United across centuries: weird composer Erik Satie and Brit pop group Take That. Surely not ?
But yes. In Satie’s ballet-realiste Parade from 1917, three Actor-Managers set up a side-show outside their tent, in an effort to attract an audience to see their show. Sadly, their efforts prove in vain: the spectacle outside the tent becomes the main attraction, and no-one is enticed in to see the proper performance inside.
You can hear this sense of desperate futility in the episode of the Chinese Magician, where the jollity of the music and the whistling in the percussion are overwhelmed by ponderous orchestration and repetition leading nowhere. At the end of the piece, exhausted by their futile efforts, the characters slump to the ground in defeat.
This sense of desperation is also captured to great effect in the video to Take That’s Said It All, released in 2009, where all the energy and antics of the clowns cannot move the audience, because the tent is empty. There’s no-one there to appreciate their manic efforts: as with the Satie, the main focus of the show, the audience, is absent, and the characters can only act out their performances with a sense of forlorn hope.
Shot in muted and washed-out colours, thereby depriving them even of the imposed jollity of their colourful outfits, there are some beautiful sequences; there’s a sense of resignation about them as they dress for what they know will be a pointless show. Clowns are rescued from the ludicrous nature of their garb and their slapstick antics through audience laughter, redeemed through the mirth they create for others. There’s none of that here: no redemption for them at all.
In both works, futility is elevated to the status of art, and circus characters, whose very existence is to entertain, end up deprived of their ability to do so. The same sentiment expressed over a distance of over ninety years in two very different cultures.
The two Proms from Friday night both employed the piano not as a percussion instrument, but as a weaver of illusions.
In the first concert, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet gave a dazzling performance of Ravel’s often brooding Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written between 1929-30, in which the piano part is so carefully constructed that, if you’d missed the title of the piece, you could be forgiven for not realising it was written for a single hand. Rather like the single instrumental voice in Bach’s solo partitas for cello and for violin, the single part executes both melody and accompaniment in a way which convinces the ear that there’s another part also involved. Ravel built the piano part so carefully that, when an arrangement was made for both hands, it actually destroyed the careful balancing and textural placing that Ravel had so diligently organised.
The second, late-night Prom saw a very different piano concerto, Morton Feldman’s Piano and Orchestra of 1975, in which the piano explores distilled vertical sonorities, often at times either blending into or emerging out of the accompanying orchestral texture. John Tilbury’s delicately-balanced reading made the piano seem as though it were dripping dabs of colour into the surrounding air. Unlike the traditional concerto, which pitches the solo instrument against the orchestra and includes a solo cadenza to display the virtuosity of the instrument, here piano and orchestra are united in a sonic exploration, defeating time by eschewing the traditional three-movement structure and using instead a slow-moving, metre-less feel over a single movement. The sense of time pausing, of contemplative reflection and of the slow examination of ideas from several perspectives are concepts another Frenchman would have recognised – Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies achieve something similar in condensed form.
Working towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Debussy talked of composing for the piano a ‘music without hammers.’ The piano is essentially a percussion instrument: rather than strings being bowed or plucked, they are struck with hammers, and you can’t get more percussive than that. It was Debussy who began the idea of treating the piano contrary to its essentially percussive nature, and Feldman’s piece stands in the tradition Debussy began nearly a century earlier.
Two concerts, using the piano to weave two very different illusions: one to overcome the absence of a right-hand (I avoid the word ‘missing,’as the concerto certainly doesn’t suffer from the absence of the upper hand), and one to pretend the piano isn’t a piano at all. Would Debussy have approved of Ravel’s piano concerto, had he lived to hear it ? I feel certain he would have approved of the Feldman.
(You can hear the concerts for a week on-line on BBC iPlayer, and the concerts will be repeated on Radio 3 later next week).
Mahler’s portentous statement about being appreciated not in his own lifetime but after his death has been negated by the Digital Age. Thanks to the affordability of home computing, music software and YouTube, bedroom music studios have become ubiquitous, amateur performances are posted on-line, and you can have your fifteen minutes of fame spread in short bursts across the globe.
But popularity’s problem exists not only in the medium, which makes performers of many but professionals of few, but in the message. Alexander Goehr identifies the beginning of the avant-garde movement as being the moment when music turned its back on the audience and lost its appeal, when it became concerned less with communication with its audience than expressing the ideas of the composer, irrespective of whether the audience related to those ideas or not. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system: Stockhausen’s electronica; the New Complexity movement of the 1970s; or jazz’s escape from tonal and harmonic structures into the realms of spontaneous improvisation in free jazz in the 60s with Ornette Coleman: such times often coincide with episodes of great creativity but little commercial success – audiences can’t understand what is going on, and feel left behind.
Pop music, however, is all about instant gratification: as its name implies, it is written to appeal to people immediately, and survives (or expires) for as long as that particular musical fad holds sway – and sells records.
Jonathan Harvey considers the relationship between artist and audience in the third chapter of Music and Inspiration, where he comments on composers such as Hindemith and Copland actually altering the path of their musical development, in order to directly engage the listener once more after they felt they had alienated them.
Is it important to consider the appeal of your music as you write it ? Should the listener be taken into account ? If you are using a tonal or harmonic palette which might be difficult for the audience to follow, or are using effects and technical devices that are challenging to the ear, is that a factor that should govern the way a composition is realised ? Or, more succinctly, can a composer take the listener into account when writing without compromising their artistry, what it is they are saying and how they are saying it ?
Of course, it is not all about making the listener’s life easy: otherwise, Schoenberg would not have created the twelve-tone system, and Ferneyhough would never have written a note; and new music is all about a new listener experience. Then again, composing ought not to be about deliberately challenging the listener in such a way as to alienate them: ought it ?
Composing in the Darmstadt School in the 1960’s was aggressively confrontational, seeking willfully to alienate the listener in order, it seems, to validate its own modernity by repudiating consonant sonorities associated with tradition. As Hans Werner Henze writes, ‘Any encounter with the audience that was not catastrophic and scandalous would defile the artist.’
But time is a great agent of acclimatisation. What caused an uproar when first written, or met with audience bewilderment and critical hostility – the Rite of Spring, for instance – often settles down into becoming a part of the great canon of concert repertoire. The message a piece is trying to convey, innovations it is trying to wreak, or a musical language that at first seems incomprehensible, often crystallises over time, usually with greater listener experience.
I speak from personal experience here. When I was about 11, in a spirit of musical enquiry, I lowered onto the record-player an LP from my father’s collection, an album with a slightly far-out artistic cover depicting a sax player called, the liner notes revealed, Charlie Parker.
I’d been playing the piano from a tender age, the usual fodder of examination repertoire distilled from the Classical tradition, but this was utterly alien to me: I had no idea what was going on, and put it to the back of the stack of records. About three years later, I’d been playing some jazz pieces with a clarinettist – Benny Goodman, Count Basie – and I came across the same LP. This time, when I listened to it, I could see where the music was going, harmonically-speaking: I could hear the underlying harmonies and had a sense of the musical landscape the notes Parker’s improvisation occupied. The music hadn’t changed in the intervening years: I had, my listening experience had widened and my understanding had developed. (Although I’m not sure I will ever comprehend Free Jazz).
Perhaps composers should follow their musical Muse wherever it leads them, trusting in posterity to allow audiences to comprehend their work if the contemporary critical response is not positive. Artistic integrity versus commercial appeal: where do you stand ?
I’ve written previously about the lack of power cultural consumers appear to wield, given that it’s our wallets that arts companies and institutions are fighting over. What should put us in a position of strength, and result in a Golden Age of Artistic Creations which the masses are clamouring to experience, doesn’t seem to be happening. Why ?
Part of the reason, it seems to me, may lie in the infrastructure that comes between the artistic object (a concert, CD, art exhibition, or latest novel) and the consumer experience.
Before the object even reaches the public, all manner of individuals have made decisions about it: what people want, what they will like, what they might pay, how it should be packaged to appeal to them, and so on. From marketing managers to distribution teams, sales executives and in-house staff, the object has had decisions made about it, and the way it should be pigeon-hold, packaged, promoted and presented long before the actual consumer gets anywhere near it.
This means that all sorts of decisions are made as a result of distribution strategies (release date, performance run, tour dates, retail price) and marketing psychology (presentation style, launch, advertising imagery and attendant promotional campaign) without necessarily having any bearing on the work itself.
How the cultural object reaches the public is the result of protracted planning and ideas about what will appeal, and ultimately what will contribute to successful sales. This takes away the innate appeal of the object itself, and replaces it with hyper-marketing trappings designed, not to make it accessible, but to make it sell well.
Renee Fleming: out of this world
This latter factor, the distinction between accessibility and successful sales, is where part of the problem may lie. If everything is made accessible, there could be too much to choose from, and consumers would drown in a wealth of too much to experience. Instead, let’s make certain things inaccessible, either through pricing or rendering something Esoteric and Difficult in comparison, so that people will buy the rubbish. Let’s package artists that are only half-decent as easy to access, performing works that everyone half-knows or knows that they like, such that they will sell. Why buy discs of Renée Fleming or Cecilia Bartoli, when you can have a CD by this lovely young girl with blonde hair singing stuff you probably already know, and ok, she doesn’t sing it very well at all, but hey, she’s a Bright Pretty Young Thing and the album won’t challenge you ?
How can that be good for the cultural market-place ? Instead, why not let consumers decide, and trust that they can make informed decisions for themselves ?
Contemporary music festivals are often perceived as being notoriously expensive. They can need dedicated professionals working at the peak of their powers to realise extremely demanding repertoire, Rolls Royce ensembles, high-profile conductors. Scores and music are expensive to hire or purchase. The music can be fiendishly difficult both to execute and to comprehend: or of course, the music of composers like Howard Skempton and Michael Nyman, which is challenging in a different way. Brash, modern ensembles, amplified instruments, electronics, a battery of percussion: think of groups like Icebreaker, the Orkest de Volharding, or Bang On a Can.
Commensurately, ticket prices can be high, as festival organisers endeavour to recoup some of the cost.
This is, of course, not true. Or at least – not always.
The widespread nature of this misconception is a shame, because contemporary music is part of the lifeblood of contemporary culture. It reflects modern concerns, resonating with the sounds of urban life and society’s hang-ups: the forthcoming opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage is a meditation on the life and untimely death of Anna Nicole Smith. Contemporary music can be riotous and fun: think of the music of Graham Fitkin or John Adams, with its exciting rhythmic vibrancy. It is a way of engaging with current issues, and making audiences consider political or social issues: Nixon in China, for example.
The music of Xenakis might not be the most accessible of modern compositions – Psappha for percussion solo, for instance.
But it has great conviction, and great virtuosity: seeing the performer is as much a part of the performance as listening to the piece itself. Toru Takemitsu’s wonderful soundscapes are full of colour and luminosity.
American composers such as Michael Torke or Nico Mulhy write music brim-full of rhythmic energy and bouncing textures. Torke’s saxophone quartet, July, is full of funky lines, bouncing rhythm and punchy textures.
Jazz may be all about the elasticity of time, about syncopation and the louche indolence of swing, but, to paraphrase George Gershwin, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got a regular pulse. (I can see why Ira changed the lyrics…)
You can’t pull against something if it’s not firmly fixed: in jazz, that’s the hi-hat. The crisp snap of the hi-hat on the second and fourth beat of a swing tune in 4/4 represents the twin pillars of the piece’s rhythm, around which swing can loll and flounce, secure in the knowledge that it is underpinned by a rock-solid rhythmic foundation. Music is often about the suspension of time, or what the American composer Elliot Carter has called the debate between ‘chronometric time versus psychological time,’ the regular pulse of the daily passage of life pitted against a time-scale imposed by the piece of music itself. Time, in jazz, slips and slides like a novice ice-skater, but one clinging firmly to the hoarding lining the rink: the security of the drum-kit.
Listen to the opening of Milestones, where the crisp homophony of the sideways triadic motion in the saxes and trumpet only works because the percussion defines exactly where the beats against which they are pulling lie: the driving ride cymbal and crisp rim-shot anchoring the beats.
And Dave Brubeck’s Take Five succeeds because the bass player roots the pulse firmly on the tonic ‘E’ every time the five-beat cycle begins anew, along with the pianist’s left-hand and a solid kick on the bass-drum.
(And, as an extra bonus, I love the descisive thwack on the snare(less) drum that marks the beginning of Desmond’s alto-sax solo when the tune ends in this clip).
The writer Michael Hall’s epithet which titles this post is spot on: the hi-hat provides the necessary beat. Next time you’re playing in a jazz ensemble, or improvising a solo, or simply listening to some Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie, keep an ear out for the drummer: he’s holding it all together.
Much debate has centred upon Dame Judi Dench’s performance of Send in the Clowns (which, for my money, is the piece which would alone guarantee Sondheim’s place amongst Song-Writing Immortals, even if he hadn’t written another note). Dame Judi is not, and nor does she pretend to be, a singer. She didn’t sing the song particularly well, which prompted heated discussion.
But she performed it brilliantly. That’s what she does. She delivered an evocative, moving performance of the song that captured the spirit and emotional intensity of the song in a way that commanded the attention. Ok, her singing might not have been first-class, but that wasn’t why she was there: she was there to perform the song, which she did. Fantastically.
And then there was Bryn. He delivered a colossal performance of part of Sweeney Todd that pretty much knocked everyone else’s singing into a cocked hat: the sheer physicality, charged gaze and demonstrative gestures meant he dominated the stage and had total authority: he didn’t just sing the part, he was the part.
The Heated Discussion resumed when he came on to sing and dance in part of Everybody Ought To Have A Maid. Of course, Bryn isn’t the most light-footed, gazelle-like creature, and suddenly the same voices debating Dench’s singing were chattering about Bryn’s dancing. But Bryn’s efforts didn’t matter: he doesn’t aspire to be a dancer, and it was a light-hearted moment in which he good-naturedly joined in, which contrasted with the demonic performance he had just given as the Demon Barber.
People don’t go to hear Judi Dench sing, or Bryn Terfel dance: they go to see them perform. And perform they did – two contrasting pieces, one moving, one menacing. Had they gone to a vocal masterclass by the Dame, or a dancing lesson from Bryn, they might have cause: but it was a Prom concert, where performance is meant sometimes to be diverse and theatrical.
Anyone who grumbles about it will perhaps have missed the point.
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…
Because it does. Doesn't it ? Blogging about extra-curricular musical life at the University of Kent.
United across centuries: weird composer Erik Satie and Brit pop group Take That. Surely not ?
This sense of desperation is also captured to great effect in the video to Take That’s Said It All, released in 2009, where all the energy and antics of the clowns cannot move the audience, because the tent is empty. There’s no-one there to appreciate their manic efforts: as with the Satie, the main focus of the show, the audience, is absent, and the characters can only act out their performances with a sense of forlorn hope.
There’s been some discussion amongst friends and acquaintances since last night’s