Campaign 2008

More
dialogues
columns

Oscars 2008
The mystery of Rebecca Miller's dress is solved!
Kim Masters
posted Feb. 25, 2008
Oscars 2008
E-mail debates of newsworthy topics.
Troy Patterson
posted Feb. 25, 2008
Let Us Leave Our Musical Islands
Two critics discuss the state of classical, jazz, and pop.
Ben Ratliff
posted Nov. 7, 2007
Debating The Year of Living Biblically
Exercising the God muscle.
A.J. Jacobs
posted Oct. 18, 2007
Debating God's Harvard
A Patrick Henry College grad weighs in.
David Kuo
posted Sept. 20, 2007
Search for more dialogues articles
Subscribe to the dialogues RSS feed
View our complete dialogues archive

dialogues: E-mail debates of newsworthy topics.

Let Us Leave Our Musical Islands

dialogues
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

from: Alex Ross
to: Ben Ratliff

Surfing the Internet Sends Me Into a Spiral of Despair

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007, at 11:14 AM ET

Ben Ratliff and Alex Ross were online on Nov. 8 to chat about this article. Read the transcript.

Ben,

Mixing the ancient and the new is at the core of what classical composers strive for, although admittedly they seldom generate as vivid a blend as the Bahia Carnival. (While working on a profile of Björk, I found myself running down the happily raging streets of Salvador as she followed the Carnival floats; there may be some Brazilian spirit on her latest album, Volta.) For me, great composers, classical or pop, are those who make violently unexpected combinations of sounds: consonance and dissonance, short motifs and large structures, emotional upheaval and intellectual distance. They step back from a prevalent style, mash it together with something more obscure or something more popular, contort the familiar until it becomes strange. Often in the 20^th century, composition got too specialized: One group concentrated on cubistic arrangements of 18^th-century tunes; another worked out the mathematics of 12-note rows. But in pieces like Ives' Three Places in New England or Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars, all the possibilities are simultaneous, everything's sounding together, music is whole again.

Right now, Golijov may be the decisive agent of "ancient-to-the-future" in classical music. You've heard his Ayre, right? It's a classical composition that was planned as a pop album (Gustavo Santaolalla, producer) and comes close to inventing a new form. I gave an unmarked copy of that disc to a pop-critic friend who reported, to my satisfaction, that he had no clue what the hell it was. Here's a sample.

Of course, all the above is an auteurist's vision of musical creation. Since my days as a preteen classical snob, I've worked to overcome the prejudices built in to a classical education, but it's very hard for me to abandon the ideal of a Bachian composer-god interconnecting the notes behind the scenes. I know so much great music is produced in other ways—by communal rituals rooted in folk practice, by well-oiled factory-line production, by scattered individuals who get it right once or twice and then vanish from the scene (if we're lucky). Then there are the classical musics of India, Persia, China, and Japan, where a "name" master carries on the great tradition not so much by imprinting his or her personality on it, auteur-style, but by embodying it with spectacular virtuosity and authority. And while almost every genre of Western music has undergone dizzying 20^th-century cycles of revolution and reinvention—to the point where folks are no longer sure what "classical" or "jazz" or "rock" still means—Eastern genres have maintained an uncannily steady balance between the deep past and the present moment.

Musical auteurism arose when people started writing notes on paper. All music created before notation is basically unknowable (interesting how this art form has the most limited historical record). Only those who mastered notation could get their work distributed; that's why classical music reigned for so long. In the 20^th century, recording allowed pop musicians to share their work and make their names without necessarily mastering notation. In the 21^st century, as you say, the game has been even more radically leveled, so that YouTube unknowns can achieve tabloid fame in a day, and anti-social metal-machine musicians can piece together an audience of 20 in as many time zones. As a result, the auteurist model may be in crisis. People always ask me, "Who are the great composers right now? Who is going to last 200 years?" I'm inclined to answer: What do you like? And where do you live? Someone's probably doing it within a five-mile radius. The scene is splintered in a way that's actually bringing music closer to its potential audience, even if we can't agree on who the great ones are.

Maybe we are beginning our initial descent into a terminal state of chaos. Or maybe it's the birth of a more sane kind of musical democracy. I can't help looking at the situation a little nervously, because among the first collateral casualties of a total democratization of music would be the generalist critic, such as I be. Print publications increasingly see no need for critics in the age of blogs. With self-produced recording and downloads, the job is in some ways becoming almost impossible; opening the mail or surfing the Internet often sends me into a spiral of despair, because there is far more music pouring in by the day than I can possibly hear and make sense of. But then I find something weirdly beautiful to fall in love with, and I get that excellent gut feeling that I won't be the only one. For the moment, we're still useful.

Alex

dialogues
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

from: Alex Ross
to: Ben Ratliff

Surfing the Internet Sends Me Into a Spiral of Despair

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007, at 11:14 AM ET

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz critic at the New York Times since 1996. His new book is Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has just been published.

Illustration by Rob Donnelly.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum

What did you think of this article?

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray

The day my local orchestra advertises a concert of modern-day Hollywood film score music is the day I'll by my next ticket. Dances with Wolves, Star Wars, Superman, Batman, Unbreakable, and even The Untouchables have soundtracks with incredible music by such modern-day greats as Danny Elfman, John Williams, and Hanz Zimmer. You want good jazz? The soundtrack to Sneakers is definitely worth a listen...

You want to get younger generations interested in "classical" types of music? Then start playing more music that was written in the last 30 years or so. There's plenty of it out there at your local film theater every week and none of it has the pretentious snobbery of a long dead master attached...

--Ashman

(To reply, click here)

There's an important characteristic of rock (and some pop) that separates it from Jazz and Classical--and its not just "simplicity" or "accessibility." It's sound design.

In my experience, classical music and Jazz are primarily concerned with the arrangement of notes. There are tons of different philosophies of melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc. that abound in both types of music. But it seems to me that the primary question that Classical composers and Jazz improvisers ask themselves is "what note goes here?"

Rock is more concerned with the tonal characteristics of the note (or song) than it is with the harmonic relationships of the notes. What makes a band or artist distinctive has more to do with the sounds they employ in crafting songs, as opposed to the types of chords or melodies they generate. To me, true rock music emerged in the 1960's, when the technology emerged to allow for more interesting manipulation of electronic signals, and a growing appreciation for world music. One of the best examples of this is Jimi Hendrix, who wrote great songs--but more or less redefined the idea of what a guitar could sound like.

Further proof of this lies in the fact that rock cover bands are, as a rule, lame. If I go to see a Nirvana cover band, I lose more than if I go to see the London symphony perform Mozart. Mozart and Kurt Cobain are dead, but his musical legacy was more in his notes than Cobain's was; the sonic qualities of his guitar, voice, (let's not forget Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic) are what really made his songs great to listen to.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here)

(11/6)

also in slate