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ASK THE PROFESSOR | Popular Music Puzzles Me

By James Parker on February 9, 2016

(Credit: Christian Northeast)
(Credit: Christian Northeast)

Hi Professor,

It puzzles me that popular music, with all its tremendous limitations of format, harmony, subject matter, etc., there is nevertheless an unending stream of hits, artists and compositions that send audiences into raptures of excitement. It is a world forever cheering the “new” and “revolutionary” and “ground-breaking,” seemingly in a constant state of renewal, sweeping its audiences along with it. In classical music, on the other hand, there is precious little excitement about—or even interest in—the new, and precious few works. Worse still, precious few works, even as the decades roll by, are added to the standard repertoire. Is it because classical music is so complex that “hits” are so difficult and rare? Is it because classical music left audiences behind when it veered away from tonality and melody?

Sincerely,

Puzzled

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Dear Puzzled,

You raise some really good conversation points here. I think that the whole phenomenon of popular music, with its endless stream of hits, is based on the shallowness of instant gratification in our society. (This business has also had huge amounts of money and media coverage thrown at it.) One could choose to do a university degree in music in order to better understand contemporary classical music, or one can just succumb to a repetitive drum beat in a pop song, with its melodic hook and catchy chorus. It’s just quicker and easier to do that.

Online we do it all the time – we can listen to a lecture on www.openculture.com, or we can choose mindless clickbait that promises us money, naked people, shocking truths, and weight loss while eating doughnuts. (I’ve even been known to spend my time making completely idiotic Facebook videos for a quick laugh.)

Contemporary classical music can be very complex in harmonic, structural, and rhythmic ways – believe me, some of it does more than just puzzle me. Veering away from tonality and melodies has also driven off audiences. These events have placed a lot of modern music out of the mainstream, so that’s partly why we don’t have lots of ‘hits’ in our field. Sometimes, composers just sound like lunatics:

There’s one Stockhausen Q&A session where he kind of hints that people like him are further along the evolutionary chain than us mere mortals, and that’s why we can’t understand and appreciate his genius. (Right – either that, or you’re an insufferably arrogant douchebag.)

Another interesting point that I was just talking about with one of my students is that there’s such an emphasis on commissioning and World Premieres, that not a lot of performers spend the time to find good existing modern repertoire and give ‘World Secondaires’. (And while I really do enjoy the part of my career that focuses on playing new music, every now and then I feel an intense urge to organize an ‘Official World Derniere’, where after a designated performance of a really bad piece, all extant copies and computer files of the piece will be destroyed forever.)

When I was a student it was very difficult to find audio or visual recordings of Canadian compositions, but now there’s much more media available. Nowadays, there isn’t any ‘typical’ style of composition, the way there was throughout the history of western classical music, so it also takes more effort for listeners to connect with music that speaks to them. It’s also really important for performers and composers to introduce new music in a way that is inviting, informative, yet not condescending, to audiences. One of my pet peeves is when a composer says to an audience, “I prefer to let my music speak for itself.” I just don’t think that’s good enough – give your audience a couple of things to listen for – a couple of places to make them feel good about recognizing.

Got a question for The Professor? Email AskTheProfessor@musicaltoronto.org. His advice column will appear here every month.

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