many hits his blog gets.

The excerpt really pushed my buttons. It smacks of vile cultural elitism coated with that sickeningly childish Beethoven worship which I hate so much. It made me want to rant.


Of course it's entirely possible that Mencken has his tongue firmly in his cheek. How am I to be sure - with no smiley faces in the text?

It starts out like one of those "There are two kinds of people..." jokes. For example: "There are three kinds of people - those who understand math and those who don't." Warning: certain mathematical concepts will be abused in this post.


Here's an excerpt from Mencken's excerpt:

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only ... That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States ... it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all.

I have no clue how many people in the US in 1925 had actually heard of Beethoven. Neither did Mencken. He was making up his facts ("it is probable"). That's an old journalistic tradition now preserved mainly by us bloggers. These days real journalists are into "fact checking". (Quick, name the capital city of Mongolia. )

Let's take Mencken at his word and stipulate that in 1925 about two percent of Americans actually knew who Beethoven was and the rest would have lynched him in the street for the crime of being meaningful and for coming back from the dead.


But times have changed. Allowing for the three-fold increase in U.S. population, no one could claim in 2008 that only 6 million Americans have ever heard of Beethoven. Any other composer (except Mozart), maybe, but not Beethoven.

I wanted to shout back at the excerpt: "Hey, H.L. Now-a-days, thanks to our limited choices of infotainment conglomerates, the U.S. is homogenized pretty thoroughly. We've all heard of the same stuff - including Beethoven."


We here at Mixed Meters set out to prove the point that everybody knows Beethoven by conducting a poll. The sample was small (9 responses) but the results prove the hypothesis so why bother going on. (Call that going, call that on.)

METHODOLOGY: I told each person that I had a question and asked for the first answer that popped into their head. No thinking, please. The question was: "Name a classical composer." (Not really a question, but hey.)

DATA: Here are the answers listed in descending frequency together with the first names of the respondents:

• Beethoven (Kevin, Sean, Claudia and Tom)
• Mozart (Rose and Lucy)
• Bach (Sandra)
• Brahms (Kristina)
• Takemitsu (Daniel)

Most of the answers were immediate, almost joyful. The exception was Claudia, secretary at an auto repair shop, who needed nearly a minute of her deepest cogitation before she came up with an answer, any answer (which she mispronounced.) But she knew "Beethoven".

Daniel's unexpected answer stems from the fact that he's a professional composer, the only trained musician in the sample. He cheated by thinking for several seconds before answering.

My poll has a probable margin of error of 25%. Remember: the "probable" - like Mencken I make up facts too. Please attempt to reproduce my results with polls of your own and post the probable results as comments below.


CONCLUSION: Forty-four percent of all Americans think of Beethoven first when they consider classical composers. If the question instead had been "Who is Beethoven?" my poll would have shown name recognition of 100% or more. That's because anyone who knows of Bach, Mozart, Brahms or Takemitsu probably knows of Beethoven too.


Poor Ludwig is now a cultural icon considerably separate from the appreciation of his music. Beethoven, who could still write music even after he went deaf. Beethoven, who overcame insurmountable obstacles. The Beethoven of Disney movies, disco hits, dog movies, strange rock band names and the John Thompson arrangement of Ode to Joy, among others.

We have made Beethoven's life's lemonade into a cultural kool-aid so diluted that everyone has tasted it but no one need be affected by it. The more diluted he becomes the less meaningful he gets. If people don't know why Beethoven is famous, they still know that he IS famous. Famous for being famous. Zsa Zsa Gabor.


Mencken goes on to tell us what would happen if the 1925 unwashed did take notice of our hero composer. He doesn't even say "probably".

If [Beethoven's music] could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.

Okay, I get it now. Beethoven is really a stalking horse for Mencken's real target - the anti-teaching-of-evolution crowd. He wants to show us how stupid those people really are by telling us about the bonehead stunts they would pull if they catch up with the poor unsuspecting Ludwig.

How much have things changed since 1925?

Suppose that in 2008 a teacher were arrested somewhere in America, just as John Scopes was in 1925, for telling his class about evolution. Could it happen? Would you be surprised? I wouldn't. The battle over teaching the idea of evolution continues to this day.

Could a contemporary journalist attack the opinions held by creationists (or neo-cons or right-to-lifers or some other deserving group) by describing their probably hateful retribution on a ... composer? A composer of music? I doubt it. A blogger might try it, but not a real journalist.

Which composer's villification at the hands of the cretinous masses would arouse the most sympathy among us - the good people? Copland? Carter? Leiber and Stoller? Keith Burstein? Richard Thomas? In the wildest journalistic imagination could any composer be plausibly turned into the next Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe?

In a word, no. That is because it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels.


And what of Poor Beethoven in all this? Suppose he did come back from the dead, hearing restored, to observe the holy adulations he so regularly receives. What would he think of his universal name recognition? Would be giggle nervously when asked about Immortal Beloved? I don't know.

But it is probable that if he actually listened (for the first time ever) to a performance of his own Ninth Symphony he would say "That's awful. I must completely rewrite it."


=-=-=-=-=-

The picture of John Belushi as Beethoven channeling Ray Charles on Saturday Night Live comes from here.

The Beethoven figurine picture comes from here.

The picture of Beethoven's skull comes from here.

The picture of John Cleese as Beethoven comes from here which also has a story about how poor Ludwig might have died. The script to Beethoven's Mynah Bird, a sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus, is here.

The Beethoven action figure pictures come from here and here.

The picture of Beethoven's ear trumpets comes from here.

I took the pictures of the Ludwig sticker (which looks like Johnny Depp) on the traffic box in Civic Center, downtown Los Angeles.

Click any picture for an enlargement.

H.L. Tags: Mencken. . . Beethoven. . . Scopes Trial

A New Rhapsody in Blue

I turned on the car radio last month to the strains of Rhapsody in Blue. Ah, I thought "I must be listening to KUSC, LA's (one remaining) classical music station." Rhapsody in Blue, for all its jazzness, is part of the classical repertoire. It seems to be played by every symphony orchestra and every piano soloist over and over, each performance pretty much identical to all the others. Audiences appalaud dutifully.

After a few seconds I realized this was no ordinary Rhapsody in Blue. Along with the "classical" bits it contained actual improvisation. And I was not listening to the classical radio station. This was being broadcast on the (one remaining) jazz station - which normally never plays Rhapsody in Blue (because they don't play classical music.)


This rhapsody had soloists soloing (yep, multiple soloists along with the pianist including a big part for the lowly banjo). The soloists were making things up, they were being creative and individual. The familiar segues were different. There were new fascinating harmonies in the piano part; chord substitution is not a classical music talent (any more). This pianist, whoever it was, was a master of twisting the familiar into the fabulous.

In between all this was a regular orchestra playing the familiar bits which sounded, well, familiar.

It was still going strong when I reached our driveway. I sat and listened, enthralled, until it was over. Turned out to be a Jazz from Lincoln Center broadcast. The announcer (some guy named Winston or Wilton) said the pianist was Marcus Roberts. I marched inside and immediately ordered the album, Portraits in Blue by Marcus Roberts.. Here's more info.


When the album arrived I was surprised to learn that there were two sets of musicians; the improvising musicians and the classical musicians were not the same. The performance was credited to "Members of the Orchestra of St. Lukes and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra". I had naively assumed that there are plenty of musicians who could play both halves of this piece, the classical and improvisation. I guess not.


The music is a mix of jazz styles - the liner notes mention Errol Gardner and Thelonius Monk. There's a Mingus-like section. The final cadenza ends with a vamp right out of Leslie Gore. I guffawed when I heard that. Now, dozens of listens later and knowing full well that it's about to happen, I still laugh.


This arrangement of the Rhapsody gets various live performances.
Here's an excerpt from a recent review by Harvey Steiman in Aspen Times (about the Aspen Music Festival's survey of the relationship between jazz and classical music):

I­n a 1­998 p­erformance o­f “R­hapsody i­n B­lue” h­ere i­n A­spen, t­he j­azz p­ianist M­arcus R­oberts p­layed G­ershwin’s m­usic a­s i­f i­t w­ere r­eal j­azz a­nd e­xtended t­he c­adenzas i­nto full­s­cale j­azz s­olos. T­hat w­as i­mpressive. A­nd r­are.

And Marcus Roberts performed the Rhapsody in Blue last week at the Proms. Here are some notes. And here are some reviews.

In a BBC interview before the broadcast Roberts said:

It's been wonderful pretty much every time we've done it ... because people know the piece, so when you improvise on it they can follow what you're doing, even if it's fairly abstract, even if it's fairly spontaneous.

The live performance was less interesting to me than the recording since many of the solos reverted back to the orchestra players who played them really "straight". Well, it was a run-out concert. And of course the recording represents the best of several takes. I'd like to hear the Lincoln Center recording again - that seemed pretty wild.

It occurred to me that if many (or even a few) performances of classical music had this level of creativity in them - of even a small fraction of the creativity in this performance - I would not think of it as such a dead art form.

Other music in my current listening rotation (meaning on my iPod) have similar creativity within a classical framework:

• the Diabelli Variations by Uri Caine (Mixed Meters on Uri Caine's Goldberg Variations)
• the Art of Fuguing, Bach arranged by William Malloch
• Mozart in Egypt (Egyptian composers re-compose W.A.)
• Some Combinations of Fingers and Passion - piano improvisations by Sergei Kuryohkin who displays an abundant classical technique

What these have in common is that someone has taken classical music, or some aspect of the classical music style, and treated it creatively with new ideas and new elements. This is not re-creative work, as so much classical performance is these days. It is also not recreational entertainment product. It will not need to be rerecorded and reinterpreted.

However, this is stuff you'll need to think about while you listen. Afterwards too. And of course a grounding in the classics will help but it's not enough. Not nearly enough. If you already have fixed thoughts about the great works of music, then you'll need to think new thoughts in order to listen to these pieces. That, it seems to me, is what makes a living art form.


Clazzical Jassical Tags: George Gershwin. . . Rhapsody in Blue. . . Marcus Roberts. . . classical music. . . jazz. . . Proms

The Death of Nursery Rhymes

Read Pop songs threaten nursery rhymes



Pop Tags: nursery rhymes. . . pop songs. . . death

Combining Four-letter Words: Oboe + Blog

Part One: BASE + BALL, DIES + IRAE, HIP + HOP

I received an email about my post In Which David Is Confused By The Second Coming. This concerned a piece of hip-hop music, The Second Coming by Juelz Santana, which quotes the Dies Irae. It was used in a television commercial for basketball shoes. I can tell you, it confused the hell out of me when I first heard it.

That post has gotten more hits than any Mixed Meters post ever. When you're one of the first to write online about a subject many people are actually interested in, I guess that's what happens. This wave of hits rose up and carried Mixed Meters along for a while, giving me a whole new understanding of the phrase "Surfing the Internet".

Anyway - like I was saying...

I received an email about my post on Nike/Dies Irae/Juelz Santana from Susan Spector. Susan plays oboe at the Met in New York City. That means she wears black clothing and sits in the big hole in front of the stage where only people in the first few rows can see her. Here is her picture from her blog Perfect Pitch showing the proper way to hold an oboe. What a grip.

Obviously a blog called Perfect Pitch is about BASEBALL Duh. Specifically her blog is about her team, the Mets. Susan is a big fan of the Mets.

Let's review: Susan plays at the Met and she roots for the Mets. What were the chances?

What brings

• Hip Hop and
• Baseball and the
  
• Dies Irae and an
  
• Opera Orchestra Oboist

all together in one post? I'm glad you asked.

Well, The Second Coming, that same music from the Nike commercial, is being used to rouse the Mets fans into something approaching excitement at their home games. Susan's first reaction, not unlike mine, was confusion. She has a good deal more to say about The Second Coming story and the meaning of the Dies Irae. Read her Perfect Pitch Post entitled Day of Wrath here.

Part Two: RICH + POOR, FEMALE + CRITIC, MUSIC + DANCE, POLITE + PEOPLE

In a more recent MM post Rich Critic, Poor Critic, I asked whether there were any female music critics out there. Another blogging-oboist (or oboe-playing-blogger), Patty Mitchell of OboeInsight, added a comment alerting me to the history of female music critics in the Bay Area. She also mentioned NY Times' critic Anne Midgette. Thanks Patty.

(Later without any help I remembered music critic Donna Perlmutter here in Southern California.)

In Patty's blog I found this article entitled To: Guy Who Screamed Obscentities at the Ballet the Other Night which links to a too-good-to-pass-up story told in this Craigslist posting.

Here's a sample.

It was then you yelled, in your beautiful gray-haired old crotchety man voice, "WILL YOU PEOPLE SIT DOWN AND LET THE *POLITE* PEOPLE SHOW THEIR APPRECIATION?!," slight pause, "YA ASSHOLES!"

Just read the whole thing for yourself. Gentility lives at the Ballet. At least the recent fist fight in Boston was at a Pops concert.


PART THREE: DEATH + MUSIC, CHAMBER + NIGHTCLUB, THEN + NOW

On Sunday, June 24, at my local Pasadena Starbucks I picked up an abandoned copy of the New York Times Arts & Leisure section. The featured column-one article was "Music That Thinks Outside the Chamber". I read the first few paragraphs finding these striking quotes:

...an acquaintance informed him that the two most boring words in the English language were "chamber music."

...for many people, chamber music is dead.

"Wow" I thought. "I wonder whose article this is."

I looked for a by-line. It was by none other than Anne Midgette. Since the death of classical music is turning out to be a frequent Mixed Meters theme I read on. A couple more paragraphs and I found this:

"At the moment supply outstrips demand," said John Steinmetz, a bassoonist and composer active in the chamber music field.

"Double Wow" I thought. John Steinmetz has been a close friend of mine for many decades. He and I were students together at Cal Arts, co-founders of the chamber ensemble X-tet, frequent performers of one anothers music and, these days, close neighbors (if only by the loose standards of Southern California geography). And here he was being quoted on the front page of the NYT Arts section above the fold. Way to go, John.

"I'd better read this entire article." my thoughts concluded.

(For those of you who wonder "What's a Bassoon?" imagine four oboes laid end to end and twisted around the body of the performer. This picture shows a somewhat younger John Steinmetz playing one.)


Anne Midgette's article dealt mainly with people playing chamber music in "non traditional spaces" Um, that means "bars".

Fine. Let's give this idea another try. In 1976, when John and I were studying at Cal Arts, the chamber ensemble Tashi (including my clarinet teacher Richard Stoltzman) played The Quartet For The End of Time at the Bottom Line in New York City. That concert was big news back then. Yep. And it really changed everything in the world of chamber music. Nothing's ever been the same since.

Apparently Anthony Braxton shared the bill with Tashi at the Bottom Line.





Oboe+Blog Tags: Perfect Pitch. . . OboeInsight. . . Juelz Santana. . . The Second Coming. . . baseball. . . nike. . . The Mets. . . Metropolitan Opera. . . female music critic. . . Anne Midgette. . . chamber music. . . death of chamber music. . . non traditional spaces. . . Susan Spector. . . Patty Mitchell. . . John Steinmetz. . . Richard Emmet. . . Frank Zappa. . . Tashi

Anne Midgette's fascinating 2002 article, A Critical Difference about being a woman and a music critic is here. (Thanks to Diva341 for pointing this out.)

The "Beats The Hell Outa Playing the Oboe" picture came from Roboflutist

Another MM post, entitled Who Is Weiden-Kennedy Anyway?, about a different Nike television commercial which used religious-themed classical music to sell basketball shoes.

Here's an article about the 2008 reunion of Tashi.

The picture of Richard Emmet, John Steinmetz, Frank Zappa and myself - and others like it - can be found on Richard Emmet's website.

X-tet's website can be found here.

John Steinmetz's website can be found here. He has been mentioned previously in Mixed Meters here and here. The little metal rat sculpture was given to me by John years ago. You'll have to ask him what it signified and why he wanted me to have it.

If Music Be The Food Of Love . . . .

. . . then of course there needs to be a label to help music consumers select the most wholesome and nutritious product.

The Improvising Guitarist, mysterious force behind the blog The Improvising Guitar, provided this example in a post entitled daily recommended traditional intake:

Tradition Facts
Performance Duration 65' 00"
Amount Per Performance
Improv 48' 20"	From Jazz 25' 00"
Total Improvisation	74%
Non-Idiomatic	8.5%
Jazz	55%
Hard-Bop	0.5%
Free Jazz	40%
Trans-European	15%
Euro-American	10%
Rock/Pop	35%
Folk	20%
Nomadic	8%
Non-Western	12%
Musician may be nuts. Jazz content may be higher than taste suggests.

At first I thought this was just a cool joke. But yesterday, cruising through Best Buy music department looking for a Kylie Minogue album (I kid you not, but I have my reasons), I marveled at how many artists in that shamefully small selection I've never heard of.

Certain packages might catch my eye because of bright colors or a surreal title or an obscene cover. But if that's all you know about a disk the chances of accidentally purchasing something interesting are zero. New CDs are exorbitantly expensive if you only play them once.

But a government mandated contents disclosure label (such as TIG's) would provide clues. I could make an informed choice by comparison shopping. Are there a lot of pop classics in this album? A lot of classical pop in that one? How about mindless-electronica, soft jazz, softer rock or misogynistic hip-hop? What if you're into Polynesian micro-tonal ska? (A Better Buy would be if Best Buy allowed me to listen to any album before purchase. That's pretty funny.)

Q: What are these people doing in my local Best Buy?


A: Playing a video game.

Suppose the government did mandate such a label on all music; it would mean a vast new bureaucracy. Finally full employment for otherwise unemployable music school graduates. They could sit in cubicles identifying album contents by inspecting the underside of CDs with microscopes; search out that imaginary musical DNA. Pandora.com already does this with the Music Genome Project.

Of course, such a huge government project could never lead to censorship. Never. Nope. Can't happen here. Read all about music censorship in general and the PMRC, in particular.

The Improvising Guitarist also recently referred to the breathless question "Is Jazz Dead?" This reminded me of the myriad boring blog posts out there in Internet-land arguing the question "Is Classical Music Dead?" And that reminded me of this snap I took in a Vons grocery store.


I didn't bother to look inside to find out what the 10 reasons for Hip Hop's non-death might be. But it made me think I'd post my own musical obituary list. Remember, just because a music is dead doesn't mean you can't enjoy it - or imitate it - or worship it.

1) Classical Music has been dead pretty much since Bartok died. Problem is, people are still paying their respects every week by buying tickets to hear the same pieces over and over. Most of the audience wouldn't give a rats ass if all the orchestra and chamber music of the last 60 years just disappeared in a puff of

2) Jazz died much more recently. Every time someone is awarded a Doctorate in Jazz Studies jazz dies a little more. That also means that Jazz is becoming another Classical Music. This ought to be regarded as a kind of victory. Now we have two classical musics.

3) Rock and Roll is not dead, it is merely in a Persistent Vegetative State. The heart of Rock (the evil Back Beat) simply will not die.

4) Hip Hop, as the magazine cover says, is not dead. However Hip Hop has recently discovered its own mortality. It has recently learned that it ain't gonna live forever. Scholarly biographies, reunion tours and professors of Hip Hop can't be far behind. I saw a DJ with a Karaoke machine doing a kids birthday party at a Pasadena restaurant recently. I didn't get a picture - but I remember seeing the word "dizzle" in the lyrics.

Does all this make you want to listen to some music? Here are two albums that I have discovered in the last few days and enjoyed. The downloads are free.

Sid Peacock - You can't buy everything forever. Comes from somewhere UK-ish I think. I learned about this album from Kill Ugly Radio.

Móveis Coloniais de Acuja from Brazil. The name means Colonial Furniture of Acuja (a kind of wood apparently). Here's their website translated into apparently a kind-of-English by Altavista. And there's a fun video to watch on their MySpace space.



Musical Content Tags: Improvising Guitar. . . The Improvising Guitarist. . . music labels. . . Kylie Minogue. . . Best Buy. . . compact discs. . . jazz is dead. . . classical music is dead. . . doctorate in jazz studies. . . hip hop is dead. . . rock is dead. . . Sid Peacock. . . Móveis Coloniais de Acuja. . . Pandora.com

P.S. I bought the Kylie Minogue album because I've started reading this. I'm pretty sure I already have the Alvin Lucier somewhere.

P.P.S. No I don't have I Am Sitting In A Room (although I have other Lucier recordings). Strangely, Paul Morley (in his book) says he doesn't have a copy either. (P.P.S.2 - Download I Am Sitting In A Room here.)

P.P.P.S. The Death of Classical Music reared its ugly head in the blogospheric realm again this very day. Click here to read how Alex Ross thinks Classical Music isn't dead because Classical CDs are still selling. By that logic, Ross must believe that Elvis isn't dead yet either.