[Futurework] Re: Classical Music in Enlgand (was: Enslaved by Free Trade?)

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Thanks Keith,     Might we term your economics Newtonian and mine Quantum? (tease)    Thanks for the article.   It does get around to the reason that it hasn't yet helped the British educational system.    Even classical music can be simple hedonism and hedonism is not developing of the mind.    You have to learn, as the late chromatic audiences did to DO the music and that means perform it and write it.    Commercial musicians do both as did the Liverpool Gang but their writing was very simple.   Their performance work on the other hand when taken holistically was extremely flexible and dense which created a virtuosic complexity but the compositions were too banal to sustain the true exploration which was in the performing.   Same problem for old jazz performed today.    A string of clich�'s strung together does not equal modern art unless you are making the point that the audience is dumb.     Chromatic music is every bit as complicated to learn to do as is Eliot Carter or Milton Babbit.    If you truly understand it, it is also as difficult to inhabit consciously as an audience.    Richard Strauss is the most difficult operatic composer I know.    The serial composers may be more difficult rhythmically but tonally they are not as difficult for me anyway.    Serial composition is initially difficult.   In the 1960s we recorded the Schoenberg male choruses one phrase at a time because of the difficulty.   Today there are advanced high school madrigal choirs who perform them after having heard our recording enough times.   Complexity declines through supply and practice.    Problems are solved.   Solving complex artistic problems are always excellent practice for solving the simply intellectual ones.       Let me give you an example from the present.   I am a master voice teacher.    I am not a master writer on the computer but I hold my own with most.    I have run a company for 25 years that has done outstanding artistic things, even cutting edge ones.   Unlike most not-for-profits we have always balanced our budgets as well but that is another story.   I am now putting together a Festival that has an initial budget of a million dollars or so.   It is always more than you say but that also is another story.    I was told two days ago that I had a reputation in the business as a "miracle worker."    Nice compliment and I immediately took advantage of that capital.     I put things together (when most capitalists quit) and they work. (Harry's wall)   Not unusual for most artists I might add.   Most would call this a very complicated venture.      But I can still do it even with the vertigo that I developed last week.   I can also  participate competently in business meetings on the highest levels with the top people in Arts and Entertainment and otherwise.   But what I cannot do with vertigo is perform.   In fact I have had to stop my performing and conducting because they require more holistically of me than the other jobs.      Teaching a voice lesson where I must take the complex psycho-physical reality that a sound represents into my brain, analyze it and construct an answer in the immediate moment then transfer that answer to my own voice and hands on the piano is exhausting with vertigo.   I couldn't get through the day two days ago.    I then slept for 12 hours when my normal amount is from four to six.   This stuff that we do with a joy and a gusto is hard.    Not complex but hard.   It is not complex because I have done it for 48 years and know it very well but doing it is another matter completely.     On the other hand I can sit and work at the computer all night long and barely be tired at all.   It's easy.   Planning a national approach to the Festival is also not that hard and doing the polls with the various groups is a snap on the internet.    Business is really easy to do on the internet and takes not much more than the discipline of practice.    Working on a phrase in a Rachmaninoff prelude for hours is more difficult and more arduous and more fun.    But doing this repetitive business work is the work of the retail salesman and it is easy and requires immediate gratification in the form of money to make it valuable because on a psycho-physical level it is not.     But on a personal level when you are "selling it" that is different.   The complexity of the "sell" is about cleverness and has the whole human drama of right and wrong, cheating or helping, stealing etc.    That is theater but with the implication of the trick that the audience will have to live with.   Academia is much like that as well since it is involved with "mass production" or "education of scale" rather than the development of individual mastery.    Only the most simple things can be taught in lectures and in classrooms.   Most education is meant to channel hormones.   As are most of the things that we sell in the marketplace.    But not Art.   Art has deeper purposes and rewards.   There are two areas of damage in my brain from the lead poisoning that are truly hard for me.   Numbers and language memory.    Even there, when I totally immerse myself as in going to a foreign country, those channels revive.   Total immersion for an opera or a song cycle was also very good but I found that it made the rest of life impossible in order to do it.   I tend to have to inhabit whole systems one at a time due to the damage in my brain.    I'm slow on the uptake but total immersion brings me along quickly.   I also have to do the Math from the top down.   Early testing proved that those of us with lead poison were able to develop practical answers to things quickly and had to use the practical to get to the abstraction beneath.   That is the reverse of academic instruction.   So I start better in Math with the Mega issues rather than with arithmetic which still is very erratic.   At one point since I was taught algebra by an arithmetic specialist I invented my own algebra without realizing it to solve a problem.   Only later did I discover that all of those "object related" maxims that he had taught like numbers were the same thing that I had done in order to solve a problem or more accurately in order to see the form of a problem on the page.     I once read that Einstein said that if he taught children he too would begin with the Mega issues first.  I wonder if he had a handicap?   Back to the "classics"   if you want to hear Ravel in America listen to Stephen Sondheim.   He wrote Ravel operas.   But that is not what I mean for the education problem.   I'm talking about the kind of involvement with music that is problem solving on a psycho-physical level.   An example would be the late magnificent amateur movement that was killed by the elitist musicians aligned with their capitalist masters.    They insisted that only professionals could truly do music and that was a lie for a political purpose.   Domenico Scarlatti wrote the essercizi for an amateur harpsichordist who was a finer virtuoso than most pianists today.   The man who taught Caruso La Gioconda in a week was an aristocrat amateur coach who Caruso said was one of the finest he encountered.   It is in the building of Truth and Beauty in the exceptionalism of the mind of the average human being that we find the real purpose of Art and Artistic Education.     Not the development of audience consumers.    They are a byproduct of the real work.   In the Arts we are all made "audience" by greatness.    Without greatness we should all be performers until one arises.    All reality flows from the maturity of the Aesthetic.    That is the beginning of education.   Ray Evans Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED]              ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: Ray Evans Harrell Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2003 10:04 AM Subject: Classical Music in Enlgand (was: Enslaved by Free Trade?) I'm sure I don't know how to answer your comments on my posting on free trade, but by way of consolation here's a cheerful article about classical music from this week's Economist: <<<< ALLEGRO CON BRIO Clasical muisc is booming, contrary to the pessimism of most in the business Dull, elitist and expensive, classical music in Britain is in its death-throes, the pundits say. The young prefer Boyzone to Beethoven. Punters shun the plinkety- plonk modern stuff, and stick to the same tired old repertoire, stifling innovation. Recording work has slumped, partly because of the CD's relative indestructibility, partly because orchestras in central Europe are cheaper. Corporate sponsorship, particularly from the City, has slowed sharply. A true largo doloroso, then -- were it not for the awkward fact that in the things that matter most, classical music is actually healthier than for decades. For a start, London is more than ever the uncontested classical capital of the world, with some 20 professional orchestras and five music colleges. Many of the world's great soloists choose to make their home there, as do home-grown musicians in great quantity and quality. In 1985, for example, the Association of British Orchestras had just 12 members; now it has 50. Up to half of this growth has come from new orchestras, says Russell Jones, its director, such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment -- an outfit that specialises in music from that eponymous 18th-century era. For all the much-bewailed changes in state subsidy policy towards more popular causes, plenty still flows. The Arts Council recently rescued several ailing bands with money from the National Lottery. Over the past three years it has pumped �30m ($49m) into orchestras to get rid of their deficits. Strings were attached: orchestras had to produce detailed future plans. Mostly these seem to be working; a handful is even making surpluses, says Hilary Boulding, the music director for the Arts Council of England. In the great cacophony of government spending, �30m is a mere tinkle. Yet its effect is far-reaching, because necessity has made Britain's orchestras and musicians astonishingly flexible. Until recent years many of those who went to Britain's ten music colleges expected to make a living performing. Now even those with a relatively secure orchestral job realise they have to teach, too. Such work is usually a condition for getting money from the state. The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), for example, is spending �18m on an education programme based in St Luke's, a disused inner-city church. Clive Gillinson, the LSO'S respected manager, claims that its programme reaches 30,000 children. Almost all orchestras now play to and teach some locals; Manchester's Halle has set up its own youth orchestra. That partly explains why, despite all the handwringing, and the lack of music-making at state schools, there is no evidence that audiences are ageing. Instead, people still seem to warm to classical music as they age, much as they always have. The CD market is also showing hopeful signs. Orchestras are finding new ways to entice people to buy fresh versions of works they already own. One is to play by-gone music on bygone instruments (or copies). Trumpet players these days are likely to finish music college able to play both the modern instrument and the (valve-less) natural trumpet, for which Baroque trumpet parts were written. Another is orchestras' own-label recordings of live performances. That cuts the cost of recording studios, and fees too-players, soloists and conductors all get a slice of the royalties. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic started this trend, with a recording business run by the principal oboeist. Sponsorship is more difficult to come by, especially now that the economy is weak, but far from impossible. There is still money for those that "tick the social responsibility box", says Mr Jones. Much of the �16.5m that the LSO has already raised for its St Luke's project has come from companies. The purists' best-grounded lament is that top-selling classical CDS are such an unchallenging lot, chiefly film music "Harry Potter", "Lord of the Rings", trite compilations (Classical Chillout Gold), and cheesy tenors and the products of eye- catching artistes. But if people like the ear candy, they may develop a taste for better fare thereafter. What would really change things would be more listenable modern music. That may be happening, thanks to composers like John Taverner or Thomas Ades. Jeremy Summerly, a musicologist, says that the "new complexity" of the 1960s has given way to "new simplicity". Few went to premieres when he was a student, he notes. Now, by contrast, "even normal people go". >>>> At 03:13 31/05/2003 -0400, you wrote: Was a man who didn't love a wall.    Do you wear clothes Kieth?    Do you live in a house?   Do you live in a city of walls?    There are always payments.     And something is always being taken from another.   You are making the same argument against tariffs that the Christians make against abortion.   It isn't natural and it is against life.   Well of course but so is civilization.   Systems are never pure and you decide the consequences and decide what the good is that you will get.   There are a great many more goods than just economic ones and that is what you don't address.     As for the Industrial revolution?    Yes it would.    We stole from the Soviets because they were the competitors and they did the same for us.   If there wasn't competition across borders there would have been another type.    What do you think all those wars in the 18th and 19th centuries were about?    The 20th century was the mean one, the one about patronization and race.     You yourself made the point about novelty and the need to invent things.   We have a lot more to develop and control than just dollars and dollars have proven a very poor measure of value.   That is why we have the mess with aesthetics that we have and the mess in your educational system as the aesthetics have declined since the 1960s and your blessed Liverpoole gang.    Before they were through they were writing second rate choral music as well and now we have Sir Phantom of the Opera.   Now that is a decline in education.    But he is the highest payed composer in the history of the world.  That must mean that he is the greatest right?   He has the most monetary value.   Culture for Dummies anyone?      Ray Evans Harrell Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England