The other Benjamin... (no, NOT Floella!)

[Master Jacques]

On the positive side, classical music is flourishing in the Far East -- 40 million Chinese kids learning the piano in emulation of Lang-Lang, Yuja etc

Or closer to home, we could learn an awful lot from the way the Finns (for example) get their children singing and playing together from year dot. I recently heard the Finnish racing driver Valtteri Bottas talking about this, saying that he felt he owed his motor skills and ability to focus, as well as his ease in working closely with other people, to that early choral training.

[Maclintick]

Or closer to home, we could learn an awful lot from the way the Finns (for example) get their children singing and playing together from year dot.

Or, to take a prehistorical precedent, children singing and playing together as I did in my state primary school in the late-50s early 60s...

[Master Jacques]

Or, to take a prehistorical precedent, children singing and playing together as I did in my state primary school in the late-50s early 60s...

Unlike us, the Finns have consciously kept their folk choral traditions alive. I don't suppose many youngsters in this benighted land are given the privilege and pleasure of singing together the rich "folk songs of the four nations" which you and I experienced at primary school. It is a stupendous loss, especially as today's popular song repertoire is unsuited/unsuitable for children. Another small - but very significant - example of the way the arts have been harried out of the curriculum as somehow "useless". This obsession with what's measurable has damaged society, and the chicken is coming home to roost. The powers that be evidently haven't read Hard Times as closely as they ought!

[Serial_Apologist]

Or, to take a prehistorical precedent, children singing and playing together as I did in my state primary school in the late-50s early 60s...

I never got to hear the tapes which my father heard of an experimental partially improvising music class led by a teacher friend of his at a primary school. Dad vouched for the results, claiming them as interesting in many ways as the new music we were listening to in the 1970s on Music In Our Time. Coming from him, that was quite something.

[RichardB]

My point too, with the London Sinfonietta / Lutoslawski project. Because they'd never heard of Brahms, these children were clean sheets to work with, without the ingrained prejudices of those people who think it's all about these long dead composers

I think I'm not getting through here! My point was, once more, that the proportion of people who think it's all about these long dead composers is extremely small! - no doubt even smaller now than it was 30 or so years ago when GB first made that assertion. "Ingrained prejudices" in favour of classical music on the part of young people are only a reality in the kind of rarefied circles people like GB live and work and were educated in.

[RichardB]

an experimental partially improvising music class ... as interesting in many ways as the new music we were listening to in the 1970s on Music In Our Time.

Now you're talking. Personally I don't think the future of creative music education lies either in Mozart and Brahms on the one hand or Lutoslawski on the other (he's no more alive than Mozart after all), but in demonstrating collective and spontaneous creativity and inspiring young people with it - something which an institution like the London Sinfonietta is not really in a position to provide because they remain wedded to a traditional view of composition and performance.

[Joseph K]

Now you're talking. Personally I don't think the future of creative music education lies either in Mozart and Brahms on the one hand or Lutoslawski on the other (he's no more alive than Mozart after all), but in demonstrating collective and spontaneous creativity and inspiring young people with it - something which an institution like the London Sinfonietta is not really in a position to provide because they remain wedded to a traditional view of composition and performance.

I don't think it should be an either/or. I would have liked to have been taught about improvisation and dead composers (and, indeed, how dead composers improvised!)

[Master Jacques]

Personally I don't think the future of creative music education lies either in Mozart and Brahms on the one hand or Lutoslawski on the other (he's no more alive than Mozart after all), but in demonstrating collective and spontaneous creativity and inspiring young people with it - something which an institution like the London Sinfonietta is not really in a position to provide because they remain wedded to a traditional view of composition and performance.

Of course Lutoslawski was very much alive at the time of London Sinfonietta's project, indeed he did some of the South London school sessions. And he's not a good stick to beat "traditional views" with, seeing that his mature scores (and the project, incidentally) put aleatoric music at the heart of the business.

Otherwise, I might agree with you if I could be sure what you were talking about (seriously!) Can you expand on what you mean by "demonstrating collective and spontaneous creativity and inspiring young people with it"? I don't suppose you mean anything so negatively individualistic as "do your own thing", a precept which got us into trouble generally, whether in music or outside it: but I do wonder whether this "spontaneous creativity" (whatever it may be) might exclude audiences, and therefore making a living.

[ahinton]

"The other Benjamin...(no, NOT)"...

NOT Arthur? NOT Walter? NOT Britten? NOT Grosvenor?...

As you were...

[RichardB]

I don't think it should be an either/or. I would have liked to have been taught about improvisation and dead composers (and, indeed, how dead composers improvised!)

Absolutely - I was talking about creative music education, that is to say activating the innate creativity of young people.

In answer to Master Jacques: (a) I'm not using Lutoslawski as a stick, but he was a deeply traditionally-minded composer whose tentative forays into "aleatoric" composition were intended to give precisely-imagined and completely predictable results; (b) I'm talking about the very opposite of individualism; rather, an encouragement of collaborative creativity for which there are very few examples in the "dead composers" tradition; (c) far from excluding audiences, it's a matter of finding ways to make creative processes more open, and to emphasise listening as a creative activity, and music not as something that's done in front of audiences, but as something shared with them, with the intention of drawing people into thinking about music in perhaps new and challenging ways; (d) how is "making a living" relevant to any of this?

[Master Jacques]

Thank you RichardB, I'm a lot clearer now about what you meant.

For myself, I think that we need to be much clearer about what "innate creativity" amounts to, philosophically, musically - and in practical terms - if we're to move away from a concept of individualist expression which is corrosive for the individual, society and art itself. And we should always remember, in our pride, that what audiences have most liked since Apollo put digit to lyre, is a good tune.

[RichardB]

we should always remember, in our pride, that what audiences have most liked since Apollo put digit to lyre, is a good tune.

How many "good tunes" from European music prior to say 1600 do you remember? How many "good tunes" do you think there are in the musics of India, Indonesia, China, Japan, the Arab world and Africa? That is a painfully insular point of view to take. "Corrosive", in your word. I am very clear about what I mean by "innate creativity", thanks. I'm not talking about what I think, I'm talking about what I do.

[Master Jacques]

How many "good tunes" from European music prior to say 1600 do you remember? How many "good tunes" do you think there are in the musics of India, Indonesia, China, Japan, the Arab world and Africa? That is a painfully insular point of view to take. "Corrosive", in your word. I am very clear about what I mean by "innate creativity", thanks. I'm not talking about what I think, I'm talking about what I do.

I can immediately think of a good few great "tunes" prior to 1600, frankly - how about 'Tristan's lament', for starters, or 'L'Homme Armé', which of course formed the basis of quite a few works as people recognised it immediately. Or, closer to home, 'Greensleeves'. Or don't you count itinerant minstrelsy as music? I was under the impression we were talking about Western musical traditions, high and low, not the hugely diverse musical cultures of every point on the planet.

Though to broaden it out just a little, from what I know of Japanese court musics (such as Gagaku), Kabuki and Noh, their strict rules don't allow for huge amounts of personal "expression". This search for "innate creativity" seems to me a - yes, corrosive - Western trope, of fairly recent (largely transatlantic) provenance. Other musical cultures seem to me to have surprisingly little room for this idea, from our 21st century individualistic standpoint. They are more about transcendence of the individual in something larger.

I don't mean to give offence - quite the contrary, as I know (as musical communicators) we agree about many things - so I'm sorry if you found my remark about good tunes unduly populist. Music is a continuum, from high art to low, and alert composers of every age have always had a remarkably strong sense of the popular, tuneful things going on around them, whether it was folk song and dance, bourgeois waltz tunes, foxtrots or spirituals.

[Master Jacques]

As a tiny PS to the "good tunes" - and again from my own small areas of knowledge - many Japanese folk tunes (such as the ubiquitous 'Sakura', a popular urban melody) have maintained their popularity across centuries.

[RichardB]

I don't think "tunes" in the modern Western sense have been a particularly important feature of most musics, or of Western music before a certain point in history. Surely rare exceptions like "Greensleeves" (and "Sakura" which actually isn't so ancient) just serve to underline this.

I really wouldn't say there's anything crassly individualistic, about the idea of fostering innate creativity. I would always put the emphasis, as indeed I did in a previous post, on collaboration and cooperation being central to people's creative potential. On the one hand there is the idea of being part of something larger than the individual, as you say, but this isn't the whole story. For example, the composer/performer/scholar George Lewis has this to say: "the pursuit of individualism within an egalitarian frame has been central not only to the jazz moment, but also to African American music before and since that moment. … Indeed, it seems fitting that in the wake of the radical physical and even mental silencing of slavery ... African Americans developed an array of musical practices that encouraged all to speak." Anyway, I know it's possible to talk about developing people's creativity without couching it in terms of "self-expression" and all the baggage that comes with that, and this is one reason why I wouldn't use a very traditionally self-expressive composer like Lutoslawski as a model!