Prom 40 - 12.08.13: 6 Music Prom

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Varese and Xenakis = "then"??!! Pshaw! We haven't caught up with them, yet!

[teamsaint]

Varese and Xenakis = "then"??!! Pshaw! We haven't caught up with them, yet!

that is what I thought...Ed will explain, I feel sure !!

[edashtav]

Fascinating thoughts as ever, ED. I am grateful. I shall never see Punk in quite the same light. Might have to spend a while checking out Development sections in The Jam's singles, and so on !

I was thinking today about what I had written about the "Now " element of rock. I do feel that, and to some extent I could explain and justify it.
The problem comes, not with the symbiosis of new and new,(and where this might lead) but in reflecting on what I feel about rock with how classical music written long ago stays alive.....viz the rigorous debate about the recent Mahler 2.

I guess the problem, if there is one, is for popular music (the sort I grew up with) finding a place and a meaning as it ages. perhaps there isn't one.
But it's hard to imagine a world where, for instance Bowie's music is just reduced to a museum piece, or something only to enjoy in its original recorded form.
I suppose folk music has to an extent already dealt with this successfully, at least to a point. Reusing, changing , synthesising material and styles is grist to the (good) folk musicians mill.
Perhaps here is where Rock can learn, as well as from the classical performance tradition.

Incidentally, not quite sure I grasped your nuance re Berio Xenakis etc !!

It's good to see you gripping some of the issues that the BBC needs to think through before attempting more fusions. So far, we've seen the Beeb achieve two molten phases but there's been an absence of miscibility, and certainly a failure to achieve a eutectic mixture.

There was scarcely a nuance on my part re B.;X. & V. - just the thought that Radio 6 concentrates on new music, and despite their classic status, Berio, Xenakis, and Varese are yesterday's new "classical" (Radio 3) music. Sadly, they're all dead.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

despite their classic status, Berio, Xenakis, and Varese are yesterday's new "classical" (Radio 3) music. Sadly, they're all dead.

Hmm. Listening to the majority of "New" works presented in this year's Prom season, Xenakis and Varese are still tomorrow's Music.

[edashtav]

Hmm. Listening to the majority of "New" works presented in this year's Prom season, Xenakis and Varese are still tomorrow's Music.

A valid point - but what you're implying, surely, is that the "wrong" contemporary works are being selected by the Beeb - it's afraid of, has failed to identify, today's big bad wolves with cutting-edge teeth.

I agree with you, fhg, that most of this year's "New" works should be cases for review by Trading Standards; even some formerly leonine figures, such Ades, have turned their own roars into miaows, IMO.

Is it dumbing down or pussyfooting ("with cat-like tread")?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A valid point - but what you're implying, surely, is that the "wrong" contemporary works are being selected by the Beeb - it's afraid of, has failed to identify, today's big bad wolves with cutting-edge teeth.

I don't intend to "imply" this at all. I want to make it loud and clear! (It's like that bit in The Odd Couple: "So, in other words, you want me to leave?" "No! Not 'in others words': in those exact words!")

I agree with you, fhg, that most of this year's "New" works should be cases for review by Trading Standards; even some formerly leonine figures, such Ades, have turned their own roars into miaows, IMO.

Is it dumbing down or pussyfooting ("with cat-like tread")?

IMO, too, although "dumbing-down" isn't really what I think is going on. "Blanding out"? A desire not to offend, not to cause controversy, to smile at an indifferent audience so that they don't turn into a hostile one? Or (to be more charitable) a desire to please an audience that doesn't really listen to "New Music", in order to ease it into the "untamed" stuff in the wild? The Proms as a zoo of living composers - carefully letting a large audience see what Music sounds like in captivity, with the occasional visitors from Germany unleashing a furious Lachenmann into South Kensington. And doesn't he look magnificent in all his dangerous, hungry focus on Truth!

[edashtav]

Lion on the Loose at Blandings Castle

Varese and Xenakis = "then"??!! Pshaw! We haven't caught up with them, yet!

that is what I thought...Ed will explain, I feel sure !!

My apologies, gentlemen - I missed your responses last night - I hope we're now back on track... there's no doubting the authenticity of the roars from the Lion stalking Blandings Castle in post#21!

[aeolium]

IMO, too, although "dumbing-down" isn't really what I think is going on. "Blanding out"? A desire not to offend, not to cause controversy, to smile at an indifferent audience so that they don't turn into a hostile one? Or (to be more charitable) a desire to please an audience that doesn't really listen to "New Music", in order to ease it into the "untamed" stuff in the wild? The Proms as a zoo of living composers - carefully letting a large audience see what Music sounds like in captivity, with the occasional visitors from Germany unleashing a furious Lachenmann into South Kensington. And doesn't he look magnificent in all his dangerous, hungry focus on Truth!

But ferney, haven't many composers - even the greats - throughout history produced works that employed the musical language and idioms of the time rather than something outstandingly original and revolutionary? Of course there are plenty of examples of the latter, but their number is dwarfed by the number of works that worked within the contemporary conventions and were comprehensible by the audiences they were composed for. Bach's cantatas were not created for some higher breed of intelligentsia but for the ordinary congregations who attended the Thomaskirche, Handel wanted his living audiences to listen to his work not some future posterity. It's as if the requirement of the day now, for some, is that every new work must be revolutionary, must in some way upset the established musical order, whatever that is, though in fact it was the presence of a settled musical language in the past that allowed the real innovators to react against it and create something new.

It's all very well talking about "tomorrow's music" but audiences are frustratingly limited to living for today. It's not much consolation to them to think "this doesn't make much sense to me but it will be a masterpiece in fifty years".

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You're right, aeolie - to a point! Composers should write whatever they need to write and what they believe other people need to hear. My gripe against the Proms commissions (and the majority of the tiny trickle of works by living composers that reaches the main hours of R3 generally) is that this is entirely "safe"; there is no "requirement ... for every new work" to be "revolutionary" - quite the opposite in the Kingdom of the "Accessible" (the etymology of which seems to be evolving to mean "bland").

The living composers who do explore the really new modes of expression are ghetto-ed (?ghettoised??) to the "Top Shelf" of the after 11:00pm slots, preventing the wider audiences you refer to from accessing it. Lachenmann featured in an evening Prom entirely because a German Orchestra and its conductor believe in it and were determined to let mainstream audiences have an opportunity to hear it. The same was true when the Dresdeners brought Rebecca Saunders' Music to the Proms. It doesn't matter that some/many/most in that mainstream audience hated their experience (they didn't exactly rush out in their millions to buy CDs by the "safer" composers, either!) - the point is, they were allowed to hear that there are still composers working in (at least) as vital a language as the visual Artists that they're made aware of (if for perhaps the "wrong" reasons) in the outraged prose of the Daily Mail.

[Serial_Apologist]

Param Vir, the premiere of a new work of whose is destined for Prom 52 (see the devoted thread), is an interesting example of a non-"western"-born composer writing music expressive of non-"western" ideas in advanced "western" musical idioms.

Please comment.

[edashtav]

Param Vir, the premiere of a new work of whose is destined for Prom 52 (see the devoted thread), is an interesting example of a non-"western"-born copmposer writing music expressive of non-"western" ideas in advanced "western" musical idioms.

Please comment.

Param Vir is no longer young (>60 y.o.) and cannot be said to be a composer who uses "advance western musical idioms", surely? His use of intervals, sets, modes and harmonic fields arises from Olivier Messaien, Witold Lutoslawski, Elliott Carter and Jonathan Harvey: not cutting edge, but decently 20th century. His new piece "Cave of Luminous Mind" seems to derive its inner glow from a governing harmonic field that eschews the employment of the minor second interval.

All good stuff upon which this articulate composer can dwell in the PROMS PLUS Portrait that precedes Prom 52 on the 21st August.

I do feel that there's a sharp contrast to be made with Naresh Sohal's Cosmic Dance heard earlier in PROM 27. Naresh Sohal is well into his 70's and must be counted as a deeply conservative figure who dresses his rather mundane music in gorgeous orchestral robes.

I'm confident that ferney will place Sohal in his "safe" category but he may be prepared to accept that Vir's piece may teeter on the brink of being "unsafe". I'm pleased to see a BBC commission going to Param Vir but disheartened that so much expense and effort was spent on Sohal's more meretricious work.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Makes me sound like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man: "Is it safe?"

[edashtav]

But ferney, haven't many composers - even the greats - throughout history produced works that employed the musical language and idioms of the time rather than something outstandingly original and revolutionary? Of course there are plenty of examples of the latter, but their number is dwarfed by the number of works that worked within the contemporary conventions and were comprehensible by the audiences they were composed for. Bach's cantatas were not created for some higher breed of intelligentsia but for the ordinary congregations who attended the Thomaskirche, Handel wanted his living audiences to listen to his work not some future posterity. It's as if the requirement of the day now, for some, is that every new work must be revolutionary, must in some way upset the established musical order, whatever that is, though in fact it was the presence of a settled musical language in the past that allowed the real innovators to react against it and create something new.

It's all very well talking about "tomorrow's music" but audiences are frustratingly limited to living for today. It's not much consolation to them to think "this doesn't make much sense to me but it will be a masterpiece in fifty years".

But... aeolium... times have changed. Technology has ploughed ahead. Audiences in the 18th & 19th century learned to appreciate the new at a slow pace simply because there were no recordings, iPlayers, internet facilities, etc. Serious musical appreciation is HARD WORK. We're lucky, not for us one performance of Beethoven's 7th followed by weeks of study at the piano with a duet reduction prepared by Franz Liszt. The BBC can broadcast something new and difficult, but if our mind reacts "(s)he has something to say", we can listen over and over... until ... . It's important for the health of our culture that we experience as fully as possible contemporary Arts. So many of the works that are immediately comprehensible on first hearing, fail the test of repeated hearings. They do not lodge in the brain because they are redundant, having nothing of significance to say. We need the BBC to take risks, yes & to do some Reithian education. Far, far too much musical effort is being wasted either on burnishing the classics to the nth degree or through cultural relativism where nothing must be labelled as "second-rate", reviving long-lost pieces by minor or insignificant baroque figures. I was looking at a JS Bach "recomposition" of a piece by Telemann the other day. The genius of Bach cut through Telemann's lazy repetitions, the "noise" of redundant notes, the themes that had not been tested in the fire & reduced to their finest form, and from Telemann's unpromising, routine piece, Bach produced a great movement.
"The rest is noise" : we hear it far too much of it, too often.

[aeolium]

But... aeolium... times have changed. Technology has ploughed ahead. Audiences in the 18th & 19th century learned to appreciate the new at a slow pace simply because there were no recordings, iPlayers, internet facilities, etc.

edashtav, times may have changed, but people are still listening to new works, and may have only one chance if it is a premiere and there are no recordings (and if they are at a concert).

Serious musical appreciation is HARD WORK. We're lucky, not for us one performance of Beethoven's 7th followed by weeks of study at the piano with a duet reduction prepared by Franz Liszt. The BBC can broadcast something new and difficult, but if our mind reacts "(s)he has something to say", we can listen over and over... until ... .

Listening to music can be hard work but it does not have to be and certainly not for every work. Are we saying that people who put in a hard day's (non-musical) work are then expected to put in more hard work, every time they listen to music? There is a great deal of music that has been written down the centuries that does not fall into the category of hard work (to listen to), and a lot of that music has endured.

So many of the works that are immediately comprehensible on first hearing, fail the test of repeated hearings. They do not lodge in the brain because they are redundant, having nothing of significance to say. We need the BBC to take risks, yes & to do some Reithian education. Far, far too much musical effort is being wasted either on burnishing the classics to the nth degree or through cultural relativism where nothing must be labelled as "second-rate", reviving long-lost pieces by minor or insignificant baroque figures. I was looking at a JS Bach "recomposition" of a piece by Telemann the other day. The genius of Bach cut through Telemann's lazy repetitions, the "noise" of redundant notes, the themes that had not been tested in the fire & reduced to their finest form, and from Telemann's unpromising, routine piece, Bach produced a great movement.
"The rest is noise" : we hear it far too much of it, too often.

But many works that are still performed today were received with great acclaim when they were first heard - Haydn's London symphonies, for instance. And plenty of works that are immediately comprehensible on first hearing do not fail the test of repeated hearings; they are not redundant. The BBC does far too little of reviving long-lost pieces by minor or insignificant baroque figures (or indeed non-baroque ones) as far as I'm concerned, and it's largely thanks to the work of early instrument performers and researchers that so much really fine work has been rediscovered. I don't share your view of Telemann and I think people are far too obsessed with 'the canon' and 'the great'.

You're right, aeolie - to a point! Composers should write whatever they need to write and what they believe other people need to hear. My gripe against the Proms commissions (and the majority of the tiny trickle of works by living composers that reaches the main hours of R3 generally) is that this is entirely "safe"; there is no "requirement ... for every new work" to be "revolutionary" - quite the opposite in the Kingdom of the "Accessible" (the etymology of which seems to be evolving to mean "bland").

ferney, I agree also - to a point (I'm glad you didn't add "Lord Copper"!) And your own favourite modern composer has suffered particularly badly from neglect. I just think that a variety of composing styles should be presented and people allowed to make their own minds up.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

ferney, I agree also - to a point (I'm glad you didn't add "Lord Copper"!)

And your own favourite modern composer has suffered particularly badly from neglect.

I just think that a variety of composing styles should be presented and people allowed to make their own minds up.

A couple of years ago, on the Proms "Talk to the Controller" messageboard, Richard Bernas (IIRC) asked "Where is all the cutting edge Music?", to which Roger Wright replied (not an exact quotation): "I don't know what you mean - we've got a premier of a piece by Birtwistle." Now Birtwistle is one of my very favourite composers, but to comment that a 76 year-old is a representative of the most recent developments in "Art" (/"Contemporary Classical") Music strongly suggests that fingers are missing pulses. If there is room for a substantial work by Sohal at a "mainstream" Prom, (and Matthews - both of them - Anderson, Macmillan, McCabe, Glass and Ades) then there should be room there also for Barrett, (and Sciarrino, Rijnvos, Furrer, Cassidy, Billone, Schurig, Maierhof, Saunders - both of them - Johnson). And Hinton, for that matter.