Are you a conservative? I think I am!

[Beef Oven!]

Reflecting over my music over the last couple of years has revealed a truth that I've been suppressing for much of my adult life. I am a conservative!

In my youth, I had maverik/dissident music sensibilities.

Yes, these days I often listen to Lachenmann, Barrett, Rihm et al and I enjoy, and would revisit, a good 30% of what I hear on Hear & Now.

But my music centre of gravity is conservative; Messiaen, Bartok, Shostakovich, 2VS, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, Bruckner and Mahler. With Jazz, I rarely venture outside of 1962-1967 Bluenote. All backward looking

Although I groan when I see another "what's your favourite bit in the first 2 minutes of Elgar's cello concerto" thread, I'm no more dynamic myself. For example, latterly, I have really been enjoying the music of David Matthews, along with a commentary from Roger Scruton!!

What's your music centre of gravity? Are you a progressive or a conservative, or is there a third or fourth way?






Random thought: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann have slipped down the popular lists these days, it seems to me. Still popular, but not the 'default' classical composers anymore.

Random thought #2: Enjoying the compositions of the long dead kinda goes with the territory for people like us, but when we also focus on performers that are long dead, isn't that a bit worrying, or are those performances simply the best?



.

[Stanfordian]

No, I vote labour Beefy, not conservative!

Seriously, you've made an interesting and thought provoking post.

[Richard Barrett]

No I'm not, not in any sense at all, but you knew that.

With that out of the way: it strikes me that many of the composers whose work struck out most clearly out in non-conservative directions are indeed no longer with us: Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Kagel, Cage, Carter, not to mention innovative composer-performers like Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey, and individualists from the pop music direction like Mark E Smith and David Bowie. All of these are people whose work still has the potential to open up new horizons of musical experience, to a much greater extent than many of their still-living and in many cases much younger counterparts, especially in the field of notated composition (although I think that of free improvisation is (being the youngest "new" form of music) finding new and fruitful avenues to a greater extent). It's easy to see this phenomenon as reflecting the political/economic conservatism that's been dominant since the 1980s, as has been said here many times, giving rise to a "capitalist realism" in culture which expresses the priorities and assumptions of neoliberal society in exactly the same way as its "socialist" counterpart did in the USSR, and with something like the same degree of coercion behind it, albeit applied less brutally.

Another random thought brought on by BO's musings: the early 20th century composers mentioned in the OP, as well as a great deal of the early 1960s Blue Note recordings (Taylor, Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson...) were far from conservative in their outlook, and their music embodies an openness and sense of discovery that's entirely missing from the work of someone like D Matthews. These are two quite different phenomena I think.

[Beef Oven!]

No I'm not, not in any sense at all, but you knew that.

With that out of the way: it strikes me that many of the composers whose work struck out most clearly out in non-conservative directions are indeed no longer with us: Nono, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Kagel, Cage, Carter, not to mention innovative composer-performers like Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey, and individualists from the pop music direction like Mark E Smith and David Bowie. All of these are people whose work still has the potential to open up new horizons of musical experience, to a much greater extent than many of their still-living and in many cases much younger counterparts, especially in the field of notated composition (although I think that of free improvisation is (being the youngest "new" form of music) finding new and fruitful avenues to a greater extent). It's easy to see this phenomenon as reflecting the political/economic conservatism that's been dominant since the 1980s, as has been said here many times, giving rise to a "capitalist realism" in culture which expresses the priorities and assumptions of neoliberal society in exactly the same way as its "socialist" counterpart did in the USSR, and with something like the same degree of coercion behind it, albeit applied less brutally.

Another random thought brought on by BO's musings: the early 20th century composers mentioned in the OP, as well as a great deal of the early 1960s Blue Note recordings (Taylor, Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson...) were far from conservative in their outlook, and their music embodies an openness and sense of discovery that's entirely missing from the work of someone like D Matthews. These are two quite different phenomena I think.

Thank you, very interesting. There are a few things in your reply that I will enjoy reflecting on in the coming days. But what strikes me immediately, is that although not a single week will go by without me listening to Taylor, Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson .... for a few hours, it is essentiallly a backward look. David's music might be, for me, a type of backward double-take, of course.

[Serial_Apologist]

As I age, I find myself more and more drawn back to a kind of "home": to times when (as Richard indicates) the best of musical genres I mainly followed were more radical - more (to my mind) in touch with their time, or the needs of their time, than maybe it is possible to be today. This is my excuse, at any rate, when I accuse myself of living in the past and becoming more and more conservative in my musical tastes.

I always connected with British composers of the Vaughan Williams/Holst generation, especially those two figures, as well as the Continental pioneers, which I guess makes me a bit of a Payne; but it is only recently I have found out about their connections with the first stirrings of socialism in this country in very special ways to do with non-Christian spirituality, environmentalism, musical education for the masses, influences on the 1960s that live on in jazz, how new technology could hopefully be harnessed to realise some of Morris's ideas about craft in a rationally planned system, and of course inevitably a personal identification with the part of London they lived in being where I enjoyed my early years.

[Bryn]

I readily admit that all too often I find myself thinking "but we were doing that 50 years ago" when I hear supposedly cutting-edge new music, and when it comes to improvised music, I tend to prefer to listen to musicians in their 70s and 80s, but when they are performing with others in their 20s and 30s I discover that this is not a lost art. So no, I don;' reckon myself a conservative but a generalist who still tends towards the new.

[Richard Barrett]

more (to my mind) in touch with their time, or the needs of their time, than maybe it is possible to be today.

I can see how one might thus get "drawn back", though it isn't a compulsion I feel myself, but surely your implication that our time, I mean 2018, doesn't have (or, to use your thought-provoking word, need) a music that embodies a creative and critical response to it? Do you think such a thing simply doesn't exist, or it does and you aren't interested in it, or it probably does and it goes unrecognised? I think it could be said that the period 1950-80 or so was one in which the concept of a "music of our time" was alive in artists' and listeners' minds, a significant proportion of each at least, and furthermore encouraged by cultural institutions (partly, as we know, as Cold War window-dressing), and even commercial ones like record labels. Certain political figures nowadays are regularly accused of wanting to take the country "back to the 1970s" - well, a massive proportion of the music I find most inspiring was made in the 1970s, because, for whatever reason, it was a fertile time for that music to be dreamed up and to take wing... I wouldn't want to go back there, but I certainly wouldn't mind some aspects of those times being reclaimed.

[Serial_Apologist]

I can see how one might thus get "drawn back", though it isn't a compulsion I feel myself, but surely your implication that our time, I mean 2018, doesn't have (or, to use your thought-provoking word, need) a music that embodies a creative and critical response to it? Do you think such a thing simply doesn't exist, or it does and you aren't interested in it, or it probably does and it goes unrecognised? I think it could be said that the period 1950-80 or so was one in which the concept of a "music of our time" was alive in artists' and listeners' minds, a significant proportion of each at least, and furthermore encouraged by cultural institutions (partly, as we know, as Cold War window-dressing), and even commercial ones like record labels. Certain political figures nowadays are regularly accused of wanting to take the country "back to the 1970s" - well, a massive proportion of the music I find most inspiring was made in the 1970s, because, for whatever reason, it was a fertile time for that music to be dreamed up and to take wing... I wouldn't want to go back there, but I certainly wouldn't mind some aspects of those times being reclaimed.

That 1960s generation we speak of managed to evade the pitfalls of the Swinging London image others fell prey to, having experienced the ignominy of jazz venues going over wholesale to rock presentations as baby boom youth culture profitably exercised its spending power in the mixed economy. If one can accept the arguably suspect notion, the music and their chosen approach to it and its underlying shaping principles enabled both parties to do so. As with Pop Art the second half of the 60s and much of the 70s music on the outer fringes of Prog and Fusion that survived idiomatic reductionism was in an ongoing partial dialectic with avant-garde and experimental musics, operating often without subsidy, always at the mercy of cuts, through co-operatives and the grapevine. That said, I guess I've always gravitated towards some middle ground between advance and acknowledgement of some post-Enlightenment continuum, as epitomised by the Second Viennese School, perhaps the last expression of Grand Narratives in western art music. I'm old fashioned enough to maintain faith in Grand Narratives as being humankind's bit for Darwinian evolution: I think music is deeper than metanarrativisation can attain. For me its inner workings are closer to processes of nature than their conceptualised representation. Maybe I'm just risk averse to babies being thrown out with bath waters in a sea populated with charlatans and snake oil salesmen - I'm struggling with what I'm trying to say here!

[Richard Barrett]

the Second Viennese School, perhaps the last expression of Grand Narratives in western art music.

I would have said the postwar generation of serial composers (and principled antiserialists like Xenakis) had at least as grand a narrative as Schoenberg et al., and that once the dust settled on their iconoclasm they were all concerned to point out aspects of continuity at least as much as their tabula rasa, Boulez most obviously.

[cloughie]

I don’t think of myself as a conservative, with any size of ‘C’ as it reminds me of too many politicians who I’m not very keen on, although I suppose some of them are OK. However I can be a grumpy old ‘so and so’ that’s not very keen on a lot of the music in several genres that has developed in the last few decades. As to preferring performers of the past rather than the present I see that is quite valid - after all if I like the pop/rock/folk/jazz/blues/soul I listened to 50 years ago then the performances of works I listened to then - Barbirolli/Boult/Klemperer/Monteux/Beecham/Maazel/Mehta ...the list goes on then by me that’s fine. As I’ve said before on these boards our musical tastes and what we have on our shelves and turntables, are unique to us as individuals and are conservative perhaps in what we like, but are progressive in how those tastes have developed over the years. I always think about the music I am hearing and in performance, singing individually or as part of a group or choir I am always self-critical and maybe at times too analytical about what I hear around me.

[Quarky]

"What's your music centre of gravity? Are you a progressive or a conservative, or is there a third or fourth way?"

Well, I seem to have bifurcated (yes, it's rather painful, but a known condition of Chaotic systems).

In one mode, Music has to be of the current day, i.e. today, to interest me, together with music which points directly toward the present day. To put it another way: listen to today's musicians, and shine a light backwards in time: who do you see? In terms of Jazz, I would accept for example Coltrane as a direct pointer, but would rule out much of the endless amount of music from the bop period that is so highly praised. Otherwise, it's Nubya Garcia, Maisha, Hutchings.... - and just accept that much of current Jazz music appears simplistic - directed to a younger audience.

Classical music - Hear and Now seems to me to represent a broad cross-section of current music. There are very bright spots, for example the series of programmes that Beefy commented on recently. Then there are rather strange compositions which are perhaps best described as experimental, scientific, or just somethin' else - for example the Radiophonic compositions we heard last Saturday - sounds of Paris and London. But I really don't know enough to comment in any more depth.

The other leg of my bifurcation is Early music - any thing from Medieval times, through Renaissance, Baroque, but petering out with Haydn - I guess matters were getting too sophisticated.

[Lat-Literal]

Not sure I can answer this question. If most of what is new is sensed as a re-hashing and most of what is old is sensed as not having been such, then we are already in considerable difficulties. From my own point of view, I think I would see a distinction between a possible preference for supposedly conservative forms and a slightly radical instinct to roam wide.

[ahinton]

Not sure I can answer this question. If most of what is new is sensed as a re-hashing and most of what is old is sensed as not having been such, then we are already in considerable difficulties. From my own point of view, I think I would see a distinction between a possible preference for supposedly conservative forms and a slightly radical instinct to roam wide.

I am sure that I cannot answer it. Whilst I might arguably have something of a problem with the notion of proiritising some kind of radicalism per se over the quality of certain music, I see no credible wayu of labelling myself as a "conservative"...

[kea]

I think this is a dumb question to ask on a classical music forum.

All art is political, less so in its aesthetic content than in its creation, performance and reception. With very few exceptions, composers have come from highly privileged social backgrounds, attended conservatories and universities, have studied with or befriended other people of similar social strata and integrated into a network of other composers/musicians from similarly highly educated, upper-income backgrounds. For those who originate from the working class, classical music has always had an aspirational quality, something rightfully belonging to the upper classes but which one can participate in to gain access to some of that privilege. Classical audiences have ranged from petit bourgeois to genuine aristocracy and royalty; there have been very few composers whose music was written for and could appeal to the vast majority of society.

Almost all classical/"art" music as such is composed in service of the political and economic status quo. This is also true of the most profitable commercialised pop music but outside the top 40 its social context is very different: for example hip-hop is a musical movement that emerged from the black american working class, reflects its concerns & social problems, and is still primarily created by working-class people (although it has become much more internationalised). Folk songwriting relates similarly to the white working class, and so on. Within the classical field—including basically all avant-garde/experimental music—the music reflects the concerns and social problems of an intellectual and cultural elite. Even composers who come from a working-class background (eg La Monte Young) or who explicitly positioned their music as politically opposed to that elite (eg Cornelius Cardew) were steeped so deeply in this elite tradition that their music cannot escape it.

I think also in general, music is not a suitable vehicle for any political philosophy seeking change or progress. Music is, within our society, a form of entertainment—and entertainment and radical action are fundamentally opposed to one another. This does not mean that music is unnecessary, but rather that its function is to distract, to separate us from the world. In that sense there is no "progressive" music except for what political activists of a progressive persuasion listen to in order to unwind and regain their necessary mental energy to face the world again.

[Richard Barrett]

I think this is a dumb question to ask on a classical music forum.

All art is political, less so in its aesthetic content than in its creation, performance and reception. With very few exceptions, composers have come from highly privileged social backgrounds, attended conservatories and universities, have studied with or befriended other people of similar social strata and integrated into a network of other composers/musicians from similarly highly educated, upper-income backgrounds. For those who originate from the working class, classical music has always had an aspirational quality, something rightfully belonging to the upper classes but which one can participate in to gain access to some of that privilege. Classical audiences have ranged from petit bourgeois to genuine aristocracy and royalty; there have been very few composers whose music was written for and could appeal to the vast majority of society.

Almost all classical/"art" music as such is composed in service of the political and economic status quo. This is also true of the most profitable commercialised pop music but outside the top 40 its social context is very different: for example hip-hop is a musical movement that emerged from the black american working class, reflects its concerns & social problems, and is still primarily created by working-class people (although it has become much more internationalised). Folk songwriting relates similarly to the white working class, and so on. Within the classical field—including basically all avant-garde/experimental music—the music reflects the concerns and social problems of an intellectual and cultural elite. Even composers who come from a working-class background (eg La Monte Young) or who explicitly positioned their music as politically opposed to that elite (eg Cornelius Cardew) were steeped so deeply in this elite tradition that their music cannot escape it.

I think also in general, music is not a suitable vehicle for any political philosophy seeking change or progress. Music is, within our society, a form of entertainment—and entertainment and radical action are fundamentally opposed to one another. This does not mean that music is unnecessary, but rather that its function is to distract, to separate us from the world. In that sense there is no "progressive" music except for what political activists of a progressive persuasion listen to in order to unwind and regain their necessary mental energy to face the world again.

It may be a "dumb question" to ask a composer, but this thread hasn't until now been about composers but about people's listening preferences. I don't agree with you that there's such a crassly binary distinction in appreciation of "classical music" between bourgeois privilege and working-class aspiration. Nor do I think that the fact that most "classical music" has historically been associated with glorifying court or church need have any particular bearing on how it is appreciated now. And finally I would say that your words on "political music" are actually the wrong way around - it isn't necessarily a question of using music to express or encourage radical sympathies, but of how creative musicians with (or without) such sympathies might decide to channel their creativity.

A "conservative" composer, in 2018 or at any other time, might be characterised as one whose work is concentrated principally on inherited forms, instrumentations, harmonic "language" and so on. Otherwise, all of us here surely listen to different musics at different times for different reasons - what characterises a "music-lover" is maybe the range of his/her listening modes, including but not in any way restricted to the aspect of "entertainment" you mention.