The myth of elitism: Part 1

In this series of posts, I hope to demonstrate that the accusation that classical/concert music is 'elitist' is largely a myth and to propose some of the reasons why it persists.  In this first entry, several accusations commonly raised in the public sphere are rebutted.

Performances are governed by draconian rules regarding social etiquette.

Those 'rules' being: be quiet when the action's going on and (usually) don't applaud between movements. Not much to ask really, as it's little more than an extension of normal courtesy.  Exactly the same as for the theatre; the cinema; the minute or two minutes' silence for war commemorations; the memorial silences that seem increasingly common at the start of sporting matches; listening to any kind of speech or lecture; school classrooms; meetings; exams; funerals; watching snooker, golf, archery, shooting, chess and tennis matches; when an infant is asleep; and numerous other occasions. I suspect this taps into a deeper paranoia inherent in modern culture: we don't like being told what to do, we don't like being told our affairs are less important than something else, and we have a skewed idea of what actually deserves our respect.  But is it really too much to ask that you don't make unnecessary noise when the guy performing for you is working so hard?

Music is a pastime of the rich/'posh' people and is not 'accessible'

I have a pet theory that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and influences public opinion simply because people keep crowing this tired line.  Surely not for financial reasons?  Show me a pop festival that lasts for two months and at whose every concert you can get within ten feet of its stars for a fiver.  Show me how many record labels offer eighty minutes of music for £6, how many bands offer a student scheme for concerts with a generous discount, and how many of them also allow their gigs to be broadcast free of charge on public radio and over the internet.  How much pop music is available out of copyright for free on the internet and has a massive online library to facilitate this?  How many professional bands are subsidised by arts organisations in order to keep ticket costs realistic?

There is no actual good reason why concert-going and music-making need be the preserve of the wealthy or the upper-class (not that this is even the case anyhow). Plenty of young people go to concerts at the moment, and by 'young' we do actually mean under-35's, including students and teenagers, and by 'concerts' we do actually mean the sit-down-and-hear Beethoven-and-Sibelius type, not 'classical club nights' as have been on the offering in London lately.  Admittedly a great amount of 'art' music was originally commissioned by wealthy patrons, but that hasn't stopped its successful presentation to mass audiences for a period of over 200 years.  Notwithstanding facts such as the huge number of people who attended Beethoven's funeral, concert music has had genuine popular appeal and genuine influence in recent times.  To take just a few examples: the 'message' of Shostakovich's Fifth and Seventh symphonies to Soviet audiences; Rostropovich's impromptu performance of Bach as the Berlin Wall came down and Bernstein's Beethoven that followed it, with the words changed; and projects such as El Sistema and the East-Western Divan Orchestra.  Importantly, it does not seem to take sides based on political persuasion or salary-level  either.  A recent account of the unlikely friendship between Occupy New York protesters and attendees at a performance of Philip Glass' Satyagraha at the Met drew the following from its author: 'the repeated myth of opera being elitist is one of the greatest lies of modern consumerist culture'. The fact that Philip Glass, classical composer, stood up and made a speech in support of the protest, at the risk of arrest, is surely the single biggest disproof of the 'elitist' myth to result from this happening. 

Finally, exactly the same accusation can be levelled at many other cultural artefacts. To take two examples, 'Gangsta' rap relies on a knowledge of a culture the fine detail of which is unknown to the majority of people, with its own dialect and - frankly fairly misogynistic and objectionable - subject matter. The Wire, a massively popular and (quite rightly) lauded television series, which is largely set within this culture, makes no concessions to the lack of specialist knowledge of its viewers and presents them with plot threads approaching the complexity of counterpoint, yet is accepted as being part of popular culture due to its subject matter and the form of its media.  Surely both these examples demonstrate the inconsistency of the accusation - if elitism means excluding those without sufficient knowledge of the cultural artefact in question, I think these examples would qualify as much as Bach or Beethoven supposedly do.

Only the rich can afford instrumental lessons for their children.

My response to this is two-pronged: First, learning anything costs money. Do we regard learning to drive as elitist because of the costs involved?  What about electric guitar and other 'pop' instruments' lessons?  Second, if you are lucky there was, and still is, public funding for music education, so anyone who objects to individuals' financial situations causing 'elitism' in this way should really blame the accountants and politicians who sanction cuts to music services. 

Classical musicians are snobs.

Some, perhaps, but the majority are just trying to earn a living doing something they actually like (we'll ignore for now those rank-and-file second violinists who 'gave up music years ago') and have the training for.  They have the same degree of work concerns as the rest of us - and often the additional burdens of hectic travel schedules and self-assessment tax returns - tempered by the satisfaction of producing a good performance.  The fact that some may ignore pop culture because they don't have time for it is not a personality fault and should not be regarded as a superiority complex. A brilliant essay by Aldous Huxley ('On Snobbery') points out that an individual can be a snob about almost anything - and also be a snob about not being/having something, too.  As an aside, I do not recall ever being tailgated by an aggressive second clarinettist who believes the new BMW his employer has just paid £35,000 for makes him a superior species to everyone else.

Culture of the past is not relevant to today's populace.

A slightly more considered accusation.  And yet still wrong.  Firstly, it stems from the mistaken belief that people in the past were more genteel, or more intellectual, or were somehow profoundly different in taste and mentality to today. History suggests that they weren't.  Most good jokes from the last thousand years are still funny today, because our sense of humour hasn't changed. (It also begs the question as to why 'intellectual' music should be more popular in the past when the average standard of education today is astronomically higher).  Secondly, although not universally adored, it would be foolish to think that modern society has no interest in the culture of antiquity.  A television adaptation of an Austin or Dickens novel, or Downton Abbey, will draw an audience of millions. The History Channel is a viable commercial entity as are cultural documentaries on other channels.  British Museum exhibitions frequently come close to selling out. Shakespeare seems to still be doing well as a crowd-puller.  In any case, great art can, and should, be able to stand even outside of the period it was written in. I do not see that it is really necessary to have more than a rudimentary understanding of eighteenth-century culture to enjoy, say, Mozart's music on its own.

Nasty squeaky atonal music is where is all went wrong. Classical musicians only have themselves to blame.  

Yes, if those modern composers hadn't been so selfish and instead had kept writing nice tunes it wouldn't have come to this, would it? I sense a whiff of shifting the goalposts here. On the one hand the music is accused of being old-fashioned, out of touch, not relevant to the times; and yet when it moves with the times (and serialism and its children probably did genuinely reflect the cultural mood of the times - hell, they invented eugenics and nukes in the same period) it's still not good enough. To be fair, I suppose there is some truth in this accusation; all the serialists safely tucked away in government-subsidised university departments could ignore public tastes and even act with outright hostility to them, which wasn't exactly endearing.  However today's contemporary composers are working in a massively diverse range of styles and influences.  In any case, there is comparatively little public rejection of equal doses of dissonance in such fields as cinema (where, ironically, grindingly dissonant music is not only accepted but near-essential to horror genres) and the visual arts.

Things like orchestras and ballet and art don't deserve public funding because they aren't popular. Public money shouldn't be spent on them when it could be used to give us cheaper council tax/cheaper petrol/more police on the streets.

Putting aside the sigh that inevitably results when encountering an individual with this attitude (which can be summarised as 'if it's not important to me, nobody should get it') this is largely a circular argument. If they were 'popular' (even though there is actually a healthy level of interest) they would make enough money on their own to not need public funding.  Ironically, if this were the case you'd probably be going to concerts and whatnot so you'd spend more on this than comes out of your tax at the moment (bear in mind many people will happily shell out hundreds of pounds a year for football season tickets).  I suppose if you don't care about culture it's very difficult to make the case for spending on anything beyond mundane practicalities, but it really shouldn't be a cause of contention given the minute amount each individual actually contributes to arts in real terms - it's pennies. As is often pointed out, state grants for the arts actually make money for the Treasury through ticket sales and employment, which means that we should really be talking about them as investments, not subsidies. If you're still annoyed I suggest looking down the back of the sofa and you'll probably be able to 'make back' what you've contributed.

Classical music is elitist because it's for 'intellectuals'.

This brings us back to where we started and also on to the next post in this series, as it opens up a wider problem, namely stigma of displaying intelligence. It's also a stupid way of thinking. I find it no more acceptable to dislike somebody for being intellectual than it is to dislike them for wearing a turban or having an artificial limb (and in my experience all of these bigoted mindsets can often be found in the same individual).  If you dislike people with intelligence that much you should be happy to do without iPods, auto airbags, microwaves and a plethora of other things they have given us.  And for the umpteenth time, the fact that somebody has a PhD and a professorship and likes Bach does not prohibit you from having the same taste. You can take what you wish from music without actually needing to understand or debate the finer academic points of it.  Note that; firstly, the same individual may also like pop and rock music, and that some of said pop/rock has also been subjected to serious academic study - does that curse it as 'elitist' too?  Once again it is a circular argument: classical music is 'only for intellectuals' only as long as you keep saying so.

The Problem with Big Tunes

Everyone loves a great, memorable tune.  We're talking here not about just melody, but melody that can be elevated to being called a tune. Such things are usually tonal, regularly phrased, and featuring a melody-and-accompaniment texture, often chorale-like and generously orchestrated.  They are instantly recognisable, make audiences feel good and can assure a composer a place in musical history.  And yet they are also quite rare beasts.  So why doesn't every composer write one?

Well, for a start, coming up with a really good Big Tune is potentially a laborious process.  In a classic example of the symbiosis involved in composition, the effectiveness of the melody goes hand-in-hand with the skillful use of harmony - both must be devised simultaneously to compliment one another, Since a great number of Big Tunes are felt to arouse feelings of national pride or other gushing emotions, the achievement of sincerity in such an entity can only be achieved by a relatively narrow repertoire of gestures - for example starting with a stable harmony to establish gravitas, or later a move to the minor in one of the phrases, returning to the major as if in reassurance.  On the most simple level it can be hard to consciously set out to 'write a Big Tune like the one in [piece x]' and avoid sounding like a pale imitation of it.

Second, the definition of a Big Tune will confine a composer to a relatively narrow musical style unless the music is deliberately a college or pot-pourri of different influences.  Stravinsky couldn't simply introduce a four-square anthem into, say, Rite of Spring, as it would sound ridiculous in this context and be completely contrary to the aims of the music. 

Structurally and technically speaking, they present several problems. Chief amongst these is that the attraction of the thing is its completeness - that is, the tune is a sixteen-bar entity which one can sing along to and which follows recognisable lines.  This is fine if the tune is to be a thing-in-itself, but less so if it is to be used as part of a wider form such as a movement of a symphony. Percy Grainger's famous quip that 'the trouble with folk songs is that when you've played it once the only thing you can do is repeat it' rings true, for good tunes are awkward to do anything else with. The more memorable a tune is in itself, the more 'closed' an entity it is likely to be, probably ending with a nice neat cadence in the tonic.  For use in a larger form, it usually comes to just too satisfying and complete an end, meaning that the music has to stop and re-start, and that there is a lack of tension around which to build the remainder of the piece.  Apart from anything else it can be difficult to chop up the tune into smaller segments with which any development will be facilitated; particularly for the listener who, having been drawn to the piece by tune, will probably find the fragmented version less appealing than the initial whole. It is possible - the finales of Tchaikovsky's Fifth and Nielsen's Third, the first and last movements of Elgar's First and several parts of Dvorak's Ninth are famous examples that manage it by various means, mostly by following it with something contrasting and then eventually bringing the Big Tune back at the end to satisfy listeners.  Sibelius pulls it off in Finlandia, in oh-so-Sibelian fashion building the preceding material from fragments of the theme, then juxtaposing the last note of it with the start of the next section (cleverly avoiding the stasis that would have resulted from bringing it to a close) and finally presenting only the first phrase of the melody in the coda. Even when the theme is allowed to run in the central section of the piece it is carefully varied in orchestration and not allowed to become sentimentalised.

Actually, Finlandia throws up a number of interesting avenues related to this topic.  The work was originally introduced, in a slightly extended form, as the finale of the rather uninspiringly titled suite Music for the Press Celebrations.  As the general feeling of the time was explicitly nationalistic, it is no surprise that the stirring tone poem quickly became performed on its own as an anthem of independence, and was as quickly banned by the Russians for this reason.  With all this national feeling contained within, it was assumed that the work had been composed with the intent of being as 'Finnish' as possible and thus included national folk music.  Sibelius had to repeatedly state that both the theme and the rest of the piece were categorically not based on any folk-songs.  The assumption of this is quite telling.  Folk music is not all melody and even rarer still the neat four-in-a-bar, major-key type (Finnish music often features five beats in the bar).  Did the symphonic content making up the other 3/4 of the piece actually matter or would it have been enough to have just written the famous tune?  Was the big tune even written as a crowd-pleaser or just for structural purposes in the first place?  Sibelius went on to arrange the central theme for choir (twice, in fact) setting the patriotic 'Finland Awakes' and thus joining a tradition that continues to this day of putting words to likely tunes, appropriate or not.

And that brings us on to the English equivalent of Finlandia, and another issue with Big Tunes - they become appropriated for hymns, songs, 'crossover' cover versions, etc, regardless of the composer's personal beliefs or the original context of the cultural artefact - and also become overplayed.  Having seen his suite become a rare hit amongst his output, Gustav Holst eventually grew to hate the incessant elevation of The Planets to the neglect of his other music (despite it justifiably being his best work) and in particular the setting of the famous melody in Jupiter to the text of I Vow To Thee, My Country and its subsequent use at every kind of pompous nationalistic occasion. Apart from the fact that the work is more concerned with astrological connotations from Indian mysticism than the fruits of the scientific advancements of the European Enlightenment, Holst was both a pacifist and an atheist and conspicuously from an immigrant background - Sweden via Latvia.  He would have been either horrified by or, more likely, resigned to, today's appropriation of this melody by jingoistic military occasions and flag-waving nationalism, and the assumption that it was written by a Very British composer.  Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 and the 'Nimrod' movement of the Enigma Variations suffer much the same problems.  Elgar was also born an outsider (a working-class Catholic, making the patriotic 'Land of Hope and Glory' text somewhat out of place) and the Enigma Variations written as a highly personal piece, albeit in a generally light vein.  Worse, in such an extended work as this, everyone wants to hear the Big Tune to the exclusion of the rest of the piece, and because the particular excerpt is what is most readily associated with the composer, they are in danger of alienating audiences with anything that departs from this.  Returning to an earlier example, if you only knew the tune from Finlandia, then Sibelius' final two symphonies and The Tempest music must sound mightily strange on a first hearing.  Holst put off audiences simply by not re-writing The Planets in subsequent orchestral outings, a perfectly natural thing for a composer to do.

There are two happy upshots from all this.  Film music manages to use the idea of the Big Tune more successfully, largely due to its role as accompaniment.  If the audience needs to attach a particular recognisable theme to a character then this is a highly effective way to do it without having to worry about symphonic development (which would be too distracting for the medium). Indeed, the skillful writing of Leitmotif that works both as a film soundtrack and as concert excerpts is what constitutes the craft of John Williams and similar composers.

Secondly, it had been demonstrated on numerous occasions (in fact the majority of frequently-performed symphonic output) that it is not at all necessary to write a Big Tune in order to compose a first-rate piece that will not only be melodic but have audiences positively singing along. Haydn repeatedly proves that motivic writing can still sound tuneful and produce a technically stimulating work. Verdi writes almost totally melodically, yet actual four-square tunes as described above are confined to one or two choruses per opera, maximising their effectiveness in music that sets out to be crowd-pleasing (yet loses no integrity or intellectual appeal in the process).

Edit: Curiously, contemporary pop music, which is also generally populist (if not by definition), seems to be equally shy of using easily memorable Big Tunes. With a few notable exceptions, it is older popular styles which tend to be more melodic, possibly as a result of their shorter evolutionary path from blues and music-hall genres, and the notion of a hummable melody is clearly anathema to punk, rap, metal and other such styles.

Pianistic preferences

I am called upon to perform on both digital and acoustic pianos about equally in my working life.  Naturally, I press the keys on whatever is put in front of me without quibble, but if there is a choice I will always plump for a traditional acoustic piano. I have sometimes been questioned as to why, and at times this can appear a counter-intuitive option (I have played some pretty ropey pianos over the years) so I wish to make a case for why the traditional acoustic instrument is, at least in my experience, preferable to modern electronic keyboards.

We must begin by stating that electronic keyboards in general posses the following advantages:

1. They do not go out of tune.
2. If the function is supplied, they can be re-tuned to mean, Pythagorean, modal temperaments and baroque pitch at an instant.
3. They are not susceptible to changes in temperature, humidity and movement in the way an acoustic piano is. In fact the only possible damage from these factors would be water ingress causing short circuiting.
4. They are usually equipped with a moderate-to-wide range of timbral possibilities, albeit synthesised. This is probably the most significant advantage of the instrument.
5. Other useful functions such as transposition and recording capacity are often fitted.
6. They are cheaper to purchase, smaller and more portable than traditional pianos.
7. On high-end instruments, the key and pedal action is weighted in an attempt to imitate that of an acoustic instrument, aiding the traditionally trained player. 
8. They are easier to amplify as a PA system can be plugged directly into the instrument without the need for a microphone.

With all this in mind, one might wonder why anyone bothers with traditional pianos any more. By comparison, they are expensive to purchase and maintain properly, are difficult to move, can only produce one sound 'patch' and have no 'performance aids' other than three pedals and that the stool adjusts up and down.  Electronic keyboards work on the same principle as other electric instruments such as guitars: by creating a tiny sound (in this case small bars which are struck like chimes by the keys) and amplifying it, usually modifying the resulting wave as well. This means that a lot of delicate and temperamental components can be eliminated and replaced by circuitry. So why do I still prefer a 'real' piano?

Firstly, the instrument has a richness and sonority that is impossible to imitate digitally. Chiefly this is due to the effect of the strings vibrating in whatever acoustic space the instrument is played in, but also to do with the fact that the strings vibrate in sympathy with each other. The reason why this is nearly impossible to synthesise is that the additional overtones created thus, which depend on so many multiple factors - the exact notes played and the attack of each, what degree of pedals are being used, what strings may still be vibrating from the previous combination of pitches - that the memory and processing power required to store and activate the sample of each possible combination would be in the range of a supercomputer.  Even then, it is a difficult task indeed to make what is essentially an amplified glockenspiel sound like felted hammers hitting sets of metal strings.  The tone of electric pianos is almost always too fuzzy and boomy by comparison (a common problem with amplified instruments) and lacks the crispness one can get from a well-practiced staccato.  In addition, the percussive effect of the felt making initial contact with the string is difficult to synthesise, often replaced by sound of the plastic key thumping against rubber bearings and electrical contacts.  Pedal action remains a weak area, largely because of the above issue of sympathetic vibration and, on the other foot, so to speak, the fact that an una corda or due corde marking has acoustic implications far beyond simply reducing the volume a bit. I have yet to play a digital piano in which half-pedalling was at all satisfactory, and on most it was impossible as the sustain pedal was considered a binary switch which when on simply added a set amount of reverb.

As an addendum to the above, there are certain pieces which are absolutely impossible to perform on a digital piano as they require this sympathetic vibration as an essential effect. A piece titled simply 'Harmonics' in the fourth book of Bela Bartók's excellent pedagogical series Mikrokosmos is one example, requiring the player to depress keys without them sounding and then allow the strings to be set vibrating when other notes are struck. This simply could not be accomplished on a non-acoustic instrument.

The other, related, consideration is the feedback the player gets from the instrument.  Even the most sophisticated digital key mechanism cannot emulate the action of the 80-or so components that are needed to play even a single note on a strung instrument. When playing a real piano, one can directly feel, even in notes of short duration, something inside the instrument applying force to something else, changing centres of gravity and creating inertia, which provides valuable information on how the note will sound even before the sound reaches one's ears.  Electronic instruments lack much of this vital 'touch' due to there being essentially a short-cut in the action. (For much the same reasons, I dislike driving cars which have too much electronic intervention in the controls).  Furthermore, the key action often lacks sufficient resistance, meaning than when playing fast passages or using the position of one key to find another it is far too easy to accidentally sound the wrong note when passing the hand over it, as well as making chord voicing harder.  All these factors force the player to take time to adapt; whilst the musical results will probably not suffer having done so, it remains that the pianist is essentially learning a new type of instrument.

Finally, another issue which has not been satisfactorily solved by the manufacturers of synthesised instruments: volume. Not the amount of it, for most keyboards and electric pianos have a volume control in addition to touch-sensitive keys which provides more than adequate range, but the guesswork that must be undertaken to find the correct setting.  Of course this can be an advantage, as it allows the relative volume to be adjusted to suit a large or small space, but it is often a source of frustration when the player finds that what seems deafeningly loud to them comes across as feeble at the back of the room. A chief cause of this is that speakers howsoever positioned (usually under the main body or key rack) cannot synthesise a large soundboard reflecting string vibrations in a universal direction. As stated, this is less of an issue when a PA system with large speakers is connected to the instrument - but this instead creates the potential problem of the source of the sound being some distance away from the player and thus not in sync with the action of their fingers. When sitting at an acoustic piano one can always assume, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, what volume any given amount of force on the keyboard will produce.

The pipe organ is, of course, a separate instrument entirely, but has equally valid considerations in the electronic vs acoustic choice. A good full-size electronic church organ is as good as its traditional counterpart, but as far as I can see a small portable organ cannot compete - it'll simply never be as loud without excessive amplification.

The golden rules of blogging

1. Always post something interesting

This goes without saying, really. I happen to seek 'interestingness' in everything even if its precise definition is somewhat woolly.  Perhaps it means less regular updates, but hey, quality not quantity. 

2. Never post something that people can get elsewhere

There must be millions of blogs about fashion, dogs, aimless musings on life and other trivia. Why would the average surfer pick one over another?  On the other hand, if you write quality material about Gambian and Senegalese stamp collecting, your life as a deckhand on a ship made from recycled chair legs or, in the case of ITM, classical music and other unique tidbits, it is more likely your blog will be unique enough to attract a small but regular band of readers.

3. Check your facts

Laziness in researching a subject, credulity that leads one to unthinkingly reproduce myths and a general lack of scrutiny blight much journalism today.  When done well, this point often feeds nicely into #1, for research often throws up further interesting facts and ideas.

4. Check presentation, spelling and grammar

Again, goes without saying. There's a spell-checker in Blogger, so it's not unreasonable to expect its use, along with a few minutes proofreading.  I find sloppy editing a real turn-off, although I would tentatively suggest that we should allow one error every now and then just to convince oneself the prose has been written by a human. Likewise, the layout of content should be condusive to readability and consistancy of style.  (Incidentaly, I've inserted one spelling or grammatical error in every sentence of this item - post any spotted in the comments box).

5. Never link to anything unnecessary

Very tempting to pepper a post with all manner of links - less easy to find the best one to illustrate the point.  Links should provide something the text can't, be that a picture, a diagram, more specialist knowledge of a subject or simply an interesting aside.

6. Care about what you're doing

This covers all the above.  Unsurprisingly, if I were to draw up a 'golden rules of composition' or indeed of anything I suspect they would be remarkably similar to the above.  When it comes to quality, the same principles apply to most things.  In short, good blogging is that which is professional, necessary and done with integrity.  All of my favourite blogs in the sidebar stick to these principles, and I strive for this one to do so too. 

What is hip

(Part one of a proposed series in which I discuss the mechanics, techniques, joys and frustrations of composition)

Lets' start with a deceptively simple question. Establishing a tentative trend for opening blog posts with the line: 'I sometimes get asked...';

'...how do you know what notes to write?'

And the question is almost always 'know', not 'decide' or 'find'.  The questioner implies that I will have an absolute conviction in the 'correctness' of anything I write.  This is striking because, to be blunt, I often don't.  The experience of composition is like a process of engineered serendipity - not groping in the dark, but more like mining one's consciousness close to what we know in the past has been a fruitful seam. The precious mineral is there somewhere, but it is still an uncertain process as to how much of it we can get out, and what we can make with it having done so.

The hard part is when it comes to judging what is worth keeping. In this respect, one of the essential skills of composition is to be able to step outside from oneself and try to judge the work from an observer's perspective.  This is difficult, because it's nigh-on impossible to be truly objective about what is good in your work, and even, to a lesser degree, about others'.  But we can at least attempt to define what constitutes accomplishment in a chosen artistic field, and not just in music. (We are assuming here that all artists aim to create works that they feel are accomplished in some purpose - not necessarily a noble one - and that they strive to improve the effectiveness with each successive work). It seems to me that there are five primary criteria that all 'accomplished' artistic figures fulfil:

1. Originality of style: The majority of the artist's output is readily recognisable as theirs, and contains a number of stylistic 'fingerprints' which enable us to identify it as such. This does not mean that every feature of the work is unique to them alone, nor that every work exhibits the same recognisable motifs, but neither will it be blatantly derivative of another's style.

2. Originality of works: The artist does not repeatedly produce the same basic work with minor variations. An underlying template may be used, even one commonly found in the output of others, but this will allow sufficient scope for individuality that the observer does not consider differences between works to be merely superficial.

3. Technique: The artist will have a highly developed technical ability in his chosen field. This is to some extent an exchange process with the development of individual style (Stravinsky is technically very competent at being Stravinsky, because he has defined and subsequently refined what Stravinsky's style consists of) but it also confirms to wider cultural expectations and historical precedents within their discipline. There are several aspects to this:

3a. Quality of material: The artist is judicious in devising and refining their materials, such that even an observer with a similar level of knowledge cannot identify any significant flaws in the basic ideas or how they are carried through the work, other than personal taste.

3b. Suitability for the chosen medium: The artist does not attempt anything patently impossible or unsuitable for the medium they are working in. In addition, any inherent weaknesses are either avoided as best as possible or even used to some advantage.

3c. Control of material: Aside from possessing a mastery of fundamental techniques and existing conventions in their field, the artist will also have perfect control of their own innovations and original ideas for which no exact model exists.

4. Prolific-ness: The artist must produce a significant number of works. 'Significant' need not mean the thousands of works by Bach or Picasso, or even hundreds, but enough to demonstrate an ability to develop their style through time, and a sufficient diversity of creative ideas.

5. Recognition: Note that 'popularity' is an inadequate term for this aspect. 'Recognition' constitutes the interest and respect of peers, if not the wider populace. This need not be universally acknowledged, nor forthcoming within the artist's lifespan. Criticism will generally reinforce fulfilment of the criteria already discussed.

There are, of course, several factors which are more difficult to quantify.  The precise degree of 'originality', in particular, because maximum does not equal optimum in this discipline.  Even allowing for the varying degrees of 'experience' in any particular style that an observer has, there is a fairly consistent level of relation to 'known' works which helps us judge how far between yawningly derivative or discombobulatingly novel something is. The best artists have an innate feeling for where this point of balance lies.

I intend in the future to discuss a related question; whether composition can really be taught. I am fairly certain, however, that it can be learned.

Categorisation

As you may have noticed, one of the many noble purposes of ITM has been to champion the existence of composers who have, we feel, been unjustly neglected, such as this one and this one.  It would be very easy to saturate this blog with the lives and music of hundreds, nay thousands, of obscure figures in the vain hope of igniting a little interest in their output, but this seems both an impractical and an inadvisable course of action.  How can one be sure that any musician is actually worth celebrating?

To this end, and also fulfilling an earlier promise, I have prudently devised several categories in order to aid with the Neglected Composers series. This are designed as a quick field guide to determining the reasons for the aforementioned neglect (a printable leaflet version with diagrams, life cycle, conservation status etc may become available should demand arise) and allow the observer to determine the worthiness of hitherto unheard-of composers through five easy labels:

#1. 'Loada Rubbish': Composer's music is genuinely worthless; either over-contrived, formulaic, uninteresting, juvenile or in some other way considered by our good selves to be, in a nutshell, a pile of crap. Examples: I lack the legal clout to provide a full list, which is a strong hint that most of the exponents are composers still alive and working.

#2 'Of its Time': Music is either too obscure in conception to be appealing without specialist knowledge, too reliant on dead cultural idioms to make ready sense to modern ears, or boring due to subsequent repeated pillaging of ideas. Examples: all kinds of medieval chaps such as Anonymous I, II, III and IV, Hildegard of Bingen etc; most pre-Tudor folk song; increasingly musique concrete.

#3. 'Wrong Side of the Fence': Composer worked under insular regime, was in exile, imprisoned, or from territory with few cultural links to the rest of the world. This can also apply to certain periods of output from otherwise well-known figures. Examples: Tubin, Popov, Pavel Haas.

#4. 'They Liked it Back Then, But...': Music is popular/fashionable, even to the point of celebrity, during composer's lifetime, but inevitable dip in interest following death has turned into a nosedive of obscurity. Examples: Rubinstein, Salieri, Stanford.

#5. 'Who?': Composer has made little or no attempt at posterity - music either written for personal enjoyment, deliberately unpublished, or lacking in any commercial nouse. Either that, or too new to have yet reached a mass audience.  Examples: Sorobji, Gesualdo, scores of contemporary composers lucky enough not to be in Catagory One.

Rest assured, dear reader(s) that in future posts we shall continue to select only figures worthy of mention on ITM. Alternatively, the occasional post along the lines of 'Just Exactly What's Wrong with Morten Lauridson' may not go amis either.

Why violists rule the world

This, plainly, is a controversial opening gambit.

Violas and their owners are loathed by some with a zeal which I can only relate to my own irrational hatred of Audi-owning sales reps.  For another significant segment of musos and the interested public, they are objects of smirking derision, for despite history's best efforts in providing evidence to the contrary, it has been convenient to retain the altos as the butt of orchestral jokes. Of course, this is not completely without reason, for in antiquity violists were either poor violinists or else wind players who had learned the instrument as something to fall back on (whether in a literal sense or not) when their teeth fell out. In a self-fulfilling-circular-mixed-metaphor scheme, many composers usually wrote for the players they expected to get and thus violists had little to live for, perpetuating the neglect of the instrument.

Oddly, at the other end of the scale, there seemed to be plenty of really quite gifted musicians who took the instrument seriously. Viola concerti have never been particularly inferior works to the violin or cello repertoire either in terms or quality or performance technique required, although often written by less-remembered individuals.  But there was not a complete absence of capable composers interested in the viola either.  Out of the so-called 'great' composers; Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, Haydn, Hindemith, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Schubert all played, some of them quite well, not to mention Bridge, Eric Coates, Lalo, Paganini, Harry Partch, Respighi and Torelli.  What is noticeable about all the diverse figures listed above is that their ensemble music is very good to actually play.  And having played music by all but two, I can assuredly say that every instrumental part is not only well-written but the player feels well-used within the ensemble.  More, the ensemble itself is often highly innovative - Bach's Brandenburgs, several Haydn symphonies and Hindemith's Kammermusik series all feature little-used combinations of instruments for at least part of their length.  Tenuous as the link seems, I'm sure all this has quite a lot to do with the composer having played an instrument on an inner part.  Whilst being a violinist or pianist does not preclude one from becoming a skilled orchestrator, actually being 'the middle' provides a thorough understanding of how an ensemble works and how to get the most from it. Of course, long periods of time spent playing uninspiring parts probably does much for this outlook as well.

The flip side of this is that 'interesting orchestration' can also mean 'harder parts'.  (At this point I quietly brush through the scores of The Sun Rising, my orchestration of a Bach WTC fugue and some pieces for quartet I wrote in third year, cruelly smirking at the technical delights residing within).  Yet violists simply rose to the challenge and shouldered the responsibility of enlightened folk realising that 'those lot' had the same technical potential as the violins (Berlioz here receives kudos for being an early convert).  The fact that, solo-repertoire-wise, the cello was nearly as neglected as the viola in roughly the same periods of music history is rather mysterious, as this instrument has seldom been considered anything less than highly attractive and capable as a solo instrument.  Orchestral viola parts from the mid-nineteenth-century also contain few concessions to technique, indicating that most composers had cottoned on to what they could ask of the entire string section. In any case, no matter how good your folks playing the tune or the bass are, the music falls flat without an effective 'middle' - ie the violas (with assistance from horns/bassoons and such like).

To reiterate, being a violist or playing any other 'inner' instrument will, in all probability, make you a better composer.  I am not at all suggesting that violinists or pianists necessarily write dull orchestral parts (that morbid role is often filled by concert band composers and the army of arrangers who are all too eager to copy and paste saxophones as string parts) but a lot of less rewarding parts do come from composers who either spent too much time at the piano or who set excessive store by melody and thus 'conventional' melodic instruments.  Being literally inside the ensemble teaches one how it works with great effect.  If you want to be a great orchestrator, play the viola. QED.

Anyway, here's William Primrose to play us out with some expertly cultivated alto one-upmanship: