# The expert listener



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Some comments in another thread, and a re-reading of Babbitt's famous essay, lead to this question:

Should the development of classical music be guided by people with a superior musical education or perhaps an inherently keener understanding of music? Or by its level of acceptance within the wider community of people who are simply fond of the genre?


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## oogabooha (Nov 22, 2011)

the latter, I think. While the academic community can still go strong, as a global musical community we have reached a point where non-classical music close to folk roots (i.e. rock) has become a global language, in the same way that the western classical tradition unified countries in previous centuries. We should still approach and develop classical music like it has been developing, but what is also key is bringing it together by interest. Other genres of music have a more "brotherly" aspect when teaching newcomers, as opposed to classical, which can seem intimidating or daunting.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Lets try the group of 'armchair expert engineers' as those who draw the plans for the next generation of passenger airplanes... then build'em, and have only 'the armchair expert pilots you like' as those who fly'em. After that experiment, and only well after things had been running a while, might I get on board 

_Right! why a similar proposal is basically a very bad idea in any real business community is because consumers want 'the product' to be, uh, well-made, and by experts if you will. But Art and Music are 'soft,' so this otherwise more than seriously flawed proposal -- generally unheard of if one wants a good result -- seems to regularly crop up amidst the audiences._

[That cry of leaving the audience behind is a tired one which I think exaggeratedly focused more upon music repertoire than on concert ticket prices.... nonetheless discussion of the real financial dilemma of many an orchestra often finds an argument making a bit of a scapegoat of the more contemporary music, which is consumed by a less wide audience than earlier repertoire. The dilemma there is more about the price than the repertoire. _(Heaven forfend if an expert informs an audience they need a titch more education before they are 'qualified' to vote_ ]

That populist notion is rather like the 98% screaming they really should not have to live under the 'control' as doled out by the other 2% -- except that whether it is classical or other genres, I bet that far less than a wee fraction of one percent of the population is responsible for all the written music consumed by everyone... leaving well over 99% of the rest of the world its consumers.

Almost all of classical music, 'then' and now, is such an artificial construct; the writing / building of it is an intellectual's pursuit. 
After it is written, it seems whether from the era of De Machaut any later eras, about only three percent of the world's populace (that is all lay and cognoscenti consumers) listens to it or consumes it with any regularity at all.

At the pith of why the proposal is anyway moot and unnecessary is the factor that both public and cognoscenti have been 'the voters' throughout the history of music. The 'vote' has always been there, and generally well exercised. It should remain though as it has been -- that whomever buys a CD or seat to a concert does not automatically get their 'voter card,' -- those voting rights are earned, not a birthright for any and all who 'listen to music.'


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I think many people here might be interested in reading Babbitt's essay along with the reply by Christopher Palestrant. The two essays can be found here: Babbitt and Palestrant.

I think the answer to the questions above could be both the "experts" and the larger listening community. Classical music could move in parallel directions - one along the traditional path where non-expert listeners play an important role in the process, and another where some composers direct their music to a small group of highly trained experts. While I would not participate in the latter, I see no problem (other than possibly economics) in music "for, of, and by specialists". Obviously the latter path would be vastly limited compared to the former.

I'm especially interested in who contemporary composers view as their target audience. Do they want to create music that essentially only experts can appreciate or do they want to reach the larger listening audience? Babbitt argues that "the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance". All the performers I know react negatively to that suggestion.

Babbitt compares modern music to physics and math, and therefore, why should we expect that average listeners can appreciate advanced music? Physicists and mathematicians say that they discover reality rather than create it. Do composers believe that they discover music or that they create it? The constraints, I believe, are enormously different.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

PetrB said:


> Lets try the group of 'armchair expert engineers' as those who draw the plans for the next generation of passenger airplanes... then build'em, and have only 'the armchair expert pilots you like' as those who fly'em. After that experiment, and only well after things had been running a while, might I get on board
> 
> _Right! why a similar proposal is basically a very bad idea in any real business community is because consumers want 'the product' to be, uh, well-made, and by experts if you will. But Art and Music are 'soft,' so this otherwise more than seriously flawed proposal -- generally unheard of if one wants a good result -- seems to regularly crop up amidst the audiences._
> 
> ...


... true, adding that some of the consciously populist stuff from nowadays can be downright unbearable to listen to for some. We would all end up drowning in a quasi-Hollywoodesque sauce if this stuff took over completely.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

PetrB said:


> Lets try the group of 'armchair expert engineers' as those who draw the plans for the next generation of passenger airplanes... then build'em, and have only 'the armchair expert pilots you like' as those who fly'em. After that experiment, and only well after things had been running a while, might I get on board


The analogy is flawed. Airplanes are designed by experts, but *totally *to meet the needs of their audience: owners and passengers. In other words, the audience *does *totally guide the development of airplanes.

CM, though likewise written by "experts," is normally written partly with the needs of the composer in mind. The question is, what's the best balance?


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

KenOC said:


> Should the development of classical music be guided by people with a superior musical education or perhaps an inherently keener understanding of music? Or by its level of acceptance within the wider community of people who are simply fond of the genre?


I think the answer has to be both by simple virtue of the fact that the "development of classical music" will never be the responsibility of just one class of musician. It may have been so a long, long time ago, but we are irretrievably past that point now.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

The history of change in CM was a slow and carefully measured one. Due to tightening of distribution channels, it's had to change. Though not quite like country or rock, where buttons can be pushed more readily. "Votes" do count. Why else would Chandos and Hyperion be moving into more modern territory? Just one example. There are others, but I'm ready for Happy Hour. :tiphat:


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## Guest (Mar 11, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Airplanes are designed by experts, but *totally *to meet the needs of their audience: owners and passengers.


You don't fly much, do you?


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

KenOC said:


> The analogy is flawed. Airplanes are designed by experts, but *totally *to meet the needs of their audience: owners and passengers. In other words, the audience *does *totally guide the development of airplanes.
> 
> CM, though likewise written by "experts," is normally written partly with the needs of the composer in mind. The question is, what's the best balance?


The implication of the failed 'analogy' is that if a bridge collapses, those using it / on it are in real peril of loss of limb and / or life. If a composer makes a piece not to the 'users' liking, no harm done. Putting anything _you_ consider important enough that you want it to have integrity in the hands of 'amateurs,' is.... 

People make what they will and can (1st audience); if found to have enough of interest to musicians, the work then gets performed (2nd audience); then the public gets to hear (3rd audience).

The best 'balance' is the standard historic imbalance of the composer writing what they can! I really don't know, haven't ever known, too many 'fine' artists whose prime question when working on a piece was 'what will the cognoscenti and / or punters like.' The fact that even the 'furthest out' of composers is still of and on the planet and their local culture -- and that not without a huge data bank of semiotic input -- usually carries the day, whether great numbers of the public get it or not.

All that great music of the past was almost exclusively commissioned by 'cognoscenti' -- the fact, hundreds of years later, that repertoire enjoys a rather populist fan base does not turn it now into 'popular' music -- all of it was contemporary music of its day, some with more surprises within the context of its era than others. Once in a blue moon -- or far less often, a premiered work debuts as popular, remains popular, and has high merit as well. Bet those are a tiny percent of all of 'great' music literature.

The 'town meeting' dynamic where everyone in the community gets equal floor time, regardless that some of them have little or no inkling of the subject or what could / should be done with or about the subject, is a political red herring. It is a Politically Correct SpinDoktor baby-sit which can lead some to believe their (slight / uninformed) opinion is as equal and worthwhile as 'any other opinion.' That is about as false -- and patently naive to buy in to -- as it gets.

The handful of deliberately populist composers of the 20th Century, Puccini, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Steve Reich, John Adams, I believe were not 'condescending' or 'stepping down' from a more academic manner of writing but rather going with their prime personal impulses, i.e. their populist pieces are sincere and not a bit of convincing compositional acting. If they happened to make publicity hay by saying they had 'populist' concerns, well, if you got it, use it / flaunt it. What it is not is some deliberate agonized choice of sacrifice on the part of those composers to abandon the way of writing they loved for something more accessible 'for the people,' ... which is sometimes an argument made out to be about more popular / populist composers, and that then becomes a pseudo hero's badge of sorts.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

KenOC said:


> ....Airplanes are designed by experts, but *totally *to meet the needs of their audience: owners and passengers. In other words, the audience *does *totally guide the development of airplanes....


Like this one for full figures.

View attachment 14605


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## MichaelSolo (Mar 12, 2013)

Development of music is guided by culture and achievements of our comprehension of the world, and implemented by composers, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully.

Thus, the answer to the original question is "neither".


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

KenOC said:


> Some comments in another thread, and a re-reading of Babbitt's famous essay, lead to this question:
> 
> Should the development of classical music be guided by people with a superior musical education or perhaps an inherently keener understanding of music? Or by its level of acceptance within the wider community of people who are simply fond of the genre?


Well there are more classical listeners who are non-musos (not educated in music), so ultimately they are the people who pay for it and keep it going. But at the same time, what happens in classical music (eg. how/what concerts are programmed, what is recorded, what pieces are commissioned) is guided by trained people - composers, musicians, those on orchestra boards or boards of recording companies or bodies that administer government funding and so on. So its about getting that balance right. There are of course different audiences and the classical music listenership is as segmented as any other type of music. You got the most popular area being orchestral but also others like chamber, opera, contemporary/avant garde, solo instrumental, HIP/period performance - even things like film musics and crossover - and so on. I don't think there is on way, there are many ways. Ultimately I don't see a bright future for classical music as it is now, but I am confident things are and will change, it will adapt and is adapting to new realities (eg. the digital revolution).

So basically its give and take. Of course there always have been people who like to tell us what we have to have, no matter that we don't want it, that hardly any people want it. An example was the staging of a Monteverdi opera at the Sydney Festival roughly 10 years ago, it was Poppea and it was a flop. Sometimes directors of events like this take risks - sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don't. But that was I think the first and final time that particular director took the helm of this festival. Now more pragmatic decisions are made to spend the funding and this year we had a hit at the Sydney Festival - the live performance of the complete score of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyessy while the film played live. In the intermission bit they played the whole of Ligeti's Atmospheres, not just an edited version as in the film. The concert was packed, so a commercial and artistic success. It is possible to marry the two sometimes, but the attitude that we have to have some highbrow stuff that the more 'mainstream' audience doesn't want at an event like this is just arrogant and talks to a kind of treating of the listening audience as morons.


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## Rapide (Oct 11, 2011)

KenOC said:


> Some comments in another thread, and a re-reading of Babbitt's famous essay, lead to this question:
> 
> Should the development of classical music be guided by people with a superior musical education or perhaps an inherently keener understanding of music? Or by its level of acceptance within the wider community of people who are simply fond of the genre?


Let's answer this question this way, then. Broadly speaking, would the history of classical music be where it got to before the Second Viennese School _without_ the musical education and heritage of its forerunners, in particular the great composers?


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

I quite agree with the thinking that these are parallel worlds that sometimes collide (or crash in to each other) but are mutually dependent. This said, I don't think that "pure" conservative views has ever driven any development during history, it has at best adjusted (and not without complaints) to the discoveries and quantum leaps of other mindsets. (And yes, I use a very general view of what conservative is!)

Summing up, I think that the Avant-garde has always been pushing the envelop and the silent grey majority has always been paying! And what your level of education has very little to do with this even if people with an Avant-garde drive often seem to have quite a high education level..

my 2 cent rant!

/ptr


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

ptr said:


> I quite agree with the thinking that these are parallel worlds that sometimes collide (or crash in to each other) but are mutually dependent. This said, I don't think that "pure" conservative views has ever driven any development during history, it has at best adjusted (and not without complaints) to the discoveries and quantum leaps of other mindsets. (And yes, I use a very general view of what conservative is!)
> 
> Summing up, I think that the Avant-garde has always been pushing the envelop and the silent grey majority has always been paying! And what your level of education has very little to do with this even if people with an Avant-garde drive often seem to have quite a high education level..
> 
> ...


I see the issue as sometime in the 20th century, there was a change. Audiences wanted to hear new music and where excited by it, but at some stage classical became museum piece. A much older listener I know said the last piece of new music he was excited was the Australian premiere of Shostakovich's 15th (his final) symphony back in the 1970's. Dunno if the wider 'mainstream' classical audience is as interested now in stuff like that compared to back then.

I see the avant garde as a bit of an anachronism. I mean it means fighting at the forefront of change. But I think the war is over guys, put down your weapons. But some of them keep fighting. The boundaries have now been pushed to the limit in classical. Same too in other areas like jazz, it was done decades ago actually, that 'free jazz' movement of Ornette Coleman and so on. So I see this a kind of the end of history, so to speak. All the walls have been pulled down, the taboos broken. But with that we get a situation where people don't like this and go back and back. I'm trying not to judge that, just say it as I see it. I don't see classical as a vital and living artform as it was decades ago, certainly not as it was 100 years ago.

But classical is changing, so are other types of music. The digital revolution is a big part of how its being redefined. So its not over yet, maybe I should not be so pessimistic?...


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Sid James said:


> I see the issue as sometime in the 20th century, there was a change. Audiences wanted to hear new music and where excited by it, but at some stage classical became museum piece.


J. Peter Burkholder, a music historian, has made an interesting case for the late nineteenth century, and specifically Brahms, as being the moment when classical music became subject to the "museum" mentality. If you want to look it up, it's in an article entitled "Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music," published in _19th-Century Music_. (I don't know if it's ever been anthologized or published elsewhere.) It's a fascinating read.



Sid James said:


> I see the avant garde as a bit of an anachronism. I mean it means fighting at the forefront of change. But I think the war is over guys, put down your weapons.


Amen.

To the extent that avant-gardes are defined in opposition to an established norm, then one of the difficulties in identifying an avant-garde today is that there are at least two different "establishments" of classical music--the standard concert repertoire and the academic canon--and it's not always clear which of those an avant-garde is supposed to be defying. In terms of the concert repertoire, yes: many composers purported to be avant-garde will be quite alienating when compared to the majority of tastes governing the concert repertoire. (Though there are always exceptions, thank god, such as the Ligeti example cited above.) But in terms of the academic canon, many of the composers often described as avant-garde are anything but. Integrated serialism, indeterminacy, electronic music, sonorism, collage, new complexity, happenings, spectralism, installations... you name it: all of these things have, by now, been ensconced in academia for decades. Nothing could be more academically "established" than these styles. I have a hard time describing as "avant-garde" anything that can earn you an Ivy League PhD in composition, as all of these styles can.


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## LordBlackudder (Nov 13, 2010)

it cant be one or the other. if it wasn't for boneheads most of the music would not have been printed or listened to fo the folk people to play.

the religious nutters also had their say. they're mostly uneducated.

music is inherently a mixture of peoples ideas and stuff.


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