music & society
If you've noticed any hip pains recently, please let musoc.org know: gro.cosum@ofni. At the end of every year there will be a special recognition for Greatest Hip Pain.
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Time was when the performance of Baroque music was all about "getting it right", but fortunately those days have passed.
Ivan Hewett (him again), Daily Telegraph music critic, July 2010
Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, was certainly one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time.
Anne Midgette, Washington Post art music critic [see Hall of Shame July 2010], June 2010
[Stephen Sondheim's 'Company'...] one of the great 20th century musical works
Petroc 'Squire' Trelawny, BBC Radio 3 presenter, BBC Music magazine, June 2010 edition
Some blinkered purists may disagree, but [I find] it thrilling that the Proms' scope now takes in world music (the Iraqi singer/guitarist Ilham Al Madfai), folk music (the Northumbrian pipes virtuoso Kathryn Tickell) and Broadway (Simon Russell Beale leading a Sondheim 80th-birthday tribute). All that and Jamie Cullum too!
Richard Morrison, chief music critic (sign of the times) of The Times, May 2010
Sting embraces Dowland as a forebear ['Songs From the Labyrinth'], and though his crooning style takes adjusting to, the performances are painstakingly rendered and intriguing.
Anthony Tommasini, cloth-eared chief art music critic, New York Times, May 2010
The implication here is that classical singers' 'artistry and technique' is automatically on a higher plane than that of someone stuck in a 'pop-ballad rut', as Rupert [Christiansen, writing in The Daily Telegraph] puts it. That, of course, is bilge
Tom Service, in his (self-lampooning?) Tom Service On Classical Blog, April 2010
Christopher O'Riley is back in town this week doing what he does best: exploding the arbitrary borders others use to separate classical and popular music.
John von Rhein, 'classical' music critic, Chicago Tribune (Entertainment section, of course), April 2010
[...] something for opera-company managers and symphony-orchestra programmers to contemplate. If you really wanted to be true to the spirit of Wagner, you would stop playing him and focus on new work instead.
Alex Ross, everyone trendy's favourite music writer, blog entry, March 2010
I had even more positive feelings about Damon Albarn's 2007 opera Monkey. Hugely enhanced by Chen Shi-Zheng's spectacular martial-arts staging, it struck me as the most innovative music-theatre venture I'd seen for decades [...]
I wish that composers who wanted to explore new genres weren't so reviled. The reverse should be true. Serious composers who also have the ability to write commercial songs or soundtracks are far better able to support themselves, and their horizons are widened. Similarly, pop composers who aspire to bigger canvases should be acclaimed
Richard Morrison, chief music critic of The Times, March 2010
they [The Knife's Tomorrow, in a Year] might have started out as a Scandinavian synth-pop combo, but now they've written an electronic opera about Charles Darwin, and it's fascinating. To my ears, it fuses John Carpenter's film scores with pseudo-operatic camp
Tom Service, in his Tom Service On Classical Blog, March 2010
Any 22nd-century composer who will consciously write "classical music", unthinkingly adding to the pile of orchestral and chamber music that already exists [...] will truly deserve to be mocked. Now music's cutting edge has been handed to creative musicians operating outside the confines of conventionally configured classical music. The rest is dross.
Philip Clark, arch-postmodern critic in Gramophone, April 2010 (and also musoc.org's Class. Traitor of the Month for March)
I get annoyed when people criticise an artist for straying into new territory [...] Sting's voice [on his latest, almost amusical, album 'If on a Winter's Night'] has a superbly melancholy sound, great intonation and there's no distortion of vowels.
Sarah Walker, BBC Radio 3 presenter, in 'What the classical world [sic] is listening to this month', BBC Music, April 2010
Whether on the subject of Gershwin, French music, jazz, fashion, or simply what to choose from the wine list, Jean-Yves Thibaudet speaks as eloquently as he plays. Talking to the French pianist was a rare privilege.
Jeremy Pound, deputy editor of BBC Music, salivating over the bling-bling piano poseur, BBC Music, March 2010
In 2004 I was able to bring Oscar Peterson to the Minnesota Festival Sommerfest [...] after 21 years of going backstage and being a groupie [...]. What upset me the most when he died was how few people actually understood what made him such a genius.
Andrew Litton, conductor, "Living on the edge" in Gramophone, March 2010 edition
Marc-André Hamelin in Chopin, Stephen Osborne in Rachmaninov, Leonidas Kavakos in Mendelssohn, Accentus in Fauré [etc]? No, the most fun I've had with my earphones in this year has been The Beatles in punchy, visceral, thrilling mono.
David Threasher, critic for Gramophone, choosing a favourite CD of the year, Gramophone December 2009 edition
This year I've enjoyed mind-expanding free improvisation, also psychedelic disco care of [sic] my new favourite band, Chrome Hoof. But [...] The Kinks Choral Collection has provided me with the most shameless, wallowing pleasure. And often."
Philip Clark, critic for Gramophone, choosing a favourite CD of the year, Gramophone December 2009 edition
I always feel that putting labels on music rather misses the point. It seems more interesting to think in terms of music that dances, or that sings or weeps - these are categories that we all understand in our hearts, and which exclude nobody. I want audiences to experiment, to crossover - to be adventurous.
I'm fascinated by chamber music and how it works. And frustrated that it only ever seems to apply to classical music. Some of the best chamber music I've heard has been from jazz or world musicians.
'Extreme' cellist Matthew Barley, in The Guardian September 2009
Much Baroque music (1600-1750) [is] essentially posh pop - neat melodies over big basses.
Only one instrument can survive on its own for long enough to sustain our interest and achieve any level of profundity: the piano.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic, John Allison & Michael Kennedy, in The Daily Telegraph '100 Best Classical Recordings' September 2009
The whole thing ['Play the Field' concert] will be amplified to the hilt, so as far as I'm concerned teenagers can fight and toddlers can scream. I want to prove that Holst's The Planets can be as much of a sensory overload as a concert by the Grateful Dead, and just as exciting.
Charles Hazlewood, conductor, presenter, impresario extraordinaire, in The Daily Telegraph August 2009
I want people to hear really exciting music played by the best, but in a context where they can clap when they want to, chase their toddlers, drink beer, take photos, get lost in the music and generally be themselves.
In between performances of the orchestral sections, my band, the All Stars (which includes Goldfrapp's Will Gregory and Portishead's Adrian Utley), will play spontaneous electronic responses to Holst's music [The Planets] from across the parkland, incorporating material sampled from the orchestra's performance. The effect should be that of Holst's score set in a kind of ambient relief.
Charles Hazlewood, in The Guardian August 2009
When you hear a great orchestra perform Beethoven's 'Eroica', it isn't like a rock band trying to mimic the Beatles - it is like the Beatles re-incarnated.
Alex Ross, in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, published 2007. Ross's book, a postmodern history of 20th century music, was, needless to say, praised to the skies by the illuminati.
This quotation from it was the original cause of Hip Pains. Here are some more, taken from the archives of Ross's website:
[Christopher Tignor, whose] generation are erasing the line between classical and pop, dispensing with performers in favor of laptops, incorporating improvisation and world-music practices, or singing their own art songs in semi-pop style.
the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense
Morton Feldman, the greatest American composer of modern memory
As in Feldman's 'Rothko Chapel', the seeming stasis of the sound [of Ross's hero Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians'] encourages the listener to zero in on seemingly inconsequential details, so that the smallest changes in orchestration have the force of seismic shocks and something as simple as a bass line going down a half step sends chills up the spine.
Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds.
In the nineteenth century, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick dreamed of a world 'purely musical', beyond politics and personality. Such a world now exists in the form of the MP3.
And from an interview, where else, in The Guardian:
The great joy of music today is that you don't have to feel guilty about liking any of it.