Classical music is about art not algorithms

In his book Which Lie Did I Tell? the Hollywood script writer William Goldman explained the difference between entertainment and art. Entertainment either tells you lies or tells you comforting truisms that we know already. Whereas art tells you uncomfortable things that you perhaps don't want to hear, truths that you may not be comfortable hearing. My photos were taken a few weeks ago in the Moroccan oasis town of Skoura on the northern fringe of the Sahara. Listening to those local musicians playing under the stars and the next morning listening to Norman Del Mar's recording of Rubbra's Sixth and Eighth Symphonies highlighted for me again, if it needed highlighting, how right William Goldman was.

There is growing concern about the impact of algorithms on the media we consume. But there is very little concern about the impact of algorithms on the arts. In fact algorithm driven art is the new poster child of contemporary culture. The prime example of this is BBC Radio 3: the headline of a recent Guardian article, one of the very few lamenting the homogenising of culture, is a perfect summary of the new audience-boosting Radio 3 and its role model Classic FM - 'Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything'.

When last did BBC Radio 3 broadcast anything that made its audience uncomfortable, or anything that listeners didn't want to hear? And it is unfair just to single out Radio 3. Algorithm music, like algorithm movies, is easy-to-follow and guaranteed to leave no listener behind. Algorithms were created to serve social media, and the social media metrics of friends, followers, and likes are the new fungible currency of the classical world. So concert programmes and new recordings feature comforting truisms of Mahler, Shostakovich and other warhorses sprinkled with celebrity brouhaha and forgettable virtue-signaling bonbons. 

The region in Morocco that my vision quest took me to was, famously, Paul Bowles territory. In a 1993 documentary Bowles explained that "I have based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the Earth's surface contained more magic than others... A hidden but direct passage that bypassed the mind". A classical radio station, a concert hall, and a new recording should offer magic, it should offer even in the very smallest and temporary way a direct passage to a heightened state of consciousness. That is what art is about, and that is what classical music should be about. 

RIP: Writing this piece with its reference to listening to Rubbra in Morocco took me back to a post here last year. Tragically my young guide Rashid on that trek died very soon after of a sudden brain tumour. He left a wife and young family. A very sad reminder of our impermanence.