Mark Greif in the London Review of Books sums up the inadequacy of most popular music criticism when it comes to addressing the genre’s unique qualities, and its unique illusions:
This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an exaggerated sense of what pop achieves in the world. In truth, most critics aren’t verbally equipped to describe any band’s vivid effects on its main audience: the listener at home, alone in his room.
You could argue against that last point, but the reality of recording as pop music’s medium (and rock’s, if you are particular about these distinctions) is inescapable in Grief’s review of Richard Witts’ book on The Velvet Underground. Combined, the two writers reveal the band as something quite different from the quasi-mythical beast it has become in popular imagination, and discover the band’s secret twin on the other side of the continent…
Also: The Velvet Underground, as Doug Yule saw it.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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Someone please reassure me I didn’t dream this
Tuesday 27 March 2007
When finishing up the previous post (which had sat around unfinished for weeks, poor thing) I got to the bit about where artists’ ideas come from and remembered an anecdote I think I heard on the radio about 20 years ago, but have never encountered since.
Igor Stravinsky, when asked what he was thinking of while composing The Rite of Spring, once replied* “Fresh air and cheese, plus a lot of electricity.”
Incidentally, googling stravinsky +air +cheese +electricity will take you to a bunch of Frank Zappa sites.
* Allegedly! i.e. according to me.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Stockhausen, Sirius, and Self-Belief
Monday 26 March 2007
It’s the highfalutin’ equivalent of a fight breaking out on a football pitch: the premiere of Stockhausen’s Trans staggers to a halt amidst a chorus of hoots and hisses from the audience. Some incensed concertgoers jump the gun and unwittingly start booing before the end, quickly subdued by insistent shushing and the last, unexpected sounds of the orchestra. Once everyone’s certain it’s finally over, the crowd, impatient but still disorientated by the stop-start finish, rises in partisan crosstides of cheers and catcalls. For several minutes the two sides battle for supremacy, the boos and hisses drowned out by cheers, the cheers drowned out by boos and hisses – all of it preserved on the CD release, as though it were part of the music.
Edward Winkelman recently posted on his blog about the importance of self-belief in the arts, and whether all art is to some extent a game of confidence.
Reportedly, an influential Chelsea art dealer was asked once what characteristic she felt separated the artists who would feature prominently in the history books and those who would be lucky to be footnotes. Representing several who’ve already entered the history books, she responded that the ones who make it, wake up everyday, look themselves in the mirror, and say “I’m the best fucking artist in the world” before heading off to their studios.Mind you, the heading off to their studios is no small part of their success, but the belief in the importance of their work is something I’m beginning to believe might be crucial to that level of success as well….
If not arrogance, then at least wholesale delusion seems to be an asset. Stockhausen, a composer confident enough to instruct musicians when they were playing correctly in the rhythm of the universe, was asked sometime in the early seventies that chestnut dear to clueless journalists, “Where do you get your ideas?” Unexpectedly, he answered in all seriousness that all his music was dictated to him by his ancestral supreme beings from a planet in the Sirius star system. He then spent the next thirty years of his life writing a seven-day opera detailing his cosmological revelations.
Trans, however, is a piece so unusual that even Stockhausen himself is incapable of explaining it, saying merely that it came to him in a dream he could transcribe but not interpret. It doesn’t get played very often, so I made a point of going to see it at Blackheath Halls last month, where students from Trinity College were staging it as part of a new(ish) music festival.
The orchestra is directed to play from behind a scrim, bathed in dim purple light – Blackheath Halls doesn’t have a proscenium on its stage, so instead of the scrim they filled the room with fog. Three tiers of string players faced the audience; in the violet gloom behind them, rows of other musicians could vaguely be seen, following a conductor hidden behind a screen. The string players created a dense veil of sustained tones that masks the sounds that emerged from the stage behind them. Occasional, mysterious solos erupted from the orchestra, for no explicable reason. A loud, shuttling sound thundered across the room at unexpected intervals, as a random punctuation.
Audience and orchestra, equally lost in the purple fog, partook of the event in a state not unlike the suspension of disbelief required to embrace the enactment of a myth. Its alien weirdness and denial of rational meaning suspended judgement, the music and its theatre an unquestionable, unalterable fact to be experienced. We all deferred to the indomitable arrogance of Stockhausen, an arrogance that was necessary to trust that he could put across a work he could not understand, without a safety net of explanation or justification.
As a piece of theatrical irony, the student orchestra looked nervous and uncertain of their place on stage, as though overwhelmed by the audacity of the work and plagued by doubts that they could successfully pull it off. At the end of the piece many of them had a stunned expression of disbelief at their success. The music itself had been powerful enough to transcend their lack of self-possession, treating them as vessels, receiving dictation from higher beings.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Now in Lewisham unchained and living
Friday 23 March 2007
I’m finally back online, nicely settled in the new house. The new place has several amenities the old one lacked (trees, birds, grass, stars at night), but then there are some things the old place had which this house doesn’t offer (drug deals, street fighting, car wrecks, karaoke from the pub across the street at night).
A quick snapshot from the toilet of each residence should give an idea on how my lifestyle has improved. Before:
After:
Just to the right of this picture you can also see the Millennium Dome, but no matter.
Sadly, I suspect I’ll no longer be able to see all sorts of exciting things out my window anymore, like shootings, fistfights, and grisly death. On the other hand, the neighbours’ back yards may turn out to be more exciting than I imagine.
After two weeks it’s hard to get back into the habit of updating this site again, so expect to see some rather out-of-date posts for the next few days.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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Any Day Now
Monday 19 March 2007
“Normal” “service” will “resume” by the “end” of the “week”.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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House Moving! All Change.
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Can’t believe the NHS is losing money with careful organisation like this
Sunday 4 March 2007
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted here for the past week, it’s because I’ve been stuck on a bus behind an NHS protest which decided it would be a good idea to stage a march up a street that’s been closed off and dug up, and have only just got home. To be fair, the street’s only been closed for the past three weeks so it’s not like they had time to plan for this.
Filed under: London by Ben.H
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The iPod meme update: my dad clarifies the situation somewhat
Monday 26 February 2007
After posting a lengthy piece of filler about the contents of someone else’s iPod, my dad has written in to supply the missing information about the mystery orchestras.
The Beethoven is Nikolas Harnoncourt conducting The Chamber Orchestra Of Europe – this is part of a boxed set of the 9 symphonies and was released by Teldec in 1991. The 4th was recorded live 29/06/1990.The Villa Lobos is the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, conducted by Villa Lobos himself! The soprano is Victoria de los Angeles (Nos. 1 & 2), the original recording is from 1957, digitally remastered in 1987 by EMI France.
He adds that he is relying on the Gracenote database for some of this information, and if Gracenote was good enough to out Joyce Hatto as a fraud then it’s good enough for me.
My dad also confirms that, sadly, he no longer has the John Betjeman LPs and so had to source these tracks from, uh, “elsewhere”. However, he remains silent on the whole Rammstein/Lavigne/Farnham business, preferring instead to opine, erroneously, that “Undecided” is inferior to “Turn Up Your Radio“, and to gratuitously diss Tom T. Hall for no apparent reason before signing off. Clever smokescreen, there.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Saturday 24 February 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Shuffling with someone else’s mind
Thursday 22 February 2007
It had to happen by accident if it was going to happen at all. Every year I receive a shoebox containing several relatively high-end consumer knick-knacks from my dad, as he casts off his superseded technology and upgrades to the next generation of electronic gadgets. The box always arrives unexpectedly, the contents are always a surprise, and have a large degree of difference in usefulness. If you have unwanted battery-operated items lying around your house and cannot be bothered firing up eBay, I am considering expanding this service beyond members of my immediate family.
This year’s shoebox contained an iPod Nano so Dad, I hope you’re enjoying that new 80GB video iPod you’ve got yourself. I’ve never used a personal music player before, figuring that I’d always be switching it off every few minutes to hear something going on in the outside world. (The ancient Discman in the photo is patched into an amplifier, and in any case doesn’t like being moved. It’s another paternal cast-off.)
My Dad sent me his iPod with all his music still loaded on it, so before I do anything else with it I’m going to hit shuffle and report on the first ten tracks it plays. This experiment enables me to do simultaneously two things I’ve never done before: use an iPod, and take up a meme that has appeared on other blogs. Please note that I am using the latest definition of “meme”, which has now been extended to include “copying the Random Rules column in The Onion’s AV Club”.
Unlike other participants, who have prefaced their reports with disclaimers as to how the music on their iPod may not necessarily be representative of their actual tastes, I won’t resort to such a cop-out, and will boldly affirm that whatever tracks come up on this device are an unequivocal indicator of my dad’s personality.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Truly, this man was the Jesus of Cool.
Wednesday 21 February 2007
There haven’t been enough pictures here lately, so here’s one I nicked from Straight from the Tated .
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
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Pianophiles, you’ve been Hattoed
Tuesday 20 February 2007
National pride is all well and good, but British classical music buffs are notoriously partisan. No praise is too fulsome for a doughty wind band from Bournemouth or church organist in Beccles, all of whom are favourably compared to their foreign counterparts and their somewhat suspect techniques. No wonder so many music critics were beside themselves when they discovered the late-blossoming career of the Cambridge-based pianist Joyce Hatto.
Over the past year the British Gramophone magazine has been one of the most ardent champions of the 100-odd CDs recorded in the last 15 years of her life, after illness had forced her to abandon her concert career; alternately praising her and denouncing her critics in its quaint house style.
Hatto takes her place among the greats. Joyce Hatto’s CD legacy may be mired in controversy (“the forgeries of jealousy”?) but there is nothing controversial about recordings which surely place her among an elite of women pianists (only six artists of comparable stature spring to mind).
Doubting Thomases, of which there are apparently many, may well wonder how Joyce Hatto achieved such unalloyed mastery and musicianship when tragically beset with ill-health. But others will surely celebrate an awe-inspiring triumph of mind over matter, of the indomitable nature of the human spirit.
But then came 15 February 2007, when Gramophone published this sad revelation on its website:
It would take many weeks of intensive work to examine all of the Hatto recordings, but it seems clear that at least some of these great performances are identical to other performances available from other recording companies.
According to Andrew Rose, who investigated the hoax for Gramophone, the list of CDs by other pianists plagiarised by Hatto (or plagiarised in her name by her record-producer husband) is growing every day, as enthusiasts track down the matching source material.
The cranky old men who populate rec.music.classical.recordings on Usenet have descended into even wilder name-calling than usual, with hilarious use of quotations of previous Hatto praise to deflate some of the more obnoxious resident egos.
More cogent discussions are being tracked at Iron Tongue of Midnight.
Opera Chic offers her typically pertinent observation on the scandal, being the first to call out Hatto’s “Jetsons-style” bouffant.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Filler by Proxy XLVII: Great Drinker, Great Thinker
Tuesday 20 February 2007
The late, great James Tenney’s For Ann (rising) wins the inaugural Black Torrent Guard Most Annoying Song Tournament (found via Soho the Dog). Luckily, he includes an mp3 of the piece as well, but get it quick because I think it’s one of those temporary links.
For some reason I didn’t mention Tenney’s passing last year: he was one of the sharpest musical thinkers and composers of the latter part of the 20th century. He’s often pigeonholed as a musical version of a conceptual artist, but his music beautifully embodies his understanding of the nature and perception of sound and, in turn, his theoretical writings illuminate the ways in which we do and don’t “get” contemporary music, in ways that conventional talk of harmony and structure fails.
In one of the nerdiest seductions ever, I once turned a girlfriend on to the avant-garde by taking her to a performance of Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion. (That piece is usually more of a knockout than the Sonic Youth performance in the link, but I like the way they take an idea and run with it.)
Some short pieces by Tenney are online at the CalArts site (Firefox users: dodgy website alert!) including the classic tape piece Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”). People’s memories of Tenney piled up at PostClassic.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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Also, the indices are almost up to date.
Saturday 17 February 2007
In case you tried to read this site last week and wondered whether I had trashed everything in a fit of blogger burnout, the answer is no. My kerazy web hosting service likes to keep things lively by randomly deleting my account from time to time, then reinstating it a few days later with a terse apology but no explanation. Suggestions for a less impetuous web host are welcome.
I’ve used the downtime productively by getting all fatalistic and not bothering to finish up the next article I was preparing. Meanwhile, at Sarsaparilla, an intelligent posting about language and erudition has descended into a discussion about people sticking inadvisable substances into various bodily orifices. You might enjoy that.
