Category: Music

Steve Hyden on Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

My appreciation of Nirvana, and grunge in general, is one of the things that really sets me apart from most of the writers that I read on the internet. It’s an outsiders appreciation. I was born (barely) in the 90’s, and so much of the cultural hallmarks of that decade: Nirvana, The Simpsons, Daria, Fight Club, are things that I came to later. Even though I’m less than a decade apart in age from the people that were teenagers then, the 90’s are in their own way as remote to me as the 70’s or the 30’s. As the old adage goes, there’s no time more remote from the present as the recent past.

It is partly because of this distance that I’m fascinated by Steve Hyden’s (fairly) new series for the A.V. Club on the ascendency of Nirvana and the Seattle sound, “Whatever happened to alternative nation?” Each column looks at one aspect of that zeitgeist, dancing around Nirvana. The most recent column, “What’s so civil about war anyway?” looks at the relationship between Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose. It’s electric. It’s obviously personal territory for Hyden, and he writes both as a fan, and as a person trying to understand the psyche of their younger self. I highly recommend it.

Colin Eatock on classical music today.

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I look at my ArtsJournal RSS feed this morning, and there’s a link to a story labeled “What’s wrong with Classical Music?” I usually don’t click on these stories (after all, AJ links to about four a week), but today I did, and I’m glad, because it linked to a really thoughtful post by Colin Eatock on 3quarksdaily discussing the position of classical music within modern culture. Everyone should read it, but I’m going to to through some of his points:

The use of classical music in public places is increasingly common: in shopping malls, parking lots, and other places where crowds and loitering can be problems… The idea may be a Canadian innovation: in 1985, a 7-Eleven store in Vancouver pioneered the technique, which was soon adopted elsewhere. Today, about 150 7-Elevens throughout North America play classical music outside their stores… The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome.

This is one of the phenomena that really makes me sad and angry. There’s nothing more angering, nothing more demoralizing, than being confronted with the fact that the thing you love, the thing that you’ve invested a lot of time in, is so unpleasant that it’s seen as a deterrent. I consider it profoundly disrespectful to the artists involved. Even the most snobby and assholish classical music person (and there are fewer of those than the stereotype might suggest) loves to share their favorite music. Using music to make others unwelcome is perverse.

One of the few points that I disagree completely with (my emphasis):

So why do so many young people dislike classical music? (I include among the “young” people in their 40s, 50s and even older who have retained the musical tastes and attitudes they formed in their teens.)

Considering how evenhanded the rest of the article is, this is an incredibly bizarre categorization. Most of the classical music people I know or have read (professors, older people, academics, bloggers) listened to classical music as teenagers and, though their tastes may have changed, they speak with affection about the pieces that they fell in love with as teenagers. I think this is another version of that old chestnut, “It’s not a problem that classical audiences are getting older, after all, appreciation of classical music comes with maturity.” I think it’s pretty dangerous, if you’re trying to grow your audience, to label anyone that does not listen to your music “immature.” Furthermore, I don’t know anybody–musically educated or not, musically curious or not–that listens to the same music in the same way as they did as teenagers.

Eatock then lists common stereotypes and perceptions that are isolating classical music. The things he mentions are commonly invoked when talking about the future of classical music. This hit home:

But regardless of whether the objections are true or untrue, fair or unfair, they add up to a broad-based dismissal of classical music… [W]hat distresses me most about them is the fact that they’re not just held by those content to live in a cultural world bounded by pop music, television and major-league sports, but also by many inquisitive and sophisticated people who take an active interest in literature, film, theatre and other arts. These are exactly the kind of people who, a few generations ago, would have felt that classical music was “their” music. Yet today, even among the artistically inclined intelligentsia, classical music is often regarded as a foreign thing.

And this:

People who have heard nothing but popular music all their lives (again, a considerable chunk of the population) will, of necessity, develop certain assumptions about what music is “supposed to” sound like. Someone who only knows a repertoire of three-minute Top 40 songs in verse-chorus form may find a lengthy, textless orchestral work daunting and interminable. Someone weaned on percussive rock or rap music at high volumes may hear a string quartet as feeble and wimpy. And someone who admires the “natural” voices of Bob Dylan or Tom Waits may experience Plácido Domingo as artificial and overwrought.

I think this is the key problem that the tradition faces. Classical music is music that you have to go to. It won’t go to you. “California Gurls” is carefully crafted to embed itself in your head whether you’re actively listening to it or not. “The Unanswered Question” is not built like that. You have to convince people that there’s something there to be discovered, that there is going to be a payoff to having the patience to listen to a piece of music, to learn about it, to try and understand that. If people are convinced that it’s a dead, boring tradition, there’s no reason to take the time to understand it.

And it really does take time. I think a lot of commentators forget the total amount of time that they’ve spent listening to music. Of course somebody that’s new to the music is going to hear something different! This is why crowd pleasing/pops style concert’s don’t necessarily build audiences. If you convince people that they’re going to appreciate the music on the level of entertainment, if you try and branch out, they are going to think that they’ve been tricked, or even feel self-conscious because they’re suddenly reminded that there’s a lot of classical music that they don’t understand. And they withdraw.

This is not just a problem for classical music. Jazz has this problem. Folk musics have this problem. Any musical tradition that has values that differ from the mainstream pop soundsphere is going to have problems sustaining itself because it works against the musical grammar and logic that people hear all the time.

My solution to this problem is very traditional. While I think that more savvy publicity, technological innovations, and a more globalized classical music world are good things and will help, I’m a believer in the fundamentals.

Music education. I’m not talking about classical music appreciation classes, or some agenda to get kids to listen to classical music in school. I want it to become the norm for every kid to learn to play an instrument, even if it’s just for a little while (after all, there’s nothing that’s for everybody). The classical repertoire becomes less intimidating once you have a toehold into the world. I may never become accomplished enough at the piano to play Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, but when I fell in love with it at 11, it was partly because I associated the big, percussive chords with the stuff that I liked to play at my level. Plus, I’m a radical musical democrat, and I hate the idea that our society has created such a vast gulf between music maker and music listener (this is a whole other blog post).

Better concert programming. Most discussion of concert programming revolves around a dearth of contemporary music. Again, while I think that issue is important, I think it misses the point. Every single concert needs to be seen as an opportunity to teach your audience. Imagine if–instead of clutching to the deeply stupid, lunch-tray inspired overture/concerto/symphony format–concerts traced a single idea through their pieces in order to educate their audience. There are some orchestras that do this already, and I think it should be a priority.

Seal

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. – C.S. Lewis

It is an under-appreciated truth that listening to music changes your ears. With every new piece of music you listen to, you gain more points of reference that you can then apply to pieces you have never heard before. This is not a controversial view in other media; few people would argue that knowledge of the Bible is irrelevant to the experience of reading Paradise Lost, for example, or that one’s knowledge of kung-fu tropes affects the experience of watching Kill Bill. This is not always true of music. There is something threatening in the idea that we can grow out of the music that we like, which is, after all, an important part of the way that we express our identities both online and among our peers.

I try and keep my snobbery in check, and in fact, this post has nothing to do with the conclusions and opinions I have come to at this point, but rather about my first foray into the world of popular music.

My childhood home was both full of music and strangely devoid of music. I studied piano from a youngish age, so the sound of me practicing was common. Neither my mother nor my father, however, played music much around the house. Music was mostly something that we all listened to in the car. When my mother drove, that meant oldies radio. I can still sing along to most of the big Motown hits. When my father drove, it was classical music. This meant that I had little engagement with the music of the day, beyond those that were so ubiquitous that I heard them in stores, or at school. I had no musical identity apart from the music my parents listened to and the music that I heard on the radio.

There were a couple of signs that things were going to change–acquiring a small radio that I could listen to in my room, the CD I bought at a church-sponsored concert, access to the internet–but as sometimes happens, there was a particular song and a particular artist that I liked completely independently of my parents. I’d like to say that that artist was someone like Radiohead, or the Pixies, or Sonic Youth. Hell, I’d take the Beatles. But no, although now my present snobby self is somewhat ashamed to admit it, that artist was Seal, and the song was “Kiss From A Rose” (perhaps even more embarrassing, my first encounter with the song was through the soundtrack of Batman Forever).

Continue reading “Seal” →

Bolero?

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Posting has been a little light of late. The school year has started, and that means that I’ve been scrambling around trying to figure out where my time should be going each week. As of yet, this has not included the blog, but I do like to blog to procrastinate, so I hope that things will pick up again soon.

This year will be a big change from last year. I’m only taking one music class, a big change from last year which was almost all music classes. The class is on 20th Century Modernism, and I signed up for it mostly because of the discomfort that I have with that period of music. It’s a vast body of work, and it spans from things that I consider some of my favorite music (the ballets of Stravinsky) to things that go completely over my head (Pierrot Lunaire). Modernism is something that is easiest for me to accept in abstract terms–I love modern architecture and visual art–than in any ideological sense (I’ve never been able to understand why a Modern novel is considered as such). Music falls somewhere in between those art forms to me, and I’d like to learn what the intellectual framework of Modernism is at the same time as studying the major works.

So imagine my surprise when the first assigned piece was Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. A whole week. No assigned readings, just listening.

It’s kind of weird for me to think of Bolero as a Modernist piece of music at all, if only because I tend to associate Modernism with “difficult music.” This partly has to do with the way that Modern things are dismissed in our culture, but also with the belief that I have that some composers worked at making their music as inaccessible as possible. Perhaps that’s not true, and I may move away from it. But Bolero is not inaccessible.

I was worried at first that there would not be enough to say about the piece to last three classes, and to Ravel’s credit, that wasn’t true. At the same time, this week has been an exercise in close listening more than analysis. My professor tried to steer us towards analytical clichés like portrayals of the “other” in the second theme versus the “familiar” first theme. The repetition inherent in the piece shut down many analytical avenues, and I thought that the most valuable discussions centered on the orchestration of the piece.

Whatever the dividends, I’ll never again dismiss Bolero as a boring joke.