Author: Matthew Eilar

Just a dude with a stereo, a computer, and a brain.

Stephanie Meyer

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Just like clockwork, after a new Twilight movie or book comes out, there’s a frenzy of Twilight-centric pop culture critiques that spread all over the internet. They mostly focus on these ideas: a) Twilight is a piece of shit, and b) it sends awful messages to the people who read it. What I find interesting is that most of these articles, opinion pieces, and blog posts focus on the relation between the material and the fan base, and don’t spend a whole lot of time on the author, Stephanie Meyer, herself. Personally, I didn’t know anything about her, and it was a shock to me to realize that I had never checked her Wikipedia page.

It was also shocking to me that she’s 36. I don’t know why I thought that she would be older, but I guess that I thought that the only reason that anybody would write books the way that she does is for cynical commercial reasons. Even more, she talks about the books and their inspiration, both literary and personal, as an expression of herself. This made me really uncomfortable. Even though I think it’s awful, I can understand and accept a person who writes vapid novels that are calculated to appeal to the pre- and teen demographic. But to accept Twilight as a work of art created by Stephanie Meyer suggests that the reason that the novels are so clumsy is that she is that unskilled writer, that the themes are so tacky because she is so superficial.

Reading her also made me aware of the parallels between Meyer and J.K. Rowling. Both Twilight and Sorceror’s Stone were their first novels. Both were inspired to write by a vision of their protagonists.

But their differences are telling. Rowling may not be the world’s best writer, but she is nowhere near as bad as Meyer. Even when her technique fails her, her settings are imaginative and her characters authentic. Meyer never shows when she can tell, and (here I’ll cop to not reading the whole series) in the two books I’ve read, not one character interaction has felt plausible as a human (or non-human) intereaction.

The Future of the Orchestra: Part One

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I’ve been reading a ton of articles from the web archives of classical music critic and orchestra guru Greg Sandow. There is a lot that he writes about, especially about the orchestra’s place in education, but in other respects I think he is extremely off base. One of the things that he writes about is the aging of the classical music audience, and the different ways that orchestras and classical music organizations can attract new (and younger) audiences. I think Sandow is absolutely right about the need for music organizations to literally grow their audience by being active participants in public education, however sometimes he seems preoccupied with the appearances and superficialities of the business. A small disclaimer: almost all of the articles I have been reading were published between ten and fifteen years ago, so his views might have changed since then. He runs a blog at ArtsJournal.com, but I haven’t had a chance to read that yet.

One of the ideas that Sandow repeats is the idea that if orchestras coopt and mimic the language and advertising style of pop or jazz, that audiences will be more open to attending. Another is that the very use of concert halls and concert dress (tuxedos, etc.) is outdated. I think these fixations are completely wrongheaded. I do think that there is a lot of room to experiment with advertising, and I think that ambiance and presentation are important, but I think focusing on them misses more fundemental problems.

I think the two biggest “problems” that classical music institutions must find a solution to are:

1. Classical music requires engagement by the listener. Education and experience allow greater appreciation from the music, and, in the case of Modern/New or pre-Classical music, requires the listener to allow for musical languages different from that of the dominant culture.

2. The majority of people in this country don’t think that classical music belongs to them. This is independent of race, ethnicity and class.

In forthcoming posts, I’ll propose solutions to these problems.

To One in Paradise

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Here’s a recording of my college’s chamber choir singing “To One in Paradise” by James Bernhard, a setting of the poem by Poe. It’a a little rough, but it’s a deceptively difficult song. The music isn’t that hard, but all of the lines are so slow and exposed that intonation and support are issues.