CLASSIC PATTERNS
The more I live onward in audio, the more I wonder about the nature of music and about audio's immense effect upon it in these last few years. Often with pride! We have done so much. Occasionally, doggedly, it is a matter of fear. Because audio is now altering the very base of music's nature, as by some sort of unheard-of recombinant biology, and this at an ever faster pace. How long can music as we once knew it exist? What is music? Not so much the sound itself as its meaning, how we "read" it.
These questions, I think, go way beyond the usual talk of Preserving Great Art and the Importance of Culture, useful thoughts on which to base all sorts of worthy projects--not excluding, say, Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, rebuilt directly with cash from an audio success. Splendid that the profits of a lifetime in our area should lead Mr. Fisher to such a project--as well as others in his prolific musical giving--rather than, maybe, a baseball team or a stake in Atlantic City.
Yes, we can find ways to keep music alive in the flesh, the old pre-audio sort along with plenty that is new. But while Fisher Hall books its vast space week after week and month after month for live music, audio on a much larger scale goes onward with its own musical activities. In terms of fundamental musical impact, these can be devastating, a question of life and death for a whole art.
I'll have to say it bluntly. In far-reaching ways, audio is killing off the very sense of the older music on which it thrives-a kind of benevolent boa constrictor squeeze, slowly destroying our knowledge of what these sounds were once intended to convey.
No--not viciously, not intentionally.
Our main audio work is to reproduce those sounds ever more perfectly, not to fuss with meanings. But... . I'm the first to delight in the things audio can do, and have long been the first. It's my specialty. Our music is not a mere reproduction, I've said. It is a new art in itself, based on an old one; it has its own principles, parallel and equal to the live music "original." Even so, I am still scared because there is so much meaning to lose, and it is being lost.
Here we have miraculously managed to preserve and keep alive a sonic art that took centuries to evolve.
Here we are in fact expanding it on a vast scale, with more music going on right now than ever before-audible music, music in actual practice, not on paper. And yet the sense of so much of it is eroding away, inexorably.
The sales of CDs and cassettes (and even an LP or two now and then), the listenership for FM radio, represent the heartening best of our still-continuing wish to sense the "message" of music in its original pre-audio meanings. Impressive, as always! On the other hand, the commercial world reflects the opposite, the dangerous erosion.
Unfortunately, commercial music is all too forward-looking. It shows up what is going on.
People are learning, it says, not to listen to music of the past in its original sense. Commercials treat this art outrageously from a musical viewpoint and, invariably, get away with it. Not even a passing notice on our part. Just a commercial. Nevertheless, we show how our listening goes for all music, don't we? Commercials, maybe. But how about the well-informed, the educated people? They are no different, if in a gentler way. Their reactions to music's meaning are much the same, if polite.
I've been into this before. Beethoven would be shocked to hear his epoch-making "Eroica" Symphony discreetly hidden behind a barrage of polite conversation at a party, but that's where it gets played all too often. A thousand other composers suffer the same and would be as deeply shocked-even Mozart, who could write real background music and often did. But it was right for the occasion-lightweight, easy, pleasant, inconsequential.
Clearly, a very large part of the original sense of such music is simply ignored when we reproduce it in this fashion-not only at home, but in the car, in restaurants, shopping malls, banks. Do you stop to listen when you hear Schubert, or even Stravinsky? Do your ears perk up when the restaurant puts on a piece you do not know: "What can it be?" Or do you just go right on eating and talking, oblivious.
Most of us do just that. It is an audio way of life.
If the original meaning and sense are not getting across, what is? Wallpaper music. What I call the Background Syndrome. We like it, or it would not be there. But we do not listen--not in the old, forward, conscious way. We have a new meaning for music. I think, perhaps, the proof of it is in what is called "beautiful music"--which says that the stuff you are hearing sounds a lot like the older music, the classics, but without the meaning. It says nothing much. It is just "beautiful." Is this a good sort of progress for any music listening? You see, we do this not so much with live music as with recorded-music via audio. Music in the flesh still puts a lot of people to sleep at concerts, but at such events, at least, the old proprieties are kept up--you do not talk. You try not to snore. Those who want to listen can listen. In all truth, we are oddly more rigorous today in this respect than in the classical past! Total silence before music is a recent invention, believe it or not. But even minus silence, in older times people were in touch with the music's message, or a good part of it.
Live music is not often murdered in the manner of the music in commercials on radio and TV. But it can happen, usually through a misunderstanding. I remember one classic occasion, years ago, when the Dessoff Choirs of New York, including yours truly, sang for a benefit event at, I think, the Waldorf Astoria. It was on behalf of a Swiss charitable foundation-our director was Swiss born, and the connection seemed auspicious. We would be the entertainment for a fund-raiser, and it was a big one-the equivalent of $1,000 a plate today. Lotsa money for a good cause. Good music, too.
And so a vast fleet of well-dressed gents and ladies in their evening finest duly showed up in the Grand Ballroom--a magnificent sight, if common enough at such a posh hotel. We showed up too, but we were parked outside the ballroom, on a hard marble staircase, for lack of a better spot. And there we sat, and sat, for hours, while the dinner went on. Then, at last--with the dessert--our signal came and we lined up for our grand entrance. Great music--was it Palestrina?--for a great occasion.
Now, our Swiss conductor had been in the U.S. for a long time, but he was a European musician of the old school.
We would sing our elevated and beautifully prepared music as we always sang it to any audience, in proper concert format. For our director, music was music and an audience was an audience, wherever or however. So we singers filed down the stairs in two lines, across a corridor, and into the Grand Ballroom. Suddenly, we were among hundreds of tables. No passageway to anywhere. How were we to sing and where? A small central space had been set aside, more or less, surrounded by tables, and toward that space our two formal lines of singers moved--or rather, snaked--between projecting arms and legs, barely able to get past. Later, some of the female singers said they had been discreetly pinched, presumably by the dignified gentlemen, not their ladies.
When we were assembled, tightly, there was a slight diminution in the roar of talk as the director appeared and, ever the formal musician and in the usual tails, swept through the tables--where? There was no room for him! The singers, including myself, performed an undignified compression and made a small space in which the director could operate, almost immersed in our front row. He arrived and started his bow, as a conductor is supposed to do at a concert. There wasn't room for a bow. So he nodded a dignified head, and waited for silence.
There was no silence. The audience continued to chat among itself, amiably enough. The director continued to wait. Impasse! Was this a concert, or a nightclub act? Obviously, it was the latter, a thing unknown to our excellent leader. He stood, and stood, his face growing purple. He was far beyond outrage--this was the most horrendous INSULT of his life. Finally, he turned to us like a martinet and proceeded to conduct the entire program (not too long) like an overheated automaton, an absolutely furious face all the way through, without the slightest musical expression. We sang, the audience talked.
Needless to say, after about 30 seconds, the talk was as loud as ever, and nobody paid us further attention. At the end, nightclub fashion, there was a slight patter of applause, and that was it. We got out as best we could. It was a shaking experience.
Who was wrong, who was right? Neither side. It was a case of hideous cultural misunderstanding, with music as its cause. But mind you, this was live music in actual performance. I have seen (and heard) other such events. There was an outdoor wedding of a young musician who had a cellist friend play Bach while the guests assembled. The groom, too, was furious when the guests ignored the cello, right in their midst, for the usual prenuptial conversations. What else? His wife-to-be (not being on the scene yet) must have been surprised at the awful scowl she met as the two were joined together! Why should we ever treat Bach like that? Well, it's because audio has taught us to. Don't forget that Bach composed a Wedding Cantata and other such pleasantries. They did not sound like a cello solo playing heavy music. That wedding music was suited to its occasion as a matter or course.
Now to the big point. How many times have I listened to recorded music in what amounts to exactly the same situation! Happens 100 times a day, all with the best of intentions. The most enlightened souls among us, college grads and all, think nothing of using high-class (classical) music as though it were fancy tonal wallpaper.
Very discreetly, of course. Never loud and intrusive--though the music is often supposed to be loud, and to grab your full attention. We are, most of us, guilty here. We are almost as guilty, I'd say, if we play jazz, rock, even assorted pop ballads as background--though much of this music was made for informal enjoyment and isn't too harmed, nor misunderstood, in social conditions. It is our generation's, after all, and intended for us.
I am too well trained in the old way. I cannot ignore any music that gets through to my ear, even in fragments.
Guess I'm often impolite. I forget what we are talking about, my mind wandering to the sound. I try. I fail. I have to listen. It's a real social liability.
A lady I know paid a visit just after I had discovered a marvelous new Berlioz CD, two works I had never before heard. The second was a huge piece for military band from 1840, composed for the 10th anniversary of the French "bourgeois revolution" that put Louis Philippe on the French throne. (He was tossed off eight years later.) Two hundred band members played this music as they paraded all over Paris with Berlioz at their head. What a scene! And wow--is this a good recording.
Not only good sound: Somehow--imaginatively, not literally--you can visualize the gigantic spectacle, those hundreds of marching instruments putting forth a music which, I would say, was pretty strange, if exciting, for the thousands of Frenchmen lining the streets.
Impulsively, I put on this CD for my lady friend--loud, just the way you would. But she is very well conditioned in the new social uses of classical audio. "Please turn the music down!!" said she, horrified. And so I did, as another chip fell off the great edifice of past Musical Sense.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Feb. 1990)
= = = =