Lost in explanation


Can you imagine music without explanation?

Elmediator is a multi-genre and multimedia performance venue in Perpignan, France. This post is also available via Facebook and Twitter.

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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's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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New music for old instruments

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There is a neat inversion of yesterday's theme of modern orchestras being influenced by baroque performance practices in the double CD above. About Baroque features the unusual combination of contemporary music and period instruments. It was the product of an innovative funding initiative by the Siemens Arts Program that brought together the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and five leading young composers in a series of workshops and rehearsals that allowed the composers to understand the sonic potential of period instruments. The output from the programme was five new works from Michel van der Aa , Juliane Klein , Rebecca Saunders , Benjamin Schweitzer and Nadir Vassena written specifically for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. These were captured in concert performances and released on About Baroque in 2006. Let's make one thing clear, About Baroque is not ersatz early music. It is very contemporary music written for a leading period instrument ensemble. And how well it wo...
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The concert would not be worth presenting

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Robert Roper's biography of Everest climber and professor of philosophy Willi Unsoeld  contains the following thought-provoking quote from the great mountaineer: "In the Outward Bound programs parents would ask us, 'Can you guarantee the safety of our Johnny?' And our response would usually be, 'No, we certainly can't , ma'am. Fact is we go the other way and and guarantee you the genuine possibility of his death . And if we could guarantee his safety, the program wouldn't be worth running - do you see?'" This important wisdom can be paraphrased as follows: "Concertgoers would ask the music director, "Can you guarantee I will like everything in your program?" And the music director should reply, 'No, we certainly can't , ma'am. Fact is we go the other way and and guarantee you the genuine possibility that you will hate at least one work. And if we could guarantee you will like everything, the concert would not be wort...
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Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

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That photo of Sir Malcolm Arnold and Julian Bream appears on the late composer's website . Ten years ago I was literally very close to Sir Malcolm's music. He spent his final years being tended by his carer Anthony Day in Attleborough just a few miles from where I live in Norfolk. I managed Sir Malcolm's website and one of my first posts  about his music dates from that time. Following Sir Malcolm's death in 2006 I never lost my appreciation of his music, but it featured less frequently in my listening. However, recently I have returned to his symphonies, and listening to them again has raised some important questions. His nine symphonies are the product of a master craftsman. They move forward from Mahler and Shostakovich, yet should be immediately accessible to contemporary audiences saturated in the music of those two composers. But, despite this, Sir Malcolm Arnold's symphonies remain unknown outside a small circle of admirers. Why? Let me make it clear ...
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Critical Mass

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I'm a big fan of Marin Alsop . But last night her BBC Prom performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra playing her own sequence of the suites from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was strangely unsatisfying. Tempi were pulled around, and rather than adding to the tension the wayward performance weakened it. When it finished I wanted some 'in your face' music making that was over the top, but which really worked. So as Marin Alsop was a pupil of Bernstein's I put on his 1971 recording of his own Mass , a work I don't listen to very often. Is Mass Bernstein's unrecognised masterpeice? Or is it a failed experiment in using the vernacular and exploiting street chic? (But wasn't the 'parody mass' a legitimate renaissance musical form which exploited contemporary music such as L'homme arme ?) My view used to be that Mass was simply a failed experiment, but I have to confess I am slowly moving towards the view that it may be a misunderstood m...
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While classical music debates nothing changes

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'This magic comes only with the sounding of the music, with the turning of the written note into sound - and it only comes (or comes most intensely) when the listener is one with the composer, either as a performer himself, or as a listener in active sympathy' - Benjamin Britten Recent articles here about whether classical music responds to mass marketing and social media have generated considerable interest. So I thought it worthwhile to create a straw model which summarises the thrust of the articles and that is the purpose of this post. The straw model is remarkably simple and is built around the following four propositions. 1. Classical music engages new audiences most effectively by direct transmission to what Britten describes as as "a listener in active sympathy". 2. Despite this classical music today is characterised by hypermediation, meaning there are more and more intermediary layers appearing between performer and audience. 3. These intermediary la...
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Who am I?

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While researching another post I came across, completely by chance, a perceptive appreciation of Leonard Bernstein's Mass. The following was written by a well-known musical figure. But who was it? Answers please to be added as using the comments feature at the foot of the post. I'm interested to see if anyone can correctly identify the author as the tone of the piece is quite surprising once you know who wrote it. On Friday I'll add the next section that the mystery author wrote, which should make the answer clearer. "Kennedy Centre opened on September 8th 1971. The opening of the Opera House preceeded that of the Concert Hall by one day with Leonard Bernstein's Mass, written for the occassion. The work made a deep impact upon the emotionally pre-charged audience, not least because of the re-emergenceof the Kennedy name and the Kennedy tragedy. This worked-up state of mind of the public was, perhaps, detrimental to a true appreciation of the work, and the fixed da...
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A Brief History of Time

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Philip Glass is sometimes wrongly credited with composing the soundtrack for the 2014 biopic of physicist Stephen Hawking The Theory of Everything . This is because the theatrical trailer for the movie used the track Runaway Horses from his score for another movie, Mishima , whereas Jóhann Jóhannsson actually composed the soundtrack . But Philip Glass did provide the soundtrack for the earlier Hawking documentary A Brief History of Time . I was reminded of Philip Glass' soundtrack when reading Graham Farmelo 's newly published biography Hawking: His Life and Work . When reading non-fiction books, one of the first things I do is to turn to the 'Acknowledgements'; because this puts the provenance of the book and therefore the possible agenda of the author into context. So I was somewhat concerned to read that Farmelo's biography was commissioned by Stephen Hawking's Estate . Fortunately my concerns were almost unfounded. This new and meticulously-researched bio...
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