CHRIS BACKLEY/ Daily Bruin Staff Second-year piano performance
student Dan Yu practices Chopin’s "Study No. 11"
in Schoenberg Hall.
By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin reporter
[email protected]
A joke has Arnold Swarzenegger as a child playing the game
“classical composers” with two buddies in Austria. His
first friend chooses to be Beethoven and subsequently acts like
he’s a deaf genius. His second friend chooses Mozart and acts
like a child prodigy. His favorite composers already chosen, Arnie
concedes that, “I’ll be Bach.”
The joke is that Swarzenegger, a celebrity pushover known for
big muscles and bad acting, has as little to do with high musical
art as Jerry Springer does with Christian morals. The real irony,
however, turns out to be that, if Swarzenegger really did endorse
classical music, he would be anointing it with the prestige of his
celebrity, not the opposite.
This is the real force behind the doom and gloom statement,
“Classical music is dead.” While people are still
writing symphonies, going to concerts, performing Beethoven, and
learning about it in schools, classical music has lost the very
thing that made it classical: its legitimacy as our culture’s
highest artform. What is emerging, however, is a relaxation of
musical hierarchies where all music is becoming an equally valid
means of expression. It may not be that classical music is dead
but, instead, that various forces are changing it into something
unrecognizable.
“I see classical music as being very much alive. It may
just not be your grandparents’ classical music,” said
Mark Swed, music critic at the Los Angeles Times.
Not surprisingly, the new face of classical music looks more
like Britany Spears than Mother Teresa. Sexy vixens, such as
Vanessa Mae, the Ahn Trio, and Bond, play Beethoven and the Beatles
alike. Handsome tenors, such as Andrea Bocelli and Alessandro
Safina, belt out pop tunes just as easily as they would Verdi,
whose arias were themselves the pop tunes of his day.
Similarly, modernist composers who once disdained anything
popular are now reaching out to a broader world. Classical composer
Philip Glass has collaborated with David Bowie and Michael Stipe
while fellow composer Steve Reich collaborated with popular DJs on
an album of dance remixes of his works.
All of this new classical-meets-pop stuff comes under the
convenient category of postmodernism (modernism being the esoteric
idea that music must be purely abstract and disconnected from the
popular world). Arnold Schoenberg (the namesake of UCLA’s
music building) created his dissonant 12-tone method ensuring
audience rejection, Schoenberg’s elitist pride and joy.
“I think that Schoenberg, in particular, tried to build a
wall which did not exist before him between the street and the
concert hall. Myself and others in my generation have been
responsible for taking the wall down,” Reich said.
This wall, also known as the classical canon, began circa 1830,
when Beethoven’s nine symphonies were considered to be the
end of the symphony. The canon basically defined a repertoire of
masterpieces and created a strict criteria for what new music could
be allowed into the concert hall. They defended their ivory tower
with complex music that further alienated people.
“Part of it was that Boulez and these people were getting
a bit too theoretical and polemical. That scared people
away,” Swed said, referring to the extreme modernist composer
Pierre Boulez. “Suddenly, you start to think, “˜My God,
I have to understand this and know what’s going on.’
People don’t worry about that with Beethoven.”
Now, every musical style conceivable is game for classical
music. While Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was an
early pop-jazz-classical hybrid, now composers use various folk
influences as the rule, not the exception. New, young composers at
UCLA find their inspirations equally in diverse styles.
“I’ve always had a tendency to reference the folk
music of the world around me since I grew up playing more rock and
jazz than anything else. I’ve been moved a lot by music that
academia calls simple,” said Aaron Rothe, a second-year music
composition student. “At what point will I be completely
separated from the popular world? Probably never.”
In fact, Rothe’s newest work, premiering next Tuesday in
Schoenberg Hall, mixes a classical wind ensemble with a jazz combo,
including drums, that even references reggae at one point. Welcome
to the brave new world of classical music.
After 25 years, the Kronos Quartet remains innovative,
performing with casual attire (not tuxedos) and theatrical lighting
and sound designs. They perform music that is emphatically
non-European (their newest album, “Nuevo,” features
works by Mexican composers) and non-classical (which include
collaborations with rock bands such as Sigur Ros).
Indeed, the Kronos list of works performed reads like
who’s who, with people like Tan Dun, Reich, Dimitri
Shostakovich and Boulez along side James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and
Frank Zappa.
“I can see a kind of fusion of interest where avant-garde
pop and new music might meld together,” Reich said.
Of course, freedom is scary and often gets confused with chaos.
Stravinsky’s famous statement reads that great music must
have rules. The problem arises when classical music attempts to
define in precise terms what those rules are.
“There’s lots of serious music out there, with
people interested in sonic experimentation and listening to sounds,
everything that classical music is supposed to be about except that
they don’t think of it as classical,” Fink said.
Serious art music can now be found coming from people who
haven’t studied classical music. Electrical engineering
students, such as Aphex Twin, may be just as likely to come up with
new sounds based on an understanding of technology. In addition,
classical music students are defecting to the pop world for profit
margins. Opposite fusion occurs, too, with pop musicians funneling
their talents into a pseudo-classical realm. Paul McCartney’s
symphonic poem “Standing Stone” received a prestigious
Carnegie Hall performance.
The failure of classical record sales cannot be exaggerated.
Forget metals such as platinum and gold. A few thousand units sold
can push an album into the classical charts.
Independent record label Naxos, however, is working against this
tide, recording and selling classical repertoire at low prices.
Without celebrity performers, such as Bocelli, Naxos markets their
CDs under the composers. Major labels have noticed Naxos’
success and are releasing their own budget classical labels. Warner
Brothers, for example, has Apex.
Perhaps the best case for classical music recording has been
film music, which tasted the success of pop with James
Horner’s “Titanic” and John Williams’
“Star Wars.” Now the people’s love of great films
are translating into love of its music.
“I’m a very popular lecturer at famous
universities,” said film scorer Paul Chihara. “People
are packed in them, because it’s cool now at the university
to study Bernard Herrman (“˜Psycho’) or Williams. Movies
are very much like operas of the 19th century. People went to them
for the fun of it, not because it was high art. For a long time,
classical music didn’t have that.”
Now classical composers are gaining attention through the
incorporation of various styles, including rock, to create new
hybrids. Also, the future promises new technology that allows more
access to diverse music through the Internet. Forces such as prog
rock and minimalism have taken on the classical role of providing
challenging intellectual compositions. Electronica and hip hop
especially point to new ways of conceiving music.
“You could imagine in 2075 music instruction in schools
would mean learning how to use a computer, how to sample sounds and
construct beats. If you were really interested in some weird,
specialized stuff, you might go off and actually learn to play a
musical instrument,” Fink said.
The only real promise of the future is time, allowing musical
prejudices to dissolve away.
“The music of Gregorian chant is now so completely
decontextualized that people now consume it as pure sound, and they
actually like it. I don’t see why Beethoven couldn’t
function that way as soon as the whole idea of classical music has
been allowed to be put aside.”