there must be something in the air

there must be something in the air, or i'm in a real hypersensitive place. many of my favorite bloggers are musing on some really intersting topics. so many, that my head hurts and wish the earth's rotation would slow to ponder them more.

uTopianTurtleTop blogs about critics condencension. i especially agree with his thoughts on critic as cultural gatekeeper.

and the next thought was -- bingo. It’s not just music critics who can be condescending to their subjects. The problem is an inherent potential pitfall to all journalism. I had been aware of this but had forgotten it, as I’d been brooding on my critical “turn-offs” in recent days -- Chuck Klosterman’s habitual condescension to musicians, Greil Marcus’s opposite assumption that music is an esoteric mystery religion of which only a select few mysteriously annointed musicians are worthy. Marcus can be very condescending to musicians whom he seeks to cast to outer darkness, which appears to be most of them. As the self-appointed doorkeeper of his religious mysteries, he remains outside the mystery himself, and he can be positively hostile in his insistence that ordinary listeners and readers aren’t anywhere close to getting in the door. We’re somewhere out in the forsaken, graceless fields. Marcus portrays himself as at least within watching distance of the ceremonies -- close enough to lip read, but not enough to hear.

greg sandow posts about the realities of opera seria performance practice.

Then, I said, we could look at opera's past, at the way opera seria was performed in 18th century Italy. We imagine that Baroque music was restrained and dignified, but nothing could be further from the truth. Because, I said, nobody would believe me if I described in my own words what opera seria was like, I quoted Richard Taruskin, from his new, formidable, and feisty Oxford History of Western Music. Here's some of what Taruskin says:

The liberties singers were expected to take with the written music, and had to take or lose all respect, would be thought a virtually inconceivably desecration today. But that was the very least of it. [One castrato] was actually arrested and imprisoned…for "disturbing the other performers, acting in a manner bordering on lasciviousness (on stage) with one of the female singers, conversing with the spectators in the boxes from the stage, ironically echoing whichever member of the company was singing an aria"…

[The] audience…was famed throughout Europe for its sublime inattention.… [As one writer reports] "noise levels astonished diarists from abroad, nobility arrived with servants who cooked who meals, talked, played [at cards[, and relieved themselves in the antechambers that stood in back of each lavish box.…

There is no comparable genre in classical music today. The modern counterpart of the opera seria castrato is the improvising jazz ("scat") or pop singer.…However inattentive during recitatives…the audience sprang to attention when the primo uomo held forth, egging him on with applause and spontaneous shots of encouragement at each vocal feat.

I wasn't saying all this to make a sensation, I said. Instead I wanted to suggest that if opera was more like this today, then things would be better for composers. Opera would be more informal and more contemporary. It would be more popular; there would be much more of it; and no matter how populist the operatic mainstream might be, there would be plenty of room on the fringes for art (just as there is in pop music today).

jeff harrington at beepsnort blogs about the idea of musical legitmacy. what is it today that says you "made it"? sales, prizes, press, good reviews? can the freedom of the net and consumer culture coexist?

Two worlds are colliding. The net music world, with its assumptions of popular validity and sharing, typically beyond fair use standards, and the old music world, with its hierarchies, promotional methodologies and assumptions about fat paybacks. I believe, of course, as an early net music adopter, that the net music world is destined to win; one can't fight free music; the net will encompass everything at some point and become the global library.

So we're fighting for what now? Sales as a symbol of legitimacy? Print reviews or awards as a symbol of quality? That is bordering on pointless now. A write up now, a feature in say, Computer Music Journal or even Rolling Stone haha would produce in my life nothing. I've heard that even Putlitzer prizes now no longer guarantee a string of commissions.

Without the metric of the sale, legitimacy has become the playground of the elites. In the contemporary classical world, its increasingly reverting back to the playground of the idle rich. I don't believe its unconnected to point out that the first composer of my generation to win the incredibly prestigious Grawemeyer prize (first awards went to Ligeti, Lutoslawski and Takemitsu) is coincidentally a multi-millionaire, George Tsontakis. I'm not sure how it helped; he's a good composer IMO, but I am absolutely certain that without his fortune he'd likely be in the same boat as the rest of us poor mugs. Nowhere. The rich have to hide their connectedness or their privilege would be exposed. And the rich, still control, to an astonishing degree the playing field that we play on, when we engage the real world. Another reason the real music world, within the arts, is crumbling. We want a world without favorites. We want a world that rewards attentiveness not mere connectedness. We want a world where what I say to my bud matters, that artist X does in fact rock even though he's a poor shmuck working at Kinko's during the day.

its nice to know that we are all fighting the same dragons.