Where The Boundaries Are
Earlier in the year, I pledged to spend the summer finding out: Where are the Begrenzungen? (in German, literally meaning borders, but taken by me to mean musical boundaries [stylistic, but also structural, presentational, compositional, whatever really]).
So far as I can see, musical boundaries are wherever you wish them to be, but with the proviso that they should, in order to be effective, be vaguely related (by those perceiving them) to previously established boundaries, so that people can make sense of them, even if they push beyond the comfort zone of their current expectations. Cor, long sentence.
For instance, if I play Bach with a weird new conception of vibrato and sound that improves upon but doesn't betray the best traditions of established Bach interpretation, then people will find it interesting, even if they don't like it.
If I play Bach on the xylophone with an R&B backing track and very loose tonality, it will have breached the boundary of acceptability, not because it doesn't have any artistic merit (though of course it might not!) but because it is not easy for the audience to find any way to relate to it.
This ties in very nicely with Greg Sandow's argument that the so-called crisis in classical music happened partly because of the severity of the modernist movement; there just wasn't enough for a mainstream musical audience to hang onto, yet they were still forced to listen, and therefore became alienated ("no one forces book groups to labor through Finnegans Wake; nobody puts art films in a multiplex").
In a sense, we are always constrained by the current expectations of our present day audience. But this also liberates us; the moment we manage to connect and gain their trust and acceptance, by producing and representing that which they like and enjoy, we can then draw them forward and expand those very same boundaries and expectations that before seemed like an obstacle. The audience's attention will follow ("We liked what he did before - why not give this a try?").
Empirical evidence of my own from excursions to some of England's wilder suburban communities (!) suggests that the same parallel is equally valid when introducing so-called musically 'uneducated' people (like you need to be educated to enjoy music!) to types of music for the first time. If you can tap into and relate to their current experience, you can introduce people to whatever you wish. Getting 14 year olds with severe discipline problems to appreciate Wagner with more enthusiasm than a conservatoire student might sound like pie-in-the-sky to you, but I've done it. Frequently.
If this is all true, and I think it is, then this is great news, because it means that there's no crisis in classical music at all. We ('classical' musicians) are just not empathetic enough to the nature of our social environment.
Therefore, don't be surprised if this tour we're doing (tickets on sale 1st November pluggy pluggy clicky clicky) is slickly marketed and full of pictures of nice middle class boys who are charming on the radio and thrill Granny with virtuosic double stops and tricky harmonics. Instead, smile knowingly to yourself and know that accessibility and flighty repertoire choices are simply an entry point to more sophisticated classical artforms.
Where 4 octave arpeggios tread, transcendence is sure to follow. Or something.
So far as I can see, musical boundaries are wherever you wish them to be, but with the proviso that they should, in order to be effective, be vaguely related (by those perceiving them) to previously established boundaries, so that people can make sense of them, even if they push beyond the comfort zone of their current expectations. Cor, long sentence.
For instance, if I play Bach with a weird new conception of vibrato and sound that improves upon but doesn't betray the best traditions of established Bach interpretation, then people will find it interesting, even if they don't like it.
If I play Bach on the xylophone with an R&B backing track and very loose tonality, it will have breached the boundary of acceptability, not because it doesn't have any artistic merit (though of course it might not!) but because it is not easy for the audience to find any way to relate to it.
This ties in very nicely with Greg Sandow's argument that the so-called crisis in classical music happened partly because of the severity of the modernist movement; there just wasn't enough for a mainstream musical audience to hang onto, yet they were still forced to listen, and therefore became alienated ("no one forces book groups to labor through Finnegans Wake; nobody puts art films in a multiplex").
In a sense, we are always constrained by the current expectations of our present day audience. But this also liberates us; the moment we manage to connect and gain their trust and acceptance, by producing and representing that which they like and enjoy, we can then draw them forward and expand those very same boundaries and expectations that before seemed like an obstacle. The audience's attention will follow ("We liked what he did before - why not give this a try?").
Empirical evidence of my own from excursions to some of England's wilder suburban communities (!) suggests that the same parallel is equally valid when introducing so-called musically 'uneducated' people (like you need to be educated to enjoy music!) to types of music for the first time. If you can tap into and relate to their current experience, you can introduce people to whatever you wish. Getting 14 year olds with severe discipline problems to appreciate Wagner with more enthusiasm than a conservatoire student might sound like pie-in-the-sky to you, but I've done it. Frequently.
If this is all true, and I think it is, then this is great news, because it means that there's no crisis in classical music at all. We ('classical' musicians) are just not empathetic enough to the nature of our social environment.
Therefore, don't be surprised if this tour we're doing (tickets on sale 1st November pluggy pluggy clicky clicky) is slickly marketed and full of pictures of nice middle class boys who are charming on the radio and thrill Granny with virtuosic double stops and tricky harmonics. Instead, smile knowingly to yourself and know that accessibility and flighty repertoire choices are simply an entry point to more sophisticated classical artforms.
Where 4 octave arpeggios tread, transcendence is sure to follow. Or something.
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