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Ray and Keith,
I have thoroughly enjoyed your posts on the malaise
of contemporary music. I love music and it has always been a vital part of
my life in terms of spiritual renewal. At this moment I am listening to
French composer Philippe Sarde's rapturous score for Roman Polanski's film,
TESS. The experience of music, of course, is a subjective thing
always. So here is my take on the music and society relationship
referenced in the insightful INDEPENDENT article posted by Keith.
A lot of contemporary music, in my mind, comes off
sounding generic and technically sophisticated, but disconnected from human
essences, as our society has become increasingly preoccupied with technique and
atmosphere, but disconnected from human essences, human feeling. Melody is
almost the bane of contemporary composers. Ray mentioned LORD OF THE
RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING. Part of Howard Shore's achievement in the score
of that film was a return to Wagnerian roots in the scoring. Motifs for
ideas, characters, situations, and emotion ie. themes for the Orcs,
Ringwraiths, Gollum, 'the fellowship' and so on. The warm 'fellowship'
theme and the Celtic influenced 'Hobbiton' theme easily connect with
most film audiences because they have feeling. Viewers less
passionate about filmmusic than I am have commented to me about the appeal of
the 'Hobbiton' theme and a young composer, with whom I spoke recently,
spent 5 minutes enthusiastically dissecting the 'fellowship'
theme. Howard Shore (a Canadian composer) has commented his approach
(soloists, chorus, and large symphonic orchestra [The London Philharmonic] was
influenced was operatic forms and he sees his massive 9 hours score as an
opera. There is nothing novel in this approach as the style is essentially
similar to the approach of Austrian wunderkind Erich Wolgang Korngold when he
fled to Hollywood in the 1930s. Shore is currently on world tour with his
2 hour LOTR Symphony. It will be interesting to see how audiences
respond to this dramatic music that challenges them to 'feel.' Ray,
I would be interested in your deeper comments on the score.
I was interested in your comments on opera,
Ray. The ideological analysis was particularly good. I would only
add that I cannot imagine Franco Zefferelli staging one of his operas without
corporate sponsorship or a conglomerate of wealthy patrons. Western opera,
in my mind, is associated with the rising middle classes of industrial
capitalism who were cultivating their own notion of high culture that reflected
their own social mores, including racism, and a fascination with orientalism and
were prepared to put some of their wealth into the building of opera
houses. I see it as a form of class elitism. In futureart I would
hope that the masses could reappropriate musical _expression_ as a natural
extension of human communication and humanity, reflecting their lived
experiences. If someone feels like singing to express either sadness or
happiness, then it will be seen as something beautiful, and not something
'weird', as I have sometimes seen it labelled. One of the beautiful
moments in RETURN OF THE KING, I noticed, was that when Eragon was crowned king,
he sang a song to his people as part of the ceremony.
My German Shepherd dog has come to say hello, so I
had better send this before her snout causes me to lose this
message.
I enjoyed your posts.
Best regards,
Bob
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 8:41
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Where has music
gone? (Revised)
> What a lovely post Keith,
For me it was the Brahm's Requiem and the first time
singing with the
orchestra. We had plenty of first class
choruses in Tulsa but never had I
experienced the orchestra with the
descending three part women's chords with
the resounding D pedal
point. It was an important moment but I will never
forget the
absolutely sublime chords as the chorus rose higher and higher
in
Schoenberg's magnificent Friede auf Erde. Peace on Earth or
the first time
I really "got" the Beethoven Ode to Joy which seemed musty
the first time I
heard it. It took many hearings for me to
crawl into its eccentricities.
I will never forget the first singer that I
taught that opening baritone
solo too. I almost cried
because it had come to mean so much to me on the
reservation.
Or playing the trombone in the Prelude to Act III Lohengrin.
On and
on.
That is the place where I experienced community in the
non-Indian world.
Peter Drucker imagined the ideal of the modern
corporation as an orchestra.
If you've never played in one or even sung in
a chorus you have no hope of
knowing what he meant. The closest
you can get is the imaginary "higher
beings" in the old star trek series or
ESP.
Reading your article I agree that we must stress amateur
musicians once
again but it must be secular. It never
left our churches over here for
the concert hall. The Concert
Halls have died while the churches have
flourished. You can
experience more music of more variety in church in
America than any other
place. Quite the opposite from Europe. On the
other
hand such live and participatory music has been cut off from
the
non-Christian people who do not have this music available in the
secular
world except in dead recordings.
Don't get me wrong. I love my Abbado tapes and
there are many singers that
I never would have heard except on recording
but it was singing on stage
with the Richard Tuckers, Cornell McNeil,
George London, Anna Moffo, or
watching the great Cherokee ballerina Yvonne
Chouteau from the stage that
touched my heart and opened my
soul. I can put all the missing parts into
the tapes because I
played in orchestras, sang in choruses and performed on
the stage with the
greatest singers in the world from the time I left the
reservation at
17. On the reservation almost everybody did some kind
of
art. We all sang, played instruments and did the
traditional crafts.
Today many families maintain their ties by doing crafts
together and
traveling around to the Powwow summer festivals to dance and
sell the crafts
that they make during the winter months.
A Doctor once asked me if there were any great American
Indian operas or
works of art. I mentioned the Deer Dance and
the Navajo "sings" but he
thought that was strange. Opera means
"work" and is a multimedia work of
painting, dance, instruments and of
course singing. The Deer Dance is a
nine day festival
filled with all of the above and a Navajo "sing" is a many
day solo tour de
force of design, dance , singing and drama, all for the
same reason
as the original Greek dramas at Epidoris. Healing the soul
and
the community. We have forgotten the reason for the music
in the first
place and forgotten how to feel. We have also
forgotten that it takes
great skill and development to do both in the more
advanced disciplines.
That is the one place where I disagree with your
article. I find the music
of the composers that he thought
failures to be as beautiful and enriching
as the "old favorites" that he
mentions as well. In fact I find the newer
works indicative of the
time from which they are drawn and that for me is
what a large part of it
is all about. I'll never forget an audience
weeping at a
Holocaust minimalist piece at the Guggenheim. It
was
minimal, simple in concept but incredible in execution. The
dancer ran up
and down a ramp as fast as she could for almost thirty
minutes. The ramp
was wood and resounded with her feet as a drum as
the history of the
holocaust was projected on Frank Lloyd Wright's white
walls of the museum.
At first it was annoying, in the end the actual
devastating fatigue of the
dancer as she simply ran up and down, changing
directions at each end was a
inescapable for us as for
her. Her task (a part of the aleatory art form
since it
was filled with chance decisions unthought before hand) and the
reality of
the banality of her task along with the inescapable reality
translated as
being trapped, courageous, determined and for a moment
connected us to the
reality of a truly trapped individual with our being
guards who made her
continue to the end. The parallel was devastating as
the
entire audience wept no matter what people they were from.
What are the physical forms of the theater and their
meanings? The
orchestra is the underworld that feeds the themes
of life to the people on
the stage while the audience is the angels or
demons who determine the
success or failure of actual
performance. Something that we learn about
life and transfer
into our own world as humanity. Who has not enjoyed and
learned
from Baron Ochs and the Marshallin in the last act of Der
Rosencavellier as
he realizes that she has had a tryst with Octavian but is
unable to turn it
to his own advantage and the heavenly trio that follows as
the Marshallin
gives up her 17 year old lover to his new wife? What do
we
learn about the culture of the Ottoman Empire and the little
turbaned
servant who leaves nothing behind to be used against his mistress
at the
end?
Last night I went to the "Wagner like" movie "Return of
the King" the third
of the Tolkien trilogy. It was thrilling
although more than a little
stereotypical and racist in the attitudes of
Tolkien its author. The
"inferior human
races" were of course the only turbaned and black faces in the
film
while the elves were gorgeous white faces mostly blond.
Remember
this wasn't historical Europe but the pre-world "Middle
Earth."
(I didn't make it clear in the previous
version that "inferior human races" was
not my designation but in the script of
the movie. REH)
Of course it was wonderful to see the little hobbits
dreaming of
undiscovered American Indian strawberries and bringing in a
huge pumpkin
also developed by American Indian agricultural scientists not
in the
pre-world but in the historical present. But those are
little things
probably not thought about in Tolkien's English
world. But it was a grand
story with great computer human mixes
and all on the huge I Max 5 story tall
screen. Fairy Liv Tyler
speaking Gaelic was gorgeous and the mountains of
New Zealand are
amazing. The orchestra was fun and the fight scenes were
OK,
although nothing of the kind of devastation that I felt reading them
years
ago. The little Epilogue at the end I found over long and
cloying
but the whole film, after the initial enjoyment of the effects,
left me with
both admiration and an uneasy feeling.
The good Sam and the evil Smeagal whose altar ego is
gollum same sound as
the Golum in Jewish literature. I suspect
Tolkien was well aware of the
Dybbuk and the Golum. Given the
other stereotyping and the obvious
connection of the Ring to power which
easily could be material power
considering "eating the forest" and
creating the hellish factory which
created war machine in film
II. The Ring could easily be connected to
industrialization and
economic power and poor Smeagol was taken in and
destroyed and turned into
Gollum by it. Does all of that story make you as
queasy as it
does me? I've heard the story before to describe
Jewish
people. Having worked with a lot of European
legends not to mention
Shakespeare and the stereotypes from The Merchant of
Venice to Beckmesser in
Meistersinger, I felt that Tolkien whether
deliberately or subconsciously
was exercising a cartoon stereotype that I
didn't want particularly in my
own head. I don't mind
Beckmesser or Carmen because they are from another
generation which was
more provincial and did not know what we know today.
But seeing this film
come out in the 21st century with these hidden
characters I found
offensive. Instead of discussing it on the various
sites
on the internet dedicated to Tolkien, it is treated as if it
didn't
exist. I spoke today to a Jewish student who had a
strong reaction to the
first of the three films and refused to see the
other two. It took me
three to take offense but sometimes I'm
slow.
So I went home and watched the real thing, Wagner,
Lohengrin. With the
passionate Abbado in the pit and the
Spanish Domingo as the Knight of the
Holy Grail. I listened to
all of the blatant stereotyping and it made me
see our Western ancestors
once more, clearly. Wagner's music was
unbelievable and
those amazing preludes conducted with genius by Abbado.
Even on video it
was thrilling. The richness of the score, the singing and
the
commitment of the artists made me see the potential of these
human
characters of Brabant while understanding how such "artistic souls"
could
have decimated my people with impunity and then turned on themselves
in
their racism in the 20th century. More than
Tolkien's simple tale with
a lot of violence and crude subhuman
characters and Godlike white folks,
this complicated story of secrecy and
the complexity of what betrayal meant,
the loss of power through
transparency is deceptively "simple." The power
of secrecy
whether benign or evil and the importance of trust in the same
way that
Orpheus "blew it" with Euridice or Coyote did with his daughter
here our
myths. In Lohengrin the Gods of the Forest are the evil with
the
priestess Ortrud standing in as the revenge element against the
more
"modern" Knight Templar Lohengren. That was
good religion versus bad
religion with chauvinistic culture thrown in for
spice, but this "racist
issue awareness" is new.
What became accepted was the "problem" of the other, the
conquered, the
inferior, the Smeagal the gollum, the evil
spirit. Blacks moved from the
pre-history riders of
Mastodons in Tolkien to the little black turbaned
footboy in
Rosencavallier. Rosencavallier is older but the point is
still
the same. He moves from terrorist to controlled
child. Racism then is
diffused. Its just economics
and Anti-semitism, racism, religious
intolerance becomes a tool for
politics.
How easily we complain about racism in politics like
David Brooks, in
today's NYTimes, assigning anti-Semitism to those who see
a connection
between the writers who cut their teeth in the Jewish
Commentary magazine
and who to a man have provided a rational for the war
in Iraq. Calling
them Jewish is true since most of them wrote
for a conservative Jewish
magazine. Calling them Jewish in
their cause is not true unless you have
never heard of Tikkun which is more
representitive of American Jewery
although most Jews in America support
Israel. Wrapping neo-conservative
in Judaism is just as
racist as wrapping Tom DeLay and GWB in the American
flag or worse
Christianity. But racism is a real issue and it goes far
beyond
such trivializing. The attitude towards Iraq is
genuinely
culturally chauvinistic since the people advocating the war are
appalling in
their ignorance of Islamic culture or even the Arab
languages. It is one
thing to indiscriminately retaliate
against a state or group that attacks
you as in 9/11, it is quite another
just to pick someone and pronounce them
more evil than the rest in spite of
their history and their relationship to
you. Death is
death. If you kill children from the air or throw them
off
buildings they are still dead and in the service of what you want
to
accomplish. Both are evil acts. And I do believe
in evil. But I am a
man of the theater.
What has been missed by those who do not know their
heritage, and thus their
ancestors first hand, by participating in the same
sounds, rhythms, words
and feelings from times so long ago? Is
self knowledge not important and
does not such artistic experience bring us
idenity and knowledge of our
history? How poor is value when it
is determined solely by pure monetary
profit? How
degrading is it to society when the ancestors are made
available only to
the wealthy? That is the gift of the communities of
faith
to their congregations. But the glue that would cement a
society in
all American communities is missing unless they are Christian
and can hear
and perform the great Western Masterworks in
Church.
Thanks Keith for bringing this Future work of art to the
list.
Ray Evans Harrell,
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Keith Hudson"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 11:02 AM
> Subject: [Futurework] Where
has music gone?
>
>
> > 246. Where has music
gone?
> >
> > And, come to think of it, where has art gone,
or poetry, or philosophy, or
> > architecture? Apart from also
getting into a real mess.
> >
> > The new book, Music
Healing the Rift, by Ivan Hewett and as summarised by
> > Michael
Church in a recent review in the Independent, describes my own
> >
feelings about modern music -- popular or 'art/serious' -- exactly. I
>
> didn't discover choral singing until I was in my early 50s, but the
first
> > day I attended a rehearsal with an invisible sign saying
"Imposter" above
> > my head, and heard the first notes of Mozart's
Requiem rising around me
> > from the basses and tenors, tentatively
at first and then more firmly, the
> > tears flowed down my cheeks.
And the tears flow now as I write,
> remembering
> > that
wonderful occasion. Since that day, I have sung in many choral works,
>
> long and short -- though never very competently -- and I've also
enjoyed
> > the conviviality and comradeship of being in a
choir.
> >
> > Which brings me immediately to something else
that we have lost in the
> > course of the past century. Community.
I've experienced brief glimpses of
> > community in my life --
sitting in an air-raid shelter during WWII as the
> > bombs fell
around us during the Coventry Blitz, and all the street sitting
> >
there, neighbourly animosities put on one side for the moment, singing
the
> > latest pop songs. And a few other occasions. But not a great
many.
> >
> > In the last century, the consumer society has
torn the family away from
> the
> > community, has torn the
young and the old of the family apart, has torn
> sex
> > away
from love and is even now tearing away at natural partnerships,
> >
producing increasingly larger numbers of isolated individuals with all
>
> sorts of fetishes. I believe, however, that the instincts of community
are
> > still deep and strong within us and must necessarily
re-emerge. I think
> > that the new managed communities in America
are an early sign of this,
> even
> > though they are not
everybody's cultural cup of tea at present. I think
> > that a
necessary cluster of economic and technological factors must yet
> >
become more focussed before communities can become widespread again, but
I
> > think they'll return. We have lost too much.
>
>
> > I think I might re-read News from Nowhere (William Morris)
which I first
> > read 45 years ago but is still a precious book on
my shelves. Morris was
> > hopelessly idealistic and unrealistic
about human nature, but at least he
> > tapped into something very
profound in that book. When the time is ripe
> and
> > the
customer demands it from the multinational CEO and the politician
>
alike
> > (or perhaps invalidates them both) then we could recreate
An Epoch of
> Rest,
> > as Morris subtitled it.
>
>
> > Keith Hudson
> >
> >
<<<<
> > THE WESTERN WORLD MUST LEARN TO SING
AGAIN
> >
> > Micahel Church
> >
> >
Review of:
> > Music Healing the Rift by Ivan Hewett (Continuum,
2003)
> >
> >
> > Until recent times, says Ivan
Hewett, music was everywhere, and always an
> > authentic _expression_
of the social situation that called it forth. The
> > idyll was
shattered, in the developed West, by the notion that music could
> >
be transportable a mass could be taken out of church and performed in
a
> > concert hall. Then music began its long retreat from the public
domain. It
> > turned into something made en famille, then something
listened to in the
> > privacy of a room, until finally the Walkman
reduced its operative space
> to
> > six inches between the
ears.
> >
> > Hewett's book is fruitfully complex I could
have extracted several other
> > narratives which would have
summarised music's trajectory just as well.
> The
> > "rift" in
his title denotes nothing so banal as that between classicists
> >
and modernists. His big theme is the falling-apart of the
> >
laboriously-constructed musical realm of the early 20th century, and
the
> > perennial desire, among composers, to make it whole again. As
he makes
> > clear, that crisis reflects a falling-apart in our
entire culture. Putting
> > it together again - if such a thing is
possible - would benefit us all.
> >
> > His focus is on
composers past and present. Deploying the expertise which
> > made
him the ideal anchorman for Radio 3's Music Matters, Hewett writes
>
> with easy authority. He has interviewed widely, read deeply, listened
at
> > length his nine short chapters ripple with provocative
insights. Sometimes
> > the writing is too densely philosophical for
the argument to be
> immediately
> > grasped, but that only
puts it on a level with its subject-matter.
> >
> > One of
Hewett's many sub-plots follows the rise of the programme note,
> >
starting with Berlioz's instructions on how to listen to the Symphonie
>
> Fantastique, and culminating in the current situation where it's
>
> unthinkable for a new work to be presented without copious verbal
>
> explication. Herein lies the misery of the modernist composer obliged
to
> > teach the audience a new language, but inevitably doomed to
fail.
> >
> > Hewett writes so illuminatingly about
Birtwistle, Boulez, Cage and Carter
> > that one feels impelled to
listen again. Though sympathetic, he admits
> that
> > that
their invented private languages don't add up to a reconstituted
> >
public realm. He is acerbic about the blind alley of "world music",
>
> pleasantly waspish about John Tavener and prophets of the New Naivety,
and
> > shows the futility of trying to "remake" tonality. The power
of classical
> > tonality in its heyday derived from a perfect
reciprocity between form and
> > social function. The genie's out of
the bottle.
> >
> > What now? Hewett offers a brilliant tour
d'horizon of music's multifarious
> > new directions -- aided by
sampling tricks, fuelled by PC notions -- but
> > concludes that if
we want to "heal the rift", we can't delegate the job to
> >
composers. We must all start making music again. If we play and sing,
we
> > will once more listen actively too. And that way lies musical
health.
> >
> > Independent -- 1 January 2004
>
> >>>>
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> > Keith Hudson, Bath,
England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
> >
> >
_______________________________________________
> > Futurework
mailing list
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework>
>
>
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