Recently, I found two videos recommended to me on YouTube; one was called ‘Haydn killed by cell phone’ and the other was ‘Brushy One String – Chicken in The Corn (Official Video)’ (Göteborgs Symfoniker 2013, Brushy One String 2013). I had seen the videos before, and it was their juxtaposition and relevance to my research caught my eye. The main similarity was that they both involved performances, though the disparities were more pronounced.
The first video involved a segment of a performance of Haydn’s piano concerto in D major, where a mobile rang and interrupted the piece. The pianist, Christian Zacharias, then explained in an interview why he stopped the performance, saying that “if you see [the audience not concentrating on the music] it kills everything that [the music] is about […] the least you can do [is stay] there in silence” (Göteborgs Symfoniker 2013). The tradition of silence in audience etiquette for art music is a relatively recent one (Snowman 2009, 159, Wagener 2012, 1f); this tradition follows from the idea that the sounds in a performance are expected to take precedence over the context of the music. So, the increased likelihood of the audience’s appreciation of the sounds more than the music’s context, and the familiarity of working with such a common aesthetic, is what contextualises – not produces – the enjoyment of the music for Zacharias and others. However, this is not a historically or societally universal aesthetic.
This can be seen in Brushy’s video. For Brushy and his friends, the freedom of the relationship between the performer and listener created a relaxed setting, which in turn allowed them to join in when they pleased; this broke down the performer-audience distinction. The context to the music in the performance was more prominent than art music etiquette because improvisation and performer-audience interaction were focussed on more than the specifics of sounds (e.g. precise articulations, etc.) and the location of musical concentration (i.e. the ‘music element’ comes mostly from Brushy whilst his friends occasionally join in). This other aesthetic approach to performance is popular with many people, including those in the comment section that expressed opinions like “This is what music is about. [L]etting loose, [g]rooving, and having fun” (Brushy One String 2013).
Even though both videos endorse two different aesthetic approaches to the relationship between the audience and the art, they don’t invalidate each other. The listener’s understanding of context – be it performative, historical, and/or compositional – to the particular music is part of appreciating it. The spectator and audience will always have a mindset before any performance, no matter if it’s Ferneyhough or funk.
So, this is where my creative research project comes in. If I were to take the previous paragraph and expand it, it would be thus: the multiplicity of opinion on the purpose and ontology of music does not devaluate the views themselves. Rather, the multiplicity shows that music is important to many and the variety of opinion shows how evident the matter is to people. It is the existence of these views that promotes that musical performance has purpose and definition, which is then furthered by the standardisations of certain performer-audience mindsets and relationships. Therefore, the current polydoxical nature of musical purpose is very much part of the definition of what music “is about” because of the variety of music styles, contexts, and performer-audience relationships.
My next post will cover some of the compositional techniques used in ‘Jazz Bible-Mass’, as well as the relevance of polydoxical musical purpose in these techniques.
Bibliography
Brushy One String. 2013. Brushy One String – Chicken in The Corn (Official Video). March 20. Accessed December 28, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8H-67ILaqc.
Göteborgs Symfoniker. 2013. Haydn killed by cell phone. October 24. Accessed December 28, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAaU8yPXA1A.
Snowman, Daniel. 2009. The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera. London: Atlantic Books.
Wagener, Andreas. 2012. Why Do People (Not) Cough in Concerts? The Economics of Concert Etiquette . Hannover: University of Hannover.
Polydoxical Music 