Axing of BBC Singers and related cuts

[smittims]

It's news to me that the 'dumbtime' programmes have had 'success'. How do they measure that?

I continue to believe that they don't really know who's listening, and just make it up to what they want to do anyway.

[Ein Heldenleben]

"Genre" itself is a useful term for style and category, surely, in film (noir, comedy, scifi, horror etc), art, literature? And music.

Genre-fluid isn't all that shocking is it, really? Just an openness to trying or enjoying those very categories, without necessarily identifying with any restriction on those choices....similar to eclectic.
It may have derived from "gender-fluid" i.e non-binary: freeing oneself from stereotyping labels; refusing such restricted identities.

Also used of works and artists themselves which combine different genres in the one creation.... quite useful really.

My problem with the word is it’s massive over use in the media world where it has become increasingly meaningless. It’s all about commissioners moving deckchairs around on the listing Titanic and pretending they’re contributing something meaningful.

[DracoM]

Ahem..............what is 'dumbtime'?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Ahem..............what is 'dumbtime'?

That's certain to be a matter of opinion, but Tearjerker et al, Saturday Breakfast, This Classical Life and many similar programmes perhaps fall into this category.

[french frank]

Ahem..............what is 'dumbtime'?

Coined from "Downtime Symphony", yet another of the genre-fluid late night programmes: "An hour of wind-down music to help you press pause and reset your mind. With chilled sounds of orchestral, jazz, ambient and lo-fi beats to power your downtime."

[oddoneout]

That's certain to be a matter of opinion, but Tearjerker et al, Saturday Breakfast, This Classical Life and many similar programmes perhaps fall into this category.

Originally, and this is still the sense in which I use the term, it was applied to the incursions into TTN, from one of the first such, Downtime. They were programmes that had no relation or relevance to R3 output, but were put there to fulfill the requirement to be broadcast before being podcast - so we were told. The obvious question as to why they couldn't be put out on more relevant/appropriate stations was, needless to say, ignored.
Extending it to the likes of Saturday Breakfast etc is I think to stray into the wider realms of the general move to the dumbing down of R3 output.

[Master Jacques]

My problem with the word is it’s massive over use in the media world where it has become increasingly meaningless. It’s all about commissioners moving deckchairs around on the listing Titanic and pretending they’re contributing something meaningful.

As a sidelight, I'm currently involved in editing a substantial (operatic) music history, in which we are strongly encouraging all our contributors (academics and performers) not to talk about "genres", which almost always represent attempts to limit or pigeonhole works of art into rigid categories. We much prefer the scalable term "pattern", because patterns are cut and changed according to individual creative cases. "Genre" is not only over-used, it is also damaging to aesthetic discussion - unless used historiographically, for instance in reference to the history of criticism. And "genre-fluid" just gets us into even deeper mires!

[Serial_Apologist]

As a sidelight, I'm currently involved in editing a substantial (operatic) music history, in which we are strongly encouraging all our contributors (academics and performers) not to talk about "genres", which almost always represent attempts to limit or pigeonhole works of art into rigid categories. We much prefer the scalable term "pattern", because patterns are cut and changed according to individual creative cases. "Genre" is not only over-used, it is also damaging to aesthetic discussion - unless used historiographically, for instance in reference to the history of criticism. And "genre-fluid" just gets us into even deeper mires!

And yet "genre-fluidity" could well describe Radio 3 programming, along with much of what passes for "serious contemporary composition" from what one hears of it. Is the latter a message to broadcasters that pick-n-mix is more likely to get your music picked for broadcasting? Or an effort to comprehend and enfold the breadth and wealth of musical culture on offer in multicultural societies? What are the primary forces steering modern-day societies, multicultural or not, if it is not compliance? One of the great things about jazz is how at its best and most enduring its principles and practices evolved disregardful of market criteria and big business by adapting western classical techniques on its own terms, thus optimising and furthering its own authenticity. Despite what people I normally strongly agree with on so many issues here have told me, I fret that the warning some critics put out back in the 1980s that polycultural mixing, far from enriching, would merely dilute the constituents, leaving culture in broad terms at the mercy of big power marketing.

[smittims]

Ahem... sorry for any confusion, DracoM, by my lapsing into jargon. I had thought that the term had entered colloquial English, at least as far as this forum went.

I mean that time of day devoted to 'dumbing-down', i.e. deliberately reducing the intellectual demand made of the listener, not something I think Radio 3 should be doing at any time.

I was interested to see, and am grateful for, oddeoneout's explanation of the purported apppearance of these programmes. I had assumed they were there because they were perceived by R3 management, or at least expected to fulfil the Government's expectation, that they appealed more to what is known as 'Black , Asian and other Ethnic Minority' (BAME) listeners than do core-classical programmes. If (and I stress if as I may be mistaken) that's so, then I think that's rather patronising on their part. At any rate I sense an Elephant in the room here .

[french frank]

we are strongly encouraging all our contributors (academics and performers) not to talk about "genres"[

Does that mean not using the word 'genre' or not referring eg to 'verismo'?

which almost always represent attempts to limit or pigeonhole works of art into rigid categories.

That seems to me more a matter of how it's used. As I said earlier 'pigeonhole (noun and verb) seems unuseful because a pigeonhole is confining, limiting, keeping within strict boundaries, disguising connections and similarities whereas a class, classification or category can allow 'overspill. This is the point in this discussion where I usually invoke the colour spectrum. Referring to different 'colours' is useful even though they merge one into the other in a tint-fluid manner.

I see Julian Lloyd-Webber has weighed into the current cuts debate. The BBC has said that 'serious thought' has been given to the matter. Which is a bit like me saying I've given 'serious thought' to the problem of Schrödinger's cat.

[Master Jacques]

Despite what people I normally strongly agree with on so many issues here have told me, I fret that the warning some critics put out back in the 1980s that polycultural mixing, far from enriching, would merely dilute the constituents, leaving culture in broad terms at the mercy of big power marketing.

That's precisely what's happened. Globalisation of polyglot hybrids - whether in music or the other arts - has weakened the quality, resulting in the end of high culture as a concept. The process has been steered by the power marketeers, who always found high art a threat to the consumer mentality off which they feed.

[Serial_Apologist]

Ahem... sorry for any confusion, DracoM, by my lapsing into jargon. I had thought that the term had entered colloquial English, at least as far as this forum went.

I mean that time of day devoted to 'dumbing-down', i.e. deliberately reducing the intellectual demand made of the listener, not something I think Radio 3 should be doing at any time.

I was interested to see, and am grateful for, oddeoneout's explanation of the purported apppearance of these programmes. I had assumed they were there because they were perceived by R3 management, or at least expected to fulfil the Government's expectation, that they appealed more to what is known as 'Black , Asian and other Ethnic Minority' (BAME) listeners than do core-classical programmes. If (and I stress if as I may be mistaken) that's so, then I think that's rather patronising on their part. At any rate I sense an Elephant in the room here .

This is much what I was saying in my last message.

[ardcarp]

"Genre-fluid” - who writes this cobblers?

I read it as gender fluid!!

[Serial_Apologist]

That's precisely what's happened. Globalisation of polyglot hybrids - whether in music or the other arts - has weakened the quality, resulting in the end of high culture as a concept. The process has been steered by the power marketeers, who always found high art a threat to the consumer mentality off which they feed.

That's it. The lifelong apprenticeship affording recognition for admission within the higher realms of musical cultures other than "our own", sustained from pre-colonial eras in many parts of the world, speaks for itself - or rather, for practitioners steeped in the traditions and practices that once held communities together. There's probably a bigger discussion to be had here, given that the Western Cultural Inheritance is both more than an expression of White Cultural Supremacism - as it was held to be in many radical black communities in America in the 1960s - and at the same time more than the sole preserve of political descendants of privilege, namely those with time to spare for "learning". It's no coincidence that pop music, howevermuch it glosses its product while image stereeotyping those who do it, has advanced less in terms of idiomatic innovation in well-nigh 70 years of its existence than did Haydn's music during an era we're not encouraged to think of in transient modern era terms - yet in the battle for "ratings" it is always presented as "the latest thing".

While the New Populism (which Richard B and I have termed "Capitalist Realism" as an analogy with the Stalinist Socialist Realism of the 1930s-1960s) can cite an argument for spending cuts in the arts on spurious grounds of "elitism", cynically appealing to the very envy of which the privileged benefit the most, as with taking control of the levers of political and economic power, our own grounds for advocacy should be based on accessibility for all.

[Master Jacques]

While the New Populism (which Richard B and I have termed "Capitalist Realism" as an analogy with the Stalinist Socialist Realism of the 1930s-1960s) can cite an argument for spending cuts in the arts on spurious grounds of "elitism", cynically appealing to the very envy of which the privileged benefit the most, as with taking control of the levers of political and economic power, our own grounds for advocacy should be based on accessibility for all.

"Capitalist realism" - I love it, and fully intend to purloin it!

Meanwhile I heard on R4's World At One today, that certain choirs are talking about boycotting this year's Proms, in protest against the axing of the BBC Singers. Whether that comes to anything, or whether the Singers will be reinstated before the Proms programme is announced, is perhaps an open question.