Whither Classical Music?

Last weekend, I attended a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during one of my solo sojourns to the downtown of The City of Broad Shoulders, the Windy City as it's also called.  Charlie Kane said of it to his friend Jedediah that "the wind comes howling in off the lake and gosh only knows if they ever heard of lobster Newburg" but it wasn't for that wind that it earned the latter nickname.  According to what I've read, an East Coast journalist called it that because of the tendency of its residents to boast of it, rendering them and their city "windy" in the parlance of the times.

It's interesting that although I visit River North and the Loop with some frequency, and enjoy classical music, I haven't been to a performance previously.  I'm not even certain why I did so in this case.  I had been to Winter's Jazz Club the night before and enjoyed what I heard and was checking for other live performance of music or a show, and thought of the symphony and am glad I did.

An orchestra at work is an impressive and powerful thing to observe.  It would seem to me that composing for a full orchestra is onerous and creating a composition which can be played and enjoyed by musicians and audiences is a remarkable artistic achievement.  Hearing an orchestra play great music is a notable sensory experience, or is for me. 

Listening to the CSO that evening prompted me to wonder, though.  Is classical music still a living art form?  One can of course still listen to and enjoy the work of great composers of the past as played by capable professional musicians, and that in itself, I would think, will always keep some of us listening to and appreciating the music.  But what of new composers and compositions and how they compare to the those of the past?

I was about to write that I'm unfamiliar with modern classical music (it seems difficult to even write those words as what is classical would seem on its face or by definition as not being modern or new).  But if we include within it the classical music written by 20th century composers, that wouldn't be entirely correct.  I have some familiarity with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy, Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Respighi, Berg, Poulenc, Richard Strauss, and Rachmaninoff so perhaps it can be said that as to classical music of the first half of the 20th century, at least, I'm not altogether ignorant.  But I know virtually nothing of what's gone on in the last 60 years or so.

I can't say I've liked some of the modern classical music I've heard.  Atonal and twelve tone music annoy me, for the most part.  To my doubtless unschooled ear, some modern classical music is mere noise.  It is I'm sure highly complicated noise, and may even be organized noise, but I don't associate noise with classical music or music of any kind.  I'm aware of the fact that certain composers have invited musicians to more or less do what they please, or select certain chords of phrases randomly and play them haphazardly, or laugh and shout or honk while others in the orchestra do something more traditionally associated with their instruments. 

That sort of thing has led me and perhaps others to speculate that classical music has played itself out.  That's to say that what has been done has pretty much covered all the ground which can be covered by orchestras or quintets or quartets or trios of a melodic nature by past masters of the various styles popular prior to the 20th century or the more melodic styles of the last century, for example the tone poems of Richard Strauss and Respighi.  And so, classical music composers now in a kind of despair resort to musical chaos.

I don't see how that can be, though.  I'd think that the variety of instruments available traditionally in classical music, combined with what technology now allow for, means it's likely still for new classical music to be made.  And, I think that it could still be music and not be wholly derivative of what has been done by the great composers of the past.

It's not a question of whether there is classical music which can yet be composed and played, then.  It's more a question of whether there will be patrons of that music.  Will those who now grow up with modern popular music even be exposed to let alone appreciate classical music?  Will they be musicians willing to play classical music?

The experience of being at a live performance of an orchestra would, I think, convince some of them at least to be patrons of it, because it can impress and can even be profound.  And, it does so without the need for the light shows filled with dancers, musicians pretending to play guitars and stars who most likely lip-sync their way through songs which are so over-produced that they can't be duplicated in a live venue.

Whither Jazz?

Earlier this month I was sitting in Birdland, the great jazz club now on 44th St. in Manhattan, sipping the alcoholic beverage of my second choice (the first choice being unavailable, much to my dismay), and found myself wondering over the fact that the Friday night crowd was made up entirely of white people.  Even the performers were white; some Hispanic. 

Birdland, called "the jazz corner of the world" by the man who inspired its name, the late, great Charlie "Yardbird" Parker.  The place where giants of the genre have played over time, including but not limited to--as we lawyers like to say--Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Art Blakley (the list goes on and on) since its founding in 1949.  And while I wondered I recalled that in my several visits to Andy's Jazz Club in Chicago, the crowd and performers have always been white, or at least they have been when I may be said to have been sufficiently aware of my surroundings to notice or remember.  I have overindulged in liquor there, on a few occasions.

I became a fan of jazz in my college years, mostly.  I am one of the unfortunates who lived through the 1970s as a young adult and adolescent.  The popular music of the time was for the most part a horrifying mix of cloying sentiment and disco tunes, with the ridiculous bump and other grotesque dances making us look like clowns.  We males dressed like clowns as well, of course; most appropriately.  I find it hard to even glance at pictures of the time.

There were some exceptions.  Rock wasn't entirely dead.  But that's when I began listening to and buying the works of the artists I refer to above and others like Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Yusef Lateef.  I attended the last Newport Jazz festival, disrupted by a bunch of hippies or vagrants who thought entry should be free of charge and so made certain that those who paid could not listen to the artists they paid to see, and that the artists would lose future pay days at least.  I saw Maynard Ferguson and his band at a club in Boston the name of which I can't recall, but that particular event I found disappointing; Ferguson and his band seemed to me simply to play uninteresting music very loudly.  I was something of an oddity at my Alma Mater, my stereo blaring jazz through the thin door of my dorm room.

There were some white jazz artists even then, like John McLaughlin who played on some albums with Miles Davis, primarily "fusion" artists.  And of course Bill Evans and Brubeck and other white folk were outstanding jazz men long before.  But it is not inaccurate to say that jazz began with black musicians, and it seems that like other music forms such as rock and, most depressingly, blues what began with black musicians and fans has been or is being overwhelmed by whiteness.  There's something about white men singing the blues that seems almost offensive.  As George Carlin once said (if I recall correctly) white people don't sing the blues; we make other people sing the blues.

White jazz musicians are certainly not offensive.  But I wonder why it is that at least to this observer, jazz is no longer dominated by black artists as it was in the past.  Have we white fans chased them away?  Is there no longer any real incentive for young black people to acquire the vast knowledge of an instrument required to play jazz, rap and hip-hop being more desirable (and, I think, far less difficult to master)?  Is jazz, which created cool, no longer cool?

Popular music has taken an odd turn, I believe (or maybe I've become an old fogey myself).  The great stars no longer play instruments of any kind.  Instead, they sing (or rap) and dance (or hop), usually in groups, while music is played by others if not manufactured by machines.  Popular music (with the possible exception of country music, where it seems stars may still play an instrument) seems to have transformed into a kind of parade of nightclub acts or Vegas shows, full of showgirls and showboys.

Jazz and some of what is called "world music" may represent all that is left for musicians who make new music.  I love classical music, but it seems unchanging.  The efforts made to make new classical music have in my opinion resulted in what may be called musical exercises, complex but uninspired.  They appear to be strained, small efforts compared to the great masterpieces of the past.

Perhaps jazz is becoming a kind of classical music itself, now.  It still continues to live and grow, but it may be that its limitations are being reached, not because the form of music itself is limited, but because it no longer attracts the young among us.