mozart was a punk rocker

[rone]

I'd like to thank mmcirvin for directing me towards Alex Ross and his article about how elitism hurts classical music.  I found one passage positively Frippesque:

The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.

I've said more than once recently that i want to become more familiar with "classical" (symphonic?  orchestral?) music, so i will take Ross's list under consideration and borrow what i can from Renée.  `Cause i gotta, you know, get culcha'ed.

Comments

[yong-mi.livejournal.com]

I hope this inspires you to seek out stuff from composers who are still alive! I hate the attitude that classical music is only from people who are now dead. You are fortunate in having the San Francisco Symphony in reasonable proximity; it is establishing a reputation for a daring repertoire embracing contemporary American composers. Quick check of their schedule shows they're pairing Reich with Tchaikovsky, Adams with Beethoven. And of course there's always our resident culcha'd music expert dfan for more recommendations.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

It's a good article. I'm afraid, though, I can't get into the idea of throwing mats at concerts -- whatever the music. I'm one of these people who'd rather sit and listen to music than stand in the aisles clapping in rhythm and dancing, which I find distracting and irritating. Sorry. That's just who I am.

Ross's article doesn't talk about modern-day classical music radio, possibly because the subject is likely to induce a Tourette's attack in anyone. Listen to the typical station for the awful combination of inept production, cadaverous presentation, elitism, ass-kissing, and cultural necrophilia, and you'll realize what a testament to the true vitality of "the music" it is that it didn't become extinct from the airwaves forty years ago.

I largely gave up on classical music radio years ago, and while we do have a good orchestra in Syracuse, pecuniary considerations have kept me from it for some years in favor of more vital musical performances at, say, the Old Songs Festival (www.oldsongs.org/festival/). So, though like Ross (but less extremely) I was a teenage devotee of classical music, complete with portfolio of bad unfinished compositions, lately it comes up occasionally on my CD player -- sorry, no iPod -- and that's about it.

And of course, just try finding signs of life on CD for this music. Even if you subscribe to the BMG CD Club (http://www.bmgmusic.com/), close examination of the monthly mailing turns up mostly reissues of recordings made before 1980 along with anthologies of "The Most Relaxing Adagios Ever". (Where anyone ever got the idea that classical music is supposed to be relaxing, I can't imagine.) We seem to be expanding our love of dead composers to encompass dead conductors leading dead musicians.

Ross seems to try to find an explanation for how the 18th century's "music is music" devolved into the 20th's fratricidal "classical versus jazz versus rock", but I don't think he succeeds; and I know I can't explain it to my own satisfaction. As good, or as bad, an explanation as any is that it's All the Fault of Science: once you've succeeded in coming up with categories and organizing systems to pigeonhole species, elements, stars, geological strata, and so on and on, you start thinking you can do the same to music, painting, philosophy, et cetera. And as soon as you define two pigeonholes, they automatically go to war with one another.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It depends on the music, to me. Some music makes me want to mosh; other music demands my stillness. I bounced like a pogo stick during the recent Pixies show — remaining still was impossible. There's been a couple of classical performances of my kids where i wanted to press the stage.

I think it also depends on the company. I'm less likely to bounce around if i'm with Kim... i guess i don't want to embarrass her.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, classical music radio! That stuff'll turn you off classical music forever. Hell, it'll turn you off MUSIC forever.

I remember that time on a.r.k that Jorn Barger posted that he'd tried classical music that day, found it all emotionally puerile compared to Destiny's Child, and figured its alleged admirers had ulterior motives stemming from class- and race-based bigotries. Granted, Jorn was Jorn, but I think at least half of it was that he sampled it via FUCKING CLASSICAL MUSIC RADIO. And now, thirty-six hours of the same four Mozart pieces!

[mrbalihai.livejournal.com]

I will be singing the title of this post to the tune of "Sheila Is A Punk Rocker" all day now.

The next time I see you, I'm going to punch you in the armpit.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Isn't it 'Sheena'?

I seem to recall that kids in film school always used classical stuff as background music. Because, you know, it's unobtrusive, and you don't want NO music. Jerks. So everyone would have the same damn Beethoven cd on in the background of their films, regardless of mood or timing, and, man, was that ever well-thought-out.

[mrbalihai.livejournal.com]

Isn't it 'Sheena'?

Yes, yes it is. I punch myself in my own armpit as penance.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

When was the last time a movie was scored well with previously composed music, anyway?

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to come up with a list of silent films that are four minutes and thirty-three seconds long.

[merde.livejournal.com]

"Immortal Beloved".

you may now punch me in the armpit.

that aside, however, what i've found is that the best way to get interested in classical music is to see it performed live. classical CDs are expensive, and you never really know what you're going to enjoy until you hear it -- even if a friend recommends it. there are obvious standouts -- Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets are, of course, incomparable, etc. (ok, so i'm a whore for Beethoven. i admit it.)

but also, i've found that some classical pieces lose something in translation to recording media -- or rather, it's not there until i've seen it performed live, in person. but if i've seen it once, that energy comes back to life for me every time i hear it.

the SF Symphony is very, very worth the trip. especially since you work in the city already... some weekday mornings you can get inexpensive tickets for rehearsals, which can be a lot of fun. and as long as there's no chorus anywhere on the program, on the day of a performance you can go to the box office and get $15 open seating tickets for the rear terrace section, which is a blast because you can watch the conductor from the front. most of the times i've been, that section hasn't even filled up.

the philharmonia baroque is also pretty great, if you enjoy baroque music. they're a smaller orchestra and use authentic instruments or as near as they can get (all the instruments are either original to the period or copies thereof -- they even have a theorbo player [theorbist?]), and it's very interesting to hear things played as the conductor envisioned them, rather than interpreted by a huge modern symphony orchestra. it's also less expensive than the SF symphony.

and i strongly urge you to check out the opera if you haven't already done so. opera is definitely one of those things you have to see in person to really appreciate.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but i draw the line at opera. I can't stand to listen to tenors and sopranos playing with their vibratos. Every bit of opera i've heard has been unbearable.

[mrbalihai.livejournal.com]

You'd love Jerry Springer: the Opera, I guarantee it. It'll be playing in the Bay Urea sometime this year. Go.

Russian opera generally kicks ass as well.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You know, you and Neil Gaiman have recommended it, but i cannot bring myself to find an iota of interest in something that combines two things for which i have less than no interest.

[yong-mi.livejournal.com]

Hmm. How about Purcell or Handel stuff, sung by early music specialists? Operas from contemporary classical composers also do not feature as much 'operatic' singing.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

> classical CDs are expensive, and you never really know what you're going to
> enjoy until you hear it

One word: Library.

(Or your parents' collection, if available. That's how I discovered Beethoven.)

no time for the old in-out, love, I'm just here to read the meter

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"A Clockwork Orange".

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

2001: A Space Odyssey

If only for "Lux Aeterna", the most surprisingly-apropos bit of "music" for the monolith scenes.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Steve Reich is highly recommended if you're a fan of the 80's-era Crimso stuff like "Frame by Frame" and "Discipline". If there's a signature concept Reich is associated with, it's the repetition of a pattern against itself, moving in and out of phase.

Viz: Clapping Music (http://www.crownpoint.com/artists/reich/clapping.html).

[dumplechan.livejournal.com]

I love Clapping Music.

But at the end, when the musicans stopped, the audience didn't know what to do. So we pulled out violins and started playing.

That old one-music myth?

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

The division between formal and informal music (and art in general) goes at least back to the Middle Ages. Why are people so religious about formal music? Because our tradition of formal music comes from religion, back when Gregory codified chant. Polyphony is a big part of why the division runs so deep in European music, since Europe had no tradition of polyphony before it arose in the monasteries. The People sing simple tunes from the heart; The Musicians make sophisiticated and intricate music from the rules. (Of course, what The People really had was just a different, more restrictive set of rules that included "do one thing at a time.")

Of course, there's an even deeper division now, one that Ross almost manages to grab onto but then lets drop as soon as he gets out the word "hip-hop," one of race. "Classical" music froze in so many minds at the turn of the last century as soon as negro music began to dominate the popular scene. The same snobs who still today cringe at the tunes of the Roaring Twenties--never mind whether the performers are white, black, or Asian, the power's been transferred to the music itself--will gladly croon along with equally lowbrow popular tunes from the Gay Nineties--and count them as part of their precious "classical" music.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to call it "race". I think it is merely one of culture.

It also seems that non-Western music is barely considered in this whole argument.

[denshi.livejournal.com]

That was bloody awesome.

"The critic Greg Sandow recently wrote in his online journal that we partisans of the classical need to speak more from the heart about what the music means. He admits that it’s easier to analyze his ardor than to express it. The music does not lend itself to the same generational storytelling as, say, “Sgt. Pepper.” There may be kids out there who lost their virginity during Brahms’s D-Minor Piano Concerto, but they don’t want to tell the story and you don’t want to hear it. The music attracts the reticent fraction of the population. It is an art of grand gestures and vast dimensions that plays to mobs of the quiet and the shy. It is a paradise for passive-aggressives, sublimation addicts, and other relics of the Freudian world. Which may explain why it has a hard time expressing itself in the time of Dr. Phil."