Great music has no independent existence

Listening to the Amsterdam Sinfonietta's exemplary performance on CD of the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony reminded me once again that I cannot hear that Adagietto without recalling the closing scene of Visconti's Death in Venice. In his autobiographical The Way of the White Clouds Lama Govinda explains how.... 

Sometimes a glance, a few casual words, fragments of a melody floating through the quiet air of a summer evening, a book that accidentally comes into our hands, a poem, or a memory laden fragrance may bring about the impulse which changes and determines our whole life. 

In Mahayana Buddhism the entry point to a transcendent hidden land is known as a beyul. When I first saw Visconti's cinematic masterpiece in 1971 it took me through a beyul to the music of Mahler - which led on to the riches of Bruckner, Wagner and more - and on to an engaging zeitgeist. For years classical music has struggled unsuccessfully with the challenge of attracting a new audience, yet remains in denial that the strategy of don't change the music and hope that the listeners will change has failed. In his memoir Words without Music Philip Glass explains how:

A work of art has no independent existence. It has a continuing identity and a conventional reality and it comes into being through an interdependence of other events with people.

This thinking echoes Benjamim Britten's assertion that "Music does not exist in a vacuum, it does not exist until it is performed" expressed in his 'holy triangle' of composer, performer, and listener. It is the failure to understand music's dependence on the interdependence of event with audience - Mahler, Mann and Visconti is just one example - that leaves classical music as an increasingly isolated self-regarding art form. It is the dogma of 'don't change the music, just wait for the audience to change' that causes this failure. Listeners have changed, so Britten's vital holy triangle is nullified. Aaron Copland once wisely pointed out that 'When the audience changes, the music changes'; but despite seismic shifts in the expectations of today's wired audiences the music itself has not changed.

Previously I have explained how, as well as Death in Venice, psychedelic rock, Maurice Jarre's soundtracks and jazz also led me through the beyul to the greatness and diversity of classical music. But that was half a century ago. Perhaps I am now too old and too out of touch to know what beyuls will tempt post-millennials to sample classical riches. But changing the music must now surely be a priority. It is inevitable that some attempts will be misguided. However this does not justify unleashing online lynch mobs as has happened with the - misguided or not - attempts to change at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. (Remember Norman Lebrecht's zealous championship of the ill-fated Sinfini website - a marketing initiative that resembled in many ways what is happening in Birmingham? And why are the Slipped Disc lynch mobs not directing their ire at the similar populist changes at BBC Radio 3, an institution with far greater cultural impact than the CBSO?)    

Changing the music in nuanced ways does not necessarily mean rappers with symphony orchestras. The Amsterdam Sinfonietta's excellent The Mahler Album also includes Mahler's arrangement of Beethoven's String Quartet no. 11 and an intensely moving arrangement for string orchestra of the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony. On other discs the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under artistic director Candida Thompson has recorded arrangements of two other Beethoven quartets, Shostakovich's Second and Fourth Quartets, Wagner's Tristan Prelude, and Berg's Sonata Opus 1. 

Although not as dramatic as Stokowski's Bach transcriptions these interpretations, particularly the quartet transcriptions with their added bass lines, made even this jaded classical nerd hear these masterworks with fresh ears. And in an expression of diversity that goes beyond classical's current myopic and tired obsession with gender diversity, the Amsterdam Sinfonietta is presenting in concert Philip Glass in India pairing Glass' Violin Concerto no. 2 “The Four American Seasons” with Indian ragas. All these are worthwhile case studies in changing the music without throwing baby integrity out with the bath water. (Incidentally, no personal connection with or free CDs and concert tickets, or - heaven forbid - alone payola, from the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, I just happen to be inspired by their work and buy their CDs.)