(Now I don't have to wake up before noon to turn this in. Yay!)
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Preservation and Innovation: The Future of
Classical Music
Zoe Grabow
First Year Seminar: Understanding
Music
December 10, 2012
I wanted to major in music performance because of an annual
variety show our high school music department put on called Fusion. It wasn’t much, but the audience
screamed for us three nights a year. It was different from all of the other
concerts, the ones to which parents would come to placate their kids and whip
out their cell phones when they thought nobody was looking. Fusion was different. I, my show choir,
and other student musicians put copious time into it, both during school and after
hours. We groused as much as we sang. Then, when show night came, those hours
disappeared. The audience refueled us. It was cliché, but all the more true
because of it. Because of Fusion, I came into college knowing a little about
musical relationships and the energy that lashed us all together, among us and
then out to the audience.
This was an idea I came to this class with, and the reaffirmation
of something I’ve consciously experienced endeared me to Christopher Small’s “musicking”
lecture that we read in class and opened me to more of his ideas.[1] One I found novel in
particular was the use of music as a verb, not a noun.[2] This taught me a lot about
the contextual value of music and what went into making it. Small elucidates by
stating that music is a process more than a product, whether in the compositional
or performing stages. Composers put many more hours into creating a work and performers
rehearsing it than a performance really lasts, and even the resulting
performance is a process—a budding bond between audience, performers, and
composers. Reading Small’s lecture allowed my experiences to latch onto far
bigger ideas. I have a habit of taking linguistics for granted, and before this
class, I would not have considered music to be anything other than a noun
because in order for “music” to be a verb without the preceding “make,” rules
would have to be bent. (This is coming from a person who strives to
differentiate between who and whom in all instances regardless of how it comes
off, says “As am/do I” as opposed to “Me too,” and corrects herself in
conversation immediately after realizing an error.)
Common statistics state that one-eighth of an iceberg visibly
protrudes from a surface of water while the other seven-eighths remain
submerged beneath. I liken this to a performance vs. rehearsal/composition
ratio in both time and effort. The idea of “musicking” is more meaningful to me
than anything else I’ve learned in this class because it denotes that music
brings all of us together, and not just in the obvious way, not just in the
finished product.
“Musicking” is a task that integrates people of many varying
occupations.
“We might even stretch the meaning on occasion to include what the
lady is doing who takes the tickets on the door, or the hefty men who shift the
piano around or the cleaners who clean up afterwards, since their activities
all affect the nature of the event which is a musical performance,” said Small.[3]
There are no limitations on who has an affect on music, and music
thus envelops us all in a way that allows it to wash over us and allows us to
shape it as well as each other in our identical, equal power of involvement. Music
becomes organic. That is a beautiful idea, and it enticed me. Furthermore, it embodied
for me everything we learned in this class—and also why I wanted to major in
music to begin with.
Unfortunately, there are obstacles to this unity. Fewer people are
showing interest in classical concerts because of age[4], venue[5], and projected stereotypes[6], among other reasons. Les
Dryer addressed the first in the New York Times last month:
Now,
while classic rock remains a vibrant radio format, and artists like the Rolling
Stones, Billy Joel, The Who and Elton John continue to be popular, middle-agers
who never migrated to classical music are content with the songs they grew up
on. Too many of those listeners were never introduced to the power of
Beethoven, the elegance of Mozart or the soulfulness of Mahler, and if they
were, it was the aural equivalent of “eating your vegetables.”[7]
The location where a concert is held influences the ambience, and
many modern audiences are uncomfortable with and/or turned off by an excessively
formal environment. Some of classical music’s notoriety for stuffiness is
deserved, but coupled with the reality are people who are so eager to place
labels on the genre that the connotation has become cringeworthy.
“I hate ‘classical
music’: not the thing but the name,” Alex Ross stated in the opening paragraph
of an essay that appeared in the New
Yorker. “It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It
cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still
be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active
composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they
do for a living.”[8]
Classical music does not extend a universal bond to a majority of
people who lack an interest in it. One of the leading obligations of classical
musicians is to preserve and maintain interest in their craft to ensure that
there will always be demand enough for it to be able to function in a
capitalist economy. The question, of course, concerns how to put a series of attainable
solutions in practice to produce this result. Lamenting our losses and licking
our wounds won’t change or better the problem or mask the fact that some
changes need to be made to integrate classical music into a modern society, no
matter how much some traditionalists dread it. (I am one of those
traditionalists.) How do we make classical music meaningful to a larger
audience again, and once we get there, how do we retrace our steps to a
universal unity?
This is not an argument for proselytizing the masses—in the first
place, that’s unethical, and in the second place, it doesn’t work. Rather, we
need a larger audience and revenue in order to make the music that we want. Orchestras
all over the country are filing for bankruptcy, and musicians are taking pay
cuts that make it virtually impossible to make a living, let alone enjoy one.
In a world of constant cultural change, classical music masks its own evolution
with a propriety that remains static, or at least changes more slowly than
other artistic genres.
My dream is a world where we don’t have to worry about any of
these problems, and may Pangloss smite me down for his notion that this is the best of all possible worlds. It’s
only the best possible world for classical music if we throw in the towel—and
there is still a plethora of viable solutions to try.
My favorite concerts to attend here at DePauw are reminiscent of
beat culture, with musical improvisations and poetry reading. I like to close
my eyes and listen just as hard: sometimes to the music, and sometimes to my thoughts.
At the George Wolfe concert in particular, I remember the music taking my mind
to a different place and allowing it to infiltrate all of my senses. I use
music as a stimulant for other expressive arenas, writing in particular. After
that concert, I went back to my room to write, and while I don’t recall the
word count at this point, it was somewhere in the thousands. Many people seem
to realize that music is a gateway to other areas, but they see classical music as one-dimensional, inert,
and dry. Whatever gets done to bring classical music back to the forefront
needs to shatter this stereotype.
Feasible solutions were brought up in this class, too, especially as
extracted from the success of iDePod. (For a few unreasonable minutes at the
beginning, I was unsure about the ability for audiences with different musical
preferences to coalesce. After everybody clapped for everybody else, I was
presently relieved.) We’ve got the right idea for bringing classical music back
to the radar, and I believe a large part of that resulted from eliminating
formality and allowing our audience to trust their instincts. We discussed the
fact that they had found a balance between respect and casualness, which
maximized everybody’s sense of comfort and enthusiasm, including the
performers. (Didn’t somebody say that the Dells were nervous before going on? I
bet that that didn’t last long.) This was an invaluable experience for me
because it renewed my faith in audiences who could stay engaged (no more
texting soccer moms), and it also gave me a place in helping to solve classical
music’s plight. I still think that soirees are the way to go—they take care of
the venue and formality grief, and they manage to retain class regardless.
(Besides, one could always throw in some philosophical discourse a la salons!)
In future, then, I plan on arranging some with friends and inviting more
friends.
Works Cited
Dreyer, Les. “Sunday Dialogue: Is
Classical Music Dying?” The New York
Times, Opinion, November 24, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-is-classical-music-dying.html?pagewanted=1&ref=opinion&_r=0(accessed
December 10, 2012).
Alex Ross. “Onward & Upward With
the Arts.” The New Yorker, February
16, 2004. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/02/16/040216fa_fact4?printable=true¤tPage=all(accessed
December 10, 2012).
George Slade. Musicians of the
Minnesota Orchestra, “Agora or Temple.” Last modified 2012. Accessed December
10, 2012. http://www.minnesotaorchestramusicians.org/?page_id=3634.
Small, Christopher. “Musicking: A
Ritual in Social Science.” Lecture, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, AU,
June 6, 1995. Accessed December 10, 2012. http://www.musekids.org/musicking.html
[1].
Christopher Small. “Musicking: A Ritual in Social Science.” Lecture, University
of Melbourne, Melbourne, AU, June 6, 1995. Accessed December 10, 2012. http://www.musekids.org/musicking.html
[2].
Ibid.
[3].
Ibid.
[4].
Les Dreyer. “Sunday Dialogue: Is Classical Music Dying?” The New York Times, Opinion, November 24, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-is-classical-music-dying.html?pagewanted=1&ref=opinion&_r=0(accessed
December 10, 2012).
[5].
George Slade. Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, “Agora or Temple.” Last
modified 2012. Accessed December 10, 2012. http://www.minnesotaorchestramusicians.org/?page_id=3634.
[6].
Dreyer, “Is Classical Music Dying?”
[7].
Ibid.
[8].
Alex Ross. “Onward & Upward With the Arts.” The New Yorker, February 16, 2004. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/02/16/040216fa_fact4?printable=true¤tPage=all(accessed
December 10, 2012).
