More divas

Victoria de Los Angeles, born November 1 1923; died January 15 2005, The Guardian, 17 January 2005Renata Tebaldi, born 1 February 1922; died 19 December 2004Now I feel bad. I forgot to mention that, in the last few weeks we lost two of the most important Old School opera goddesses of all time: Victoria de los Angeles and Renata Tebaldi. In their native countries (Spain and Italy respectively) they were practically worshiped. They were contemporaries of Callas and of comparable stature. They’re both in my record collection – de los Angeles on several super-cheap CDs probably given to me by my friend Paul who used to buy that sort of thing from a stall on Whitechapel Waste when he worked over the road at Eastside Books (her lovely Catalan songs seem to be unavailable but you can still get this fat collection of traditional Spanish song at amazon.co.uk) and Tebaldi on heavy vintage vinyl probably bought from the quite amazing and precious Harold Moore’s Records in Great Marlborough Street when I worked next door at Marks and Spencer. Opera divas are no longer glamorous, remote figures, loved by millions from a distance – they’re struggling to retain their relevance, losing a lot of weight (well, most of them), doing Reality TV shows and charity concerts. They should be a protected species.

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Classical music’s mess

Twenty years ago, when I started listening to classical music, things looked pretty good for the form. A small revival was under way – lots of gorgeous new music, influential movie soundtracks and superstar ensembles seemed to promise some kind of renaissance. The subsidised concert halls were full and radio deregulation promised a wave of new classical stations. Now, things are much gloomier.

Classical music is a basket case, in fact. The generation that was supposed to save it has moved on – either to revitalised ‘serious’ rock or to some point on the huge and groovy spectrum of dance music. Classical album sales have collapsed, the labels can’t fund the big budget recordings any more and even the major orchestras are struggling. A decade of wasted investment in witless crossover acts and overpaid has-beens hasn’t helped. Worst of all, no one knows what to do – there’s no evidence that the industry has a response up its sleeve – either to the disastrous loss of audience or to the promise of new technology.

Meanwhile, Radio 3 and a bunch of top orchestras have got together to make classical performance available to people who wouldn’t normally see it. Disabled people are invited to call 0800 033 033 and book a free performance from some of the best musicians in the land in their own home. Marvelous: a really brave initiative – but it got me thinking. What classical music needs, I think, is something bigger, something much more ambitious.

The subsidised ensembles ought to launch the biggest outreach programme in their history. It’s quite simple (and it’s really just the disabled scheme on a bigger scale): for a year, anyone who can promise an audience of more than, say, twenty, should be able to call a single number and book an orchestra, a chamber group, a choir or a soloist for a free performance anywhere. I’d like to see a year of frenetic activity from the musicians and administrators, composers and conductors – a really serious effort to convert thousands, tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of new listeners, a really serious effort to rescue classical music from the heartbreaking spiral of irrelevance it’s caught in now.

Speaking of classical outreach, every programme in Radio 3’s brilliant Discovering Music series is worth listening to and they have a proper archive.

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Old punks

Jamie Reid's poster for the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant
Jamie Reid’s cover art was the ultimate ‘fuck off’ to our parents’ generation and all that fuss about the Queen and EMI was intoxicating if your last album purchase was Tales from Topographic Oceans. So now all that perfectly ephemeral stuff is perfectly collectable – and, I’ll tell you, I’d like one… (does that make me hopelessly middle-aged?).

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Why I love chamber music more than orchestral music

I don’t think that anything so tender, tragic or complete as Schubert’s String Quintet in C exists in the orchestral repertoire. And nowhere else will you find such passion, love and involvement as among the musicians who play it. An (unidentified) musician from a Radio 4 documentary about the Quintet:

“The expression also comes, I suppose, from loving the music and loving to play with those particular players enough to give away your personality to what they want to do at any given time. So, if you imagine, in the quintet, all five players have the leading voice at different points and you have to be confident enough and love the other four enough to trust them to take you where they want. You need imagination in the players – something that’s not routine, something that’s not “we’ve done this before. We know this piece”. And yet you have to have done it before, you have to know this piece. And yet you have to have a free mind…”

This is brilliant radio (which will presumably have been overwritten by the next programme in the series by now. How annoying is that?). Update: Sure enough, the Schubert programme has been replaced by a George Formby programme.

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You’ll have to wait until the interval…

Photograph of the St. Burchardi church with the organ on which John Cage's work 'as slow as possible'
St. Burchardi in Halberstadt

I’m afraid I’m bringing this concert to your attention about 15 months late. Luckily the ‘performance’ isn’t due to finish for another 637 years so you have time to get an ice cream. The extraordinary John Cage (who used to have his own special side-bar feature here at Bowblog, back before blogger ate my template) scored his piece ‘As Slow as Possible’ to last about twenty minutes played on a solo piano but the literal-minded Germans plan to play approximately one chord per year on the Halberstadt town organ until 2640 thus neatly untethering music from human time entirely and sending the mind reeling. The performance stretches an ephemeral human enterprise across many generations and tests the endurance of every institution associated with it. I love this kind of really long-term thinking.

Knocking Docherty

I think Danny’s wrong to knock David Docherty’s ‘Cookie Monster‘ analogy. David may have been on a hiding to nothing from the beginning at Telewest, but the nub of truth in his frustration is that the conduct of Internet users is important (how could it be otherwise?). As actors in the networked economy we have obligations and our good faith will be critical to the success or otherwise of digital music, film, whatever. If a whole generation of users really has decided that it’ll never pay for music again (which is arguable), then music will inevitably be driven off the net.

As usual, I’m mister middle-of-the-road. Where David and the suits see a field of high concept ‘broadband content’ and Danny and the geeks see an untenanted void waiting for settlers to fill it – I see a bit of both. In fact, I think it’s economic lunacy to suggest that either could be sufficient unto itself. No one but no one will bring dark fibre to my curb without some value added ‘content’ to subsidise the utterly commodified pipe and users will never accept the media owners’ vision of content-driven broadband heaven unless it looks a lot like the net. As usual, the outcome is more likely to be a messy ecology than a nice, clean monoculture.

The downtown music scene after 9/11

I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked within a few blocks of the WTC – Sonic Youth in Murray Street, Laurie Anderson in Greenwich Street, for instance. The programme is excellent – you can listen to it in Real Audio. Some of the artists interviewed have obviously had their worlds turned upside down by the event. Others do that amazing thing that only artists and egomaniacs can do – coming through a world-changing trauma, worldview, prejudices and ego intact – “yeah. It was a nightmare. And now I’m mostly working with tabla and tape loops…”

This is fun…

iTunes playlists are becoming an obsession. Here’s my “sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers” list – every track that features one of those words in its ID3 tags. For some reason, these lists make for a much more provocative listen that just randomising the whole library.

A Mother's Love, The Meters
All Your Sisters, Mazzy Star
Big Bayou, The Flying Burrito Brothers
Broken Little Sister, Death In Vegas
Brother Can You Spare A Dime, George Michael
Brother John, Cannonball Adderley
Christine's Tune, The Flying Burrito Brothers
Come To Daddy,  Mummy Mix
Divine Mother, Jah Wobble
Endless Grey Ribbon, The Corn Sisters
Every Day Is Christmas, The Webb Brothers
Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand, Williamson Brothers And Curry
Good Mornin',  Brother
Graveside Song, Stevens Sisters
He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother, Keith Barrow
He Meets His Mother, Richard Robbins
He's The Greatest Dancer, Sister Sledge
I Believe In Father Christmas, Six By Seven
I Need Someone, Wallace Brothers
Jackie Brown Soundtrack.mp3, Brothers Johnson
Jungle Brothers - Because I Got It Like That (Ultimate Mix), Jungle Brothers
Just a Little Talk With Jesus, Statler Brothers
King Of The Road, Statler Brothers
Lacassine Special, Balfa Brothers
Last Song for Mother, Nanci Griffith
Legacy (Show Me Love) (Mash Up Matt Mix), Space Brothers
Little Sister/Get Back, Elvis Presley
Little Sister/Get Back, Elvis Presley
Look At That Old Grizzly Bear, Mark Mothersbaugh
Make It Easy On Yourself, Scott Walker & The Walker Brothers
Mother (very rare), Blind Melon
Mother And Child Reunion, Paul Simon
Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles
My Baby's Gone, Wallace Brothers
My Dad's Gone Crazy, Eminem
My Sister, Tindersticks
Nebraska, The Cash Brothers
New Genious (Brother), Gorillaz
Oh Lori, Alessi brothers
Oh,  Sister
One For Daddy-O, Cannonball Adderley
One Too Many Mornings, Chemical Brothers
Our Mother The Mountain, Townes Van Zandt
Piece of my Heart, Big Brother & the Holding Company
Ras Dub, Sister Carol
Sal Got A Meatskin, Carlisle Brothers
Sister Ray, Joy Division
Sisters & Brothers, The Fire This Time
Slapshot, Brothers In Raw
Star Catching  Girl [Soulside Mix], Brother Brown Feat. Frank'ee
Transition Theme For Minor Blues (Or Little Malcolm Loves His Dad), Sonny Rollins
Tunji's Song - Tunji Oyelana, Brotherhood of Breath
Will the Circle Be Unbroken, The Neville Brothers
Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Statler Brothers
Will the Circle be Unbroken, Mother Maybelle Carter
Will the Circle be Unbroken (live), The Allman Brothers Band
You Can't Hold On To A Love That's Gone, The Holmes Brothers
Your Heart And Mine, Nicholas Brothers
Your Winter, Sister Hazel

New ways of listening

As I said, it took me a long time to adjust to the new ways of listening implied by clever tools like iTunes. A concrete example: what I used to do was exactly analogous to listening to a CD: flick through the long list of playlists until one catches my eye, double click to play. No change there. Later I downloaded a ‘play random track’ applescript and, together with the ‘shuffle’ button, that became my standard way into the library. But sometimes, random can be a bit too random. So now I use iTunes’ search function, which is simple enough. I just free associate until I get an interesting-looking playlist. Then shuffle through the results.

This is really orthogonal to the experience of ‘putting an album on’ – ‘artist’, ‘album’ and ‘genre’ are secondary to mood or ambience. Meanwhile, the whole MP3 universe is still organised into albums – MP3 players even try to locate album cover art when you play a track – but the new ways of interacting with music must imply at least a loss of emphasis on the album. Once we’re accustomed to ‘dialing up’ a mood or a feeling or an era, will we want to buy albums at all? Or will we buy (or rent) an hour of ‘contemplative’ or ‘aggressive’ or ‘Renaissance’ or whatever? Here’s one of my playlists. iTunes search terms were ‘I’m’ and ‘You’re’.

I'm Still In Love With You, Al Green
I'm Fricking Awesome, MC Paul Barman
I'm Waiting For The Day, Beach Boys
I'm Only Sleeping, The Beatles
I'm Amazed, The Pixies
I'm So Tired, The Beatles
I'm Serious, Beenie Man
I'm Waiting For The Man, Velvet Underground
You're a Big Girl Now, Bob Dylan
You're Pretty Good Looking, White Stripes
You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Bob Dylan
I'm Taking My Audition To Sing Up In The Sky, Cap, Andy, And Flip
You're So Vain, Carly Simon
You're My Thrill, Chet Baker
I'm On My Way, Clifton Chenier
I'm Waiting For The Man, David Bowie & Lou Reed
You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma, David Frizzell & Dottie West
I'm Coming Out, Diana Ross
I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas, Goons
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hank Williams
I'm In The Mood, John Lee Hooker
I'm Prison Bound, John Lee Hooker
I'm Beginning to see the Light, Johnny Hodges
You're The One That I Want, Less Than Jake
You're A Friend Of Mine, The Meters
I'm not Worried At All, Moby
I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy Waters
I'm Ready, Muddy Waters
I'm Like a Bird, Nelly Furtado
I'm Depending On You, Otis Redding
I'm Leaving You, Otis Spann
I'm A Man, Pulp
I'm Housin', Rage Against The Machine
You're in the air, REM
You're In My Heart, Rhonda Vincent
I'm Someone Who Loves You, The Roches
I'm So Glad, Skip James
I'm An Old Cowhand, Sonny Rollins
I'm An Old Cowhand (alt. take), Sonny Rollins
I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, Supremes/Temptations
I'm Still Here, Tom Waits
I'm So Glad, Skip James
I'm Taking My Audition To Sing Up In The Sky, Cap, Andy, And Flip
You're My Everything, Zoot Sims