On (new) music
Tomorrow, I’m off to Oxford to present a paper at the 19th Biennial International Nineteenth-Century Music Conference. It’s a topic which may divide, as well as (hopefully) interest: singing Lieder in English, and both the historical precedence for doing so, and the current performers and writers who are trying it today. One of the things that’s fascinated me in researching translators of the past – particularly in the later nineteenth century – is how little we seem to consider them. Translation is a tool, a method of communication and dissemination, but its agents are seldom given air time. The poet, even if he or she is not being represented in his/her vernacular, has more weight. And the composer, of course, has the most of all.
Speaking of composers, a series of Facebook reposts finally drew my attention to the keynote speech given at this year’s conference of the Contemporary Music Centre in Ireland, by composer Kevin Volans. I’m not entirely sure what he’s getting at in said speech, since it seems so riddled with contradictions around the glorious past and the evil music industry that his idea of a snappy suit and good lighting doesn’t really seem likely to do much for contemporary music audiences. But whilst I’m here, a couple of historical correctives. In the form of a fairy tale. Because apparently that’s about as much contemporary credence as some if this is given.
Once upon a time, in a town called Leipzig, a very young and extremely talented musician was appointed to conduct the city orchestra. You might have heard of him: his name was Felix. Felix was determined to make the orchestra as good as it could possibly be, so he got a carpenter to make him a magic wand, and he waved it in front of the orchestra and – amazing! – they all followed the wand, and played together better than ever. Felix invited all his friends to play with him, and bring their new pieces with them. But he also liked really old music, by dead people in wigs, so he did some of that too. By the time Felix died, his love of really old music meant that almost 50% of the music his orchestra was playing was by dead people.
Meanwhile, because the players had got so good, everyone wanted to come to the concerts. But the concerts were like a special club: you had to pay for all of them, all year, to be allowed to come. So lots of people couldn’t hear the music in the concert hall. Instead, they bought arrangements of the same pieces that they could play at home. The people who printed the music realised that these arrangements were very handy for lots of amateur players, so they started making arrangements of everything! And they sold them cheaply, and made lots of money. This is called The Music Industry.
Even after Felix wasn’t around any more, there were still lots more people who wanted to attend the concerts than there were seats in the concert hall. Families with lots of money took to buying up and guaranteeing subscriptions for future seats. So there was no chance of new (potentially poor) music lovers getting to come and listen. Instead, some towns started to hold Popular Concerts, which were cheaper, and you only had to buy tickets for one concert at a time. So lots more people got to go to concerts, and some even had programme notes so you could learn about the music you were hearing.
What was interesting, though, was that both the big expensive concerts and the popular concerts had very varied programmes. Audiences loved variety, you see, because musical events were fairly rare. So there would be orchestral pieces and solos, opera arias and overtures. Even the really serious critics in Vienna said that too much music by the same composer, or in the same style, made for a boring evening.
I could go on, but this post would get far too long and we’d all be asleep. So here are the highlights of what comes next: the gap between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ music and audiences widens, Schoenberg starts a society of concerts that you can’t go to unless he says you can, and where you’re not allowed to react to the music in any way at all once it’s over; the state starts to fund what the rich princes used to several hundred years before, and then gradually state funding is cut because of messed up economies and new cultural priorities. By that time, a considerable number of pieces have been written which broader audiences find difficult, several composers and performers have been publicly hostile about audiences, and popularity, and the very idea of people liking their music. And now, rather than constituting 50% of all concert programming, as it did in Leipzig by about 1847, contemporary music is constantly fighting against ghettoization.
I don’t like this story. Of course it’s more complicated than this. But it’s also more complicated than Volans’s view of a golden past in which the music industry didn’t exist, and composers didn’t have to think about making a living, and the government footed the bill. It did; they did; and whilst princes, electors, and other rich folk did provide some cash for some musicians in the nineteenth century, a lot of them had to make a living without that support. It didn’t mean that all they wrote was meaningless dross.
If we’re going to support contemporary music – and we should – then we need to bring it fully into mainstream programming. Write to Classic FM and ask them to play something by Boulez. Why not? They take requests, and if enough people request something, it would be silly of them not to play it. Get some contemporary musical scores to local choirs and orchestras, to schools and colleges. Investment begins with personal buy-in from music lovers, which is why the ABRSM’s Spectrum series has been so brilliant. Collaborate. Arrange. Of course be smart and plan well, fix the lighting and bow nicely. Those things matter too. But you need an audience there in the first place, right? And what if it wasn’t an audience for contemporary music? What if it was just an audience for… music?
