Category Archives: Arts and the Consumer

Cultural consumption: fight for our rights and oust laziness

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

Music, artistry and the problem of popularity.

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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 ?

Arts and the Consumer

Too much in the way: from artwork to consumer

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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
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 ?

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

Contemporary music: is it beyond our reach ?

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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.

Or, on the other hand, the contemplative scores of Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, or another Adams, John Luther Adams’ evocative In a Treeless Place, Only Snow.

And modern music concerts can be heard at the Proms for a mere £5, like Prom 28 with pieces by Oliver Knussen and George Benjamin; or discounted on-line prices to hear Stockhausen and Rebecca Saunders at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Or for £8, you could have had a ticket to hear David Matthews and John Casken at the recent Brighton Festival. 

It’s an exciting time for contemporary music, and it’s not always inaccessible, incomprehensible, or expensive. Don’t let it pass you by.

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

Stormin’ Norman: Lebrecht livid

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Ouch. A touch of outrage manifests itself in critic Norman Lebrecht’s lastest blogpost over on Slipped Disc.

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…).

Read the questions for yourself.

Double ouch.

Arts and the Consumer

I don’t have the power: cultural consumers and their wallets

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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.

Wallet
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.

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

Suffering the Clap: how should audiences behave ?

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Call me what you will, but I believe there’s an inherent snobbery about how concert audiences are expected to behave.

In the sacred cathedral that has become the Modern Concert Hall, audience members are expected to adopt an almost religious state of silent obeisance before The Music: they must enter the hall with trepidation and awe, with veneration in their hearts, and are expected to listen in a state almost bordering on ecstasy. Not until the end are they permitted to move a muscle, at which point they are then permitted to clap politely – nay,enthusiastically (although not too much of course) – and, if at a jazz gig or a promenade-type concert, they are occasionally allowed to whoop.

Now don’t get me wrong: I understand that listening to music is a deeply personal experience, and I can get as annoyed as anyone by inconsiderate or rude behaviour from someone in the same audience as myself. But if someone has been so moved by a piece that they feel the need to express this, why shouldn’t they ? I have a fantastic live recording of a performance of Walton’s First Symphony by the National Orchestra of Wales at the Albert Hall; for anyone who doesn’t know this piece, the first movement is of such epic proportions (it’s about fifteen minutes long) that it seems like a whole work in itself. It has pounding rhythms, stirring melodies, and a relentless energy that drives the music to a tremendous climax in a fierce final gesture, punctuated by timpani. In the recording, a smattering of enthusiastic applause breaks out spontaneously at the movement’s conclusion amongst some of the audience who just can’t help themselves: the music is so rousing, it just demands a response.

Yet the Apostles of the Sacred Mysteries of the Concert Hall frown upon those who don’t know any better than to actually clap between individual movements, rather than waiting until the piece is finished.  The slight rustling of a programme attracts fierce stares.

But perhaps it’s a cultural thing: after all, the etiquette of modern concert audiences is relatively recent. Until the end of the nineteenth century, audience behaviour was completely different; people went to be seen as much as to see the concert: it was a social occasion at which they talked, ate, and drank during a performance. Modern rules were laid down, according to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, by the composer-conductor Gustav Mahler, who instilled in audiences the ideas of complete, attentive silence and no applause until the end of a piece.

And some semblance of the old culture still survives: Italian opera-goers give standing ovations (or vehement boos) after a particular singer has given a great (or disastrous) rendition of an aria. In the middle of an opera. It’s an accepted, even expected, part of the performance experience. Conductors will pause at the end of arias where they know this will happen, even if the music is supposed to carry straight on. The audience are expected to voice their reaction during a piece.

As long as their response isn’t disruptive, I don’t mind if someone is so moved by their experience that they applaud between movements. People go to concerts to be moved, to be emotionally engaged.

How do you think audiences should behave ?

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

Sanctioned by Broadcast: the dangerous power of radio.

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I was talking to a colleague over a lugubrious coffee recently – it happens – and we came to the conclusion that broadcasting music can be a dangerous thing.  You see, when programmes such as Radio 3 play music, there’s a dangerous assumption that what’s being broadcast is automatically good, simply because it is being played on the radio. Lazy listeners to Radio 3 and Classic FM can easily assume that what they are hearing must be of a suitable standard, otherwise it wouldn’t be aired.

Radio image
Are you listening ?

The same danger lurks around the printed word: readers assume that, if something is typed, or printed, it Must Be So. Newspapers have an aura of omniscience as a result of this. Wikipedia seems to thrive on this assumption, and how many people have taken Wikipedia’s information as factually correct, when it often isn’t ?

I’ve heard some pretty terrible performers on the radio: soloists with otherwise eminent, reputable period-instrument ensembles, whose performing I wouldn’t even sit through if they turned up at the local community hall. There’s a sense that the performance is condoned by the broadcasting company in the act of putting the music on the air: as though the act of broadcasting confers some seal of approval on it.

As listeners, we need to be wary of accepting that performances we hear on the radio, or sometimes see on television, are acceptable (I hesitate to use the word ‘good’ here, as the judgement of one person may not be that of another: but we can all at least (I hope) distinguish between performers who are in tune, or engaging, and those that simply are not). We are often too passive as cultural consumers, reaching readily for newspaper reviews to tell us what concerts are ‘worth’ attending, what art exhibitions are ‘worth’ visiting, what films are ‘worth’ seeing.

It’s time we listened (and watched) more pro-actively; time we stopped believing in the benign, assumed sanctioning by radio and television of mediocre, even bad music-making, and started making cultural decisions for ourselves.

Arts and the Consumer, Notes on Music

The nation’s favourite aria: the results

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Radio 3 has just concluded a poll to try and find the Nation’s Favourite Aria, and the results are in.

Puccini’s Nessun dorma doesn’t appear, although he is present through E lucevan le stelle from Tosca.  There are no arias by Rossini or Verdi. Mozart appears three times, and there’s even an aria from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.

All but one of the arias (if you count Che faro senza Eurydice as a trouser-role) are for soprano or mezzo-soprano. There’s no beseeching tenors singing Che gelida manina or lamenting over flowers in La fleur que tu m’avais jetée, no baritones exhorting us to join the army in Non più andrai.

As Rupert Christiansen remarked in The Telegraph, the prevailing mood is one of doom and gloom among the choices: ‘everyone is either dying, praying or hopelessly in love.’

The winner ? When I am laid in earth, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The question remains: is a poll conducted amongst Radio 3 listeners truly representative of the nation’s choices ?  Radio 3’s site does have a caveat: “this is not a representative poll and the figures do not purport to represent public opinion as a whole on this issue.” What results would the same poll have yielded if it had been done by Classic FM ?

What’s your favourite: did it make the list ?