Jenkins, Karl

[Serial_Apologist]

Did anyone bother watching tonight's documentary on Jenkins on BBC4? I did out of sheer interest. At the end of what turned out an almost totally uncritical piece of adulation, I was left with the feeling that Jenkins may well be the unegotistical fellow he describes himself as in the final moments. However being unegotistical could stand for presenting himself and his music as a psychological punch bag or cypher onto which people who really don't think, or don't think they have to think very deeply about important questions can project their fears and anxieties about the state of the world. One does not need an ego, or guiding repository of unconscious mediated memories, to understand when one is being used. There were a lot of "straw men" arguments coming from the advocates - one from a musician positing the virtues of Jenkins's music against modernist "noise", and in general the soft acceptance coming from top artists whose opinions one would expect to respect was a depressing reflection of the level of cultural defeatism infecting the concert hall establishment of today. As a phenomenon Karl Jenkins in one sense represents what has become of the generation that took as given the stage reached in their chosen field with commitment to further progress - typified in Jenkins's case by his early career involvement in free jazz, by definition engagement with the moment - a choice made on the perception of imminent change, transvaluation of values, but not one appropriate to furthering the Tradition. Such a spirit had informed the creative motivation of their illustrious predecessors: for Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stockhausen - choose your own figurehead - this amounted to regarding the past as tacit in what they had inherited, rather than something to be disinterred for available gestures once seen as redolent of outworn thinking. In the lyrics of a 1967 pop song, "History has banned that stage, aha!" Jenkins the postmodern phenomenon epitomises a global culture hell-bent on not learning from its own history, etched into its artifacts, and instead picking and choosing from the disembodied remnants of its own amnesia.

[burning dog]

I feel extended composition is not his forte,

The thing he did that was an on a car advert was good IMO. I don't know if was part of a a long winded "snoozefett "

This might be his finest work,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLqvGTDeAh0

I may have posted something like this before. Its an old topic!

[smittims]

Thanks for your summary above, S-A. From my point of view the problem is the claims made about Jenkins and his ilk. We've had undemanding sugary music for centuries but no-one pretended it was anything more than that. What gets my goat is peopel claiming, doubtless for reasons of their own , that this music represents the state of the art today, and that more serious creative music is shunned as niche or elitist.

[burning dog]

I prefer to listen, read or watch, and would love to take part in, the elite in any field,

Opinons held by a fool such as Dominic Raab, should be called out as "snobbish" rather than elitist. The excellent in serious music is (still) available to all by the likes of Radio Three

[LMcD]

[QUOTE=Serial_Apologist;n1312340]Did anyone bother watching tonight's documentary on Jenkins on BBC4?

Once the Summer Night Concert from Vienna, which I greatly enjoyed, had ended, I decided it was time to see whether our postman's £20 bet on Spain at 4-1 was going to pay off. He'll probably be even more cheerful than usual this morning.

[french frank]

but not one appropriate to furthering the Tradition. Such a spirit had informed the creative motivation of their illustrious predecessors: for Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stockhausen - choose your own figurehead - this amounted to regarding the past as tacit in what they had inherited, rather than something to be disinterred

I think that sums it up very well. To move on is not somehow to deny the value of past cultural achievement, or think it's not worth being carefully preserved. But 'the past' was never a monolithic fixed 'tradition'': it was and is a continual evolution.

[Boilk]

I caught it from 15 minutes in. It effectively brushed over the Soft Machine era, and concentrated on the...ahem... classical works. Couldn't believe how laudatory some of these commentators were, but I guess most of the performers in particular (no doubt shortlisted as people likely to have nice things to say) have done very well out of performing/recording his music. Norman Lebrecht sat on the fence, but I suspect is not a fan at all. The (American?) chap who deemed most modern music no better than scraping a blackboard because the audience couldn't go away humming a tune like they could with Jenkins, was particularly nauseating.

[Master Jacques]

Every age gets what it deserves. My own personal circle is dotted with people who ask me, quite seriously, whether I agree with them that Britten, Lutoslawski, Tippett etc. were "frauds" laughing at the public, and creating cacophonous music to show their "superiority".

Where to start? I usually go on the attack, by saying that the real "frauds" are the populist hypesters who push sugared dreck into the public's open mouths at every opportunity. And the real elitist snobs are those who laud such national embarrassments as Karl Jenkins, while ignoring the likes of Errolyn Wallen. High Art is - at least temporarily - dead.

[burning dog]

Master Jacques. Thank for alerting me to Errolyn Warren

[Serial_Apologist]

I feel extended composition is not his forte,

The thing he did that was an on a car advert was good IMO. I don't know if was part of a a long winded "snoozefett "

This might be his finest work,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLqvGTDeAh0

I may have posted something like this before. Its an old topic!

But even there, Jenkins nicked the outer sections of the tune from Duke Ellington's "Moose the Mooch". Admittedly he did compose some good jazz materials for Graham Collier, Harry Beckett, Ian Carr and Soft Machine - oddly enough rather in the English "pastoral mode" he would come to jettison in preference for stylistic anonymity in the later work celebrated in the programme - but it was his squiggly energised oboe improvisations, especially prior to joining Softs, that I hear the good stuff he did. .

[burning dog]

I agree about the "pastoral mode". Graham Collier seemed to take his cue from the early modal jazz of the USA and give it an English feel. I'm too young to remember this band but remember Nucleus. I wasnt very keen on the Jenkins edition of Soft Machine. Heard them at a concert with Roland Kirk, who post stroke was still less bland and quirkier than them. The gig was full of Softs fans and Jenkins got the best reception

[Serial_Apologist]

I think that sums it up very well. To move on is not somehow to deny the value of past cultural achievement, or think it's not worth being carefully preserved. But 'the past' was never a monolithic fixed 'tradition'': it was and is a continual evolution.

That reality would not stop some countries from making it one, however - notably the Austrians and Germans in the wake of Beethoven and Schubert, and then, in reaction following Chopin, Liszt and their contemporaneous Russians as examples, the French, Czechoslovaks, Italians, Spanish, and finally the British (mainly English) and Hungarians, just before the advent of Modernism proper. What is specific to the German Romantics and of interest is the manner in which when they turned outside their assiduously nurtured tradition - its modelling going back no further than JS Bach in reality* - they did so in such a way as to subordinate their influences from abroad or the past on terms that did not break their own underlying musical-theoretical precepts: Strauss being a prime example where he pastiches Haydn in Till Eulenspiegel, the near-Orient in Salome, and Lully in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. For a German or Austrian of that period such as Mahler, modally flattened intervals and Eastern-sounding exotic scales either amounted to or were treated as notes needing to be resolved diatonically, or as something at best child-like, innocent when not alien almost, as they were for Strauss. Even Schoenberg decried composers using folk themes, which, thanks to the ethnological foundation work carried out by Bartok, were by then recognised as authentically self-validating, even if viewed as inferior to the Euroclassical tradition, as signifier of civilising, along with religion and later "knowledge". Harmonically, and rhythmically too, Beethoven's and Haydn's sublimations of folk tunes they borrowed would have been seen as justified in their terms.

Odd as it may seem in some ways, the English classical tradition as resumed by Vaughan Williams and Holst, after a Germanic spell of intervention lasting a hundred and more years, went back further than the German one, even though it found its national identity etched into miniatures - songs, madrigals, lute and early keyboard pieces. For all my amateur fascination going back to the 1960s it has only really been since joining the Forum that I became aware of how much JS Bach owed his French and Italian contemporaries and their predecessors: we think of his music as so quintessentially German, don't we? (Er, don't we???) Jazz represented a break with its host country's accommodation with the Euroclassical imported tradition, which tended to patronise popular idioms in the adaptation and was anomalous by cultural comparisons in rejecting its mavericks like Ives, Cowell and Cage until they could serve other purposes. Rather than look down on the white classical academic institutions ensconced in new music and its promotion the way the white establishment did jazz, the latter showed its respects by adapting the advances secured in C19 and C20 compositional methods and their generic diffusions on their own terms: namely those struggled into definition and principle by dint of hard experience and necessity. Going back to Karl Jenkins, it is ironically both drives - the individual will expressed through musical means and practices wrought against prevailing norms, and the safe aesthetics of commercialisation securing dependable career pathways for the gifted ones that break through the class barriers.

*Some may argue for detecting "Germanic" national traits a good hundred years further back, in the music of Schutz; I would however argue that the differences in idiom between the German Schütz and his contemporary Italian, Monteverdi, are more a matter of temperament - in the way northern Gothic, transcending national and linguistic but not climatological barriers, inform temperamental differences with Baroque South - than of musical materials and methodological procedures, as compared with the sharp differences between say Hindemith and Malipiero as consequences of national border and self-identification establishment in the interim, along respectively with differences in approach to the vernacular and past.

[Master Jacques]

*Some may argue for detecting "Germanic" national traits a good hundred years further back, in the music of Schutz; I would however argue that the differences in idiom between the German Schütz and his contemporary Italian, Monteverdi, are more a matter of temperament - in the way northern Gothic, transcending national and linguistic but not climatological barriers, inform temperamental differences with Baroque South - than of musical materials and methodological procedures, as compared with the sharp differences between say Hindemith and Malipiero as consequences of national border and self-identification establishment in the interim, along respectively with differences in approach to the vernacular and past.

To pick out one juicy morsel from your rich bill of fare, I always have a feeling that trying to detect national traits in any particular music is putting the cart before the horse. In the case of Schütz, his music "sounds German", but only because it defined a "German-ness" of style which stuck around. The same's true for Smetana, whose music doesn't "sound Czech", so much as defining a fruitful style by its strength and personality which, developed by others, became identified with "Czech-ness".

In these examples, as with Spanish zarzuela (lauded at home for a 'Spanish-ness' it simply doesn't have, as it is very heavily involved at all points with music from France, Italy, the Germanic countries and even England) and the English folklorists (whose music utilises Russian and French modalisms to replace worn-out romantic cliché) the international cross-currents are much more vital than any claimed exceptionalism.