Giving Up on Classical Music

I also feel that this is something that will eventually go away, the more I learn about it/listen to it. I mean, when I was pretty young I couldn't help but think of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" every time I heard jazz.

Not me. I'm not even sure what classical music is, to be fair. It's a lazy appelation like Rock or Rhythm & Blues which contains multitudes not only in quantity but in different styles and approches.

That said, I like lots of pre-1800 music and plenty that follows too.

In fact, if you find classical music recorded earlier than 1800 or so, then the history of great inventions certainly needs to be rewritten...

yeah baby, now yer talking. that shit roxx!

Purcell, though, different story. Dowland instrumental works, 'Fantasias', yes. Palestrina, yes. Gesualdo & Perotin, yes. Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers in concert, amazing.

'pre-1800' is an awful lot to just give up on. what, 'Spem In Alum' just does nothing for you? it seems like you're looking for reasons to stay ignorant.

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2005/01/noises_off.html
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/concert_rage.html
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2005/01/more_applause.html

also with Keith C about a lot of 19th/20th century romantic stuff... it's all been so thoroughly assimilated by hollywood soundtracks, I can't listen to it without glazing over.

yes, def. a friend of mine, heavily into classical music, wants to (dreams of) opening a classical music club where thats exactly what would happen. obviously he wouldnt have symphony orchestras there, but there's plenty of stuff to choose from regardless. i think it'd be kick ass.

"if he lived in the 20th century he would be writing jazz"
-besides a lot of general bach-jazz influence, there's one specific song in which this is just so apparent to me - Noreen's Nocturne by oscar peterson. not sure why, but its somehwere in the phrasing of the opening melody and counterpoint with bass.

listen to one leonin and one perotin for early polyphonic choral stuff. beautiful.

Well, a lot of great classical music was composed after 1800 for sure. After 1900, however... :)

And Mozart still rules!

Yes, they are. Always. No exception. The most interesting musical thing there is.

i too wish classical concerts weren't so tightly bound by convention and burdened by same. the berio/bach cycle at the cite de la musique achieved something like this, i thought; it somehow felt fun, experimental in a basic sense, not stuffy. there was a very diverse crowd.

xpost

did geir just write "the most beautiful piece of classical music ever"? geir, do you exist in three dimensions?

(This thread made me think of Bartók since he is the one that *really* makes me think "soundtrack"; eg 2nd movement of "Music for strings, celesta and percussion" = warped nonexistent 50's cowboy movie, or something.)

xpost obv

Amst: that convention Romantic invention, no? Before that, concerts surely *were* pop events (although for upper classes?) with intermittent cheering, chatter during music etc?

About as noise as most other 20th century composers.

He missed out the tits and the nuns.

And the nuns' tits.

-- ()ops (buttch@gmail.com) (webmail), March 10th, 2005 1:00 AM. (()()ps) (link)

how do you mean??

So? You can still argue about it--isn't that what people do on this board? One of the distinctive activities of the civilized mind, etc.?

Two great classical things I've found lately: Debussey's setting of Verlaine's Claire de Lune (not the piano one, but the one with piano and a singer); and Strauss's opera, Salomé. These have totally rekindled my interest in classical music. So has listening to music w/ score, which I'd never done before until a few weeks ago. Listening to opera with a score is amazing.

Britten's Turn of the Screw is great too.

which is not without its rewards

john; I bookmarked this inneresting kyle gann blog entry on classical/rock critical divides a few months ago: http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/archives20041001.shtml#89088

but i'd also add that (with a good recording and) with the volume up HIGH enough on your stereo, its truth is lessened.

b-but milton that's yr answer for everything!!!

Any later period Mozart in a minor key, for example; the 40th symphony, the two piano concertos, (in general) Don Giovanni... not to mention the Jupiter symphony. Haydn seems to be more listenable across the board than Mozart, but the highs are lower. Bach just has so many viscerally exciting works that I can't even begin to list them.

I don't know too much about pre-baroque, but i do remember listening to some sort of cantata in music history class where there were like 40 individual voices. We listened to it in a huge auditorium with all the lights off and it was magical. I'll try to find out what it is.

And to the people up thread (namely Geir) who pigeonhole 20th century composers into one specific category, you are wrong. Most of the great modern composers had multiple periods throughout their lives of writing extremely different types of music. Bartók went from being extremely atonal and violent with his works to an almost neo-romantic phase right before he died. His third piano concerto is remarkably easy to listen to. There were so many remarkably different 20th century periods: bi/polytonality, atonality, serialism, primitivism, neo-classicism, neo-romanticism - to name a few - each with their defining works written by a broad range of composers. I might have gotten your tone wrong and you might already know this all, Geir, but i think there are others who pigeonhole genres and to them it bears repeating.

It's not really a "should" or "shouldn't" except for me personally, but I feel like the standard post-Beat rockcrit approach ("I heard it; this is My Reaction") isn't particularly useful or interesting when writing about classical music, and as I say above, I'm not interested in how somebody felt when they listened to Liszt or in what novel comparisons they're able to make. I'd rather know what's going on in the music from a technical standpoint, and how the music relates to the canon &/or history; certainly anyone can share his/her opinion, but an opinion that doesn't begin with an intimate, informed knowledge of the canon isn't of much use. For me at least.

I know this is like the ultimate snobbish rockism but umm it's like I wouldn't trust a restaurant critic who'd only eaten at pizza joints all his life to review a five-star French restaurant, y'know?

Cool jOhn its yr preference but I dunno, I think there are other approaches to be made when talking abt this stuff beside a rockcrit one and a straight technical one or one that's a midway between the two - so I'm not saying someone anyone who just listens to rock should start documenting his experiences with classical so much as reviews hat contain descriptions of shapes that aren't stuffed with erm, jargon. Construction of language for listeners who may never learn theory.

I listen to lots of 20th century/current things and haven't gone back to the time of Lizst. I imagine lots of connections with lots of other current musics (that's 'novel comparisons' then) I listen to I'm just tired of some of the (well, mostly newspaper) criticism of classical as something that's high art and removed from anything else, something that hasn't got emotions or magic in it. or the characterization of avant-garde composers as a bunch of obnoxious modernists and the division between that and minimalists with nothing else in between.

Orlando Di Lasso - Prophetiae Sibyllarum/Missa "Ecce Nunce Benedicite Dominum - Prague Madrigal Choir (Nonesuch)

Josquin Desprez - Missa Ave Maris Stella/Four Motets - University Of Illinois Chamber Choir (Nonesuch)

Love, Lust & Piety - English Songs From The 15th & 16th Century - Pro Cantione Antiqua, London - Early Music Consort Of London (Quintessence)

Thanks, you guys. Sometimes I forget how much I like that stuff. ( I have a pretty large vinyl classical collection and i go thru periods where i listen to them a lot and other times when i don't listen to them at all. sometimes it helps to have a spark of some sort. they do seem to be kinda seperate (in my mind) from the pop/rock/etc that i listen to every day. I need to make them a regular part of my daily mix cuz i always hear/learn something different when i play them.) Okay, it's back to Smoke Rise's early 70's rock opera about the life of Joan Of Arc. (I also put on Erich Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt today, but it wasn't working for me.)

this is more or less how i feel.

i also feel that it's important to hear much classical music in performance; which makes it even more lamentable that classical music events often feel so circumscribed and stuffy. and half of the audience are wealthy subscribers who know nothing about music but who feel that, at a certain age and in a certian milieu (or aspired milieu), it's appropriate to do things like go to the symphony. i'm sure some of those people develop a genuine taste and appreciation for the music. but a lot don't, and it shows somehow in that they seem to be more into the showiness of unerring decorum than in responding to the music somehow. a venue that could someone be attractive primiarily to people passionate about the music would be most helpful.

Sadly, this is way too OTM. Sadly, because there is so much great music there, but these conventions kind of keep some genuinely interested people away from it.

but this sort of thing is a problem (maybe that should be in scare quotes?) at many cultural events, including the infamous widows who come in batches to any movie showing at MoMA and proceed to talk and/or snore through anything that doesn't capture their interest.

A bit off-topic ...

Clearly, the perception is that you have to be rich to go to the symphony. Sure, a ticket might cost $75-$100, which is expensive, but not *that* expensive compared to other typical nights out. A good seat to a hockey or basketball game costs the same amount (to name two more pastimes that one *could* enjoy at home but is best enjoyed live and in person) but people will think less about shelling out for the latter than for the former. Orchestras have a problem with the "perceived value" of what they offer, i.e. it's perceived as a huge indulgence to go to the symphony, but not to go to a basketball game.

I think this problem transcends the cultural stigma that the symphony is exclusively for stuffy snobs.

In general though, it's a shame that people don't think that spending $85 at the symphony is "worth it".

which is not without its rewards

I can TOTALLY relate to this in the other direction. I make my career teaching and composing and writing about classical music and while I love listening to rock/pop and reading a fair amount of non-academic writing about it, it's hard for me to write that way, and a big step in my (ILM?) life was accepting that I could be more of a listener, less of a talker on forums like this.

'Re: classical music and snoring -- perhaps not quite having the "civilizing influence" it was intended to have?'

I've heard of the odd riot or two during a classical concert...

I'd be tempted to spend quite a bit more in a concert if it was an opera that I wanted to see but mainly its pretty cheap compared to not only other forms of entertainment but some other concerts too.

it's really too bad about this. the entire purpose of classical conventions like the concerto (from the 1750s all the way up to the 1950s) was, for the most part, to be as show-offy as possible while creating great melodies. they're more technical andmore melodic then anything that has been written in a while. people SHOULD be standing and clapping like someone said upthread (i don't quite have time to see who that was) instead of sitting down, being motionless and still, and snoring if need be. it's just too interesting.

Honestly, applauding in the middle of the music is NOT a convention I'm eager to see taken up in classical-music culture. Classical music doesn't allow for "vamping" while the applause subsides, so it's going to mask something else worth hearing.

And anyway, while I'm not a big follower of jazz, it seems to me that applauding for soloists is more of a routine convention than a liberating element of audience interaction. I mean, after *every* solo the audience is pretty much obliged to clap. Polite clapping for the Dud solos and louder, more enthusiastic clapping for the Classic ones. Or maybe not -- do the NY jazz clubs, say, have tough crowds where you really need to earn your applause?

The kind of engagement with the music that feels more rewarding to me as a music listener really comes down to *paying close attention*. All the C/classical music that I love really rewards this approach, and the last thing I want is the distraction of the fellow next to me leaping to his feet and pumping his fist in the air in response to a well executed cadenza.

It occurs to me that I am probably an old fuddy-duddy. Also, I go to maybe three or four concerts a year featuring non-"contemporary" classical music, so I don't care *that* much about how concert-hall culture might shift.

This is so absolutely completely OTM (despite what I said earlier upthread). I just sang in a concert tonight where I actually had a pretty substantial solo and, well, I would have gone apeshit if someone had applauded in the middle of one of the pieces and covered up my next entrance. It's really a completely different paradigm of engagement than most music listeners seem to be used to (see also the routine mocking of people who go to rock/pop shows and don't dance but instead stare at the musicians and don't respond/react until the song ends).

happily, this isn't the case in chicago. the lyric opera can of course get that high and higher, but one can typically find tickets for performances at the cso for $30-40 (and sometimes less). that's still quite high for my budget, but then again an orchestral performance is an expensive undertaking compared to a rock show.

Bump for this great thread. Curious to know where your classical kicks are at now.

Reading his blog is a good way to keep a fresh perspective on music decades or centuries old: http://www.overgrownpath.com/

The author is a somewhat jaded and often inspired ex-label man.

his=this

We have a Classical listening thread if you're interested, Cops. Feel free to contribute.

Been thinking about throwing in the towel on this stuff. Just too boring.

LOL

Xpost the problem is not in the music; your listening gear need calibrating.

needs*

Too many violins and shit

Nothing good released in years

Mr. Cops there is also a general Classical rolling thread:

an attempt at a general "What are you currently digging re. classical music" thread

Classical music comprises at least 40% of my active listening and I have jags where I listen to nothing else for weeks. Kind of don't give much of a shit about the stuff upthread. Ppl should listen with their ears open and keep in mind that CM is not some homogenous slab laying across a 250 year space. That's like seeing a capybara and saying 'ok now I know what rain forest animals look like'.

Also if you want to hear some recent favorites, these are the compositions i nominated for the best of 2005-2009 poll:

George Crumb- Otherworldly Resonances for two amplified pianos
Kajia Saariaho- Notes on Light for Cello and orchestra
Kalevi Aho- Symphony no. 14 'Rituals' [actually an evening-length program combining a symphony, a concerto and a song cycle, designed to be performed together]
Per Norgard- Symphony no. 7
Christian Jost- Heart Of Darkness: odyssey for clarinet and orchestra

You can see that I find a lot of excitement coming from Scandinavia and Finland right now. That region really took the torch of abstract music and ran with it in the last 60 years IMO.

I expect Adams' opera A Flowering Tree might have made it in but I still haven't heard it; in 2010 we have already had an amazing new opera by Saariaho, 'Emilie'.

Fantastic posts, Jon Lewis.

Feelin' peppy this A.M.

Been listening to parts of Schnebel's Orchestra. Wanna do a fuller write-up when I get the space but its gd.

Honestly, applauding in the middle of the music is NOT a convention I'm eager to see taken up in classical-music culture. Classical music doesn't allow for "vamping" while the applause subsides, so it's going to mask something else worth hearing.

FWIW, there was a good Alex Ross piece in the New Yorker a while back about how respectful silence in concert halls is a relatively recent phenomenon. Also you still hear applause for solos in Opera, though it tends to be at more appropriate pauses. My understanding is that this was not the case in, say, 19th Century European opera houses.

They still hoot and throw things at La Scala, is my understanding.

A lot of contemporary classical doesn't allow spaces for applause, especially with the huge contrasts you get in its dynamic range, or the incredible stillness and near silence of certain pieces - no room for that kind of audience participation.