COVER -> DAY ONE
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For the first time in my life some people, instead of waiting until the end of a piece are clapping between movements. Predictably - the Western intellectual tradition seems incapable of denying itself dichotomy - there are now two camps: the one says that applause breaks the spell of the music; the other that the release of tension through expressing gratification is a product of the music.
Predictably, too, - most dichotomies being false - I find myself in neither camp. I would like to clap between movements of a Bach Orchestral Suite because they are the most sublime dance music ever written but I could no more applaud at the end of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, let alone between movements, than at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer even though it represents the pinnacle of my spiritual life.
The problem with rule-based democracies is that they cannot resist making rules.
Even economic deregulators on the 'right' of the Republican Party (almost entirely male) cannot help wanting to make rules about the relationship between pregnant women and their medical advisers. The problem with the musical situation is that while there may be cases at either end of the spectrum - dance music and sacred works - where the rule is obvious, there are all those pieces in the middle.
No matter how virtuosic, I would not applaud in the course of a string quartet simply because of the performance context for which it is written, but at least at the end of symphonic first movements which usually make fundamental statements I see no harm in it; and no matter how well played, the new generation of applauders never breaks out after slow movements.
I might one day bring myself to clap at the end of the First Movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as contemporaries certainly did. In fact the convention against applause is a product of high romanticism, first applied to its own creations but later applied retrospectively. My conclusion is that my mild irritation is worth the price of liberalism and pluralism.
The case of whether girls should sing in cathedral choirs is slightly more complex; but only slightly.
The intellectual objection to it is that most English choral music was written for all male choirs and that the sound produced by a boy treble is different from that of a female soprano. True, but we no longer castrate youths to secure a supply of counter-tenors. For years castrato roles were undertaken by female altos but with technical improvements in voice-production these roles have reverted to uncastrated counter-tenors.
There was no objection to Handel performances because ladies sang what had been written as male roles. The difference in the case of choristers is that it does not depend on the free, disorganised formation of public opinion which determines taste in opera but by ecclesiastical rule makers. For reasons which I do not understand after thinking about it for twenty years, the British upper classes like single sex schools and have extended the principle to choir schools.
In spite of that bogus case, it is true that there is a genuine interest today in "Authentic performance practice".
Again, I reject the dichotomy. There are those who only want pieces to be performed with the actual instruments with the actual musical forces envisaged by the composer and others who accept technological developments in instrument-making to have no real impact on the nature of performance. I can illustrate my position simply: I cannot imagine a world in which Bach's keyboard music was only played on a harpsichord but the contemporary piano makes a nonsense of the dynamics of Schubert Sonatas written for the pianos of his time.
All of which demonstrates that the music which we are accustomed, misleadingly, to call "Classical" is far from extinction.
Instrumental performance and singing may be falling out of school curricula as pressure increases for rising standards in traditional and IT literacies, but any careful listener will tell you that the standard of singing and playing is steadily rising and has been doing so at least since the birth of the phonograph.
There are revered choral performances under Furtwangler and Klemperer, for instance, which would be judged totally unacceptable today by the choir leader of a town church.
There are Jeremiahs who forecast the end of the late 19th Century orchestra but there is no evidence that this is about to happen. There have been forecasts that major recording companies will disintegrate but small, independent labels are now supplementing the great landmarks in music recording with the release of repertoire not heard since its composers' death, if at all.
Looking at my own catalogue, I see extensive listings of music of composers from the 14th-19th Centuries who did not feature in musical works of reference two decades ago. There is, finally, the forecast that the Internet will destroy music as we know it forever.
So it may but what is wrong with that? The Internet is disliked as much as it is because of the rule-making propensity of governments. Surprisingly, perhaps at first sight, that inclination is shared by traditional industries. This is why recording multinationals are frightened of the Internet and why, throughout modern history, major companies are ambivalent about monopoly and competition.
In musical terms the Internet has massive potential, not only for the distribution of existing and newly created content but also for the development of new forms of composition based collage. This was foreseen by Keith Jarrett with his "classical/jazz" fusion and by his record company ECM with its fusion of the Hilliard Ensemble, specialists in Mediaeval polyphony, and the jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek. There will be rule-makers foaming at the door of every music lab and mixing booth. They have had a ludicrous and powerful role in dictating how we read and write so, if music is to be the universal language of the new Century, let us make sure that they are not allowed the same damaging dominance again.
