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Doublereed Archive - Posting 000018.txt from 2005/08
From: philfrei@-----.com
Subj: [DR-L] Re: The Future of Art Music
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:19:24 -0400
Wonderful email! I whole-heartedly agree.
I read somewhere that when Arnold Schoenberg wrote his first 12-tone
piece, he predicted this development would be at the center of musical
theory for the next 100 years. Well the 100 years are almost up.
Arnold's "curse" has just about run its course.
- Phil Freihofner
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Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 21:17:41 -0500
To: <doublereed@-----.org>
From: "Ladonna Weeks" <LadonnaWeeks@-----.net>
Subject: The Future of Art Music
Message-ID: <006601c59963$e3572b80$2f00a8c0@30918330001>
Hello,
I've been lurking on this list for a while. With this topic, I had to
exert myself to figure out how to post a message. I hope this works.
I am an older adult amateur oboist. I played in junior high and picked
it up again when I was about 40. I first played in a community band for
a number of years but gave it up to play in a couple of community
college orchestras.
I had to give up music instruction in junior high due to family
problems. As an older teenager, I taught myself to play guitar and
became something of a folksinger. This was in the late 60s and early
70s. By about 1972, I had gone about as far as I could on my own and
realized I needed some music theory instruction so I signed up for the
beginner theory class at my local junior college. (It has since become
a "community college".) I found music theory fascinating and kept going
in it. At one point, they said I had to be a music major to keep going,
so I became a music major and was now forced to take music history. I
have to say I went into the class with an attitude: I had tried to take
a music appreciation class a few years earlier and the snooty attitude
of the instructor put me off so much I ditched the class to sit on the
lawn and watch guys playing guitars, hoping to pick up pointers, which
I did.
The first week of music history, the teacher played Haydn's Surprise
symphony. When the 3rd movement started, I felt as though I had risen
from my body because I was too heavy to hold the exquisite beauty of
the sound. To this day, 30+ years ago, I get a lumpt in my throat
remembering that moment. Needless to say, I was hooked and had the
classical station on 24 hours a day (except when I was practicing) to
make up for lost time. I was an elderly 22 and all my classmates had
been listening to this stuff for years. I gave up guitar and
re-introduced myself to the piano which I had
studied for a couple of years, also in junior high.
This autobiography is to illustrate my position as someone with one
foot in the "classical" world and one foot in the "real" world. In that
position, I see stuff that people with both feet in the respective
worlds do not. I see classical musicians who have the attitude that
they and their world are superior to the mundane world and they freely
share that attitude with anybody who will listen. Some of them sound
unbelievably snooty. Then I talk to regular people who don't want
anything to do with a bunch of snooty people in tuxedoes with their
silly traditions.
I have taken a half dozen people to their first symphony concerts and
all of them without exception loved it. I even got a couple of people
started loving opera! My first "victim", a dear friend who has since
died, agreed to go with me because the symphony was playing Dvoraks's
New World Symphony,
which she had heard somewhere and loved. Afterward, she asked me why
she liked it so much. I responded "because it's good". She said that
that was the ONLY answer I could have given her that would make her go
to another symphony concert. She said it made her feel that that her
taste was
sufficient to appreciate this new (to her) art form. She ended up with
season tickets a few years later. She was my best success, but several
other people have been changed by their experience.
To summarize this point, many classical musicians alienate their
potential audiences by their attitudes.
Point number two is in regard to "20th century music". I did complete a
BA in music and as a result had exposure (and even had to write some)
20th century music. From the beginning, I thought most of it was
garbage. It was a bunch of academicians trying to impress each other
and they didn't care in
the least what potential audience members would think of their
endeavors. Once again, I find myself straddling a line. I am willing to
give new compositions a listen and I do end up liking some of them.he
friend I mentioned above would always peruse the program to see if
there would be anything harsh and disonant.
We live in St. Louis and she started going near the end of Leonard
Slatkin's reign. He liked to program contemporary American pieces. They
were never terribly dissonant or atonal, but they were definitely
different. I could always persuade her to go giving the argument listed
above, but he always programmed those pieces first and a huge number of
audience members would refuse to enter the hall until the "modern"
piece was over. We had to wait while a couple hundred people were
seated before we could continue the program.
So here is method number two of alienating audiences: make them listen
to stuff that sounds ugly and scary and that they can't understand.
In conclusion, I want to say that the classical music community is
largely responsible for the dwindling audiences, by their snobbish
behavior and absurdly ugly new compositions for a good part of the
previous century.
I
realize that music is being cut from the schools, but it's our elected
officials doing the cutting and they very likely had experiences like I
described above.
It appears to me that the classical music community has come to its
collective senses and begun making efforts to be accessible to people.
I'm seeing more young people at the opera in recent years, but not so
much at the symphony. But it's a start. I hope it's not too late.
Ladonna Weeks
ladonnaweeks@-----.net
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