Music from the Front: The merger of the Longy School of Music and Bard College

While looking online for free articles from the NY Times, as I do not have a subscription yet, I stumbled upon an article from last week's Boston Globe on the merger of the Longy School of Music and Bard College. This topic caught my eye, and is important to me, because I am a student at Longy. The summer before I was to begin my first semester, the issues with Longy's teachers desire to unionize as well as the teacher layoffs had me worried. I called Longy to be sure the teacher I was to study with was not one who had been laid off. She was not, thankfully, but my heart goes out to those who were let go.

One of the first things mentioned was that Bard and Longy have innovative ideas of the future training of musicians. According to the article, Bard urges the integration of music and the liberal arts whereas Longy works to connect its musicians to their communities. How will these ideals affect the music (and musicians) of the future?

Longy's largest program is its community program which provides learning and performance opportunities to children and adults within the community who are not necessarily pursuing a music degree. The community program has an average of 1,000 participants whereas the conservatory students number less than a quarter of that. Longy's community program is immensely important to Boston's music scene, particularly with all the "little" musicians that are furthering their music education within Longy's halls. Last spring, I took Dr. Evan's Pedagogy of Theory course during which we were required to observe a few of Longy's music courses. I chose to observe a few of the children's music theory classes, and was amazed at the competency of both the children and tutor. These prep classes are essentially bringing music and music education to the masses which brings me to what Bard's president Leon Botstein said in the article: "Music can no longer be taught as an athletic or self-referential exercise." This pertains to many of the concepts we've been discussing in this course, particularly the idea of returning music to the masses through education and exposure.

Longy has had a mostly quiet history and has long "been overshadowed by Boston's other music schools." For example, almost every time my husband mentions me and my music studies in a conversation, the most common question is "Does she go to Berklee?" Upon informing them that I attend Longy, they usually respond with a look of vague recollection and "is it that old house in Cambridge?"

Hopefully the merger of Bard and Longy will result in positive improvements for both schools. As both Longy and Bard are looking to what the future of classical music holds, they should integrate elements and ideas from both partner's successes, such as Bard's public music festivals and Longy's community program. The increased budget will hopefully allow Longy to expand its role in Boston's music community, particularly with the production of free concerts and the education of children.

Here is the link to the Boston Globe article (you will need to create a log-in to view):

http://tinyurl.com/6zugfca

On a side note, here is an interesting video I stumbled upon while browsing the NY Times website:

http://tinyurl.com/2e6vatu

The Future of Classical Music: “MP3 of the week”

The Future of Classical Music: “MP3 of the week”

A report from the front, or at least from the recent past: 3 New York Times articles from this summer

A report from the front, or at least from the recent past: 3 New York Times articles from this summer

While reading Highbrow/Lowbrow this week, I was reminded of a series of articles about film that appeared in The New York Times this summer. Before discussing the articles, I will include the links so that everyone can take a look.

1)“Eating Your Cultural Vegetables” by Dan Kois

2)Response to Kois by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott: “In Defense of the Slow and Boring”

3)Kois, Dargis, and Scott discuss the matter together: “Sometimes a Vegetable is Just a Vegetable”

What is particularly interesting about these articles is that they were not planned as a series. Rather, Dan Kois’s initial article from the Sunday Magazine provoked strong reactions with many people, including two of the Times’s regular Arts Section film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott. Since the series stems from a disagreement among the Times’s staff (what we would assume to be an extremely “cultured” or “highbrow” group to begin with), their discussion on how we are (or should be) experiencing the arts highlights how multivalent our current understanding of “high” and “low” art can be.

In Kois’s intial article, he focuses on a phenomenon he calls “aspirational viewing”. He suggests that we watch some of visual media specifically because we know it is more than we can understand, but that we want to try to understand it. Kois suggests that we watch unbearably slow films (or, in the case of his daughter, cartoons with referential humor like “Phineas and Ferb”) because of the social cachet they carry as important works of art. Kois may sometimes be moved by the films, “But am I actually moved? Or am I responding to the rhythms of emotionally affecting cinema? Am I laughing because I get the jokes or because I know what jokes sound like?” Kois concludes that he has less and less patience for “eating his cultural vegetables”.

Dargis and Scott passionately disagree, claiming, for example, that it is not slow films, but rather lackadaisical sequels like The Hangover: Part II that are truly boring cinema. I will let you read more of these articles for yourselves, and will instead note where I believe each of these authors make good points. While my knee-jerk reaction would be to disagree with Kois, his article does well to address how we perceive culture in our own experiences, rather than make statement about what art “should” be. The hierarchies within art set up during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (as described by Levine) deeply engrained within us a sense of betterment through higher culture. We developed a sense that education was required to understand “higher” art forms, and the middle classes actively pursued this education to distinguish themselves from lower classes. Kois’s “aspirational viewing” speaks very well to this sensibility, as well as to a certain guilt that perhaps this is not the best way to view culture. We could certainly turn his discussion of film over to music: is there anything that you have “aspirationally listened to,” whether slow moving or not? If you have listened to or watched all of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, for example, were you attentive the whole time? Should you have been?

However, Kois is merely working within an understanding that certain types of films must be better than others. Are all slow films really better for you culturally? Are they really all harder to watch than faster fare? Obviously not, but Kois seems to suggest that we are simply stuck in these hegemonic views, without much way out aside from apathy.

One of A.O. Scott’s comments from the third article (“Sometimes a Vegetable is Just a Vegetable”), on the other hand, exemplifies the new pluralism that Levine describes in his epilogue. Scott specifically rejects the notion of “high” and “low” as useful to their discussion.

I guess my own aspirations are always to see something interesting, and ideally something that will challenge my expectations and prejudices and show me something new about life, love, art, whatever. I don’t believe that certain kinds of work have a monopoly on offering this kind of experience, and the history of movies as a popular art form proves as much. So I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a snob or an elitist, or as someone who believes that one kind of movie is a priori better than another. Thinking in categories — high and low, trash and art, entertaining and “serious” — is a shortcut and an obstacle, and it leads inevitably to name calling and accusations of bad faith. “You’re a snob!” “Well, you’re a philistine!”

The suspicion that only certain kinds of people like certain kinds of movies slides into contempt for the movies themselves, which flourishes on both sides of the supposed high-low divide, and other divisions as well. Action movies are for guys; romantic comedies are for girls; animation is for kids; subtitled movies are for skinny people dressed in black. And so on.

Scott’s democratic view of culture is laudable in many ways, especially that he goes beyond the slippery “high/low” divide to discuss cultural divisions that parse audiences by gender, age, or race. Scott’s view is ultimately rooted in a sense of individual agency in our ability to deconstruct long-standing categories. While Kois’s does not directly respond to this, his article suggests a culturally deterministic view that might criticize Scott’s individualism as naïve. In Kois’s view, cultural categories form a “habitus” from which we cannot easily escape.

Levine suggests that we are currently at a point of great deliberation and confusion over culture and hierarchy, caught between a variety of more or less democratic ways of parsing society. This series of articles epitomizes this current sense of uncertainty.

Report from the Front: Bargemusic and the Blending of Genres

This weekend, I found this article by Steve Smith from The New York Times entitled "Standard Fare Upended, to Reinvent and Explore," reviewing a Bargemusic concert. The article focuses on a concert that took place during Labor Day weekend from Bargemusic’s Here and Now series, a new music series with concerts scheduled throughout Bargemusic's concert calendar. Bargemusic’c current artistic director, violinist Mark Peskanov, who has held that post with the organization since 2006, introduced the series. In addition to the Here and Now concerts, the contrasting There and Then series featuring music from the Medieval and Baroque periods appears on Bargemusic’s calendar, as well as concerts of solo and chamber music from the standard classical repertoire.

The concert reviewed in the article was one of a variety untypical of the average new music concert. The program contained new works by composers both within the boundaries of conventional new classical music (including the fairly conservative Piano Trio by Lera Auerbach) and outside those boundaries (such as an original composition performed by cellist Yoed Nir on an electric cello). Also, new renditions of existing works were part of the concert (the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 made an above-tempo appearance on the program) as well as inclusions of items usually considered to be from the realm of popular music, such as Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The performers consisted of various soloists (quite a few cellists) and several small ensembles (including the American Modern Ensemble and Trio Vela). Towards the end of the article, this sentence about the cellist David Eggar, who concluded the program, caught my attention:

Pressed by Mr. Peskanov to play something “legitimate,” Mr. Eggar said from the stage, he took up a tenor violin for a cheeky account of Paganini’s Variations on One String.

Steve Smith, "Standard Fare Upended, to Reinvent and Explore," The New York Times, September 4, 2011, accessed September 17, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/arts/music/the-here-and-now-series-at-bargemusic-review.html?_r=1

The writer of the article does indicate Peskanov’s request was meant humorously, but the inclusion of the request itself reveals the ever-present tendency to classify music in a hierarchical manner. However jokingly Peskanov may have used the term “legitimate,” his using the word in the first place is telling of how ingrained the categorizations of culture in American society are. Ironically, despite the (albeit lighthearted) request on Peskanov’s part for a “legitimate” piece, Eggar chose to end the concert with a rendition of “Bring Me To Life” by the rock band Evanescence.

In conclusion, it is refreshing to see an organization fill its concert calendar with programs from the standard classical repertoire as well as performances of new music (and, as in this concert’s case, new renditions of previous works) by innovative artists without an overwhelming sense of elitism or intellectualism, an openness to the blending of genres, and relatively little evidence of a hierarchical attitude towards music.

“MP3 of the week”

“...I haven't bought an album in years...”

I have a friend who loves to buy albums. He didn't tell me why, and I never thought to ask – but I recently bought the Rolling Stones Album, Let it Bleed – and it brought back that dialog I had with him.

I'm gonna tell you that I bought the album via Itunes (and I happen to love Itunes). I love how fast the downloads are; that there is a popularity bar; top charts; ping; genius bar, and that you can buy only one song... hmmm – one song? Does this means that I do not have to buy an entire album?

GREAT JOY! Now I can listen to my favorite music, and not waste money on that extra crap! Ha!

This is how my mind works sometimes, and I am sure other people have thought the exact same thing. “let's get to the good stuff already!”.

I have no problem thinking this way. I love going straight for the things that I like most, and I love having things on demand and ready to go.

So why did I buy this album?

OK, well, I was listening to a radio broadcast that was aired about 9 years ago in London. They started to play Monkey Man – but because it was edited, I only heard 3 seconds of the beginning and 5 seconds of the end. I thought, “this sounds great! I have to get this song”. I went to Itunes and bought the album... by accident. I didn't feel like going through the process of having to try to get my money back. So I said, “I might as well listen to what's on this thing.”

well... MY MIND WAS BLOWN! What an awesome experience from beginning to end! I completely forgot how amazing it is to just sit back and listen to an album for an hour. It made me think about how I used to listen to music pre iPod, Mp3 and etc.

It also made me think about how people are listening to music now; especially classical music. The majority of people aren't being exposed to classical music by going to the concert halls. They get it via movies, TV commercials and so forth. But what are those? They're snippets; fragments of a whole; Interpretations and remixes. But, honestly, I do find myself favoring specific movements of a piece. I still haven't listened beyond the first movement of Beethoven's 5^th, which people of my ilk would frown upon.

So where are we now?

Who knows? But, the experiences...? We are in total control of our own experiences. We can fast-forward, pause and rewind. We can skip the advertisement and jump to the boxing match. We can listen to the Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi on youtube; rip an audio file off a video; download via torrent, and do it all from a 13'' laptop. Technology has given us the power to do whatever the hell we want! -- and If we are at this stage now, what's next? What more can we ask for? What do we have? What don't we have? Who will buy the Album, and who will by the single.

I'm one in million x's.

Thank You for reading,

Kwaumane Brown

Longy School of Music

UD in Composition ('12)

Unlikely Places: Music in society, from the Front

While it may not directly deal with classical music, I found myself surrounded by music this weekend. Thursday I joined my father in a freelance sound recording job in Cambridge. The group was a three-piece free improvisation group. We got to the Lily Pad early and were able to catch the end of a Jazz quintet. The audience was the same modest few that I was accustomed to seeing at the Lily Pad. The group was great and I just accounted for the low turn out as a sign of the times. When the free improvisation group took the “stage” the crowd grew nearly doubled in numbers. I personally found it fascinating that these musicians were able to play for 30 minutes straight without a break between pieces.

Perhaps more noteworthy was the size and behavior of the audience. When I first arrived there was another group playing some more standard jazz pieces. The improvisation stuck close to the chord changes and there was clear structure and form to those who are familiar with Jazz. The audience was tiny compared to the waves of people that came for opening night with the free improvisation group. While I feel that I understood what was going on in the free improvisation, It was approaching an area of music unfamiliar to me. The performers were skilled, but the performance was enough to put the average listener out of their comfort zone. Still the audience was respectful, attentive, responsive, and numerous.

Friday night I took a break, in the best sense of a night off that a graduate student can hope for. I put on Netflix and loaded up an old Japanese monster movie, Gamera vs. Barugon (1966). Most movies have a fully orchestrated “classical” score. While Gamera vs. Barugon isn’t an American film, it does reflect western influence on motion pictures. While watching a movie with orchestral music isn’t the same thing as hearing it in the concert hall, the music greatly contributes to the success of the film industry.

I was at the Greek Orthodox Church in Brockton Saturday night for their annual Greek Festival. Almost everyone in the city joins in the festivities and this year the line for food extended into the parking lot. The Greek Festival always means two things: good food and music from my ancient ancestry. The room was full of modal sounds and spices which overwhelmed the urban jungle that laid beyond the tent. I watched as the dancing started. As I ate my pastitsio I did so joining hundreds of other Brocktonians, perhaps even thousands if you count the other nights and I wondered if these people would ever listen to this music outside of the tent. Was it background noise or tradition?

That night later took me to a small bar in the town of Abington, MA. The music was loud and because I couldn’t suppress my instinct to analyze modern music, I realized it contained elements of impressionism and “so-called” modernism. People came here to dance; even though there wasn’t anyone that had spectacular moves on the dance floor, they did so anyways. In this unlikely place of contemplation and intellectual thought, I wondered the same questions: Was it background or tradition? People were talking very loudly to one another, but there was no one with a voice that competed with the DJ’s pair of JBLs. It looked as if music was playing a few roles in this bar and for once a situation I’d viewed with a cynical eye became more of a curious social inquiry.

Music plays many roles in modern society. It serves as both tradition or habit and white noise. It is in the interest of the performer to study the varying audiences in society.

Highbrow/Lowbrow, Cultured/Uneducated??

In order to maintain many of the phenomena of our culture's past, particularly the arts, historians and the like have taken those arts and essentially put them in a glass box on a shelf. Metaphorically, that is. The arts have become so expensive, elite, and exclusive that the common man is no longer regularly exposed to them. It's like taking an antique lamp and putting it away to preserve it rather than maintaining its upkeep and using it for its purpose: light. Perhaps historians have unintentionally done the same to the arts, particularly music. In order to preserve it and keep it in its original "pure" state, the music has been taken out of the hands of the common majority of society and placed in a glass box on a shelf. So what if someone wants to play a Bach sonata in a nontraditional manner? Wouldn't Bach have wanted today's musicians to be as innovative as he? By closing the door to non-approved ideas, in order to maintain art in its original state, historians have in turn closed the door to just about everyone but themselves, cutting off society from the arts themselves! This concept came up in a Music Business course I took during my undergraduate studies: why is classical music so removed from common society? The subject fascinated me, but until reading Highbrow/Lowbrow, I had no idea the road down which classical music had traveled, specifically in America.

Classical music and opera were not always so exclusive. During Walt Whitman's time, opera was readily available and well attended by audiences that loved the music. Everyone went whether poor, filthy rich, or somewhere in between. Though foreign-language operas were not necessarily well received initially, upon translation into English, their popularity skyrocketed. One did not have to be well-educated and fluent in French, Italian, and German to enjoy opera. English-language opera became part of popular culture because the audience understood what was going on! Henry Rowley Bishop helped to expand the English opera repertory by translating about 25 operas into English often inserting music of his own making in between. No wonder English operas became known as "operas for the people."

By the end of the 19th century, "high society" had removed themselves from the "popular" opera scene (English-language operas) and focused instead on foreign language operas, particularly Italian operas. Operas became a thing that was again controlled by the wealthy and therefore exclusive of the common people. Opera houses no longer were for the average Joe, but for the wealthy and elite. Attending an opera became more of a way to show off and prove one's societal status rather than for the love of music. Less than wealthy people who dared attend such operas were critiqued mercilessly even of their clothing. Imagine saving up your money to attend a concert you've been dying to see and when you walk in the door, someone scoffs at you for daring to wear a suit that cost less than $2,000. I would be fuming.

Opera houses gradually came under the control of patrons (there are less attendees when you don't allow the little guy to come!) and the English-language operas began to fade into the background. This step away from regular society elevated opera to a "higher" art which could only truly be appreciated by "cultured" peoples. What a ludicrous idea! Why do people so desire to be "better" than one another to such a detrimental degree? Even Italian opera was pushed aside for German giants like Richard Wagner.

This elitist attitude was contagious. W.J. Henderson of the New York Times judged attendees of the Metropolitan Opera's concluding show in 1900 which included four acts from four different operas in one show. He had the audacity to say that concert-goers only went to the concert because they could see several famous singers at the same time and price. What a pompous cad. What gave him the right to pass such harsh judgment on his fellow attendees? Alas, his enlarged view of self had become quite contagious amongst opera-goers half-way through the century. He even went so far as to say the audience members were not good enough for the music they came to hear. It was essentially wasted on them. Alas, orchestral and band music suffered a similar fate in America.

As Ronald Davis said, opera became a symbol of American culture rather than a real cultural force. Alas, this mindset has continued for most of the past century regarding both opera and orchestral music. But there is hope! The LA Opera Company and LA Philharmonic both host functions with children and offer rush seating (though still expensive). It is time for the us, the musicians of today, to seize the opportunity before us to reignite the fiery love of classical music amongst Americans, particularly those without $2,000 suits!

Thoughts on Highbrow/Lowbrow, and the Atmoshpere/Perception of Classical Music

In my reading of Highbrow/Lowbrow this week, I have enjoyed reading about the historical “progression” of the sacralization of classical music. It has helped me understand the background of today’s attitudes towards classical music, and perhaps helped me realize some things that might be done better to perpetuate classical music in the future.

The influential late 19^th century Boston music critic John Sullivan Dwight claimed that classical music is a highly intellectual form of art meant for the highly intellectual portion of the population. To reach those who were not as “lofty,” one would have to compromise the integrity of the masterworks to endow them with popular appeal. In the late 19^th century, popular appeal for classical music began to be viewed as something negative, indicative of the music's being reduced in its complexity in order to be enjoyed by the uneducated in classical music. The mixing of genres in a program for variety, the performances of virtuoso soloists, or the omission of a movement or movements from a lengthy multi-movement work became viewed as disgraces to the purity of the music. Therefore, it was best to let classical music remain a “highbrow” art. Such an attitude still prevails today in the classical music world, and even when it doesn’t, the public’s perception of classical music is still primarily one of an intellectual, “stuffy” institution.

Unlike the classical music leaders in the late 19^th century, however, there are many classical musicians today who do not have a condescending attitude towards musical outreach, and actually want people of all backgrounds (“intellectuals” or not) to have the chance to hear and appreciate classical music. I attended a chamber music performance this week that attempted to appeal to both classical musicians and non-musicians alike. The venue was a fairly casual one. It was quite small, and is used for both classical and non-classical music. The performers introduced each piece verbally, and programmed a wide variety of music from Schubert to a newly-composed work commissioned by the ensemble. Some of the items on the program were single-movement works, while others were individual movements taken from multi-movement works. The set-up of this program was conducive to making the music accessible to all audience members, and even invited participation--their programs included a space on the back to include any reactions or thoughts about the performance. I do not mean to say that any of the characteristics of the performance I have just listed are the “best” ways to make classical music accessible, but they are some approaches that I was able to see in action.

The formal and often cerebral manner in which classical music is usually presented might prevent listeners from enjoying the music as a living work of art, or prevent their interests from being piqued by a piece they have never heard before. Therefore, an audience that is not well-versed in classical music might find it difficult to thoroughly enjoy the typical classical music concert simply because of presentation. The “highbrow” atmosphere distracts the audience from the experience of the music itself for both non-musicians and perhaps even those who are educated in classical music. Classical music is music, after all. Referring back to our discussion in class last week on the definition of music, it is a human expression capable of communicating emotions and ideas, and also of being enjoyed. Therefore, maybe a change in our perspective of how to present classical music is called for in a time such as ours when classical music is viewed as an isolated, “dying” art.

Responding to Highbrow/Lowbrow, Prologue & Ch. 2

A few thoughts regarding Highbrow/Lowbrow:

The only book available at the Coop when I went was the Cook, so I read some of his Very Short Introduction while waiting for Highbrow/Lowbrow to arrive from Amazon. As a result, my thoughts on Levine are very colored by Cook.

Hierarchy of composers over performers

One of Cook’s arguments suggests that much of the hierarchies in our current musical categories turn on valuing the composer over the performer (the performer is, in turn, more valued than the listener). Music history texts focus primarily on composers; when performers are mentioned, it is often to criticize their overuse of artistic license or meaningless virtuosity. Likewise, singer-songwriter "authenticity" in rock is more highly valued than cover bands or pop singers (e.g. Madonna, Spice Girls) who do not write their own material (Cook 1998: 12-14). Cook’s point nicely complements Levine’s description of the “sacralization” of American musical culture from the 19^th to the 20^th century. Perhaps the best example of this is when Levine contrasts Jullien’s gargantuan symphonic shows with the Germania Musical Society style: “There were musical groups… that strove to concentrate on the music rather than the performance.” (Levine 1988: 110) Levine doesn’t deconstruct his use of the word “music”, but it is meant as “the music itself”, that is, the pure artistic vision of the composer. According to the Germania Society, the artistic greatness of the composers they presented were far superior to any performers’ contribution. Also see Henderson’s criticism of the Metropolitan Opera (p. 103), in which he claims the public was more interested in seeing a “hotch-potch” of opera stars than in the music they were singing.

Sociology of the arts and its influence on Levine and Cook

However, it is also clear that many things changed in academia in the 10 years between Levine and Cook, especially regarding the influence of sociology on musicology. I was surprised by how timid Levine sounded in his introduction, being sure to include a caveat: “My own interest is not in attacking the notion of cultural hierarchy per se. Obviously we need to make distinctions within culture.” (Levine 1988: 7). I was surprised considering that it had been almost 10 years since Bourdieu’s La Distinction was published. Clearly, Levine’s line of thought on hierarchy and art has powerful allies in the sociology world – why does he seem so defensive in the prologue?

Perhaps Bourdieu only really became an accepted part of the canon in the years between Levine and Cook. Cook is clearly very influenced by both Levi-Strauss’s structuralism and by Bourdieu. The linguistic side of structuralism comes through in Cook’s section on “Words and Music”: “The values wrapped up in the idea of authenticity, for example, are not simply there in the music; they are there because of the way we think about music puts them there, and of course the way we think about music also affects the way we make music.”(1998: 14–15) Likewise, Cook’s analysis of cultural or aesthetic “capital” of music suggests his indebtedness to Bourdieu.

What about pops orchestras?

One last quick criticism of Levine (perhaps not so much a criticism as what I think is an interesting omission): Levine suggests that the medley style of orchestral concerts, combining Beethoven symphony movements with vernacular song and opera arias, was lost in the process of "sacralization." In many ways, it was. However, that American tradition is still very much alive in orchestral pops concerts that crop up all over during the summer months. The musical selections at pops concerts are similarly eclectic, and the audience is large and heterogeneous. Apparently, we actually have held on to a part of the 19^th century musical culture.

Edit to this section: looking over the chapter again, it seems that I have misrepresented Levine's argument regarding the effect of sacralization on pops orchestras. He does in fact mention the Boston Pops, claiming that it was created as a way of segregating this type of eclectic performance from the "serious" regular season symphony concerts. I think he accounts for pops orchestras very well with this argument. I withdraw my previous criticism. Still, it is interesting how the pops concert genre has persisted in its popularity today. In spite of a century of change in popular musical taste, these concerts still include many popular forms of the 19th century (19th century song, marches, opera aria, symphonic excerpts) alongside 20th century music (pop songs, film music, music of American composers such as Copland or John Williams).

Thanks for reading!

Simon

I wonder if I'm doing this Correctly (?) & How far...

OK! My first post! ...not sure where to begin. I have no thoughts about music at this moment, although I do feel like typing -- so I'll just keep typing until I have no more words to type!

So... huh. (sigh); ...then there was music!; said... I don't know, somebody -- but it's true, right? I have a theory that music has been around since, what, sound. Come on! If people are saying that music is life, or apart of life; then I'm sure that I can raise a theory about "sounds/music".

I can't really think straight. Music is confusing to me; I just don't get it. There are so many things that I don't understand about music. I don't know why it makes people cry, laugh, dance. I'm mean, I think I know why, but how (I guess)? Do I mean why? Look at that, I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions. I'm gonna keep typing.

Alright, back to the sound thing. Life is made up of rhythms, vibrations ect. Where am I going with this? I don't know, but follow me. Life moves to irregular rhythms. Nothings perfect. Even if you think a machine was perfectly, designed, built, structured; there's a loose bolt somewhere. Am I right? (Spilling out thoughts here, don't judge me. I'm not even sure if i'm right!!)

Next thought:

It's a miracle that we have the ability to hear. I'm sure we could have done well without the ear bits. Who ever designed the human being, or what ever the evolutionary turn in science has taken said, "OK, this "thing" is going to be able to... hear! That's it!! "It" will be able to not only see, taste, touch, smell, but be "blessed" with the power to feel, internally, vibrations. For all who are able to HEAR, will experience life!; will be the witness to the power of absorption!; will feel, awaken; be magnified by the spirits of what have long lived in space, and hypnotized by the power of fruition!!; realize the depth of, of this force of nature that'll bend the laws of science!; will prove to realize the true nature of the human disposition; test all those who dare to challenge the forces of nature, and humanize!!!

Now, the power of instrumental music is interesting. I have never cried to a piece of instrumental music, but I have been moved by it; touched emotionally. My moments with instrumental music have been fun, exciting, interesting, moving, and fascinating. Without context, music never had the power to make me cry; It is then, too abstract. Stories make me cry -- probably because there is context, and I can relate and understand the characters in the, lets say, movie; novel; or poem. Structure doesn't mean anything to me. Sonata, Fugue, Rondo and ect. isn't context -- It's something to expect; It's fun to follow, but in the end, it doesn't mean a thing to the, lets say, non musician (an average music listener).

What does all this have to do with The Future of Classical Music? I have no idea. I'm talking about music. I don't know what music is! I don't really know if I'm writing music. The idea of it is abstract to me. I know the power of words/literature, the images we frame/the snapshot of life, the spicy curry I had last night, and the affect of pollen once I get a whiff of it. But, how does music do what it does? How does it bring people together? What makes rhythm so infectious? Why do I listen to a 3 min song... 50 times in a row?!? Where is music going? That's a good question because we now know where music has been, and it's impact on society. What is different about it? How has it changed? What hasn't changed? (I can say, "a lot").

(chuckle) Well then -- I can keep typing, but this is just the beginning. We all have our own thoughts about the future of music -- But I, on the other hand, do not.

Thank You for reading,

Kwaumane Brown

Longy School of Music

UD in Composition ('12)

Initial Reflections on H/L

Since arriving at conservatory I have been developing my own take on the supposed decline in orchestral music, otherwise known to the general public as classical music. There were a number of ideas presented to me from various professionals throughout the Boston music scene ranging from budget crunching to community awareness. Dr. Lawrence Levine wrote a comprehensive examination of American music in a  class-based society discussing the roles that music played in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow. Theodore Thomas is quoted saying:
"Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven were sons of God!"
(Lawrence Levine. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization] [p. 118]. Kindle Edition.)
The elevation of orchestral or otherwise grand masterwork “classical” music to a sacred level puts a barrier between the larger general audience and art music. Music serves a variety of purposes and some are personal, shown through the countless differences in opinions among critics with an expertise in “classical” music.
Proclamation of these artists as gods or sons of God ignores the fact that contemporaries of these “deities” weren’t all convinced of their so-called divinity.  Harmonies used in these “divine” masterworks were vastly contrary to the conventions used and accepted by the church. One example is parallelism and the use of ninth and fourth intervals.
While concerts continued and still do continue into the present, the audience has changed as have the desires of the audience.

Midtown Manhattan

Dear all:

I'm not sure if anyone checks this blog anymore, but I wanted to post a link to my personal blog--one I've been keeping since moving to New York City. My latest post centers around an Alex Ross quote and compares the uptown (classical) and downtown (Broadway) scenes in Manhattan. A lot of the issues that I explore here touch on issues that we discussed in our FOCM class last fall.

Check it out if you're interested: Erica's Blog ("Only in New York"). I'd love to hear your feedback!

I hope everyone is doing well. :-)

Erica

Topics and Link

I am sorry I forgot to enter my topics and link to my Wikipedia page on the blog. Even though we have already chosen topics and created pages I will give my proposed topics here now and perhaps create them in the future. The topics I suggested were as follows:

Sphinx Organization, Non-profit Organization
Sanford Allen, Violinist
Anthony Elliott, Cellist

Added links, and thoughts on current compositional trends

Hi all,

I have added some more links to the Juventas Wiki page. They are pretty minor changes (a few more links to reviews and a couple of internal links to other Wikipedia pages) but I am hoping that it will slowly increase the credibility of the page. I also removed the "Orphan" tag, since the strict definition is that it applies to a page with three links or less. You can see the updated page here and the list of changes here.

My philosophizing for this week comes from an experience I had this past weekend. I did a recording session for a local music college (I don't want to name names here because it's really not important) who's students had taken an advanced composition course. The students' final project was to compose and orchestrate a short, original work. They were then given about 20 minutes with a pickup orchestra in a studio to record their work.

Many of the works were quite nice, however, they generally all followed very predictable patterns of melody, rhythm and harmony. In short, many of them were rather banal and formulaic. Hewett's comments regarding the "evocation" trend in contemporary tonal music came to mind (see p. 233). Out of 20 different works, only 2 struck me as somewhat original in style and presentation. I recorded from 10 AM to 4:30 PM (with breaks), but by the early afternoon I felt like I was recording the same piece over and over.

Incidentally, this contrasts to an almost absurd degree with the majority of my past experience with student works. During my undergraduate and graduate careers I performed many outlandish, bizarre and utterly strange pieces by university composition students. What struck me most is that during my college career, most student works I have performed fall starkly into one of two polar categories: 1) commercially-disposable, cliché music for mass media or 2) aggressively bizarre, experimental art music. Rarely have I ever found a middle ground between these extremes.

I mentioned this to one of the other horn players at the session and she agreed with my experience completely. The thing I'm now trying to figure out is, why? I understand that music is often composed with a specific purpose in mind (for a film, for a TV commercial, to be iconoclastic, or even to specifically avoid having a purpose) but it seems strange that the camps should be so sharply and widely divided. The few really memorable original works that I have played seem to straddle this gap. Why don't more composers seek a fusion rather than holding to one extreme or the other? Perhaps one of our resident composers will be able to shed more light on this for me.

Until tomorrow,
Dave

More on Morrison

Just a couple of things:

1. I added a photograph to John Morrison's Wikipedia site. (Check it out: Article)

2. At my composition lesson with Dr. Morrison last week, I asked him if he felt it was possible to re-interest young audiences in classical music. He grinned and said, "Of course! But it won't be by playing them Bach and Beethoven; it will be by playing Cage and Ligeti. I honestly believe that it is through new music that the average population can come to understand classical music. You perform a Mozart piece for a bunch of inner-city youth, and they'll be like, 'Yeah, that's boring.' But play them some Varese, and classical music is suddenly cool and amazing. Modern music is often discounted because so-called 'classical enthusiasts' only know one way to analyze it. The untrained ear, in some ways, is the more intelligent and open of the two. We should never insult the intelligence of any listener; they already know more than they think they do about classical music."

What a fascinating idea! I then asked Dr. Morrison where he felt like the future of classical music is headed in general. I was curious to see how he'd respond. I wondered if he'd agree with Cook or Hewett or if he'd have an entirely unique position of his own. Here's what he said:

"The era of common practice is gone. In order to understand why, we have to understand what spawned a common practice in the first place. It developed under very specific conditions in a part of Europe that was self-contained and limited by geography, language, and culture. The world we live in today will never be that isolated again; technology alone will see to that. And what was the one major invention of Western classical music's common practice? Harmony. Counterpoint had existed previously; the common practice simply defined the way that individual lines could and could not overlap. Harmony, then, became the common musical language of that area of the world at that time. Since our musical community now includes the entire world and all human cultures, what is our shared language? It is the language of sound itself. We also need to realize that common practice principles reflected the hierarchy of the times (they developed during a period of great change including the formation of a middle class). Modern society no longer espouses such hierarchal distinctions, and we, more or less, realize that all people are 'equal' in their potential. We certainly aren't free from prejudice yet, but I think it's safe to say that this is a non-hierchal age. So what is the only element of music that doesn't rely on hierarchy--that really hasn't yet been fully explored? Timbre. It's the only element, in fact, that is large enough and uncharted enough to suggest a new world of musical possibilities. Timbre is the one structural element that can tie together all pieces from the earliest days of Western classical music to the most diverse and experimental pieces of the 21st century. Timbre is the future of classical composition."

Finally posted a final version of Christian Lauba...

Hello everyone,


See the link for the new article I posted on Wikipedia about Christian Lauba. I really would like this page to stay up, if there is anything that you can do to help it stay up and prevent it from being zapped, please let me know. In case it is zapped here is a link to my draft page: Draft Page. There was a lot of work that was involved in making this, and it was a good experience overall in posting this and I don't want it to be lost.

On class in Tuesday let me know what was good or bad about it, and everyone is obviously free to edit it if there are problems. Have a fabulous weekend everyone, and good luck on concerts/exams!


Matt

John Adams in the news

Hey all, just wanted to share this article/interview with John Adams. Nothing super noteworthy, but he is one of those people in our world that it's good to keep an eye on.

Enjoy!