Music you will not find in the Apple download chart

You won't find Khandroma from Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective in the Apple download chart. But does that reduce its worthiness? Today audience size is used to measure the worthiness of not just downloads, but also live music, websites, and every other aspect of classical music. Which is a big mistake: because art music is not about attracting the largest possible audience. It is about meeting human needs. Every human is complex and different, and every human has a different musical need, and these unique needs also vary with circumstances. So there is no 'one size fits all needs' classical music. Which means that, despite industry dogma, there is no mass market for classical music.

Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective have had a long involvement with psychogeography. In 2016 their exploration of the effect of geographical location on emotions and behaviour took them to Upper Mustang in Nepal. The result of this exploration was Khandroma, a multi-channel audio and video installation at the Rubin Museum, New York. The audio for the installation has now been released on CD by the Unione Buddhista Italiana. As the Collective states: 

'The album traces the continuous morphing of the wind into sound expressions. The Himalayan Plateau seems designed to amplify and echo the encounter of the breaths, the prayers, and the chants emerging from around and within those temples; amid the sounding of bells, the turning of prayer wheels, and the billowing of flags. A resonant musical body that we recorded so as to capture its boundless mutations; an unstoppable force that cries, whispers, and blows through and over stones, wood, empty halls and monastic robes, etching an ever-changing sonic landscape onto the surfaces it encounters.'


Khandroma will definitely not be to every one's taste, and some may even argue that this is not music. But this is precisely the point I am making. Classical music is granular. It comprises many different but overlapping niches which meet different but overlapping audience needs. The biggest of these is the easy listening/classical light segment dominated in the UK by Classic FM and, now, BBC Radio 3. But this is a finite market, and there are many rich niches beyond its boundaries: opera, electronic, early music, contemporary music, lieder, ambient etc etc. And this granularity extends beyond the classical genre. At a macro level Western classical music is one niche in a granular mix of rock, jazz, etc. And beyond this Western music is just one niche in a rich conglomeration of world musics. If the music market was not highly granular there would be a global mass market for Western classic music and remote Amazonian tribes would be grooving to Beethoven.  


The classical industry is now servant to the mass market fallacy, which dictates that if music doesn't put bums on seats, it is not worthy. This futile search for a non-existent classical mass market has been going on for years. The result is the creation of a spurious celebrity culture underpinned by a bloated business model and oversupply of classical resources. So you will not find the mysterious sound-world of Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective's Khandroma in the Apple classical download chart. Nor will you find their Vajrayana inspired album Peradam which features Anoushka Shankar, Tenzin Choegyal and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Or their exploration of mystical Islam Mummer Love featuring Philip Glass, Mulatu Astatke, and the Sufi Group of Sheikh Ibrahim, or the hallucinogenic Peyote Dance. The latter trio of albums - all illustrated here - are underpinned by the poetry of René Daumal, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud respectively.

But does their absence from populist metrics really matter? Surely we should value the mysterious more than the popular. Because as Albert Einstein told us: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed". 
  

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