bigideas

Not sure how I missed the fact that Harrison Birtwistle‘s piece Panic was played at the proms a few weeks ago. It’s over a decade since it was premiered there, in what turned out to be the most high-profile classical premier in very many years. (The best freebie I can find online is a short snippet on Amazon, but it doesn’t give a very fair picture of the piece; Boosey & Hawkes and Encarta claim to offer clips but neither worked for me).

The premier took place at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995, a red-faced flag-waving and foot-stomping event that’s the very last place you want to play any interesting music. (YouTube has some clips of this annual event, though not of the event in question, in case you aren’t familiar with it). A few booed, a few others unfurled banners protesting against the European Union, while a jazz saxophonist and kit drummer appeared to engage in a quarter-hour pitched battle with most of an orchestra.

Of course, many people are possessed of the general idea that things they don’t understand must be rubbish precisely because they don’t understand them. There’s a missing premise there that’s easy enough to deny. Still, the piece really must have sounded very loud and aggressive in that context; the Independent newspaper called it ‘the ultimate up-yours piece’.

Birtwistle says he never intended Panic to offend or annoy anyone, but it was an odd time for classical music and this wasn’t the first time a piece of his had been booed in a London concert hall. The previous year composer Frederick Stocken had organised an anti-modernist group calling themselves the Hecklers who had booed at the end of a revival of Birtwistle’s opera Gawain. You might not think that’s a big deal, but it’s really not the done thing at Covent Garden and it caused quite a stir.

Stocken is a composer who feels that modernism has become a dogma in the musical establishment, to the extent that composers who prefer other styles find it hard to make a living. He’s written a diatribe against Pierre Boulez for the New Statesman and been given a very gentle interview in the Idler if you’re interested in hearing what he has to say.

(As an aside, I must point out that Stocken’s existence doesn’t sound too miserable. This from the Idler:

Life has been a struggle, and I have to earn my living teaching the piano. I teach two days a week in a school, and I also play the organ in a church. It’s very hard, to work while I’m composing.

By comparison, Birtwistle has held teaching posts at universities in the UK and US, worked for eight years as musical director of the Royal National Theatre and until the age of 30 also earned money as a clarinettist; it’s interesting how official biographies play these things down, as if having to work for a living were something to be kept quiet.)

His compositions themselves have received a good bit of negative press, probably in part because of his previous militancy, which he now seems to somewhat regret. On the other hand, he’s lauded by some cultural conservatives, such as the Churchill Society (who, incidentally, I assume haven’t heard much of Peter Maxwell Davies‘s music).

I’m not especially interested in Stocken so much as the very idea of protesting against a style of music-making not because the results are evil or corrupting but because they’re somehow culturally degenerate. Indeed, the allegation is that a small elite is promoting modernism in music schools and concert halls — the artworld, in other words — and deliberately suppressing other forms of classical music.

The prevailing view of the history of classical music is that it’s seen a smooth, inevitable progression in style since about the end of the sixteenth century. At any one time the particular way of composing fitted into that progression — a bit more chromatic than before, a bit less rhythmically varied than what came after and so on. Stocken appears to make as good a living at it as any contemporary composer can reasonably expect; I think what he’s really worried about is being written out of history because his music doesn’t fit the narrative.

Yet there’s an equally false narrative embedded in the objection to Boulez or Birtwistle, which is that the influence of the artworld is stifling some kind of natural process of development. As Stephen Poole recently pointed out at the Unspeak blog, “nature” is an easy word to misuse when talking about things that are socially constructed such as stylistic developments in the arts. Nothing but the artworld can define a narrative of the sort Stocken would like to be included in.

Misfits, radicals, iconoclasts, mavericks, reactionaries and cranks all risk being left out of mainstream narratives. The prize, awarded rarely but with great aplomb, is the revival of interest in such a figure and their incorporation into the canon by means of a change in the narrative itself. That’s the sort of thing that happened to the minimalists, and I suppose it could happen to Stocken and his fellow travellers too. But for most, obscurity and the admiration of a small minority of specialists is all that can reasonably be expected.

So is anyone right to campaign against the decisions the artworld appears to be making? Much as I dislike what little I’ve heard of Stocken’s music and find his tone annoyingly whiny, a part of me wants to take my hat off to him. The artworld isn’t some kind of soviet, standing aside from society and handing down judgements that the rest of us have to accept. It’s a part of society and has complex and dynamic interactions with everything else that’s going on. While hooting at concerts and complaining in magazines might not be sensible tactics, the idea that interested parties can and should find ways to petition the artworld and influence it is, it seems to me, entirely laudable.