# Classical Music Scene: Fashions & Fashion Victims?



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

When I read the current listening threads & see the discussions about latest recordings, I realise I know very little about trends in today's classical music scene.

In the 1990s, I noticed there was a trend for spiritualised orientalised medieval choral music; then there's the whole HIP thing, which I am more 'into'; and presumably experiments with different sounds and note-systems?

Would some of you who know more care to identify the trends in the classical music scene - whether in the performance of older pieces, the fashionable repertoire, or the style of the newest composed pieces? And do you think some of these fashions are now overripe or have done damage to the styles they originally promoted? Or are you really grateful for a particular trend, which you think has promoted musical excellence?

I have no axe to grind at all & am genuinely interested. Obviously, this is probably my sole post on this thread, but I would so appreciate any enlightening replies from the TC scholars-and-wallahs! 

Thank you in advance. :tiphat:


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## SimonNZ (Jul 12, 2012)

I'm no expert - far from it - and its only in recent times I've put the contemporary listening into top gear, but if youre looking for a good place to start I'd give the strongest recommendation to The Guardian newspaper's "Guide To Contemporary Classical":

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2012/apr/23/welcome-new-contemporary-music-guide

Fifty non-technical potted overviews (listed and linked down the middle of that page) of many of the most important names currently working or recently deceased, complete with youtube samples following the descriptions. Some familiar names, some considerably less so. Not all was to my taste, but was invariably ear-opening and the product of the most intelligent, committed minds.

As for the "fashions" thing in the OP - either I'm not looking in the right places or I'm just not finding it. The few -isms I've heard of recently all have composers who they then say don't fit the terms exactly. The best work while clearly following threads and preoccupations from various past composers all seems to me to be defiantly individual. But then maybe there's a second and third tier of hangers-on that my pre-filtered listening (largely through recommendations) is stopping me from hearing.

Regarding the current "scene" in the recording of older repertoire, the situation seems very much exactly where it was twenty years ago: "smaller" labels outshining the "major" labels by doing the spade-work of rediscovering lost treasures and providing award-class recordings that make the best case for them.

[it dawned on me later that my first two paragraphs here are the result of a bit of a misreading of the OP - I'm leaving them as they are, if only because that's a really good link - apologies to Ingenue for subverting the thread at the outset]


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

It's difficult to talk about trends, because the classical music scene worldwide is so diverse . There is so much
diversity of repertoire, ranging from music from the medieval and renaissnce eras to the latest works by living
composers , different musicians with different ideas on how to interpret this or that work by this or that composer .
One thing I have noticed in recent years is the trend to push HIP (the so-called "historically informed performance ") ever further
forward in time . It began many years ago with the attempt to perform the music of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi etc
on old instruments or copies thereof and studying treatises etc to try to come as close as possible to the
way the music was performed centuries ago , and on toward the music of Haydn,Mozart,Beethoven , Schubert and Schumann
etc on period instruments . 
Then Berlioz, Brahms , and even Wagner . We now have an orchestra in London called the New Queen's Hall orchestra,
named after one which existed there around the 1920s and 30s , which has been giving siupposedly "authentic " performances
of the music of Elgar, Holst, and Vaughan Williams etc under a variety of different conductors .
They have made recordings of the Planets by Holst as well as a CD of several works by Vaughan Williams , a composer
who died in 1958 was apparently not bothered by performnces of his music by orchestras of the 1950s, which were
not really different from those of today . It claims to use smaller bore brass instruments of the past and uses gut strings .
Supposedly, these smaller bore brass instruments provide for better balance between the other sections of the orchestra,
the current ones supposedly being too loud and overbearing . I don't recall hearing any performnces recently where the brass
drowned out the rest of the orchestra . 
I've seen their website , and there are insufferably arrogant, presumptuous and self-serving claims about how this orchestra
finally lets us hear the music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries "as it should sound ". The blanket dismissal of
our mainstream orchestras is frankly infuriating . What next ?


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

I noticed in the early music "scene" more (HIP) performances have been digging up Baroque operas, especially by Vivaldi, Pergolesi, Handel of course. I am coming across more lesser known early composers in the last five years of listening to more early music, composers and music who not even my parents, friends and teachers have heard of before. Rediscovering many more older composers are great of course, there must be so much music from the past out there (not just Baroque but up to mide Romantic as well).


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

superhorn said:


> It's difficult to talk about trends, because the classical music scene worldwide is so diverse . There is so much
> diversity of repertoire, ranging from music from the medieval and renaissnce eras to the latest works by living
> composers , different musicians with different ideas on how to interpret this or that work by this or that composer .
> One thing I have noticed in recent years is the trend to push HIP (the so-called "historically informed performance ") ever further
> ...


Leave it to listeners to decide. Forget about the concept of HIP of whatever they call it. Just listen to the interpretation. If listeners like it, then good. If not, there will be no demand for it. More likely the former as music schoold do teach both ways of playing early music and viol students do carry an "early bow" around.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I've listened to a few podcasts of interviews with composers either in or fresh out of college. I gather from that brief sampling there may be a trend away from methods such as serialism or any other type of -ism, and also away from "classical" or academic music as a separate genre in an effort to make new music, music that is very individual to each composer. There also seems to be a merging of what might be called performance art with the music and, as always, incorporating new technologies.

That's all pretty vague I suppose. I'm likely way too old to pretend to be trend savvy.


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## Guest (Oct 23, 2013)

Everything you say is true, Weston, except that these things happened sixty, seventy, or even (in the case of "individual to each composer") a hundred years ago.

That may be a trend, that composers in or fresh out of college are less aware of what has happened in the past hundred years than you'd think they would be--being students, you'd expect that they'd be very aware (having just taken a "Trends in 20th Century Music" course). 

Depends on which students you're talking too, though. The ones I know seem pretty savvy about what's been happening the past century and where they fit in. But not universally. I have gotten a strong sense that students nowadays are not only a- but anti-historical, but that sense comes more from reading posts to online forums than it does from talking to people. The student composers I've met are more up on what has happened since Schoenberg than the student composers who post to online forums.

Though obviously, there are exceptions to that as well. Some students who post here seem quite familiar with twentieth century musics aside from serialism, which has never had anything like the stranglehold it's been credited with. Serialism happens to have been a convenient lightning rod for anti-modernist sentiment, which has been fine. It's taken the pressure off some other things that are only just recently beginning to be noticed and objected to. (Cage's 4'33" piece is 61 years old, after all.)

Minimalism has always had a presence, but only the repetitive version of it. Experimentalism, including Fluxus, managed to develop and flourish, and continues to exist, with very little attention from the bulk of classical music listeners. In fact, since its name was co-opted by popular musicians (as was electronic), it (and electronic, too) has managed to exist without very much fuss at all until recently. And since most of the things now called experimental are not part of the twentieth century "experimental" tradition, most of the fuss you see is directed at other things.

Babbitt's vision in that respect has been able to happen in actual fact--experimental and electronic composers have been able to live and work in relative peace and quiet (as it were) for a few generations. (Electroacoustic music generally has already been going on longer than the so-called "classical era," and shows no sign of tapering off.)

The trend I personally like the most is that of increasingly ignoring the big genre designations: ROCK, JAZZ, CLASSICAL. If the entire output of the classical era could have happened before the term "classical music" was even coined, then probably the music of the future will be able to flourish just fine if the term fades out of use.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Ingenue said:


> When I read the current listening threads & see the discussions about latest recordings, I realise I know very little about trends in today's classical music scene.
> 
> In the 1990s, I noticed there was a trend for spiritualised orientalised medieval choral music; then there's the whole HIP thing, which I am more 'into'; and presumably experiments with different sounds and note-systems?


Yeah I do remember that trend. Upside of it is that Gorecki's 3rd symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) did get real traction after something like two decades of it being composed. The downside is that it resulted in various spin offs, basically giving watered down rehash of the same thing.

Its not Gorecki's fault of course, nor Arvo Part's who also did that style early on (and John Tavener). I read one writer on music half joking that Gorecki's third was the music of choice for playing whilst trendoids had dinner parties, little did they know the content of the second movement (a poem written by a girl who was imprisoned during WW2). The writer expressed some misgivings about that, and the whole thing of treating such music as fodder for this type of trendy "ambient" vibe that was going around at the time. I have bought a good number of second hand cd's and the most common one I see is that Gorecki as well as things like Nyman's score for The Piano. I wonder if people who bought these in their millions listened to them more than once? Or outside the context of using them as background to a party?

It just goes to show what's happened today, that element of marketing is rife in everything. So you get spin offs of the Three Tenors (Carreras, Domingo, Pavorotti) like Il Divo, the Ten Tenors, the Irish Tenors, you name it.



> Would some of you who know more care to identify the trends in the classical music scene - whether in the performance of older pieces, the fashionable repertoire, or the style of the newest composed pieces? And do you think some of these fashions are now overripe or have done damage to the styles they originally promoted? Or are you really grateful for a particular trend, which you think has promoted musical excellence?
> 
> ...


Well there's many there, and it goes way back. You always had rehash, and there is good and bad rehash, stuff that has some quality and tends to last, and stuff that simply doesn't. Handel had many imitators for example in the UK, one whose music has survived is Boyce, especially his symphonies. I think Arne as well.

In the 20th century this got more marked. Many people rehashed Debussy's Impressionism, and he hated it. So too Vaughan Williams' pastoralism, Stravinsky's primitivism, Sibelius' Nordic vibes, they had a good deal of imitators too. I suppose though that its hard to distinguish sometimes between rehash, jumping on some bandwagon or trendy fad, or actually working to cratively combine someone's influence with your own ideas and visions, but I don't mind much as long as I enjoy it basically. The big names tended to do it quite well though, and sometimes its confusing as to who is copying who!

With serialism as mentioned, I think it wasn't just a fad. There where composers who icorporated it into their own styles, composers like Britten, Bernstein, Stravinsky, Walton, Dutilleux, Feldman, Ginastera and so on. But I suppose it didn't turn out exactly as some academics and those in various cliques and cabals expected it to early on, or indeed wanted it to. The more rigorous approaches to serialism have their place in the repertoire, but so too do the more flexible approaches. I think it can be argued that the more flexible approaches have endured in terms of some chance of reaching outside of those cliques and cabals. Lenny's Cool Fugue from West Side Story is the best example I can think of.

However in terms of the ivory tower syndrome, it is much less now than before. I read a quote by Copland saying that young composers need to read outside of the comfort zones of academe and reach a wider audience. Similar things where said by Michael Tippett. But this has happened, and whatever dominance more ideological views of serialism had before, there is a trend towards more diversity now. I was listening to the clarinet concertos of Copland and Aldridge this week, and the latter is now a chair at an American university. His style is very eclectic and I think pretty accessible, I enjoyed his concerto just as I did Copland's, my opinions on them both here.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Sid James said:


> The more rigorous approaches to serialism have their place in the repertoire, but so too do the more flexible approaches.


The most rigorous form of serial music, so-called "total serialism", was indeed a very short phase that burned itself out within a matter of a few years. Afterwards, everyone involved turned to looser adaptations, including Boulez, who had claimed anyone who didn't understand the "necessity" of 12-tone music was "useless". He even withdrew a number of his pieces of this period (like Polyphony X).


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I have a question for people who've been observing the scene for a long time. Have amateur performances become more common lately? It _seems_ to me like they have….


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## Guest (Oct 25, 2013)

I think so, yes.

(If by amateur, you mean, putting on shows without being remunerated. Or even paid.)


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Mahlerian said:


> The most rigorous form of serial music, so-called "total serialism", was indeed a very short phase that burned itself out within a matter of a few years. Afterwards, everyone involved turned to looser adaptations, including Boulez, who had claimed anyone who didn't understand the "necessity" of 12-tone music was "useless". He even withdrew a number of his pieces of this period (like Polyphony X).


Yes with Pierre it was a case of "do as I say not as I do." I find his transformation from angry young man and lefty to a darling of the establishment from middle age onwards to be quite astonishing.

But you get a lot of this in classical music. Cliques and cabals where one thing that prevented Mozart from getting a court job in any of the major centres. The intrigues in Vienna against him where considerable (even though its highly unlikely that Salieri killed him, as the film Amadeus suggested). The same can be said of Wagner when he wanted to get into Vienna - and also Munich - which is why he set up shop in Bayreuth, so to speak. Mahler also had issues in Budapest and Vienna, I think. Then there was the turf war between the Mighty Handful and Tchaikovsky. They said he was too cosmopolitan. The next generation who more or less continued the more outward looking trends set by Tchaikovsky - eg. Rachmaninov and Glazunov - also got grief from Russian ultra nationalists.

Bottom line is that classical music has this, and its probably been worse there than in any other genre of music. More bitching and backstabbing. I think it is a part of human nature, that tribalism, unfortunately. However the good thing is that now its being talked about and written about - no less in academia itself than elsewhere. So we can look at these things a bit more objectively now than in the past.

I think its fair to say that ideologies and cliques come and go but the music itself remains forever, and I suppose after all the turf wars and dividing lines between what trend is "in" and "out" kind of go down as yesterday's stuff, as history, what we get is the stuff that survives all that stuff and remains to do so for the long term.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

science said:


> I have a question for people who've been observing the scene for a long time. Have amateur performances become more common lately? It _seems_ to me like they have….


In a 'word,' Youtube -- or collectively, "internet media."

From there, amateur flash mobs, other amateur performances as well as those of younger beginning professionals are given because it is known that a video with decent audio can be "broadcast" and have the chance to reach millions.

Prior the access to those media, performances were local, for the same purpose to promote and make the public aware. I believe increased frequency is probably proportionate to the much higher degree of possible exposure via the internet media.


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