People say: Is classical music dying? Go to Covent Garden and you can view the corpse.
–Joe Queenan reacts negatively on Newsnight Review earlier this evening to Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s new opera The Minotaur
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Samizdata quote of the dayApril 18th, 2008 |
 14 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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I couldn’t find the Joe Queenan Minotaur review you mentioned. Could you re-post the link?
I did, however, enjoy the Josh Karp interview of Queenan.
I think it was a television review, hence no link to it.
Is that the same Joe Queenan as the one who wrote Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon?
I did not care for the book. I found it smug, superior, and frankly bitchy.
As for what’s going on with classical music…I’m not really able to have an opinion. Other than liking Sergei Prokofiev and John Willians, that is. (Which probably will get me an entry in Queenan’s next book)
Classical Music is not dying. It is alive and well and living in Frankfurt, where it makes a very comfortable living writing award winning scores for Hollywood Blockbusters.
I stopped listening to classical music some time ago, after having become bored with all the good stuff written a few centuries ago, but am unable to tolerate the antonal mish mash that is “modern classical”
However, I find myself listening anew to the scores written by the likes of Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt for movies like Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.
In a century of so, people like this will be recognized as the Handels and Beethovens of our era (although not quite up to Mozart or Bach).
I cant stand modern atonal either.
No it is not dead but it has been static for quite a while.
The reason for that in my opinion is the insistence on an orchestra or whatever, playing the piece or symphony exactly as written by the composer.
Back in the days of Bach and Beethoven, orchestras were allowed to improvise certain passages.
“Classical” music has been ” dying ” for the past hundred years. The audience has as far I can remember always been elderly, but it always seems to be replaced by people discovering it as they get older. There is an extensive reportory of drop dead gogeous music going back 600 years depending on ones definition of classical. I don’t know much about the newer stuff,but something like Penderecki’s 2nd Symphony might be a revelation.
I should live so long.
What I meant: I should live as long as classical music. The schools here in the US have done no one a favor in dropping music appreciation.
I think DocBrown is right. There is some pretty good music (as well as a whole lot of trash!) being written today for movie scores. Of course, that’s the way it has always been. A century or so clears out the debris and the really good stuff remains; eventually we start referring to it as “classical”. There weren’t many movies being made in the 19th century, but people needed entertainment and opera was an important medium. Lots of second-rate composers made good livings writing forgettable (and forgotten) operas to fill up the opera houses. Today we only bother with the best of it. The next century will treat us the same way.
I’m not particularly fond of modern atonal music either (drawing a distinction between “atonality” and “dissonance”; the latter can add some wonderful spice to music), but to a large extent I think that’s a function of how our ears are trained. In the late Romantic era people were shocked and outraged by what was then “modern” music, because they couldn’t get their ears around the new tonalities. (There’s a wonderful book by Nicolas Slonimsky called “Lexicon of Musical Invective” which reprints savage contemporary reviews of composers whose works we revere today. A random example: Mahler had not much to say in his Fifth Symphony and occupied a wonderous time in saying it. His manner is ponderous; his matter imponderable. Wonderful!) Future audiences, having the benefit of familiarity, might find some of our modern stuff more accessible and enjoyable than we do. Time will tell; it always does.
Classical music is not dying. It’s just harder to make a good living out of playing or recording classical music. Technology marches on.
DocBrown: The soundtrack for the movie The Time Machine is fantastic if you haven’t heard it (Klaus Badelt).
“Classical” does not have to mean “Orchestral”.
One day today’s music will be considered ‘Classical Music of the Rock Era’ and inattentive students will mix it up with ‘Classical Music of the Romantic Era’ and think that Procol Harum was a Russian composer and Freddie Mercury performed for the Salzburg Court and has a statue in Vienna.
Doubtful.
New opera is very much alive and well in Scotland. The ‘Five for Fifteen’ was wonderful. You should lobby to get it performed in London.
Somewhere my parents have a cassette they taped off the radio of an R3 broadcast of Birtwhistle’s Xenakis Ais. They used to play it every now and again just for a laugh. It sounds like sacks of cats being fed into a woodchipper. It is the sort of utterly meretricious pseudo-highbrow crap where you have to be that deeply earnest sort of stupid to enjoy (or pretend to enjoy, rather; I cannot imagine anyone actually liking it.) Birtwhistle is as big a fraud as John Cage and all the rest of that dreary crowd of poseurs who wouldn’t recognise a melody if ran up their leg and bit them in the scrotes.