When I was a yung'un I was lucky enough to get enrolled in a university course that heavily pressed the ideas of semiotics, deconstructinalism and structuralism and introduced to the ideas of Roland Barthes abnd Focault and the like. It was pretty challenging to my personal beliefs, particularly when I had spent my adolescent years trying to develop myself as a classical musician, and reading Jane Austen. I felt that it undermined what I thought I knew about the study of literature and music and I wasn't really ready to hear it, so I dropped out and headed off to study music some more.
Now I would say that a lot of that philsophical reading has gone over my head, but I guess now I realise how important that thought is to what we refer to, for want of a better term, as "classical" music. For my part, I think the discourse that surrounds classical is that it is a "higher" form of music, that it is separate from other music, that it is some kind of sainted music of pure intention, and the purpose in this society is that people listen to it to engage in something "better", or "highbrow". Which is to say - it kind of sucks the life out of it. I am thinking of Cameron's Diaz' boyfriend in Bad Teacher and his "who will save Opera!". I can think of certain recordings made by an Australian orchestra where this kind of snobby attitude pervades the music, making it unlistenable for me.
Certainly there are composers who do not fit at all into that discourse - this is why until only recently Haydn was viewed as a "lesser" composer to Beethoven and Mozart, who do certainly fit the idea of sainted artists better. It's an interesting excercise to challenge yourself to take Haydn as seriously as the other two of the sainted classical trinity - his work is more innovative, more extensive, it has quality high's and quality lows. Given that similes are lies, if Mozart's music is like the stars in the eather, or Beethoven is the music of a stomping giant, Haydn's music is like the soil beneath your feet, or your life flowing through your veins - there is an inner tension that you will miss if you are, say, listening for the secrets of the human condition. And whilst in this day and age musicology is viewed as pointless, I do not think that Haydn's recent resurgence would have happened without the work of the musicologist James Webster, particularly for me his book "Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style" - a book which melted my face.
It's another interesting exercise to remove the classical music education shibboleths' of "baroque", "classical", "romantic", "modern" and "contemporary" styles - to view the works that we knows as historical documents, not artefacts, as products of their time. If we think that Mozart, Haydn were influenced by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment that surrounded them, influenced by historical events that dominated their time such as the French and American revolution, as well as their requirement to find patrons and make a living; or to think about Beethoven being influenced by the person of Goethe and his ideas of what purposes art and the artist serve, as well as his salesmanship and taking commercial advantage of the Viennese embarrasment at the fate of Mozart - rather than some vague ideal to do with greek architecture.
And further, it's interesting if we just kind of say "it's music". That there is no boundary between it and other musics. That it is imperative for compoasers and performers of that music,as with all other musics, rather than trying to convey some concept about for example "THE CLASSICAL", are aiming to make a connection with the audience, on a personal level - that we as listeners are engaged with a living document, rather than looking at a dusky picture in a frame, and that we have a right to say "yep, that's great", or "nooo, that's not for me", without some judgement or self judgement that "yes, you are intelligent for hearing it" or "yes, I am engaging in a higher activity here".
Topic: The Classical Music Thread (merged) (Read 31154 times)
