Convert a Philistine: Interim Report

Further to my earlier post on the “Convert a Philistine” project, I decided to hold a classical music night at my house on Friday night to introduce some friends to classical music. I won’t go into all the details of what I did, but here are my findings so far, I think:

1. If you hassle them enough and don’t make it too hard, people will try almost anything once.

2. Wine and cheese is a good drawcard.

3. Even to people approaching with fresh ears, 20th century classical music can be less fun to listen to than Romantic music. (I think this needs to be explored further, but that was the outcome of the previous night.)

4. Taking people in-depth into the music is a good thing

5. Getting people lost along the way is not

6. My projector has rubbish contrast

 

So coming out of this, I want to refine the process to head off potential places where people get lost trying to get in to classical music. I want to make the listening experience as rich as possible, but not at the expense of some people feeling left behind and not clever enough to keep up with the music.

It’s something to aim for anyway. I’ll come back with more definite stuff when I feel like I’ve cracked things a little bit better.

More soon, hopefully.

CD Review: Bach Cantatas vol. 24

Volume 24 of this series, despite the Buddhist monk on the front cover, contains Bach’s cantatas for the Third and Fourth Sunday after that Easter, so they cover that territory of Jesus being arisen and leaving his followers on earth. I wasn’t such a huge fan of the second disc (the fourth Sunday), despite having some great work from baritone Steven Varcoe and the usual top stuff from the orchestra and choir (I think the cantatas are starting to blur together a bit) but the 3^rd Sundays cantatas, on Disc 1, contain some great stuff.

The highlights for me are the opening chorus of BWV 103, featuring a highly dramatic and angular melody that dives down into the depths, as the chorus sings of its weeping and lamenting. But the one that’s probably worth the price of admission is the opening of BWV 146, which features a highly dramatic concerto opening for organ and orchestra, which was later turned into a famous keyboard concerto of Bach’s. I have heard the version played with piano and orchestra before, but hearing it on the bright and spectacular organ at the Schlosskirke in Altenburg – an organ which Bach himself would have played with – was just an awesome experience. So while this volume didn’t jump out at me as much as some of the others, I still look forward to future volumes.

4 out of 5.

 

A Challenge For The Classical Music World

I’ve been thinking this one for a while, but I thought I might as well put it out there seeing as it’s the beginning of a new year.

In the classical music industry – an industry that I should say I’m quite delighted to be devoting my time to helping – we talk a lot about audience development and trying to increase  audiences. However, this can mean different things to different people. To most in the industry, it’s about finding a few new people who are nearly fans of live classical music and seeing if we can rope them in. Or it’s getting that person who goes to two concerts a year to stump up and go to seven.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but I’d like to suggest something a little more adventurous. Never mind the person who goes to two concerts. (Well, actually, don’t ignore them – they are indeed the next big prospect.) But why not set out sights on the big game?

Yes, I’m talking the person out there who pours a fortune into live performing arts but just does not get your fascination with classical music. You know the person I’m talking about. It could be the theatre junkie who has subscriptions to two of your local theatre companies, loves stories and live performance – but classical music leaves him cold.

It could be the person who adores musical theatre and will think nothing of flying around the world to Broadway every few years to catch the latest shows. But a string quartet seems rather dull in comparison.

It could be that 20-something you know, with their first full-time job, who went and saw Muse, U2 and Bon Jovi, and didn’t batter an eyelid to get in the A Reserve area.

What about these people?

So I’ve come up with a challenge for 2011 – Classical Music Fans, 2011 is the year of the “Convert a Philistine” challenge. Your goal – to see if, in one year, you can take one of your “I think classical music is boring” friends and convert them into a die-hard classical music fan. (Or if not a die-hard fan, at least someone who wants to explore more – which is all good classical music fans start.)

There’s more to discuss about this, but that’ll do for the day. Who’s in?

CD Review: Hyperion Schubert Edition Complete Songs Vols. 3 & 4

It’s been a while since I last reviewed any of the Hyperion Schubert Edition – in fact, so long, that I realised I managed to review volume 2 twice and give it two different scores. Anyway, you can read my reviewed for volume 1 here and volume 2 here and here. The short version for those who haven’t heard of this series before – English pianist Graham Johnson decided to record all of the 600+ songs of Franz Schubert for piano and voice. For every volume of this set of the complete songs, he signed up a different singer and picked a mix of famous and not-so-famous songs for them to sing. Then he would complete each volume by writing some of the most brilliant liner notes ever written, telling you everything you ever wanted to know about even the most obscure of songs.

But are the songs any good? Well, I would say that so far, volume 3 with Ann Murray is my absolute favourite. Ann is an alto with a beautiful control of long lines – she can hold a note without it becoming overpowering or irritating. If was to list three songs that you absolutely must listen to off the CD (and I believe the Hyperion label now allows you to buy individual tracks), I’d recommend An die Freunde (a moving song about a poet wanting to die with a beautiful change from minor to major in the middle), Der Zwerg (a creepily effective Gothic song about a dwarf that murders a queen) and the best of the lot would be Viola (about an anthropomorphic violet that wakes earlier than any of the other spring flowers and then dies sad and alone before the other flowers find her – it’s only about flowers, but the music is so sad and delicate that you can’t help feeling sorry for the flower.)

5 out of 5.

Volume 4 is especially relevant to being reviewed this week, because the singer for this volume, tenor Philip Langridge, sadly passed away of cancer just last week. I always find tenors a bit of a gamble – sometimes they sound like there’s too much strain in their voice or they’re loud and overpowering. The main thing I wasn’t immediately bowled over by with Langridge’s voice is that at the time of the  recording (either late 80s or early 90s), it sounded a bit old. But very quickly you realise that he has a great grasp of how to bring drama and meaning to every word. And Graham Johnson gives him a huge variety of songs to work with.

They range from the majestic and beautiful Auf der Riesenkoppe (On the Giant Peak) a patriotic song where the singer takes us up the side of the mountain, surveys the Austrian countryside and sings the praises of his native land. On the other end of the scale is the Epistle to Josef von Spaun, a friend of Schubert’s who’d moved away and hadn’t written to his friends in a long while. So to rile him up, Schubert composed the music for a letter to Spaun telling him what a barbarian and downright rotten friend he was. It’s done in mock Italian opera style, complete with ear-splitting high notes and mock drama. It’s the kind of song you wouldn’t expect to hear on a normal compilation of songs of Schubert, but that is the wonder of hearing the complete Schubert songs.

4 out of 5.

Am very much looking forward to volume 5, which I hope to start on soon.

CD Review: Bach Cantata Pilgrimage vols. 1 and 8

Update 17 April 2010: Seeing as they asked me so nicely, I thought I’d give you a link to the Soli Deo Gloria Facebook page, where you can hear more about what’s going on with these CDs.

The composer Johann Sebastian Bach composed over 200 works known as cantatas. Quite simply, these are works for choir, orchestra and soloists that were designed to be performed in church. They run for about 25-30 minutes each, so presumably they would have been a part of the Lutheran church service at Bach’s church. Nowadays, the only type of music we tend to get in our churches is purely congregational music – it’s rare to hear (at least in Presbyterian churches) music designed to be presented to the congregation, rather than performed by the congregation. But Bach argues a very good case…

His cantatas are extraordinary. First of all, the speed at which he put them together. Every cantata is designed for a specific Sunday  in the Lutheran calendar (e.g. 2nd Sunday after Trinity, Feast Day of John the Baptist, etc.) so Bach presumably would have been working on them up until that particular Sunday. Second, the fact that he did this for serveral years, so for any given Sunday, there are usually three or four cantatas to draw on for that day.

But what is most extraordinary of all is the quality of this music. Walk into many churches today, and the music is lacklustre, boring. Even when it’s upbeat and exciting, very few music fans would prefer listening to church music to secular music today. It’s not just because church music is about a more limited range of subjects – it’s simply that church music is often musically inferior to much of the music that exists out there.

Not so in Bach’s day. His cantatas, even though they were composed to be used in a church service, were (and still are) some of the most complex, beautiful and magnificent music ever composed. Even today, among classical music fans, there are many, many people – most of whom have very little interest in Bach’s theology or the subjects for his music – who nonetheless are moved and inspired by the music that he wrote.

For Christians out there – I think we need to rediscover this music. Not that we have to write Baroque music – and not many churches are going to have the resources to provide top-notch singers, a choir and an orchestra each week – but the challenge is there: Christian music should be some of the best-quality music in the world, not the lowest.

The story behind these particular CDs is just as extraordinary as the music. In 2000, English conductor John Eliot Gardiner set out to perform every 0ne of Bach’s cantatas on the church day they were written for at a variety of churches across Europe, England and America. Calling it the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, every concert was faithfully recorded and they started to be released on the Archiv label, but something went wrong and they stopped releasing the CDs after about half a dozen CDs were released.

But the recordings still existed and so Gardiner and his wife formed their own record label, Soli Deo Gloria, and have started releasing all the concerts in beautifully-presented two-disc sets. I don’t normally get too excited about packaging, but these CDs are a great example of when CDs beat MP3s hands-down. Each one is like a little mini-sized hardbound book, with the CDs in cardboard sleeves at each end, and a booklet in the middle with notes from Gardiner on the cantatas and the complete German and English texts of the cantatas. On the front cover, they’ve gathered stunningly atmospheric images of people from different cultures and backgrounds – making a marked contrast to the quite Germanic sounding music. The only thing I’d fault is that in Gardiner’s notes, he likes to obscure Italian terms referring to the styles of music Bach employs. They’re not even regularly used in classical music circles, so I was irritated with that, but it is sadly a part of the classical music world that we always talk above the average person’s head…

But what really matters is the quality of the music on offer. I’m not a huge Bach expert, and I haven’t listened to a lot of these things, but every one of the cantatas is beautiful and musically interesting to listen to, especially when combined with the notes, which explain Gardiner’s enthusiasm for each and every one of them. The way I judge church music is simply is the music enhancing the text? Bad church music is often just whatever music the composer felt like with words crammed in to fit it. But the truly great music for the church that lasts through the years is music that brings the listener into the mood and emotion of the subject being sung about.

Bach does it amazingly well. I won’t go into each cantata, but some of the highlights from these two volumes (two discs each) for me were:

• The final chorus from Cantata BWV 167. It only goes for a couple of minutes, and it consists of a rather slow hymn tune which, in other hands, could be rather a plodding number. To give you an idea of this, this YouTube video plays the final chorus (not the Gardiner version, however). If you listen, they’re singing beautiful, but slow, hymn tune. But the accompaniment is so joyful, that it lifts the hymn (that begins with the words “Laud and praise with honour God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost!”) and it takes off and soars.

• The amazing aria for alto from Cantata BWV 30. The words are encouraging the waking sheep to rise for their hour of redemption, for sinners to run after their Saviour, Jesus Christ. Maybe the image of sheep skipping, combined with running is what inspired it – but Bach gives this music a skipping, dancing accompaniment. This video is from the Gardiner CD.

• Those last two were from Disc 1 of vol 1. There’s great stuff on Disc 2 as well, and also Disc 1 of vol 8. But the highlight CD for me was the second disc of vol 8. The canatas on this CD were written for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, a day where Lutherans dwell on death. This is not as morbid as it sounds. In fact, it’s downright astonishing. Much music to come out of the 19th century dealt with death – it was a bit of a Romantic preoccupation. But death is very often portrayed as being incredibly tragic or terrifying. By contrast, the texts to these cantatas talk about not being afraid of death, because there is life after death for those who follow Jesus. I could be laid in my grave today, they say, and it will be fine. I’ll be in a better place. Considering how much death was prevalent in the 1700s, this is an incredibly brave view to take – it’s open-eyed, looking death in the face and not being afraid. There are many tracks I could play, but the one I like best is the opening chorus from Cantata BWV 8.The words (paraphrased by me are: “Dear God, when shall I die? I know that I’m descended from Adam and all his descendants have this in common – we’ll all return to the ground one day.” However, this morbid sentiment (even for many Evangelicals today) is expressed in music of the most sublime calmness. Also, I can’t help but thinking that Bach has actually crafted this to have the sound of a ticking clock. The music seems to move in big arcs, with a constantly moving accompainment for two oboe d’amores (early versions of the oboe) and the ticking being provided by the high flutes repeating the same notes over and over. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful, and everyone deserves to hear it at least once in their lifetime. Here’s the YouTube. It’s not the Gardiner version which is the best I’ve ever heard of this chorus, and has a less reedy sound from the oboes. But it will give you the idea.

The 1812 Overture – The Guided Tour

Could there be any more fitting way to finish off a reading of War and Peace? The 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky was written as a musical representation of the year of 1812, and is a hugely entertaining 15 minutes of music, beloved of audiences everywhere.

It has been used in so many different ways, that most people wouldn’t realise what the real history of 1812 was. Certainly, I remember it as a youngster in the context of Australian Army ads – this was back in the days when we used to advertise the Army with images of guys in camouflage gear wandering around in the bush shooting machine guns. Once the 90s arrived, and the Gulf War happened, ads oddly enough started just being about how the army would help you get a degree … no guns in sight, after that.

Anyway, here it is – a video of the 1812 Overture. I have taken the liberty of sticking a running commentary over the top. Those of you who know my blog will have seen this before. For those of you horrified by the idea, you might want to look it up on YouTube.

1812 Overture – Part One

1812 Overture – Part Two

Film Review: The Soloist

On my trip to the States, I flew on United Airlines, which was mainly to save my company about $1,000 off the cost of airfare. It was a miserable flight both ways.

However, the saving grace of both trips was that this movie, The Soloist, was screened. I fell asleep in it the first time across, because I’d been on the plane for about 10 hours before they broke it out and I couldn’t stay away any longer, but what I saw in the first half moved me to tears.

Then I was on the flight back and, right at the tail end of all the films, they screened it again. The back half put me in tears as well. I am willing to admit that this could be due to the extreme dehydration and sleep-deprivation, but I think this movie has more than that going for it. I certainly would be keen to see it again, perhaps at the movies (it comes out next week in Australia, I believe) or certainly on DVD.

From the director of Atonement, it tells a very simple (and true) story. A journalist in Los Angeles, Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr), one day came across a homeless man (Jamie Foxx), Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic, hiding out near a statue of Beethoven, doing his best to scrap a tune out of a violin with only two strings.

A throwaway comment by Ayers revealed that he had attended the prestigiouis Juilliard School of Music and so Lopez investigates further, only to find that he has a great cellist on his hands, whose mental incapacity has led him to the streets. The rest of the movie tells the story of how Lopez moves from cynical curiosity to kindness and friendship towards Ayers.

First of all, having just flown out of LA Airport, this film has some greater resonance for me. The airport – certainly the bits where I was boarding flights – feels really primitive. It’s a scumhole of a place to hang around, and looking at the smog hanging over the city, it doesn’t look much more attractive. I’m sure there are nice places, but the overall first impression is one of a crumbling city. So the graffiti and homelessness displayed in this film immediately seem realistic.

Downey Jr and Foxx both turn in great performances. Apparently, playing a man with a mental illness reminded Foxx of a bad drug episode in his late teens and was a struggle to play. He pulls it off beautifully, and for this non-cellist, his cello playing looked convincing.

The film offers no easy solutions to the poverty. There’s not a standard Hollywood ending, or even a Shine moment, where Ayers returns to his former life. In fact, it’s very much a work in progress, and we feel like it’s still going on in real life with the real guys – beyond the timeframe captured in this film. But two things really made this film stand out:

1. It’s a film about human kindness. I know when I was younger, I was attracted to films with dark themes, and I certainly have sat through some films that start out in a bright-lit places, only to drag their audiences into the depths. But it’s so much rarer (and for me, nowadays, so much more inspiring) to see a film that starts in the depths and heads for bright places. So, for me, the trajectory of these men – both of whom inspire each other in different ways – was beautiful to behold.

2. But none of this would really have worked without a nod to the soundtrack. I was a bit put off this film when I first saw the trailer a few months ago, because the artwork and the music used on the trailer were much more grungy and poppy, with only a nod to classical music with a bit of a Bach Cello Suite (which I thought was odd for a film about a guy who played the cello).

But that was just the trailer guys trying to broaden the appeal of the film. Ladies and gentlemen, this soundtrack is nearly all Beethoven, as arranged fairly cleverly by Dario Marianelli. But not just any Beethoven – it’s my favourite Beethoven. It’s like they read my mind and picked out every piece of Beethoven that I loved and put it into this film, just for me to be taken out of my horrible United Airways flight.

In flashbacks to a young Nathaniel, we first see that he loves Beethoven and has taught himself the cello part to Beethoven’s 3rd Eroic Symphony – without doubt, my favourite Beethoven symphony.

But then it got even better. In the highly dramatic moment when Ayers is first given a new cello by Lopez, he pulls it out – and there is a certain suspense here – after all, what do you play when you haven’t played the cello in years? He begins to play Beethoven’s most spiritual piece of chamber music – the famous slow …

[Sorry, just had a moment of excitement - the unit upstairs in our apartment block started yelling out that they had a fire and Rachel came in to get me - so I've just been downstairs for five minutes with the kids and Rachel out the front. But it was only a barbecue that got a bit out of hand and they put it all out. So that's all good.]

Anyway, where was I? Ayers starts to play and out comes the famous slow third movement from Beethoven’s opus 132 String Quartet. This particular movement (or section) was written when Beethoven was recovering from an illness and he named it something like “Hymn of Thanksgiving to the Godhead for  helping me recover from my illness”. (I know, that’s not exact – but I’ll leave you to Google it.)

It starts very slowly, one instrument and a time. In fact, it’s so low-key when it enters, it’s almost as if Beethoven was too weak to come in with something more energetic. So that’s the feeling you get as you hear Foxx play. Furthermore, at first we can only hear the cello part – but he’s hearing in his head the other three instruments. As he plays, the music soars more and more, and in a beautiful visual moment, the music literally takes us out of the squalor of Los Angeles for a moment and shows us something beautiful. But I’ll let you see it for yourself.

Then a bit later, the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony is used for the final sequence and end credits, surely one of Beethoven’s most beautiful slow movements. I’ve always had a theory that Beethoven (who himself led a pretty tortured life) wrote these slow movements to provide a comfort to himself in the dark hours. And when I heard the music in this context, providing comfort to Nathaniel Ayers in the trials that he faced, it was doubly reinforced.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it – for the last 24 hours, I’ve been getting teary every time I think about this film.

If you don’t like Beethoven, but enjoy a well-acted drama, you may not get why I like it, but you should still enjoy yourself. For you, it’s a 3 1/2 out of 5. If you love Beethoven as much as I do and you think that kindness towards others should rank a little more highly on our priorities than it does, this is really, really good stuff. 4 1/2 out of 5.

Book Review: Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Jeremy Begbie)

I got given this book last year when I turned 30, but I really wish I’d read it a lot earlier, because it deals with a subject that has played a major part in my life over the last five or six years. And that is – what is the relationship between Christianity and music?

This is not an academic question for me. As some of you may know, when I finished school, I went to study mathematics and statistics for four years, and then worked as a statistician for five years after that.

And then, all of a sudden, I decided to switch over to working in the classical music industry. (Partly, this was inspired by another fantastic book called What Color is Your Parachute? but that’s for a different review.)

It took me two years to get into the arts, and I’ll tell you now – it wasn’t an easy journey. It was hard on two fronts. One, it was hard logistically. Only having maths and statistics on my resume and no arts experience at all, it was hard to get even an interview when I first went job hunting.

However, running parallel with this logistical issue was a theological issue – why should a Christian work in the arts? If you’re not a Christian, or you’re not familiar with those circles, you may not understand why this was an issue. If you are a Christian, and you can’t see how it is a problem, then you may well hang around with some very well thought-out Christians.

But the basic problem was something like this – Christians are called to follow Jesus Christ in all things – so where does music fit into that? Sure, there’s what’s known as “Christian” music nowadays, which refers to specific genres of music, usually set apart by having lyrics that refer to various Christian themes. And certainly, there is a role for musicians in church.

But working for a classical music company? For music that not only has no Christian lyrics, but no lyrics at all? To just put on music for people to listen to? How on earth would that be bringing glory to God?

I really struggled with this issue, because it was even suggested to me by some people that it’d be a bit of a waste if I went into the arts, compared with, say, working for a Christian organisation that was directly spreading the Gospel.  I wasn’t quite sure how to answer these sorts of objections and it left me with another dilemma – if music was a bit of a waste, then being a statistician probably wasn’t all that great either.

So thus began an on-and-off again study of Christianity as it related to work in general, and now with this book – music in particular.

It’s an enjoyable book to read, because the author, Jeremy Begbie, has done an immense amount of research – but at the same time is also a musician himself. So he provides insights that couldn’t be offered by just a theologian alone.

The first half of the book is an overview of the history of thought in Christian circles regarding music. He first of all gives a comprehensive overview of pretty much every verse where music appears in the Bible, and then looks at various thinkers over the last couple of millennia, from the early Greeks to the Reformers to the current day.

Then, in the second half, he sets out a basic theology of music, and how it fits in.

I’m going to give a very simple paraphrase of his position, but really, the book has so many more interesting detail and side tangents to follow (well, interesting if you like music) that this is really only providing a rough overview.

Begbie’s basic point is that, because there’s not a hard and fast theology of music spelt out in the Bible (ie there are no verses which say, “Thou shalt listen to” or “thou shalt not listen to”), we need to follow the larger themes of the Bible to understand where music fits in.

He starts with Creation. God created the world to bring Him glory. He created man, in His image, to be the primary being in this created world that would bring glory to God. The way God wanted man to bring glory to Him is in working with the materials in this world to improve the world (part of the “have dominion over the earth” command).

And so God created the world with various potentialities that we can tap into. For instance, wood is found in trees. But there is also the potential for us to use it to make things – from furniture to houses. Likewise for music. There is the potentiality for us to create certain sounds that blend together and combine in ways that our ears would find interesting.

In fact, interesting is an understatement. Music speaks to us in a language all of its own. It moves our emotions, it inspires us, it saddens us, it uplifts us, it depresses us, it puzzles us, it makes us smile. It does all these things. Just from making a few sounds and combining theme together.

Begbie really brings out that the potential in the creation for us to make musical sounds and the way our bodies are designed to respond to music is something that God planned all along. So therefore, there is an onus on music makers to remember that music is not just something that is man-made, but is actually something that exists in God’s created order that we can tap into and use to bring God glory.

However, because of the Fall, the Bible teaches that the world has become imperfect. And the way we use the world, and the potentialities there, becomes imperfect as well. We don’t always compose good music, we don’t always listen to good music, and we can use music for a lot of purposes that don’t glorify God.

But, Christians believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is reversing the effects of the fall. This is not completed yet – and all Christians look forward to a time when things will finally be perfected – but in the meantime, Christians are called to work in this world to improve it, bearing witness to Christ.

Christians have realised this throughout the ages – it’s no surprise that Christians back in the medieval days and onwards were heavily involved in hospitals, helping the poor, fighting for justic, improving people’s standards of living, etc. (Which is not to ignore, in any way, the many people who also called themselves Christians but seemed to have confused the situation by acting in the exact opposite of that.)

Christians naturally are called to contribute to this world in ways that restore the world, albeit imperfectly, from its flawed state. Music is no different.

So that’s the general groundwork, but there are all sorts of interesting analogies that Begbie draws between music and theology that are worth reading.

However, the book ended with a bit of a cliffhanger – how do you judge what is good music or bad? Begbie says that he’s run out of room in this book and is working on another one.

This is a bit of a shame because, of course, the highly controversial questions are all around “good” vs “bad” music. Is rock music bad? Or if you’re a Christian, can you listen to whatever you want? (As long as you remind yourself that you might not agree with all of the lyrics?)

Then, of course, there is the perennial church music question. Are hymns  better than modern church choruses? What makes any church music particularly great? Should we just play whatever is the latest music so people want to come to our church? What do you do about old “traditional” church services where anything that’s not an organ is considered sacrilegious?

I had an interesting discussion this week with a couple of people about the church music question, and I’d like to come back to it soon, but I thought I needed to get this book review out first, because I would say that it’s overall framework is where I stand on the music issue. God gave us the potential to make music, and we make it to his glory.

The question is, what does that look like?

These are the bigger questions and, like Jeremy Begbie, I’m going to leave this with a bit of a cliffhanger and come back to them some other time – hopefully in the not too distant future.

Benjamin Zander Explains Music

A while back, I was posting about how to explain classical music, and I said that if we really want to help people understand the music, our explanations of music need to:

1. Be emotionally engaging.

2. Provide a complete end-to-end listening guide through the music.

3. Not use terms that people don’t understand (unless you explain them).

Have a look at this video by famous conductor Benjamin Zander, as he (among other things) explains a prelude by Chopin. he doesn’t do it in any academic way, and you may not even realise he’s educating you, but in the space of 20 minutes, he applies all three of the above principles to the music he’s talking about.

I thought it was really well done. See what you think.

New Idea for Classical Music: We Could Try Talking in English

There are a lot of issues that classical music has to deal with if it ever wants to become popular again (yes, it once was really popular – even with young people!). It has a terrible image problem, for instance. Most people figure it’s only for old people, rich people or as background music for expensive restaurants. There’s also an awful lot of other music out there for it to compete against. So I don’t doubt it has its fair share of problems.

But by the same token, it’s obvious that the classical music world is not being as welcoming as it could be. After all, Shakespeare is much older than most classical music, and nobody thinks we should throw that out. People still like reading Charles Dickens and, as this blog shows, Leo Tolstoy. And it’s not an intelligence thing. People of all ages love going to arthouse movies, foreign films, and Tom Stoppard plays.

So why is classical music dying out?

As I said – it’s a multifaceted question. And many people are making great steps towards addressing the question, probably none more so than Greg Sandow, who has an excellent blog on the future of classical music. Even if you have no interest in classical music, but you just like music, his site is well worth a look, especially his book-in-progress that he’s writing on the future of classical music.

I don’t pretend to have any comprehensive answers on the different topics, but I’ve been giving some thought to one particular facet of the problem – how to explain classical music. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. It’s been the main dilemma floating around in my head for something like the last five years.

The reason I’ve gotten so interested in this one is twofold:

1. As someone who never learned much music theory, I’ve been struggling to understand classical music for years. I’m getting there, but it’s actually surprisingly difficult to learn about classical music without going off and getting a music degree.
2. I’ve also seen classical music companies that will go all out – setting off fireworks in concerts, projecting pictures on the walls, getting their musicians to wear casual clothes, etc – anything, literally anything, to make their concerts seem more relevant.

I have a very simple question – never mind the fireworks and pictures – why don’t we start explaining classical music to people? Maybe – just maybe – the reason they don’t like it, is because they don’t understand it. Certainly, I’d have been going to a lot more concerts at an earlier age, if somebody had taken the time to explain the music to me.

Up until recently, I  never had my thoughts on this in any sort of cohesive order, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve finally been able to put my thoughts down properly. Here they are. It should be stated up front, that there’s not a large body of research to back up what I’m saying, so everything’s still in the hypothetical stage at this point in time – but I’d be very curious to see what happens if this area was investigated further by classical music companies in the future.

My Main Hypothesis: To the untrained listener, most classical music sounds random (ie they can’t tell where it’s going or how long it’s going to last) and similar (they can’t distinguish one work from another).

I thought I’d cleverly thought this hypothesis up by myself, but I was just looking around the Oxford Companion to Music recently and no – they’ve known it for ages – you can read all about it under the entry about Music Appreciation.

Anyway, that hypothesis, for me, explains why, when you simply just expose a newcomer to classical music – instead of being bowled over by the experience and eagerly wanting more – they find it all rather long and boring and exactly like all other classical music they’ve heard. Even if they like the music, they may only do so for simple reasons such as certain melodies and an overall mood. And I believe that type of shallow listening leads to the “chocolate box music”  which gets cranked out on a regular basis in upmarket shopping centres , and why there’s only 100 or so pieces being recombined in various ways in classical compilation albums around the world.

There are educational resources provided at most classical concerts – a set of annotations or progamme notes and often a pre-concert talk – but it’s quite unclear who these are aimed at, and there is a wild variance in style, depending on who writes them. Some writers will tell you all the scandals going on in the composer’s life. Others will give you a rather lengthy technical analysis. The only thing that you can guarantee in 99% of the cases is that they will assume you have six grades of music theory under your belt, and will consistently use terms that the average person on the street does not understand.

Thus, to address the problem in the hypothesis, I propose that all educational activities (or “contextualisation” as we like to call it in the industry) should be directed towards the following goal:

Main Aim of Educational Activities (including programme notes and pre-concert talks): To provide a guided listening experience for the musical newcomer that a) removes the randomness of the music (by explaining the overall structure and direction of the work) and b) points out the particularities of that composition (so they are able to distinguish it from other works).

Again, I thought this was a novel new idea that I’d arrived at, but it was in the Oxford Companion under Annotations. That’s apparently why they invented programme notes in the first place – because the ordinary man on the street didn’t understand what he was listening to.

If that was the overarching goal, how to run and evaluate contextualisation activities would become quite clear. However, over the decades, I believe presenters have lost touch with that purpose. As I said, it varies greatly from writer to writer exactly what they’re going to focus on. In addition, audiences don’t come equipped with the same musical knowledge that they used to have. So classical music presenters in the 21st century are left with three main problems to overcome.

Problem 1 – High Entry Point: Because newcomers don’t have the musical training that they used to, many of the terms and concepts that the classical music world takes for granted – terms that are, in fact, essential for understanding the music – aren’t known by new people. So thus we assume that people know about sonata form, Italian tempo markings, etc. when quite clearly, there are less and less people who do understand it.

Problem 2 – Missing Audio Hooks: Even where descriptions of classical music works are provided to listeners, one of the biggest problems is that it’s really easy to get “lost” in the middle of a work. Nothing is worse than listening to a 15-20 minute movement and have no idea what’s going on or what’s coming up. I think programme notes used to provide complete walk-throughs of music that helped people follow things, but increasingly notes either provide only a cursory overview of the piece or mention specific highlights and assume that the audience will know when they’re up to the second theme or the recapitulation. The way this used to be dealt with (looking at some of the classic old books that explain music, such as George Grove’s Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies or Joseph de Marliave’s Beethoven’s Quartets, for example) was a) to write quite a lengthy description that provided a wall-to-wall description with no gaps and b) to quote examples in musical notation so that audiences (most of whom could read music) could listen out for the bits and know where they were in the music. Obviously, this is not still an appropriate way to deal with the problem, because it’s not realistic to assume that new audiences are going to be able to read music. However, it does show the importance of providing audio hooks for listeners to follow through the music.

Problem 3 – Emotion vs Analysis: If you go back to the old books, like the Grove and the de Marliave I just mentioned, you’ll notice they weren’t afraid to express their emotions about music. If they found something beautiful or stirring, they said so. While this may provide a subjective approach to the music, I believe it encourages active listening, because you want to hear what these guys hear. If they say something is beautiful, you listen more closely to see if it is. If they say that a passage is terrifying, you listen out for it. However, most writers on music in the last 50 years or so have retreated to a very academic position, and it’s quite difficult to work out from many musical writers if they actually enjoy the music they’re writing about. Who wants to hear from someone who doesn’t like something? (Unless it’s a reviewer . . .)

Even die-hard classical music fans don’t think this way. Just hear the crowd talking on the way out from a concert or read user comments on CDs on Amazon, and listeners are regularly reporting their subjective emotional reactions to the music. So why aren’t the music explainers?

So, the upshot of that is, my thoughts on how to present music to a) provide a guided listening experience and b) to overcome the three problems above, are as follows:

1. Provide an introduction before the work begins, that covers off any terminology or concepts the listeners need to know before they begin. This covers off Problem 1. While this could be done in a pre-concert talk, I’m not sure that most new listeners would show up for this kind of thing. After all, is it essential to show up for a talk 45 minutes before you see Beyonce, Justin Timberlake or U2 perform? (There might be a market for it with, say, Bob Dylan, but that’s a different discussion . . .)

I think ultimately, the necessary pre-requisite knowledge needs to be explained by someone on stage before the work begins in front of the entire audience (not just the 10% who came to your talk).

2. This is a more radical idea: Provide a written running commentary throughout the work while it’s playing. If you’ve got a very clever writer, you could do it in the programme, but it would still be sensible to have some visuals to indicate where you’re up to. The best idea I ever heard of for this was the Concert Companion which they were trialling in the US, but it sounds as if it got too expensive and died out. I would simply set up a surtitle machine like they do for the opera and have comments run on that. That would ensure that listeners hear the moments they’re supposed to hear without getting lost, thus dealing with Problem 2.

3. Finally, with both 1. and 2., they should be in language that is human and interesting, not cold and analytical.

Anyway, while this is all hypothetical, I find it all really exciting and it makes me quite optimistic because:

• All of this is largely untested. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of classical music explanations (either in programmes or CD liner notes) that explain all the terminology you need to know, so point 1 is almost completely untested and is almost the most crucial. So who knows what could happen if the classical music world decided to start speaking in English?
• The idea of a running commentary also has very rarely been tried with instrumental music. The Concert Companion is the best example of that, and by all accounts, it was very popular with new audiences. However, if we look to the field of opera, the invention of surtitles, allowing audiences to follow the opera moment by moment, has worked wonders for opera’s popularity. Who’s to say it couldn’t do great things for instrumental classical music?
• Whenever I see musicians speaking from stage and using ordinary language about their music – while it doesn’t always deal with Problem 1 and rarely with Problem 2, the connection that is formed between performer and audience, as they explain why they like a work and what’s going on, nearly always makes the audiences listen better.

So, really, while the present state of classical music is all doom and gloom, there are vast uncharted areas of how to present and explain classical music that are open to the performing arts organisations, recording companies and performers. Maybe this current recession will be the catalyst we need to change direction?