I’m going through a David Bowie phase in my car at the moment – in-car listening is a terrific way of exploring music – and am working through Changes,Black Tie, White Noise and Reality,
All was going well until three tracks into Black Tie,White Noise when Bowie started singing his cover version of Cream’s I Feel Free. I’ve not heard it before – and it was terrifying.
A 60’s super-group comprising guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, Cream’s original version of I Feel Free has a manic, slightly trippy euphoria about it, a recklessly exuberant feel.
Bowie’s, however, has none of that: instead, there’s a brooding menace about his version: he sings in a very low register, the rhythmic feel is halved, such that it is much slower, there’s none of the jolly hand-clapping of the Cream original. All in all, it adds up to a very creepy rendition: I think it works, but I’m still not wholly sure, being slightly freaked out at hearing a song I’ve loved for years delivered in such a brooding and ominous fashion (once you get past the opening twenty seconds, that is…).
Combined with a slightly deranged guitar improvised chorus, it’s quite disturbing: shades of Buffalo Bill or the Jigsaw Man’s soundtrack inside their head as they stalk the pavements for their next victim.
Compare them for yourself, and let me know what you think. If you dare…
A new album has got me excited. Admittedly, it’s a new album of old stuff, but even so. The old stuff in question is about forty years old, and can be found on Wondrous Stories, a new compilation of the best of Progressive Rock.
Most people I know hate prog rock: a former colleague of mine called it ‘pomp rock,’ and was infuriated with its self-indulgent self-belief and over-blown self-importance (features encountered in classical music too, I countered: think of Wagner…).
Wondrous worlds: album artwork by Roger Dean
Prog rock was about exploration: extending the structure of songs beyond the three-minute wonder of the traditional pop song; extending the textural soundscapes using electronics, singing about bizarre, elliptical subjects, and often incorporating elements of improvisation from jazz. The swirling synthesiser sounds of Rick Wakeman and the melodramatic Mellotron in the hands of Tony Banks (think of the opening of ‘Watcher of the Skies’ from Foxtrot, where the whole album seems to appear out the fog); and rhythmic trickery (see the opening of BBC 4’s marvellous ‘Prog Rock Britannia’ for a vocal rendition of some of the movement’s famous rhythms): all these elements contributed to drive rock to new dimensions.
Prog rock also embraced instruments not usually associated with pop, such as the violin and the flute, and live experiences often included heightened theatricality aided by bizarre costumes (think of Gabriel’s flower-costume for ‘Return of the Giant Hogweed’ or the face-painted fire-dancing of Arthur Brown).
The wonderfully tactile nature of gate-fold LPs gave full reign to the imaginary invention of prog rock albums, with fantastic imagery and the often incomprehensible lyrics of the quasi-erudite subject matter adorning the inner covers. Artist Roger Dean’s dream-like escapist album art for the group Yesrevelled in the panaromic possibilities the gate-fold album offered, a visual feast sadly diminished with the arrival of CDs and all but lost with the mp3-download culture.
Admittedly, prog rock threw up some turkeys: Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall is so dreadfully awful that it put me off going any further in my Wakeman exploration of discovery, which is good because I enjoyed The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Criminal Record without the horror, so I’m informed, of The Myths and Legends of King Arthur on Ice that still awaits me.
But consider the endless inventiveness of King Crimson, led by Robert Fripp, with its deliberately complicated time-signatures; Pink Floyd’s marvellous Animals; very early Genesis (before the departures of Peter Gabriel and later Steve Hackett, turning Genesis into Phil Collin’s pop backing band and ruining them forever), with great albums Nursery Crymes and Foxtrot; Yes’s ‘Close to the Edge;’
Closer to home, Canterbury also had a foothold in the prog rock movement, with the Canterbury Scene including bands such as Soft Machine, Matching Mole, Steve Hillage and Hatfield and the North. Hillage’s music may often be just the product of guitar-loop trickery, delay and repetition (as in ’Meditation of the Snake’ from Fish Rising and ‘Ether Ships’ from Green), but I like the cascading textures; whilst his Rainbow Dome Musik (1979) anticipates some of the New Age music’s ambient sonic soundscapes.
Yes, prog rock sometimes was hideously self-indulgent, often took itself far too seriously, and had an inflated view of its own importance. But it also yielded some classic albums, and allowed pop music to spread its wings beyond traditional structures, liberating it from the confines of the three-minute cage to envisage new landscapes and new musical textures.
It’s no good: I’m going to have to get this album. Amazon, here I come…
Lebrecht poses a series of eight scathing questions concerning recent events in the nation’s cultural life: the fourth concerns one summer music festival, which is billing itself as ‘Britiain’s first classical music festival’ (anyone heard of the Proms over there ?) and is featuring Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson. The festival’s website even features a video of Jenkins singing, erm, Bring Me To Life by American rockers Evanescence (at least, the one I found by using Google did: Lebrecht seems to avoid potential litigation by neglecting to name the festival directly. Perhaps Google led me to the wrong one…).
I was struck the other day, whilst reading Donald Mitchell’s excellent book Cradles of the New, by a passage in which he describes Debussy’s Fêtes as ‘one of the earliest explorations of acoustic space.’ There is a section in the work, the middle movement of his orchestral Nocturnes, in which a march-theme appears in the orchestra, grows louder and then recedes. Mitchell suggests Debussy is creating the sense of a marching band appearing and receding into the distance, and the work is re-creating the effect of music moving through space.
This practice of moving sound around, it seems to me, becomes an increasingly significant aspect of composition in twentieth- and twenty-first century music: think of the lone trumpeter in Ives’ The Unanswered Questionor the structural arrangement of the score in Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum which reflects the layout in St. Mark’s, Venice; the off-stage ensemble in Mahler’s Resurrection symphony; or Turnage’s About Time, for modern ensemble and the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, where the initial brass chorale is played by instruments arrayed around the tower of Ely Cathedral.
The movement of sound around the performance venue (I’m having to avoid the phrase ‘concert hall,’ given the nature of the Turnage piece!) has become a very real phenomenon with the advent of amplification in performance, in particular with electro-acoustic music: rather than move the performers around the space, the sound itself can be transported around the environment. Think of Stockhausen, or Jonathan Harvey’s Mortuos Plango, Vivos Vocos: no longer is the sound static, in the sense that it is being created in one place in relation to the listener: now, the actual sonic space in which the listener is immersed can be altered and moved – the distribution of sound itself becomes as much a part of the compositional process, and the listening experience, as is the choice of instrumentation or harmonic modulation.
Medieval minstrels performed in the city streets, at festivals and mystery plays, playing as they moved, often in order to advertise their playing and draw listeners towards the eventual site of the performance. The sonorous music of Gabrieli in the Renaissance period was working with its acoustic environment, exploring textures and effects dictated by the intended performance space. Modern concert audiences can have a similar experience without leaving the comfort of their seats: the music is moving, receding, diminishing, or growing louder all around them.
Listening to music is no longer about being a fixed point in a static sonic environment: we can be moved by sound, in more ways than one.
Is period-instrument reconstruction of Baroque and Classical music the new contemporary music ? And should performances by modern orchestras or pianists using contemporary pianos take period-practice into account ? Would Mozart and Beethoven have approved ?
Thoughts on all these questions and more in my article published on Bachtrack this morning: click here to read.
1913 was a year of destruction: it saw the beginning of the First World War, and the première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring which smashed the homogeny of the orchestra, as well as principles of rhythm and harmony.
The Master of Arcueil: Erik Satie
But it also witnessed annihilation on a smaller scale: Erik Satie, the master of Arcueil, took on Mozart and destroyed him. Satie turned his satiricial eye on Mozart’s famous Rondo alla turcain his set of three piano pieces forming the Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois.
Satie’s exaggerated parody in the first of these, his Tyroliene Turque, skewers Mozart harmonically, rhythmically, and structurally.
Satie has introduced strange dissonances into Mozart’s harmonies, and altered the time-signature from Mozart’s original 2/4 to a rhythmic feel of three beats in a bar (although, by this stage, Satie had long abandoned anything so traditional as time-signatures and bar-lines, so the score has neither). The right-hand octaves in Mozart’s piece have been split by Satie, such that the melody is distended further by having each note repeated an octave higher.
And then: the music returns to the opening ostinato, which seems to be in G major, but with a prominent flattened seventh on the third beat of each repetition suggesting that the music may move to C major – which, being Satie, of course it does not. These repeating, endless patterns, implying harmonic motion on the one hand whilst denying it on the other, are typical of Satie: ” listen, I’m going to modulate: oh, wait, no I’m not!”
That’s the great thing about Satie: his music is murderous in a brilliantly concise fashion. Don’t underestimate him: there’s always more to Satie than meets the ear.
Originally scored for large orchestra, including an eleven-player percussion section which uses sirens, it’s a vibrant and often alarming tone-poem depcting the city of New York itself.
Hearing it in Varèse’s own two-piano transcription, which was not discovered until recently, offers a remarkable perspective on an already notorious work.
As consumers, we should have a lot of power. It’s our money that companies want, that marketing strategies are devised for, to help us to part with our cash for things we either want, or didn’t realise we wanted. Audiences are turned into commodities, entities with profiles and habits towards which companies can tailor their marketing campaigns to achieve maximum efficiency, which supermarkets can index and target with specific adverts for products relevant to particular consumer groups. Products are matched with relevant consumers, with advertising crafted to appeal specifically to them alone.
A tool of power ?
The culture industries are no exception to this: as consumers of culture, we are also labelled, profiled and targeted: how often have you been asked to fill out a questionnaire that came with a CD, or sign up for promotional features by an arts organisation’s website, or been confronted by a pop-up survey on a website saying ‘your views are important to us ?’
The cost of producing a cultural commodity for popular consumption is balanced against consumer group spending power: cost-effectiveness is key. Ticket prices for concerts and exhibitions, the number of dates on a performing tour, number of nights’ run on a show: all these are factors in off-setting production costs against income recovered. Competition for audiences in the cultural sector must be huge.
If, as consumers, we are so important to arts industries, if companies and organisations are so desperate to attract our custom, and hence our cash, why aren’t we wielding more power ? Why aren’t promoters offering us things that we do want to visit, to see or to hear ? Why isn’t competition for audiences and for ticket-sales translating into a Golden Age of Artistic Production and consumption ?
The loyalty-card schemes run by supermarkets are a tool for helping them define customers in terms of the products they purchase regularly. A person who buys nappies and powdered formula milk is probably a good target for money-off vouchers for baby food and clothing; but it’s getting harder to divide consumers so easily across the wider spectrum when looking at their cultural consumption.It’s easier to run a list of products someone purchases from a supermarket, and ascertain what they purchase regularly and what related products might be of interest. It’s perhaps less easy to do this with someone’s cultural predilections (unless companies can access one’s browsing history, and assuming one does most of one’s reading and listening on-line).
As Nicholas Garnham writes, ‘’What analysis of the cultural industries does bring home to us is the need to take the question […] of cultural resources seriously, together with the question of audiences – who they are, how they are formed, and how they can best be served’ (my italics) (from ‘Concepts of Culture – public policy and the cultural industries’, printed in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture, 1993: 60-61). That last part is crucial: as far as dis-empowering the spending power of cultural audiences is concerned, companies are more likely to prefer ‘how they can best be manipulated.’
Why are we often dissatisfied with what we are offered ? One only has to read the critics’ columns in the papers to read of another disappointing exhibition, an artist’s newly-released album that’s a let-down or another mindless summer action blockbuster film.
Perhaps it’s complicated by the plurality of society, both in terms of consumer group identities as well as the multiple streams by which culture can be created and consumed. Society is too diverse in its interests to be formed into meaningful or significant groups, easily able to be defined. With everything from medieval music to Muse, Botticelli to Bacon, Chaucer to Chomsky, it’s difficult to define individual consumer bases as having a specific taste that makes them a marketing consultant’s dream: the intellectual who reads Schopenhauer, listens to Slipknot and Webern, is vegetarian, likes Studio Ghibli films and paintings by Monet would be a marketing nightmare. Television schedules of course have to please as wide a spectrum of viewers as they can, and what is enjoyable to one is dross to another.
I don’t have a simple answer to the question of why we, as cultural consumers, don’t have more power in our wallets. Perhaps the realisation that we ought to is enough to start with. It’s time to start using our power more effectively. How we begin to do that is another question.
Because it does. Doesn't it ? Blogging about extra-curricular musical life at the University of Kent.
Is period-instrument reconstruction of Baroque and Classical music the new contemporary music ? And should performances by modern orchestras or pianists using contemporary pianos take period-practice into account ? Would Mozart and Beethoven have approved ?
