Peter Maxwell Davies let loose some fightin’ words a few months ago at the annual meeting of Britain’s Incorporated Society of Musicians. Music education has been unavailable in schools for two generations; the hegemony of commercial music is unchecked; and students now graduate high school with vocabularies insufficient to express the complexity of experience. Surprised? It’s all the same trend. Let’s start teaching kids to notate music, sing Palestrina, and go to new music concerts. (So Max.)
A related personal anecdote: Around the same time Davies was giving this speech, I asked the faculty of the Harvard Music Department if the declining standards of musical literacy were affecting their tasks as music educators. They didn’t seem to think so.
Hope this helps:
masterpiece |ˈmastərˌpēs| noun a work of outstanding artistry, skill, or workmanship : a great literary masterpiece | the car was a masterpiece of space-age technology. • an artist’s or craftsman’s best piece of work : the painting is arguably Picasso’s masterpiece. • historical a piece of work by a craftsman accepted as qualification for membership of a guild as an acknowledged master.
I believe that all mature composers have written pieces that they judge are valid displays of their mastery, and therefore transcend mere journeyman works, and so are masterpieces. At least, I have, and I would objectively say that others here have as well, regardless of whether or not I *like* them.
OK, “most.” But it’s not the aim, it’s the flush. Industrial strength wall-mounted atomizers those American Standards are.
And if it’s spraying on…her clothes, that epidemiologist has other issues…
Like hangin’ out in men’s rooms? Or maybe U. of Chicago just doesn’t have a literacy requirement. 🙂 A real pissing contest, this.
Don’t know about your epidemiologist, but most people’s urine is sterile. And if it’s spraying on his or her clothes, that epidemiologist has other issues…
The guy from Chicago says “Yeah—well, I went to the University of Chicago, and they taught me not to pee on my hands.”
As any epidemiologist (Harvard trained or otherwise) can tell you, after using (and presumably flushing) a urinal you’d do well not just washing your hands but changing your clothes as well.
The guy from Chicago didn’t get his money’s worth. 😉
How about this pearl of wisdom: “Here one should not forget that much “popular” music is manufactured purely for commercial gain.”
Hmm, so I guess performers of popular music don’t make economic sacrifices to follow their muse, and classical organizations have never whored themselves out to rich patrons?
He didn’t say that people who don’t write music down are creating lesser music than those that do. He also didn’t say that it would be wasteful for his students to apply their notation skills to non-classical music. Last I checked, there’s a lot of overlap between how jazz lead sheets and classical scores are written down.
The bit about the child banging on a percussion music was about music education that’s not really education. In the sentence right before the one you quoted, Davies associates these programs with classical institutions:
I mentioned “outreach” programmes. Some are exemplary, but so often, with the best intentions, and with the best will in the world for the orchestras, etc, who sponsor them, they simply fail.
“If people want to continue this argument, some quotes showing examples of Davies’s classical chauvinism would be nice.”
One example for me:
“I had them sing the sounds before they wrote them down – this is important – so that the sign on paper represented a meaningful sound-object,…
There is little insight gained into how music works when a child with no musical experience bangs a percussion instrument,…all too often they remain musically ignorant and illiterate…”
Equating 12 tone equal temperament notation with musical literacy is foolish. If I create music passed on from an oral or performance tradition am I still musically illiterate?
The unthinking use of amplification in many kinds of music turns what should be an intimate and sensitive experience into a soul and ear-numbing imitation of a Hitlerian or Stalinist rally, with all sensibilities subsumed in blather and beat.
He qualified the kind of amplification he referred to. I wouldn’t make the same political implication, but I’m not a fan of overamplification myself. (Glenn Branca notwithstanding, but then again, John Cage described Branca’s music as fascist)
Since the possibility of making megabucks out of young people by feeding them the lowest common denominator of “music” has been realised, “music” became an industry, not a profession, where, for the least possible work put in, the maximum profit is extracted for the fat cats, with “music” becoming ever more zombie-like, and the bands ruthlessly exploited.
As far as I could tell, Davies’s main complaint here was with commercialized music and consumerism, not pop music per se. Classical music is not without its lowest-common denominator factions, either. The actual references to pop music were pretty scant. His criticism of consumer culture as being manipulative and one-directional is, like Seth said, simplistic and played out, but this seemed secondary to the main argument of music education.
The speech’s main point seemed to be that we should be keep music education in public schools so that people can express whatever it is they want to. He didn’t specify how they had to use their training:
There is no substitute for having a professionally trained and led music department in a school. Were there consistent, dedicated teaching and funds, classical music, big band, brass, folk, jazz, pop, etc, would all flourish.
He spends a lot of time discussing why classical music is great, but he’s a, um, classical musician speaking to a group of… classical musicians. He used that final section to try to demonstrate the benefits of a high degree of musical literacy. Given his own background and the audience, would the Davies-detractors here have preferred a sloppy account of something more pop?
If people want to continue this argument, some quotes showing examples of Davies’s classical chauvinism would be nice.
I wasn’t assuming that you COULDN’T read, only wondering, due to the comments, whether or not you actually HAD. I don’t think I’m the only one with that impression.
Evan, you’re missing the point. How are you determining, other than your own subjective opinion, that classical music is superior—number of listeners? If that’s the metric, then classical music is crap compared with popular music or C+W. Profundity? I think there’s stuff from Nirvana and some indie groups today that is pretty profound. And how are you defining classical music—academia? Downtown? Western? Non-Western? Why is Western classical music more profound than Indian raga or W. African drumming? And in terms of age, my understanding is that the Indian musical tradition is far older than Western classical music. And I’m not including music from the middle east, much of which predates the usual dead white dudes (Bach, Beethoven) by centuries.
No one’s saying that you can’t have a profound preference for classical music over all else. Hell, you’re welcome to prefer academically acceptable music over, say, Charlemagne Palestine. Whatever. But to claim that classical music is superior does suggest either snobbery at best or chauvinism at worst. Either way, it’s a myopic attitude, and yes, I am one of those hippie throwbacks who has a serious problem with elitism.
It’s like the old story I tell about my alma mater, the U of Chicago (which is a geek school, but is anything but elitist). Two guys are in a men’s room, one from Harvard, one from the U of C. The Harvard guy pees and goes to wash his hands. The U of C guy pees and starts to head for the exit when the Harvard guy says rather affectedly “I went to Harvard, and they taught me to wash my hands after relieving myself.” The guy from Chicago says “Yeah—well, I went to the University of Chicago, and they taught me not to pee on my hands.”
That’s the problem with elitists—they know how to wash their hands after the fact, but don’t understand that one shouldn’t pee on one’s hands… 😎
So you would deny that most “art music” or whathaveyou is more serious (choose your definition) than most pop music? That it has higher cultural ambitions, strives for greater longetivity and profundity? Whether or not these are automatically good attitudes, they seem to me to be pretty obvious.
I would deny that, yeah. The only way that argument works is if you compare classical music only to the most least-common-denominator pop music. There’s a whole world of pop music out there that aims “higher” – easily, the majority of it strives for longevity and profundity – but PMD is simply ignorant of that. It’s no different than those who assume most modern classical music is atonal and arrhythmic.
His knowledge of popular music appears to be limited to that which someone who doesn’t live under a rock can’t help but be exposed to – the snippets he hears coming out of people’s cars, the 30-second edits that play in the background of TV advertisements. Everybody knows Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, but you couldn’t help but hear them at a certain point in time. But you had to go out of your way – you had to have the cultural curiosity – to experience De La Soul Is Dead. He didn’t, I guess. Whatever, that’s his business.
And … what’s wrong with value judgements?
Depends. It’s okay within a given context: “In-n-Out Burgers are better quality than McDonalds” or the like – but what he’s saying is “Boiled meat is better than sandwiches” – not as a statement of personal preference, e.g. “I prefer boiled meat to sandwiches” – but as if this was simply fact for everyone. That it tastes better even if you don’t realize it because you don’t know enough about boiled meat to understand it.
But topping that, he’s making this judgment having tasted only sandwiches made by McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy’s.
And beyond the I-Know-Better-Than-You-What’s-Good-For-You Elitism of it, it’s yet another thing to expect the government to spend money or base policy on your personal values. Go through his speech and replace “classical music” with “traditional marriage,” “popular” with “gay,” and “pounding bass” with “pounding-” …er, well, you get the idea.
You agree with him, though – in your world, popular music is not as “serious” as classical music. To those of us with a broader understanding of – or perhaps “immersion in” is a better way to put it – popular forms, it’s quite a different story.
I am wondering – this just struck me – what your (or PMD’s, though I doubt he’s reading this and likely to answer) criteria for “serious” is, exactly. What specific things make one work “serious” vs. one that isn’t?
I’m wondering if you all actually read the whole talk–or any of it, for that matter.
I did. Twice.
There is indeed something preachy and panicky about the tone of the speech; I read it again and while there is the occasional phrase I don’t agree with, for the most part, I found it well-intentioned.
And I found it self-serving, ignorant, and paranoid. Oh well, the road to hell is paved with…
“No Rodney, I don’t think many people have actually read the entire (3-page speech).”
Now I’m not sure which is more insulting, Davies’ histrionic rant or the assumption that I might not be able to read three pages of text?
For the record, I love country music. I think the breadth of its expression over the course of the 20th and 21st century is on par with anything that’s come out of the world of “contemporary classical.”
Evan–
I’ve been pretty well represented by what other people are saying, but just to clarify and have it come straight from me: the difference between chauvinism and preference is whether you think something is objectively superior versus whether you personally like it better. I don’t like country music, and I’ve been known in casual conversations to say that it sucks, but I would never claim in a serious discourse that it’s objectively inferior. Davies is welcome to have whatever taste he wants, the problem arises when he elevates his personal tastes to the status of objective truth.
You say “‘Superior’ of course implies criteria of superiority, which imply subjective priorities,” but I mean just the opposite. “Superior,” to me, means that you believe you’re making _objective_ comparisons of quality, and those were the kinds of judgements that I’m labeling as chauvinism. I also disagree that classical music “has higher cultural ambitions, strives for greater longetivity and profundity” than popular music, but even if I’m wrong, the cultural ambitions of the creator don’t define the actual value of the product.
You’re right, though, that a lot of people think classical music is elitist. Unfortunately, to a large extent they’re right.
Rodney–In fact, I read the whole thing, and reread parts of it several times. What makes you think I didn’t?
Rodney and Eric,
I was also wondering if some of the commenters had read the article, and went back to check to see if I had skipped over anything (I hadn’t). It should also be noted, that this was a speech before professional musicians. If anything, PMD is guilty of caring deeply about something he’s devoted his life to – we should all have so much passion.
No Rodney, I don’t think many people have actually read the entire (3-page speech). I think some people are basing their entire rant on Galen’s somewhat out-of-context quotes, which do seem misguided.
There is indeed something preachy and panicky about the tone of the speech; I read it again and while there is the occasional phrase I don’t agree with, for the most part, I found it well-intentioned.
When I first read some comments here, I was expecting a full-on bash of popular music. It wasn’t. Read it more carefully and his argument is ultimately more subtle than most of you think.
I’m wondering if you all actually read the whole talk–or any of it, for that matter.
I think it goes a bit beyond having preferences. If I prefer the company of men to women, for whatever reason, that’s a preference. If I think women are less serious than men, that’s chauvinism.
So you would deny that most “art music” or whathaveyou is more serious (choose your definition) than most pop music? That it has higher cultural ambitions, strives for greater longetivity and profundity? Whether or not these are automatically good attitudes, they seem to me to be pretty obvious.
PMD’s comments at no point stated an aesthetic preference. He made value judgements, pure and simple.
And … what’s wrong with value judgements? Again, there’s plenty wrong with PMD’s eyebrow-raising rhetoric, but since when are value judgements themselves objectionable??!
I think PMD misunderstands one important thing: no one thinks that classical music itself is elitist.
Seriously? Nobody thinks that? Have you asked Tony Blair?
Pop music is folk music. It’s popular because it’s what The People have chosen. It wasn’t forced down their throats by corporate conglomerates.
Seems to me these two situations can, and do, co-exist quite comfortably.
I won’t speak for Galen, but perhaps if you replace ‘chauvinism’ with the word ’snobbery’ you will understand what I think Galen’s point is. It’s the difference between preferring classical music and saying that hip-hop is crap because it isn’t classical.
Well, yeah, maybe, but Galen said this:
First, “classical chauvinism” just means thinking that classical music is superior to other kinds of music.
“Superior” of course implies criteria of superiority, which imply subjective priorities; I would submit that thinking every sort of music is potentially as “good” (?!) as any other simply implies a lack of substantial and meaningful criteria – hence the oft-approvingly-cited “if it sounds good, it is good,” which is clever and catchy as a catchphrase but pretty vapid in the end – and thus either a sort of feel-good hey-man-whatever ecumenicism or a lack of discernment.
There’s nothing wrong with finding one body of creative work superior to another. And there’s also nothing wrong with having a relatively small number of people share your opinion, despite the horror of “elitism.” PMD’s rhetoric was a little, um, forceful, yes, and the main problem with that is it makes it too easy to dismiss what he’s actually saying.
There are men who would pay a small fortune to have Britney Spears smash them in the face with a jackboot. Perhaps PMD is simply too prudish to see the “intimate and sensitive experience” in it. Mind you it’s not my thing, personally. I think everyone knows I’m more of a Lindsay Lohan guy these days.
Galen, when having aesthetic preferences is “chauvinism,” there’s really very little room for discussion, isn’t there?
I think it goes a bit beyond having preferences. If I prefer the company of men to women, for whatever reason, that’s a preference. If I think women are less serious than men, that’s chauvinism. If I found Asian girls more aesthetically pleasing than black girls, that’s a preference. If I thought Asian girls were smarter than black girls, that would be racism.
Mind you, before anyone takes any of that out of context – none of the above is the case. Just making examples. PMD’s comments at no point stated an aesthetic preference. He made value judgements, pure and simple.
But do I care? Oh wow, another fuddy-duddy is complaining about how the kids these days just don’t get it. I half expected him to go on a tangent about piercings and “why can’t they wear pants that fit properly?”
I think PMD misunderstands one important thing: no one thinks that classical music itself is elitist. What some people find elitist are classical’s snooty pundits – primi exempli, Peter Maxwell Davies. His rant, in my opinion, does more harm than good. It reinforces the notion that one must be educated in this music in order to enjoy it, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Must one know Color Theory to appreciate a painting? An illiterate can enjoy and understand a film or a play as well as anyone else (as long as there aren’t subtitles, I suppose…) – the fact that one doesn’t understand the instructions on paper doesn’t mean jack. Just ask any of the people who don’t play an instrument or read music yet enjoy music on a daily basis, which would amount to… give or take 2% or so… everyone in the world.
I don’t think he realizes that his stance makes John Q. Public less likely to give classical music a go. They hear his frothing, and, figuring he’s an expert on these matters, take him at his word that because they don’t know how to read music they’re just not going to “get” it.
And before he goes and sells the Crown Jewels to fund universal music education, he may want to consider some of the UK’s larger educational problems (some of which he touched on, granted) : currently ranked second-to-last in adult literacy for industrialized nations, 28% below the international average in eighth-grade math (sorry, maths) scores… How do you expect someone to understand the difference between a quarter-note and an eighth-note when they don’t know the difference between 1/4 and 1/8?
His comparisons with Stalin and Hitler are just… silly. Again, he misunderstands. Pop music is folk music. It’s popular because it’s what The People have chosen. It wasn’t forced down their throats by corporate conglomerates. PMD’s reductive assessment of it – that anything loud with a 4/4 beat is going to put the common folk into an opium-like stupor – shows alarming ignorance. His opinion of lay people – that they are soeasily brainwashed, at the mercy of Sony and Warner Brothers – is insulting and beneath contempt. And paranoid. If anything, corporations are at the mercy of the public’s elusive whims. But he goes on and on about everything that’s been done to classical music, how classical music has been denied its proper place.
Bullshit. The sooner he wakes up and realizes the world doesn’t owe him (or classical music) anything, the sooner he might try thinking about things he can do to increase awareness, things he and other composers and arts organizations can do make people interested. But instead, he believes he doesn’t have to do jack shit since that’s… the Prime Minister’s job or something. He’s a lazy-ass, honestly. Another slacktivist arm-chair quarterback, only with a high-falutin’ vocabulary and a pet issue no one cares about. He goes so far as to call “serious” music a “God-given right” – the chutzpah!
Well, if that’s the case, he should just relax – God’ll deal with it. It appears, however, that He doesn’t give a shit what His creation listens to. If he did, he’d do something about that devil music the kids call Rock-n-Roll that turns them into premarital fornicators and marijuana smokers.
I thought his generation were supposed to be the go-getters, the do-ers, the “I woke up at the crack of dawn and worked seven hours on the family farm before walking ten miles uphill to school and paid my way through Oxford turning tricks in Hyde Park”-ers. Not complainers who expected everything delivered to them on a silver platter.
What’s kind of amusing is that he’s essentially asking the government / educational system to do exactly what he accuses the music industry of doing – forcing one kind of music on everybody.
Mind you, I can understand his frustration. Poor fella just feels the world is leaving him behind. Just the other day I was bitchin’ and moanin’ about how the young’ns today don’t really understand The Transformers. Not the way people (okay, men) my age do, and how sad it is that they’re going to grow up with their transformative Transformers experience being what’s bound to be a god-awful abomination of a movie (that I’m going to see opening night, regardless…) Sigh.
Paul, until you said you disagreed with me, I thought your definition of masterpiece was exactly the point I was making, that it represents a pinnacle or apex. OK, so in the (little known?) origin of the term as you relate, it comes at the beginning of one’s career as a master, but it still represented a pinnacle of sorts, no?
If the idea, as put forth earlier (and with which I personally disagree), that a masterpiece is a great work by someone, then I would have included far more for each of the composers. I think Reich’s “Triple Quartet” is a really great piece of music. Does it represent SR at his absolute best? Some might argue that it doesn’t. But again, who cares—I really like the piece. Every piece doesn’t have to be a “masterpiece.” But I would hope that every piece is honest and worthwhile to my ears and pedestrian taste.
“It’s the difference between preferring classical music and saying that hip-hop is crap because it isn’t classical.”
That’s it exactly. If a person off the street made a comment that some form of music they didn’t like was the product of stupidity and a tool of fascism it would be embarrassing, for a person with Maxwell Davies’ influence and power to say that is unforgivable.
I suppose I am going to add to the confusion on the term masterpiece. I had thought it was a sort of middle-ages term for something a journeyman did to prove he was good enough to be considered a master at his craft. So a mason would build a wall or a building that reflected the sum of his expertise and capability. The point being it was a benchmark accomplished at the start of his career as a master. Subsequent works were pieces by a master, but not necessarily the masterpiece. So I would disagree with David Toub on the definition of masterpiece as the pinnacle of an artist’s achievement.
In that light, it might be more interesting to identify the single, benchmark masterpiece of a composer rather than argue about how many of his works are masterpieces.
Galen, when having aesthetic preferences is “chauvinism,” there’s really very little room for discussion, isn’t there?
I won’t speak for Galen, but perhaps if you replace ‘chauvinism’ with the word ‘snobbery’ you will understand what I think Galen’s point is. It’s the difference between preferring classical music and saying that hip-hop is crap because it isn’t classical. I personally can’t stand most C+W, but I’d never go so far as to say that it’s destructive or harmful. That’s the point, I think.
Galen,
I used ‘non-serious-western-music’ as a kind of distillation of a stylistic category PMD used. I didn’t reword from the ‘serious music’, because generalizations have a very tenuous connection with reality, and if you change the terminology too much, you distort the meaning and aren’t really paraphrasing anymore.
You have a good point with regard to PMD’s willingness to lump together cultural practices that he doesn’t know that well- bad idea. On reread, perhaps you’re right, that there is a general indictment of unspecified popular musics that creeps out of his paragraphs indicting commercialism in music (which I think is an important distinction in PMD’s speech). However, I don’t think it’s simply a mean-spirited attack. Take for example:
“Since the possibility of making megabucks out of young people by feeding them the lowest common denominator of “music” has been realised, “music” became an industry, not a profession, where, for the least possible work put in, the maximum profit is extracted for the fat cats, with “music” becoming ever more zombie-like, and the bands ruthlessly exploited.”
It seems to me that PMD isn’t saying that the bands should not be, in fact he is decrying their exploitation- he thinks that the bands should just be able to do their thing (zombie like is commercial music, not popular music- notice). This kind of talk would fit right in to a punk aesthetic. I guess I can’t say whether I think if PMD was walking down the street and passed a garage band (or a laptop performer in a club) if he’d say ‘cheerio’ or not, but I don’t think that he’s saying those garage bands are ‘Hitlerian’. I think to arrive at your interpretation of these comments, you have to assume that PMD has lumped together all of popular music (whatever all of that would be) and that all of his negative comments refer to that totality, which you can’t do from the explicit content of the speech- you have to say ‘oh, he doesn’t really mean this and that, that’s a dodge, etc.’
I feel that the reason for PMD’s agitation is that thinks that music has content, that this content is both effected by and effects the society around it (and therefore, in a small way, music matters), and that on a gut level he’s concerned about some stuff that he doesn’t really understand that well (for example, maybe he’s actually concerned about overamplification- I know a lot of musicians of all stripes that are, and I know that with certain kinds of concerts from Canadian style EA to Rock that I have to bring earplugs, because it’s going to be excessively, hearing-loss-inducingly loud if I don’t- and sometimes even with the earplugs in!), and he talked about it.
Part of my charitable reading comes from having read about how he’s made his way; earlier PMD tried to make room for popular music, modern music, and early music in conservatories when these were basically forbidden, he’s gay and writes a lot of music connected with Christian tradition (which often is hostile towards him), and he was successful as a composer, having come from a working class background (which is tough). I just don’t feel from what was said that he really means that groups like Sonic Youth or Radiohead (if he knows about them or not) are on his Hitler-list. I don’t think this is a good speech. It’s kind of carelessly offensive. But I think that you’re digging down into subtext that may or may not be there to make him out to be an out and out anti-popular-music-bigot.
BTW- I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘state of our culture’- What would that mean?
Mary Jane,
I think it’s a very good point that people can only talk about what they know, and it is ridiculous to expect someone to know everything. In fact, what our postmodern revelations demand is that we take into account where out interlocutor is ‘coming from’ culturally, which may demand that we have sympathy for the fact that someone you was trained before the 1980s is going to have been oriented with terms like ‘serious music’- i.e. recognizing that there is no meta-terminology for anything; that you can only describe from a particular standpoint.
However, if someone generalizes, as PMD does, without thorough, detailed knowledge of what they’re describing (i.e. generalizing without models), we certainly have reason to be suspicious of their conclusions, and perhaps even to be angry at them for being a blowhard. If PMD is concerned about particular trends in ‘commercial music’ and he’s going to give a big speech about it, it would behoove him to be better informed, so that he might actually communicate himself to someone like Galen, instead of just pissing him of and making him feel persecuted.
Asking the Harvard faculty about declining standards might not be fair. It’s like asking a guy on top of the mountain if the flood in the valley gets his shoes wet. I teach at a community college and the level of literacy that I experience in my students is far less than one would hope for a high school graduate with six years of instrumental music.
Mary Jane–thanks for your comments.
Galen, when having aesthetic preferences is “chauvinism,” there’s really very little room for discussion, isn’t there?
First off, David, Danke für das Kompliment (my calendar’s phrase for the day). I do think that those are four of my best pieces, although I’ve got a couple others that I think are as good, if not better.
I’m going to be a contrarian – I actually thought parts of MD’s speach were inspiring. It could have used some smoother transitions and avoided a couple of throwaway lines, but all in all, I thought it was pretty good. By latching onto the Hitler line to criticize, to me, is the equivalent of extracting a thirty second sound bite from a long, thoughtful policy speech. Upon reading his speech, when I got to that line, my reaction was that he was referring to Jaques Attali’s “Noise, The Political Economy of Music,” and the preferatory quote from Hilter about how he couldn’t have come to power without the loudspeaker. I thought MD could have prepared for the reference more and provided more explanation, though. [There also have been recent discussions in pop music about Hitler, pink noise, and loud music.]
My primary take on his speech, though, was that he was bemoaning the lack of active participation in life, and specifically music, and that he spoke about it through what he knows, his experience in classical music. He didn’t seem to exclude any type of music, but spoke about what he knows. I didn’t get that he was putting down all pop music, just some of it, (and there’s no denying that some of it is awful.) And I didn’t take offense to his “minimalistic” reference, since I took it as an adjective, not a genre.
Secondarily, I thought he was talking about our waning common cultural references, and again spoke about music, that being which he knows the most about, but is probably also the field that well-rounded and educated people know the least about. I thought it was inspiring that he got a school full of children to not only perform, but to create their own works. To me it showed that by performing music, it developed from being a passive activity, to active participation, to creating.
As far as his amplification argument goes, he does have a point, in that it has come to be used unthinkingly. To go to an extreme example, the US government blasts non-stop pop music through loudspeakers as a form of torture. There’s a headphone manufacturer advertising its product saying it will get you high, that it can alter your brain waves. And how many pieces have you heard that rely on the visceral impact of loudness, both pop and classical?
Finally, near the end of his speech, I actually took his talking about what goes on beyond what’s on the page, to him being receptive to minimal music, although he may or may not be in actuality. By this I mean, that whether it be sound phenomena or rhythmic phasing that he meant to be talking about, he was describing them in general terms and would probably be receptive to minimal music if he got beyond judging just on the surface.
Finally, it seems kind of silly to judge what he says on whether or not he has written good, or masterful, music.
“I always wonder what it is about minimalism and postminimalism that seems to still piss people off, particularly those from academia. ”
If you haven’t read it already, you might want to check out Robert Fink’s book _Repeating Ourselves: Minimalism as Cultural Practice_. It’s quite a remarkable book, and one of the things he does well is analyze the criticisms of Minimalism. So for example Elliott Carter has compared minimalism to advertising, and Fink shows that the comparison is somewhat valid but that Carter is wrong to think of it as a negative thing.
“The worst one can say about him is that he’s a really fine musician, and he loves music and cares about the way it can change and enrich people’s lives, if it’s allowed to do (even if his frame of reference might be too narrow). ”
Actually, the worst one can say about him is that he’s an arrogant, xenophobic bigot who seems to think that pop music is morally equivalent to genocide. I’m sure he has good qualities as well, but those are some pretty seriously troubling ones. I don’t know Davies’s music–it might be brilliant–but is ideas about the state of our culture are appalling.
I think xenophobe nails it exactly. It’s sad that someone with that level of influence can be such an ignorant jackass.
I think that most people consider ‘masterpiece’ to be something that is the pinnacle of one’s art. The Sistine Chapel, for example, is often referred to as Michelangelo’s masterpiece, or at least one of his masterpieces (I personally prefer his Pieta and of course, David, for obvious selfish reasons). But whatever. I like Eight Songs for a Mad King, even if it does creep out my daughter.
In terms of Davies’ comments, yes Galen, you and I are among the degenerata. And that’s a badge I’m happy to wear with honor.
I always wonder what it is about minimalism and postminimalism that seems to still piss people off, particularly those from academia. I realize it’s thought of as a reaction against serial and other “ugly” music, but that is a very incomplete definition. I, for one, happen to love much serial and dissonant music (I was just listening to Copland’s Connotations and Inscape, which certainly isn’t exactly Appalachian Spring). And some minimalism is very dissonant. So just as I can’t stand people dissing minimalism as simplistic, etc. (it isn’t—just ask anyone who performs it), I also don’t like people automatically writing off Schoenberg, etc. Again, I like some of Davies’ music, even if he has no clue about pop music and minimalism. His loss.
If no one likes the word “masterpiece”, then think of it merely as “an outstanding work of art”. Surely no one could object to that
I hardly used the word “masterpiece” to display false erudition and to attempt to pull rank.
I did not even know I had a rank.
A lot to chew on….
First of all, I can’t see that more and better music education could possibly make things any worse than they are. I’m not sure it matters what kind of music people might happen to be thinking about seriously, but I’m not convinced that many people are, and that does seem to me to be problematic. I guess music, since there’s been mass media, has been terribly commodified, but it certainly is now, in much the same way that politics is. I’m not a fan of bringing up Hitler and Nazis in any context, since, as far as I can tell it always ends up trivializing both the evil of Hitler and whatever it is that’s supposed to be just like it. But, to commit a parallel evil, just as we’re involved as a country in a war that was pretty much sold, in the most crass and grotesque way, for low motives, and with results which we’ve not even begun to imagine yet, to a badly informed, mislead, and mostly incurious populace, musically we’re in pretty much the same situation, and anything that might bring about more knowledge and serious thought about any kind of music would be desirable, and I can’t see that calling for that is a bad thing, how ever awkwardly, or even offensively it’s put. (I wonder which music educators at Harvard think that having their students being illiterate is not a problem for them, incidentally.) (I’m reminded of a place in The Obscurity of the Poet by Randall Jarrell: “If a democracy should offer it’s citizens a show of education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous than their old illiteracy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all, but one more variant of those “People’s Democracies” which share with any true democracy little more than the name.”)
As to Max’s music, as someone who knows him and it quite well, I’d say that Ave Maris Stella, Image, Reflection, Shadow, The Hymn to St. Magnus, At least two of the symphonies (1 &3), The Number 33 Bus, Taverner, the 5th Strathclyde Concerto, and maybe three of the recent quartets, just coming up with a list off the top of my heard,are pieces that have at one point or another moved me deeply and impressed me with the seriousness and skill with which they’ve been made. Masterpieces? Who knows, and, for that matter, who the hell cares. (That’s just a way of displaying some kind of false erudition and trying to pull rank on the basis of it.)
He does seem to have moved, impressed, entertained, whatever, more people than any of us has, not that that makes him beyond criticism, but it should gain him some respect and a serious and honorable colleague. The worst one can say about him is that he’s a really fine musician, and he loves music and cares about the way it can change and enrich people’s lives, if it’s allowed to do (even if his frame of reference might be too narrow). Trying to make people aware of that fact is not a bad thing.
I missed one other key quote before: “Much minimalist music exhibits the same alarming features, albeit less aggressively.” David Toub and I are the Slobodon Milosovics of the music world 🙂
Steven,
I appreciate your willingness to step up and defend Davies, but let me clarify what I mean.
First, “classical chauvinism” just means thinking that classical music is superior to other kinds of music. Davies spends the whole article talking about “serious” music and using that term interchangeably with “classical” music; when he discusses “the masterpieces of Western Music” he’s speaking only of classical music; and at one point he objects to the fact that we are “pressed, now, to regard” certain commercial musics as classical music’s “absolute equal.” He says nice things about non-classical music on a couple of occasions–he has “been very moved by” Indian classical music; he says there are “honourable exceptions” to the “zombie-like” nature of popular music, but that little of it is as good as “Beatles or early Rolling Stones quality.” These are the classic dodges of the classical chauvinist–the equivalent of the “I’m not racist, some of my friends are black” argument (I don’t mean to imply moral equivalence between racism and classical music chauvinism, merely to point out the structural similarity. Davies doesn’t provide any such caveat in his comparisons to Hitler et al.) I would add to this that your own use of the term “non-serious-western-music” suggests a certain amount of classical music chauvinism on your own part — although you may have been intending to channel Davies’s attitudes rather than convey your own.
I happen to disagree with you that ultra-commercial pop is culturally problematic, but that’s a conversation for a different time. You might be right that if Davies knew Aphex Twin or Squarepusher he would have said different things (although given his condemnation of Minimalism I rather doubt it) but part of my point is that he seems perfectly comfortable NOT knowing much popular music and still lumping it together as inferior and dangerous–that’s the attitude of a bigot.
Anyway, there’s a big difference between saying “classical music is underrepresented in our culture and it would be nice if we fixed that,” which I agree with, and saying “classical music is in trouble because our culture is in decline and the music replacing it is Hitlerian.”
I used the word “masterpiece” in its most common usage: “an outstanding work of art”.
The four works I listed are, I believe, “outstanding works of art”, and are generally accepted to be such, which does not suggest that Maxwell Davies has not also written other outstanding works of art. I have not heard “Eight Songs For A Mad King” for a while, and I have paid insufficient attention to the extended series of chamber concertos he wrote some years back, and I have not listened to his Symphony No. 1 for a while. All of those works may be masterpieces, too, and I know they have their advocates.
I also happen to think that Maxwell Davies is treading water now, and never was this belief so strong as when I sat through his most recent symphony’s premiere performance. His series of the so-called “Naxos” Quartets also strikes me as uninspired note-spinning.
However, Maxwell Davies’ work from the 1980’s is very, very good, and it is disappointing to me that his work is so seldom performed in the U.S.
I don’t know a lot of Maxwell-Davies, but one piece I revisit frequently is Ave Maris Stella.
That would be my definition of a masterpiece: a piece that one can return to again and again, with interest and pleasure.
You forgot Eight Songs for a Mad King…
Personally, though, who gives a damn about “masterpieces?” One person’s masterpiece is another person’s piece of crap. And for all the talk about masterpieces, how many people even know the four pieces you cite, and of them, how many really like them, and how many do indeed feel they meet some bogus criteria for being a “masterpiece?”
If I had to play along with this and consider how many living composers have written “masterpieces,” (whatever the fuck that means), I actually could name several just off the top of my head:
Reich: Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Different Trains, Piano Phase
Glass: Music in 12 Parts, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Music in Fifths (yes, dammit, I consider that last one a masterpiece)
de Alvear: En Amor Duro, World, vagina, Llena
Riley: In C, Salome Dances for Peace, Persian Surgery Dervishes, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band
Leach: Green Mountain Madrigal, Xantippe’s Rebuke, Ariadne’s Lament, Bruckstuck (MJ might disagree, but they’re masterpieces to my ears)
Palestine: Strumming Music, Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone, (ok, so there are only two, but what CP lacks in quantity he makes up in quality)
Branca: The Ascension, Symphony #1, Symphony #3, Symphony #6, Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses
And FWIW, my own for philip glass, textbook: music of descending landscapes in hyperspace (piece for IPS), objects, and ‘this piece intentionally left blank’ all qualify as masterpieces in my book. Indeed, I’d paraphrase the late Morton Feldman (who composed way more than four “masterpieces”) and say my four works are “fucking masterpieces”).
So there—isn’t this masterpiece thing a bit ridiculous? Obviously, it’s 100% subjective and arguable. Does PMD strive to write masterpieces? Should anyone care?
Masterpieces… now that’s a debatable assertion. I find all of the recent music I’ve heard unfocussed, meandering and muddily orchestrated.
I will confess to liking some of his early music. Eight Songs for a Mad King, that orchestral vocal duet – (although it seems really Petrassi-derived – like a lot of his early music).
Regardless, the dude, weird (whatever) or not, is asking for this type of attention by making these statements. He’s going to get ignored and he’s going to make the whole British new music scene wince. That’s the price of acting like a pretentious bloody git these days. Not rallying discussion. Not inciting relevant reflection. Ignored.
I think everyone is being too hard on Maxwell Davies.
Maxwell Davies says weird things all the time, probably because he is a very weird guy. He thinks his current position as Master Of The Queen’s Music gives him a right and duty to speak out. In fact, he would be better off if he kept his mouth shut and stuck to writing music.
And I believe that he is a very, very fine composer. He has written at least four masterpieces: the Trumpet Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the song cycle “Into The Labyrinth” and the opera “The Lighthouse”.
How many other living composers have written four masterpieces? Not too many, I fear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackboot
What’s a “jackboot”?
Galen,
I think these comments are a bit of a misrepresentation of the speech. If Max knew Aphex Twin or Squarepusher, or people of the sort, I doubt that he would have used the same examples; notice for example that he pauses to say nice things about various shining examples from musical traditions other than his- perhaps not examples that reveal a deep knowledge of those other traditions (Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc), but i think it’s enough to show that he’s not indicting popular music in general or non-serious-western-music in general. It seems to me that what he’s talking about is Britney-Spears-eque music, which I think that so-called popular music listeners would also liken to being stepped on by a jackboot (Well, I feel like Britney Spears is like being smashed in the face with a jackboot, anyway…). A certain large section of the popular music sphere, what one would be referring to when one talks about the ‘music industry’- the sort of stuff you’d hear on a clearchannel station, is music that has been co-opted by Orwrllian CEOs; as David Crosby has said, one day the suits stepped in and ended the party. Of course great music is great whatever it is, but sometimes when music is bad, it’s a kind of cultural travesty, a nightmare. While the Max’s speech isn’t anything new, and perhaps I feel that the concepts involved are factually incorrect, I don’t think you can say that he’s a chauvinist on the basis of this speech.
-S
Yeah Galen! I’m with you. Frankly, I feel that if we had better music education LESS people would listen to Sir Maxwell-Davies music. because it is so bloody boring, pointless, never climaxes worth a hoot, and when he writes pastiche his material is as dull as his atonal music!
I think we need to teach kids one thing. To love learning. To not be afraid of new things and to enjoy intellectual pursuits. That – our future depends on.
Wow, what a despicable speech. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Davies is exhibiting some truly primo classical music chauvinism. Some especially choice moments:
“The unthinking use of amplification in many kinds of music turns what should be an intimate and sensitive experience into a soul and ear-numbing imitation of a Hitlerian or Stalinist rally, with all sensibilities subsumed in blather and beat.”
“To return for a moment to extremely loud music with a gut-churning thudding bass beat – in 1984, Orwell envisaged the future of mankind as the perpetual stamping of a jackboot on the face of humanity. In this regard our consumer culture has achieved something more subtle and more penetrating than Lenin’s Agitprop or Goebbel’s Reichspropagandaministerium, or anything envisaged in a Huxleyan or Orwellian nightmare future.”
“To witness ‘music’ being used as an instrument of mind-control or mind-erasure in this manner is as repulsive, in its way, as was witnessing Mozart and Schubert played by the concentration camp band as Hitler’s victims were marched to their fate.”
That’s right, folks: popular music is not merely inferior to classical music, but it’s morally equivalent to some of the most horrific xenophobically genocidal dictatorships in world history. How ironic that Davies is such a xenophobe himself.