I owe this blog a "What I did on my holidays" spiel (although my two-week busman's holiday really only accounts for a tiny portion of the hiatus here). But I thought it better to get on with current stuff while it's fresh. It's been an eventful week, with colleagues to welcome and farewell (in style), a season brochure on the prowl and seemingly reluctant to be put to bed, a concert including one of my favourite pieces of music, and talks — to give and to hear.
I can't really comment on my own talks except to express relief that my 30-year-old memory of ballet mime didn't fail me as I'd feared it might. Tonight was the "night off" in the Master Series. Instead the conductor for the week, David Robertson, brought his marvellous intellect to the annual Challender lecture.
He confessed straight up to having chosen his title, "Is classical music relevant?", in a spirit of provocativeness, unaware that provocateur-extraordinaire Norman Lebrecht had given last year's lecture. In the end, and "preaching to the choir" as he was, he largely avoided the matter of relevance (in fact I don't think the question, or "relevance", was ever really defined). I do wish that he had been more provocative (from the choir's perspective).
He also apologised in advance for the presentation of his musical examples via an mp3 player. This was unfortunate and did spoil the flow considerably (surely at least an On-the-Go Playlist could have been assembled – the gadget in question appeared to be an iPod), but the audience was extremely tolerant despite the overplayed joke about Cage's most famous composition, the precise duration of which I always find difficult to recall.
Third in the introductory remarks was the gentlest of gibes about the playing of background music as the audience came in (Siegfried Idyll, which I missed, and Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances). This turned out to be particularly pertinent given the points that he was about to make (and which he had already made in his article in The Australian), but it's also a big bug-bear of mine, for the same reasons. In a culture that encourages the "use" of music as a wallpaper (thereby discouraging the act of listening), the very last thing any concert-presenting organisation should be doing is using music (especially the repertoire that we perform) as background or mood or atmosphere. ’Nuff said.
Many of Robertson's points have been outlined here. And the aforemention article does summarise the spirit and content of what he had to say. But as Greg Sandow has demonstrated, there are many, many provocative and stimulating (sometimes infuriating) words to spill if one is to truly grapple with the matter of classical music's "relevance". An hour or an article is simply not up to the task.
All the same, he touched on some things that are indeed worth thinking about. Especially if you're in the choir. Such as: perhaps classical music isn't relevant (!) | why are there so few of us in the classical music camp? | the increasing uniqueness (yes, that's possible, don't be pedantic) of the classical concert format | how a live concert affects the way we listen | the nature of concert programming, at least from his perspective – every conductor is different | the classical score as a blueprint | classical music as a solitary and transforming experience | art versus "mere" entertainment (art can, of course, be entertaining as well but that's not the kind of entertainment he was talking about) | the nature of the modernist movement in music.
And yes, the mechanical reproduction of music. I was surprised that he didn't repeat the anecdote that he used in the Australian article:
This theme was at the heart of much that he had to say. In addition to live versus studio-produced music, it's connected with the idea of a consumer society regarding music of any kind as a commodity: simple to reproduce and to package, and easy to sell and to own. [In fact much music (not just Western classical) is not all that easy "to own" – it often requires work, attention, time and intellectual effort. If you like it, that's quite possibly why you like it.]
He made a lovely analogy (and I hope I'm remembering it correctly – as I try to articulate it now it seems confused) of the classical concert being like a library. This was in the sense that (unlike, say, searching the internet) you don't need pre-existing knowledge to find what you're looking for but can "browse".
Another analogy (from the studio versus live performance theme) was of the "classical recording as a memento (like an art museum postcard)" as compared to the commercial/pop recording, which increasingly represents the end product, often unreproduceable in live performance. However, Robertson didn't go into the question of why so many classical music lovers, including some of the most serious and committed ones, rarely attend concerts but get their fix from recordings, i.e. from what he would consider "mementos". That is a question every concert presenter needs to be thinking about. (Perhaps it's connected to the commodification of culture also.) All the same, to the extent that classical audiophiles may be aging just as rapidly as the concertgoers, perhaps it's still a small question in the bigger scheme of things.
Eventually he got on to the point about music-as-background, again tying into the mechanical reproduction of music. He observed that commercial pop recordings are heavily compressed, whereas classical recordings must embrace a much wider range of dynamics in order to give a faithful reproduction. Behind compression is a canny understanding that the Western commodification of music has effectively taught people not to listen, so any recording that will jump out at you with a sudden fortissimo will spoil the "washing over you effect" that belongs to most music with a beat and indeed (as he wrily pointed out) much baroque music.
Finally, the point that he'd made in his interview for the Sydney Morning Herald, and which I can therefore express more faithfully in his own words:
"This is why I think what we're doing, although it has an entertaining aspect, is the difference between art and entertainment: in entertainment you pay your money and you expect to come out of the experience essentially the same way as you went in. Something that professes to art is subtly working at changing you, and there's no way to predict what the change will be … Entertainment is not threatening. Art sometimes is."
I didn't ask a question – it always seems fairer at events like this to leave the questions to the "real" audience (unless there's an awkward pause). If I had, it might have been along these lines:
We're living in a culture that treats all music as a commodity and that values passive entertainment. Some orchestral concertgoers expect and want such "passive entertainment" (the others find the artistic experience to be actively entertaining). And you could also argue that, right now, most orchestral concerts aren't particularly entertaining in the conventional, passive sense. (When orchestras attempt to make them more overtly and superficially entertaining the results can be awfully lame.)
So...how do we – indeed, should we – promote orchestral concerts as entertainment in a consumer society? (And if we don't promote them as entertainment, what do we promote them as?)
PS. Relevance. So what about that? If relevance is strictly defined as "pertinency to important current issues" then you could argue that classical music is almost never relevant and that perhaps this is one of the reasons that those who love it do love it. But within a world of "hot-button issues", to use Robertson's phrase, there is space for the timeless, for deep human concerns, and, yes, for art that demands something of us and perhaps changes us. That's relevant.