Day 26
When you listen to the opening notes of the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and you hear the way those instruments blend to create a wholly new sound, is your first thought “that’s some step up from ripping off Chuck Berry”? The more you listen to it the more you want to marvel out how reasonable it is to compare Brian Wilson to Mozart, the way he used musical textures, sometimes denoting emotion but often going for pure musical joy. It makes you wonder whether Mozart would be taking up the conductor’s baton were he alive today, or would he be glued to an electronic keyboard threatening to bring the musical stylings of Kraftwerk to the masses.
There are clear conceptual similarities between classical and modern popular music today, from the thematic developments in the music of Tool to the way instrumentation is used to develop and give depth to a story in Sive’s Turn Down The Silence. And yet classical music survives in some form or other today, the kind that directly descends from Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler. But popular consensus (that modicum of standards) understands contemporary classical music to be purposely impenetrable, and even the old stuff is hard to get into.
The same problems of accessibility that plague the state of the novel are faced in classical music, it takes time and attention to get into it. It’s also faced with that wonderful Capitalist ethos that says economics are the only way to value a thing, and lord knows you’ll sell way more tickets with an orchestra-worth of instruments being run over by an eighteen-wheeler than you will getting someone who understands the capabilities of music to compose a piece of transcendent beauty. Something about our desire to destroy overpowering our desire to create or feel. All that jazz.
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My knowledge of contemporary classical music was lax to say the least, so in exploring what was going on in that scene I recruited the help of GoldenPlec’s own team of classical writers for a few recommendations. The first thing I realised when the pieces started coming in was that I was not going to be dispelling any myths about the amount of effort it takes to engage with contemporary classical music. Many of these pieces are in excess of twenty minutes, and some that are shorter seem to go on for longer.
There aren’t really two kinds of contemporary classical music, but I’m going to pretend there are for the sake of clarity. On one side you’ve got the kind of music that attempts to work in a familiar model, the kind you can stick on in the background if that’s the way you consume music; the likes of Gorecki or Arvo Pärt. Then there’s the kind that has more in common with Dadaism, a musical version of a trip to a Modern Art museum where you really have to commit the time to listening to the piece. That may sound really dry and uninteresting but here’s a fairly gripping piece in that style:
In the video the performer explains the purpose of the piece which is fascinating, particularly the way the piece experiments with an almost cinematic level of tension. Appropriately titled Failing this video actually appeals to the same part of you that enjoys those failblog videos; you watch with the knowledge that the only reason you’re watching is because somebody’s going to make a fool of themselves. It’s an enjoyable little number on its own, but as I explained above it’s more in the modern art category than the music category, even though it’s obviously making a point about the divergences between the composition and the performance of a musical piece. It’s actually more enjoyable when you listen without watching as you can get a better idea of just how affected his voice gets by the playing.
That’s a particularly accessible piece. For one thing it’s only eight minutes long, and you weren’t going to do anything particularly ground-breaking in eight minutes anyway, were you? But then, just when you’re thinking this modern stuff ain’t so bad, comes Ireland’s own Andrew Hamilton with Music For People Who Like Art, all but ending the short-lived honeymoon period. It’s basically an assault of three musical notes while a female vocalist repeats “What is art” over and over, mixing it up from time to time with a few startling gasping and wretching sounds. It’s everything you feared contemporary classical music was and more. But at the same time, judging your own reaction to it is a fascinating thing to do, and with that particular recording you do find yourself really dissatisfied when it cuts off suddenly after twenty-two minutes.
This kind of music is at the forefront of challenging our preconceptions, even more so than the foreign-language music I talked about in previous editions. Here it’s not just the lyrical aspect that’s causing a disjoint between the performer and the listener, it’s the music itself. But that doesn’t mean that a connection is impossible, it’s just delayed. With pop music you can listen to thirty seconds of a song and have a pretty good idea of whether you’ll enjoy an entire album. With this music you won’t have a clue what you’ll feel until you’ve experienced it in its entirety. Ultimately the intention of the composer and the singer-songwriter is the same, in that both are trying to forge a connection between themselves and the listener, one just has a more roundabout way of doing it.
It’s inherently anti-consumerist and opposed to instant gratification, but in challenging what we know about tonality and emotional cues in music it helps us to understand the music we do like better. It’s the kind of magical third option that is neither “good” music nor “bad” music. It’s “ugly” music, all angular and unbalanced, taking you from being physically repulsed one minute to being in complete awe the next, and without it the experience of the “good” music will eventually reach a point of staleness. As uncomfortable as listening to Music For People Who Like Art can be, particularly during the vocal gasping and wretching, it can also induce shivers, the kind usually reserved for moments of beautiful musical harmony and crescendo in other genres. It makes you question where those reactions come from inside yourself, and makes you want to find out what other people felt when they heard it, to compare notes.
On the other side of my completely false imagined spectrum of classical music (all such spectra are false and imagined by the way, the political kind being an obvious example) we have what for the most part nowadays ends up being labelled movie music. But for the sake of talking about music that’s actually interesting we’ll ignore Hans Zimmer and John Williams – masters of their craft though they are – for their being mostly stuck in hitting certain emotional points in their scores. Jonny Greenwood is the big crossover success in terms of the type of contemporary classical music that’s accessible yet interesting, and his work on film scores shows that he is not one to go for the easy or obvious note. However one of his big influences is even more interesting to look at than the Radiohead man himself.
Krzysztof Penderecki is the guy who tied these two disparate factions of classical music together, the weird with the wonderful, the conceptual with the lyrical. You may recognise his music from such fun little film scenes as this one from ‘The Shining’ and while Kubrick used his music specifically to mark a tone of unease and mental instability, Penderecki had quite the emotional berth. An example would be his version of what for any popular musician would be considered selling out, when in the winter of 1979-80 he composed a Christmas Symphony. It has the kind of easy romanticism we all generally like and enjoy but it seems desperately conventional and boring when compared with his earlier works like Dimensions of Time and Silence.
You can talk about The Rite of Spring being an atonal piece but there are even parts of that you can hum. Dimensions of Time and Silence feels as conceptual and as challenging as Music For People Who Like Art but it also feels like it’s evoking a certain tone that isn’t stuck in the cold standoffishness of modern art. In other words it doesn’t feel so much like an intellectual idea transposed to music as it feels like it’s aiming for a less tangible emotion or tone. It feels like floating through space, or wandering through a dark forest, which are things we can understand on an imaginative level. It’s the kind of music you can embrace once you learn to accept the frightening surface of its musical textures. There’s a strange appeal to his music from this era that you can also find in Kosmogonia and De Natura Sonoris No. 2, if indeed you can find it at all.
On the subject of musical textures it’s worth pointing out that the early use of electronic sounds were being explored around the late 1950s by a classical musician by the name of Karlheinz Stockhausen. His Kontakte does for electronic sounds what John Cage did around the same time for the sound of water with his Water Walk and this was ten years before Kraftwerk, seventeen years before ‘Low’. There’s nothing texturally in either of those things that doesn’t appear here in Stockhausen but what Kraftwerk and then Bowie brought to the table was a popular mindset, a way of nicely packaging electronica into something presentable. Stockhausen is an example of where musical innovation comes from, proving that the experimental classical music of today is the popular music of 2030.
Everything I wrote about here has too many influences and too many loose threads to tie up in one article. The history of electronic music is beyond my current ken but these connections seem obvious, whatever came before or after either party doesn’t change the connection between them. What is clear is that contemporary classical music is where experimentation thrives, because it is non-commercial and therefore doesn’t have to worry about pleasing an audience. It’s like Tom Waits said shortly after ‘Frank’s Wild Years’ was released, when asked about his being the “scavenger of songwriting”: “It’s really all around you all the time. It’s just a matter of framing it, getting thrilled by it. You have to find something to capture it in, make sure your umbrella is upside down.”
What he’s talking about is taking something everyday, something “ugly”, and turning it into something beautiful, or “good”. To enjoy contemporary classical music you have to have your umbrella upside down, you have to be able to be creative, to turn what you hear into something other than what it is, the way you do when you walk the street and hear a voice or sound that delights you for its textures. You have to block out the cars and the birds and the screaming kids and listen to what you want to hear, as an active participant in the process of listening.
For me, I always love the sound of someone eating a packet of crisps in a quiet environment. It makes me laugh every time, the loud crunches getting slowly quieter and quiter, then stopping altogether, a moment of silence, then the inevitable loud crunch again, starting the process all over. I can’t really give an idea in words of that feeling, it seems so drab written down like that. I suppose if I were a musician I’d try to turn that feeling into a song, but seeing as I’m not I guess I’ll just have to keep my perverse little aural pleasure to myself.
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As a bonus, here’s one to stick on repeat: