All that twitters is not gold


That tweet saddens me. It was written by Jeremy Pound who identifies himself without disclaimer on his Twitter account - see below - as the deputy editor of BBC Music Magazine. I don't know Jeremy Pound, but presumably he is a very nice guy who holds a senior position in an influential publication which he reached due to his qualifications and experience. Of course all of us have blind spots in our music appreciation. But is it not the role of a writer to report with a reasonable degree of objectivity that a work fails to engage them, fails to move them, or is beyond their comprehension? And is it not also their role to explore why that vital connection has not been made? Karlheinz Stockhausen has been judged by others with far stronger credentials than Jeremy Pound to be an important if controversial figure in late 20th-century music. To publicly dismiss one of his seminal works as "a load of pish" - definition "variation of piss, most usually used in the north (particularly Scotland)" - is an act of hubris which further undermines my confidence in the future of music journalism.


Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Comments

Pliable said…
Neil Talbott comments on Facebook: 'I wish I felt less judgmental about this Pound chap. Devaluing the currency of music. He makes himself sound cheap and spivvy in that tweet. Incidentally, I don't really find Stimmung that easy to listen to in any 'western' conventional sense.'
9:55 am
Eric Edberg said…
If he had written a non-inflammatory tweet like, "I have a blind spot for Stockhausen, but many musicians I admire find his music engaging and absorbing," I doubt you would have written a blog post about it. The tweet he did write is the kind of thing that gets retweets, critical blog posts like yours, and other publicity, which raises his public profile and in all likelihood got him more Twitter followers. By publicizing his tweet, you have (inadvertently, I assume) rewarded the type of writing you are criticizing, at least in terms of the social-media game he is playing.
6:48 pm
Pliable said…
Very good point Eric and thank you for making it. But what should we do? Should we let this kind of foolishness prevail? Or should we speak up? It's not a rhetorical question - I would welcome views.
6:57 pm
Pliable said…
Jeremy Pound has said on Twitter, among other things, that he "would appreciate the right of reply". As is longstanding practice on this blog, comments about this post can be submitted for moderation and possible publication.

https://twitter.com/JeremyPound71/status/795626709148123137
2:53 pm
Philip Amos said…
I have looked for some word re Pound's qualifications and experience on the internet, but with no success. However, I was just curious, for in these days 'qualifications', pieces of paper, tell me nothing. I taught in universities for some forty years, and I aver that a graduate today will most likely have the level of knowledge of their chosen subject equal to a passing grade in a GCE A-level in the 1960s. This is not a mere guess. I did a survey of the opinions of both faculty and students about this issue, i.e., the appalling decline of standards in the education system in Britain, and also in North America. And so to Tom Service of the Guardian, who has a doctorate in music from, I think, Southampton, and who notoriously wrote a column in which he mentioned Wagner's Valkyries zooming around the world killing warriors, just one his howlers. The responses to that may be imagined. Suffice to say that one commenter was banned, and I, who was mightily persistent on this, was replied to by Service's editor, who said that we should be civil (which I was, in fact) because everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. Well, not about Wagner's Valkyries they not! Nor, it occurs to me, about Beethoven's piano sonatas, of which the publicist for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra said he composed 111. I'm sick to death of all this ignorance, and the tolerance of it by newspapers, symphony orchestra executives, et al. My response to Mr. Edberg is that Pound's twitter was the stuff of ignorant comments on YouTube, and juvenile. This is but one example (to which I've added two more) of first, the state of the education system, and secondly, the state of musical criticism, to which I add the quality of orchestra executives and their employees. This list, of course, could be much longer, for the number of guilty parties is large. If nothing is done about it, if passivity prevails, it will continue to wreak mayhem on classical music, and there is vastly too much of that from various 'stakeholders' in the music business already. But nothing will be done unless these dollops of ignorance issuing from influential sources are highlighted, their perpetrators called out. That is why Bob was absolutely right to write a post about it, especially as Overgrown Path is a very widely read and highly respected blog, one of the few serious music blogs remaining, the rest now being devoted to self-promotion and posts that are mostly vacuous twaddle. If Pound gets more Twitter followers from this, it will only be for the same reason Slipped Disc has a large following -- in large degree of people who correct his errors and call out him out when he posts click-bait. That doesn't matter. These people should be nailed for their bits of idiocy and ignorance, else things will never improve in newspaper columns, blogs, education, the world of classical music. And that list could be added to as well.
4:00 pm
Pliable said…
Thanks for that Philip. One point that is worth clarifying is that BBC Music Magazine is not a BBC publication. BBC Music Magazine is a title of Immediate Publishing which is owned by a private equity fund. Their other titles include Simply Knitting, Love Crochet, Made for Mums and Gardeners' World.

http://www.immediate.co.uk/brands/
4:37 pm
Pliable said…
It is worth noting that Jeremy Pound has now blocked me from viewing his Twitter account. Which is not something that I am losing any sleep over. Particularly because an account is only blocked if the other party is logged on to Twitter. So as I am hardly ever logged on, the tweets by @jeremypound71 are all available for me to read. What a strange parallel universe social media is.
2:42 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
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...
Read more

All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

Image
Depressing, but predictable, to see the mainstream media scrambling aboard the Bohuslav Martinů bandwagon as soon as BBC Radio 3 announces a cycle of his superb symphonies . Equally depressing, but a sign of the times, to see the Independent publishing an appreciation of the composer's symphonies by a writer who confesses elsewhere to never having heard a single note of them. As Norman Lebrecht famously wrote in the Evening Standard back in 2006: ‘... until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town’. Sadly the hard facts now show that Norman is no longer at the Evening Standard , and, as from next Monday, the Evening Standard will no longer be a paid for newspaper . But you can find pre-bandwagon appreciations of Martinů here and here . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of ...
Read more

The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

Image
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...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

Is syncretic music the future?

Image
Western classical music's search for a new more inclusive paradigm has led it to world music. Many, including Philip Glass , leading critics and this blog , have said the world music is the future. But so many east meets west project sound like awkward forced marriages . Yet beyond world music the path leads onwards towards a destination which may be a mirage or may be the future. Syncretism is the process of reconciling contrary beliefs and involves melding practices of differing schools of thought. Syncretic music has been around for many centuries, notably in the blend of the three monotheistic religions in Moorish Spain, as captured by Jordi Savall and many others . The Middle East is also home to musical syncreticism and the recent budget re-release of Sister Marie Keyrouz and L'Ensemble de la Paix performing Hymns from Lebanon , which sets Christian texts in Arabic using early Eastern music scales is an excellent example. More recently French gypsy musician Titi Robin...
Read more

Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

Image
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 ...
Read more

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
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...
Read more