Record companies are trying to sell us the
idea of jazz. Diana Krall is a very talented singer and piano player,
but her publicists are peddling her as a form instant sophistication.
If you listen to Krall, suddenly you will feel all grown up and cool.
I suppose there are some who may listen to her for this reason...
http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/pul ... click=true
Pulling the strings of music fashion
July 16, 2005
The fashions of music are a dangerous thing: fashions fade, writes Andrew Ford.
I am not fashionable. My music is not fashionable. I don't expect
either my music or I ever will be, but the thing is, you never can
tell. I imagine, for example, that the Polish composer Henryck Gorecki
completely failed to predict that his third symphony would become
fashionable - especially not a decade-and-a-half after its first
performance.
Gorecki composed his slow moving and repetitious Symphony of Sorrowful
Songs in 1977; two commercial recordings were made - amazing enough
for a piece of contemporary classical music, yet still it remained
only a piece of contemporary classical music. Then in 1992, Warners
released another CD of the symphony by the London Sinfonietta with the
soprano, Dawn Upshaw, playing up the tragic aspects of the piece in
the publicity. For the next year or two the CD sold like hot cakes and
Gorecki became rather wealthy on the profits. It was the first
recording of a piece of music by a living "classical" composer to
notch up more than a million sales. In Britain, it ended up in the pop
charts.
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Good, you might say. Well, yes and no. Following on from the intense
fashion for Gorecki's third, and during the succeeding 12 years of
mounting pressure on him to produce "Gorecki's fourth", the composer
hasn't managed to finish anything of genuine substance. Fashion would
appear to have finished him off.
There are less dramatic examples. Once, the composer Michael Smetanin
was "the bad boy of Australian music". I don't know where this epithet
came from - even at the time, it was a meaningless cliche - but nearly
20 years ago his photograph was on the front page of a national
newspaper, showing him sitting in a pub over a schooner of beer
looking moody and . . . well, bad.
Now, like me, Smetanin is pushing 50. Even if he were still bad (and
of course he isn't - he never was; he was always a pussy cat), what is
quite certain is that he's no longer a boy. But what can you do when
you're landed with such notoriety? How do you survive fashion?
The trouble with being fashionable is that, sooner or later, you will
find yourself unfashionable. Fashions come and go; it is in their
nature. Smetanin has survived, and it's rather to his credit. He's
managed better than Gorecki, though Smetanin's "bad boy" image was
always of a lesser magnitude than Gorecki's image as a sort of musical
saviour. On Tuesday night, the world premiere of Smetanin's new piano
concerto will be broadcast on ABC Classic FM. We'll see just how "bad"
it is.
I am painting a distinctly negative picture of musical fashions here,
but there are some positives. It's surely a positive thing that so
many people got to hear Gorecki's third. But that piece only had to
wait 15 years before it found a broad public. Vivaldi's Four Seasons
waited much longer - 200 years longer. Today it seems impossible to
credit when the music is playing in every hotel elevator, but only
half a century ago if you had mentioned the composer or the piece -
and you happened not to be addressing a musicologist specialising in
the Italian baroque - your remarks would have been met with blankness.
No one played Vivaldi's music and no one knew his name.
Then in 1955 an Italian chamber orchestra called I Musici made a
recording of the piece - it was the orchestra's first recording of
anything - and it became suddenly fashionable. It was very much like
what happened with Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's Goldberg
Variations, made the very same year. Such was the response to I
Musici's LP of The Four Seasons that only four years later the
orchestra was obliged to record the piece again, this time in stereo.
Today, I believe, there are 120 different recorded versions available;
and still they come.
Good, you say again. Well, yes and no again. The Four Seasons is a
masterpiece - I don't think many people would dispute that - and it is
certainly good that it was rescued from oblivion. But ubiquitous is
now the word for it, and I dare say I am not alone in feeling that I
could live very happily if I didn't hear it again for the next few
years. The reason that fashions fade is that one grows used to them.
Or sick of them. And the trouble with becoming as used to (or sick of)
The Four Seasons, as many of us are, is that we find it impossible to
listen to the music. All we can do is hear and recognise it. This
might be a good moment to argue in favour of listening to music, which
is active, as opposed to hearing it, which is merely passive.
If old music can come back into fashion, immediately fashionable music
seldom survives, at least not with the same level of fame as before.
We see it all the time with pop music. January's hit is July's distant
memory. Ludwig van Beethoven thought the greatest musical genius of
his lifetime was Luigi Cherubini. I doubt there is anyone alive today
who would agree. Name me two pieces by this composer.
My generation grew up believing that Beethoven was the greatest
composer in history, but he was overtaken by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
when the movie of Amadeus came out in 1984. Suddenly there were
"Mostly Mozart" concerts everywhere. A horrible idea: Mozart may yet
be my favourite composer, but an undiluted diet of his music does him
no favours. Although not quite such a meteoric rise to fame as
Vivaldi's, Mozart's ascendancy was still quite impressive. Back in the
1930s, the conductor Thomas Beecham was still indulging in a certain
amount of special pleading on the composer's behalf.
But there can be life after fame. Survival is possible. In
18th-century London, Handel's operas were the equivalent - in terms of
the fashion for them, if not, perhaps, musical quality - of Cats or
Phantom of the Opera. Handel was a businessman, sometimes hugely
successful, sometimes not. He kept on good terms with the British
monarchy and picked up some very nice commissions as a result. But
mostly he wrote music as a commercial enterprise. It wouldn't have
entered his head to imagine that his operas might be art (art was what
he hung on his wall). But that's how we think of them. Indeed, in
recent times, these operas have become fashionable once more. But now
it's a rather recherche fashion. One of the chic-est things you can do
in a modern opera house is mount a production of Julius Caesar or
Alcina or Rinaldo.
Most religious people believe their God is unchanging. But fashions in
religious music have certainly changed. The last 1000 years of
Christianity have taken us from plainsong to Hillsong. Many of the
changes have been brought about by shifts in theology. At the Council
of Trent in the 16th century, for instance, the Catholic Church
attacked excessive polyphony for clouding matters of doctrine. All
that rich, multi-layered choral music from the Renaissance might sound
very nice but who could understand the words? What was needed was to
wind the clock back and return to simple chant. Fortunately, the great
Roman composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was able to come up
with a half-way house that seemed to satisfy his Pope - a sort of
limited polyphony that allowed the words of the liturgy to be heard -
and thus (or so goes the legend) Catholic music was saved from an
unrelieved diet of chanting.
What is so interesting about the middle-of-the road pop that plays in
Pentecostal churches today is that the words are relatively
unimportant. As with secular pop, a few rather obvious phrases are
repeated over and over, providing not doctrine (that happens
elsewhere) so much as mood enhancement. And the significance of this
is that it is actually musical fashion that has led the way. Young
people feel comfortable with pop music, so that's what Hillsong and
the Christian City Church serve up. It's not as new as you might
think. After all, Luther did something similar, though his chorales
preached a relatively complex message.
There are those who maintain that fashion is the enemy of great music.
Of course it's not that simple. They are entirely different things. So
are fashion and popularity. Popularity often lasts; fashion, by
definition, must fade. Popularity is usually based on musical worth,
fashion need not be and usually isn't. It is like marketing. Marketing
has never made a piece of music greater than it already was, but it
has often made it seem more important than it is.
Fashion is all about appearances, so usually it is not the music
itself, but the idea of the music that makes it fashionable.
Orchestras promote the idea of classical music. It will soothe our
cares (well, some of it will) or inspire us (ditto) or make us better
people (very doubtful). Record companies are trying to sell us the
idea of jazz. Diana Krall is a very talented singer and piano player,
but her publicists are peddling her as a form instant sophistication.
If you listen to Krall, suddenly you will feel all grown up and cool.
I think something similar has happened with what the recording
industry labelled "world music". We like the idea of "world music". It
sells us the idea of renewal. It takes us back to simpler times when
music was part of everyone's daily life, happening joyously and
spontaneously (remind me, when was that again?). World music seems to
us somehow authentic. And some of it is authentic. Some, of course, is
little more than a commercial confection of authentic-sounding
moments.
But what happens to a genuine musical tradition that has existed
happily and perhaps for centuries in an obscure corner of West Africa
or Eastern Europe when it is suddenly thrust on to the world stage?
And what happens when the fashion for it fades?
When it comes to music, fashion, if not the enemy, must certainly be
regarded with deep suspicion. For every piece or type of music that
fashion has brought to the world's attention, there's at least one
more it has destroyed. Music must be very strong to survive the image
makers. Of course, fortunately, the best of it is.
Andrew Ford is a composer, writer and broadcaster. His six-part series
Music and Fashion begins tomorrow at 5pm on ABC Radio National.
