By Frank J. Oteri

Wednesday, July 13, 2005, 1:56:41 PM

For the last three weeks, Randy, Molly, and I have been engaged in an intense debate as to whether or not music has any meaning and whether or not that meaning can be conveyed to a listener exclusively through music.

Call it the post-post-modernist version of the timeworn classical vs. romantic debate. Although I’d be loathe to describe any of us as classicists or romantics, for the sake of argument I’ll call Randy—who doesn’t believe in musical meaning—a classicist, and myself a romantic since I buy into all sorts of musical iconography. (Ironically he’s the more intuitive composer making him a romantic, and I’m obsessed with form and structure making me a classicist. But we have the same fights about uptown and downtown. See how foolish categories are!) Molly, always the level-headed journalist-type, maintains a cautious middle ground.

To temper this debate, I’d like to suggest that music can have profound meaning, but it requires a contextual framework in which to understand it which is usually the result of a process of acculturation, much like learning a verbal language.

In Modal Subjectivities, a recent book about 16th century Italian madrigals, the always provocative UCLA-based musicologist Susan McClary asserts that Monteverdi’s compositional process is “nearly as organic as any by a latter-day serialist, except that he has a commitment not only to the saturated integrity of his piece but also to the conventions that make it publicly intelligible.” (emphasis added).

Is this fair? Can the compositional process of any music, from 12-bar blues to spectralism, be “publicly intelligible” without some kind of grounding in its conventions? And, once you are grounded in those conventions, couldn’t even the music of Brian Ferneyhough make perfectly simple sense? Similarly, if you’ve never heard a nursery rhyme in your life (difficult I know, for arguments sake imagine an extraterrestrial sentient being), wouldn’t it seem baffling on first listen?

As I read McClary’s pronouncement on an overcrowded subway this morning, several lightbulbs went off. I wanted to scream “A-ha!” to nearby passengers but that probably would not have been advisable in a climate of “Orange Alert.”

Whether or not music can be publicly intelligible has also played a role in a chain of emails I’ve been having with composer Christopher Adler which he has published on his web site. Chris had issues with some of the comments I made last year about his Tzadik CD and assumed they were the result of my lack of familiarity with the traditional Lao-Thai khaen (mouth organ) music that inspires him. Ironically, while I’ve never studied it formally, this is music I’ve heard a fair amount of and I even possess a khaen (although I usually get hopelessly out of breath after only a minute of trying to play it). My tête-à-tête with Adler would seemingly prove Randy’s contention. I thought I understood Adler’s music but without sufficient explanatory words to guide me, the music was not able to convey its meaning on its own. Before I generate another downpour of emails, I am not implying here that this is the fault of Adler’s music.

I would contend that any lapse in understanding between music and its listeners is partially the result of our over-dependence on verbal language and our automatic assumptions derived from experiential memory. These alone cannot provide immediate acculturation any more than reading a Berlitz book can keep you from being snubbed when you try to speak French in Paris. Verbal language can only go so far in expressing the meanings that music can convey. However, as primarily language-based communicators, we’re stuck with words for everything we do. Randy would say that explanatory words are a waste of time and that they get in the way of the musical experience which is ultimately not about comprehension on any level, but something else. But without some attempt at analysis (which unfortunately will inevitably have to use words at some point), how can we make sense out of anything?

When I listen to music, any music, I usually respond to details I am able to analyze. Despite my admiration for Brian Eno, no music is ambient when I listen to it. All music is foreground, even the horrid MuzakTM I was subjected to on the phone earlier this week while on-hold in which a series of parallel thirds caught my attention. I can’t turn off this mode of listening. It is how I process music and that processing is why I am perpetually fascinated by music. But I also know all too well that my methods are far from universal. So is anything about music universal?

What does McClary mean by “public intelligibility”? Is it the Common Practice-era cliché of major means happy and minor means sad? Could most angular twelve-tone music be turning potential listeners off because trichords that reject major and minor implications sound frustrated and angry? (Despite my wishes for the contrary, most people listen to music just to relax.) How far can you go with a compositional process and have listeners know what you’re doing without having to explain it by other means?

Light music brings classics to the masses
By Carolyn

English conductor Anthony Inglis rehearses with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Australian Air Force Band for the Spectaculars at the Rod Laver Arena.
Photo: Ken Irwin

Five years ago, Raymond Gubbay applied for the job of head of the Royal Opera House, London. Given that he had spent 35 years promoting popular classics concerts and musical theatre, the application was not taken seriously by the music establishment.

He didn’t get the job, but Gubbay hardly went away and cried – he is laughing all the way to the bank, having invented the Classical Spectacular franchise, which has become an international success in 16 years. Two concerts at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena today will be among the 30 Classical Spectacular concerts Gubbay will produce this year in Europe and Australia.

The formula is simple. Take the world’s most popular classical pieces – from Nessun Dorma to the Swan Lake Finale, Blue Danube Waltz and the Can Can theme. Engage a 90-piece symphony orchestra, 100-piece choir, military band and soloists to perform them. Package it with synchronised lasers, lights and fireworks. Put them on stage in an arena packed with 10,000 people, and your bank manager will be popping champagne and whistling the 1812 Overture.

Gubbay says the concerts introduce classical music to mainstream audiences, who often go on to patronise the likes of the Royal Opera House.

Gubbay says rock concerts, with their dry ice, lasers and pyrotechnics, were the inspiration for the first Classical Spectacular at London’s Royal Albert Hall in October, 1989.

A capacity audience of 5000 turned up to hear the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Band of the Welsh Guards, and the London Choral Society perform a classical greatest hits.

Singing, humming and clapping along was encouraged. A second show was added, then two more. This year, Royal Albert Hall will host two, six-show Classical Spectacular seasons.

Manchester and Birmingham have been added to the calendar, as have Dublin, Scandinavia, Germany and Switzerland. There are two concerts in Sydney next week, and plans for other Australian capitals next year.

The Melbourne concerts feature the English conductor Anthony Inglis, the 90-piece Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, 100-voice Melbourne Chorale, and the Royal Australian Air Force Band.

Local tenor Rosario La Spina and baritone Jose Carbo will sing arias such as La Donna e Mobile and Nessun Dorma.

The show does not have a chronology or theme. The conductor makes light banter with the audience, but information on the pieces and composers is confined to the program. Asked why the formula has been so popular, Gubbay says: “I think it’s just struck a popular chord with people.

“Classical music can be fun, and a pleasure to listen to. It’s just a great, fun night out. It’s not stuffy, it’s not starchy . . . we’re just saying, come and enjoy yourselves.”

The buzz about Beethoven

By Norman Lebrecht / June 29, 2005
  
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Somewhere within the recesses of the virtual BBC they are still crunching the numbers, unable to believe their magnitude. When the first five symphonies of Beethoven went on-line in the opening week of this month, the Radio 3 website registered 657,399 individual downloads, a figure so immense it exceeded the annual sales of any classical record label and should, by rights, have qualified each of the symphonies for a slot in Top of the Pops.

Last night the BBC let loose the second tranche ?from Pastoral to Choral symphonies ?amid growing confidence that the demand for free Beethoven will cross the million mark, transforming the future of musical dissemination. As a responsible public organisation, the BBC is offering to share its data with the rest of the musical community but the analysis so far is tantalisingly inchoate.

All we know for certain is that the symphonies reached a new audience of I-pod users, presumed to be under 20s, many of whom knew nothing of Beethoven beyond the name. This can be deduced from the fact that the first two symphonies, the least significant in the canon, drew the highest number of downloads ?well over 150,000 each – while the benchmark Eroica mustered the fewest, just below 90,000.

There were shoals of emails to the Radio 3 message board from first-timers, some of whom were anxious to be assured that they had taped a symphony right through to the end. Others appealed plaintively for the relay to be renewed, having missed the week-long deadline to download.

There is clearly a demand for more ?so much so that such commercial download sites as I-tunes and Napster have linked up to the BBC뭩 output and some have launched Beethoven promotions of their own. There is a web buzz about Beethoven that could never have been achieved by plastic and terrestrial means of communication.

What this means is that we have crossed a portal into a new era from which there is no return. Broadcasting by the old methods of tall transmitters and small transistors belongs to the 20th century. The post-industrial broadcast user demands audio and video programmes that are streamed over extended periods and available, the world over, for instant download and possible retention as part of a private collection.

The legal protections for this expansion are finally in place with the ruling this week by the US Supreme Court that file-sharing ?the free exchange of music and movies among individual enthusiasts ?is illegal at source and can be choked off by prosecuting the software makers. 멌onsumers are going to have to get used to paying for their music, period,?sighed Wayne Grosso, one of the founders of the Grokster file-swapping network. The music industry have acclaimed the judgement as the most important in decades. It can now stop penalising innocent teens in their bedrooms and go for the geeks who make the stealing systems.

The BBC stayed on the right side of the music industry by limiting download time for Beethoven to a week and restricting it by contractual terms of use to personal consumption (there are, of course, limitless risks of mass piracy once the music is downloaded in tiger Asian countries). The success of its experiment provides the glimmer of a future model for the music industry ?a model similar to the strategy of newspapers that give away freesheets and poly-wrapped gifts in order to nurture regular buying habits. Apart from a few label dinosaurs, there is more excitement in the music industry than depression at the BBC뭩 remarkable breakthrough.

As for artistic quality, from what I have heard so far, Gianandrea Noseda뭩 freeloads with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra hold their own with most boxes that can be found in shops. The recorded Beethoven cycle has been the cornerstone of every classical record collection since Arturo Toscanini뭩 dominant performances on American radio in 1939. Recorded in a dim acoustic with poor microphone placements, their monolithic exactitude and irresistible propulsion became the touchstone for maestros and music lovers alike, unmatched until Herbert von Karajan in 1962 produced a stereo set in Berlin that combined immaculate orchestral sound and studio technology with structural certainty of an almost irrefutable order.

Noseda, Italian-born and in his early forties, admits to the combined influence of Toscanini and Karajan, but as a man of modern times he has assimilated other streams of thought. He knows, for instance, the quicker speeds of period-instrument leaders such as Christopher Hogwood and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, as well as the illuminating alterations to be found within new scholarly editions of the scores.

In the old-world record industry, a Beethoven cycle was the highest accolade that could be granted to a maestro. Not all of them crossed the hurdle of credibility. Remainder bins in record stores burst with dreary repetitions ?Muti, Menuhin, Masur and many more. Even Simon Rattle, whose set with the Vienna Philharmonic appeared to great fanfares in 2002, gave a less convincing account of a cleaned-up score than the veteran David Zinman, who recorded the same edition in Zurich.

Noseda will have covered all these trends and discarded them before conducting a bright, dashingly fast run of the symphonies in Manchester, nicely played by the BBC Philharmonic if not indelibly memorable for individual passage work. The Pastoral, which I뭭e just clocked, is a Mayday frolic, rippling with bucolic pleasures and untroubled by assumptions of prior familiarity. It is very much a new-listeners-start-here kind of performance, and all the more enjoyable for refusing to look over its shoulder at the daunting trail of past interpretations. This is the starting point of a new medium, not a checkpost for cognoscenti ?though experts will not fail to admire Noseda뭩 elegant way with andante phrasing.

So what happens next? By this time next week, the BBC will have a database of more than a million Beethoven users, a resource that can be applied intelligently to build a new global audience for classical music ?mostly home listeners, but some might well be enticed to an occasional concert.

Before Christmas, Radio 3 will embark on a Bach jamboree, some of which will go on-line for downloads. Other broadcasters must compete, or fade out. The world is changing before our astonished ears. I have heard the future, and it could work.