Category: music

The Baghdad Symphony Orchestra has played a concert. Consider the gravity of such a statement. In a city where many residents are without electricity, or water, or basic medical care, and where American and British troops continue to conduct daily raids searching for supporters of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, 50 musicians sat on a stage in formal attire, and brought music back to the Iraqi capital for the first time since the invasion began. The first work on the program was the patriotic song, “My Nation,” virtually banned under Hussein’s rule.

Nearly two decades ago, journalist Will Crutchfield uncovered a stack of moldy old manuscript papers filled with musical jumbles, abandoned compositions, and what appeared to be pieces of an unpublished opera by Donizetti. “It didn’t take long to discover the pages were in fact a lost opera. But it took nearly two decades, and return trips to Europe, to piece together a version capable of being produced. On July 17, that big step in this ongoing detective story will be taken at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, N.Y., when Crutchfield himself will conduct Elisabeth, the never-produced Donizetti opera he rediscovered.

Does listening to Mozart make you smarter? That’s the claim, repeated often, without much scientific study to back it up. Now the Neurosciences Institute, a “respected research body perched by the sea near La Jolla,” California is presenting a concert series with neuroscience experts to address the question.

“The British music industry, both live and recorded, employs more than 100,000 people and generates around £3 billion a year, yet it is perceived unquestioningly to be in the slough of despond. The hand-wringing reaches its apogee on Wednesday when Britain’s most popular radio station, Radio 2, devotes five hours to The Great British Music Debate.” But British music has never been healthier. Music occupies a central role in our lives, and look at this week’s Glastonbury festival. Each “festival-goer has paid £100 for admission, and all tickets sold out within 18 hours of going on sale.”

This trend of classical musicians speaking to their audiences before performing a piece of music is becoming very popular. But why? Why is it necessary to introduce the music? “Perhaps this thirst for the human voice has been created by television and radio. We are so used to being talked at, bombarded with information, never left in silence for a moment, that it has become unthinkable for a performer to need and use silence. Nobody ever plays on TV without first being talked about, or talked to, or talking themselves. The space between us and the performer always has to be filled.”

Why is the symphony orchestra dying? Bernard Holland spells it out in clinical style. “Classical music has only itself to blame. It has indulged the creation of a narcissistic avant-garde speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener in even our most sophisticated American cities. Intelligent, music-loving and eager to learn, such listeners largely understand that true talent and originality must find their own voice. What they do not understand is why the commitment to reach and touch listeners in the seats does not stand at the beginning of the creative process, as it did with Haydn and Mozart. This kind of art-for-art’s-sake has much to answer for.”

“So what exactly is Outsider Music? You might as well ask, “What is Outsider Art?” In a field occupied by a dozen or so jostling factions, the overall spectrum remains bewilderingly inclusive. Like its more closely monitored visual counterpart, O.M. practitioners range from the infantile to the institutionally committed — almost anything qualifies. ‘Outsider music includes all manner of incompetent but sincere recordings, music by the mentally challenged, industry rejects, eccentrics, singing celebrities, lovable oddballs, grandiose statements, etc’.”

The UK is overrun with music festivals. So “why do we have music festivals, what do they achieve and where can it all go wrong – or right? Essentially, a festival, even an early-music festival, must be about the new and the fresh as well as celebrating the established. If it seeks only to reinforce preconceptions and repeat the familiar, it has failed. It is all too easy to build a programme of nothing but popular classics and, certainly in financial terms, all too tempting. But while such a festival may deliver an audience, it does nothing to extend musical horizons, or to create a buzz.”

“I know that the British music industry is in crisis. You know that the British music industry is in crisis. My parents – whose interest in music is so profound that they have now owned a CD player for 15 years without ever learning how to use it – know that the British music industry is in crisis.” But sitting around whining about it solves nothing. The music industry is in crisis because of a series of bad business decisions and an inability to change with a changing world.

The music recording industry is chasing consumers to punish them for downloading music. But perhaps it’s because the industry has not kept up with what consumers want. “The problem for the industry is: Who makes the money in the future? The people who are making the money now are much less interested in making these changes. It is not an industry that has had to change much. Traditionally the music industry has been about selling product on a piece of plastic. The industry has been clinging to CDs for too long.”