Classical music is shanghaied


My recent posts on classical music in China in general and Shanghai in particular were remarkably prescient. Header image is from my 2006 post about music in China.

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Why I will never stop buying CDs

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Joseph Campbell famously revealed the importance of myths in contemporary society, explaining that "Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is". Today the unreliability of journalism is conveniently ignored . But the importance of myth is also overlooked. This is puzzling because it explains, among many other things, the refusal of physical music media - CD and vinyl - to go away , and the staying power of print books .  In our digital age the dated concept of myth has been replaced by the zeitgeist friendly 'backstory' - a set of events that have occurred before the main story. The vitally important difference between physical and virtual media is that CDs, and vinyl can eloquently narrate a backstory; whereas streamed and downloaded music  is no more than a sequence of dumb binary characters.  In his famous Aspen Award acceptance speech Benjamin Britten explained "Music demands mor
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Classical music's problem nailed in one sentence

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While admiring Igor Levit as a pianist, in a Wall Street Journal review Tim Page takes exception to Levit's new book House Concert , describing it as "a dreary jumble—a succession of would-be aphorisms". Predictably Norman Lebrecht, who has turned negativity into a lucrative Olympic sport , gloats over the WSJ review. A few months ago I wrote enthusiastically about Igor Levit's double CD Tristan , so I bought and read House Concert with some interest - that's the book on my 'just read' bookshelf. Now, as Tim Page confirms, Igor Levit is a remarkable pianistic success story. One measure of the value he has added to classical music is that at a time when the artform is suffering from serial deflation , his acclaimed Beethoven Sonata cycle for Sony retails for around double the price of cycles from other legendary pianists. So I read House Concert not to have my preconceptions and prejudices confirmed or to generate some tasty clickbait, but to learn m
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Never sit in the comfy chair

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Travelling round Northern France, I found myself listening to France Musique. Frank Bridge. Arnold Bax. And the incomparable performance of In a Summer Garden by Barbirolli . Presented in a way that suggested the presenter knew what he was saying.... Cf Petroc Trelawny That comment was added by a reader to a recent post . By coincidence it was awaiting moderation when I returned from driving from Cahors in the Limousin region of south-west France to the Channel port of Caen, during which drive I too found France Musique's output unusually satisfying. When I cleared the UK border control at Portsmouth and turned onto the M27 I tuned in to Martin Handley on BBC Radio 3 . In the past Martin Handley was one of the station's more erudite presenters, but I quickly switched back to the SDHC memory card in my car's audio system . Because Handley's presentation style has descended - or more probably has been forced to descend - into ' Jack and Jill radio' which treats
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be
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Classical music adds visual slam

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"Shouldn't we be making classical music more visual to attract younger audiences?" was the question asked in See the music . When I posed that question last year a marriage between classical music and contemporary visual art was no more than a dream. But Nov 12 brought resounding confirmation that the visual could provide a way forward to reach new audiences. Aldeburgh Music's innovatory Faster Than Sound project presented an evening of new music in the Britten Studio at Snape. All the compositions were created in an Aldeburgh Residency that explored the relationship between the acoustic and the electric. Spheres and Splinters provided the finale, this Aldeburgh Music commission for MIT guru and composer Tod Machover was played on a hypercello by Peter Gregson accompanied by interactive visuals. British based collective UnitedVisualArtists (UVA) created the visuals. Best known for their collabarations with rock acts such Massive Attack, Kylie, U2, and Jay
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
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Classical music is not connecting with its rewired audience

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A typical American adult spends more than 11 hours each day interacting with media. Our brains are being rewired by this extended use of all-pervasive digital technologies, and the resulting re-synapsing of neural connections is fundamentally changing behaviour patterns and value systems. My proposition is that classical music is not adapting to these fundamental changes with the result that the artform is failing to connect with a new audience. A simple example of how quickly and easily neural connections are rewired is provided by an experiment carried out by the respected neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandaran . Test subjects viewed an image of jumbled black dots on a white background. After a short time the dots were seen to form a dog. Detailed brains scans taken during the recognition process showed that neurons in the temporal lobes became permanently altered once the dog had been recognised. That the dog was easily seen subsequently is confirmation of the new neural connections
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Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
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Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
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We're a record label. But we are not evil

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The emergence of magnatune.com which describes itself as 'the only online record label' is another interesting development in the changing classical music distribution landscape. Magnatune certainly take an alternative position, saying on its web site... "We're a record label. But we're not evil. We call it "try before you buy." It's the shareware model applied to music. Listen to 373 complete MP3 albums we've picked (not 30 second snippets). We let the music sell itself, because we think that's the best way to get you excited by it. Our selection is intentionally small: we never waste your time with mediocre music. If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use. Artists keep half of every purchase. And unlike most record labels, our artists keep all the rights to their music. No major label connections and no venture capital. We are not evi
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