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Paul Morley: ‘Pop belongs to the last century. Classical music is more relevant

Started by KB7DQH, September 24, 2014, 07:42:23 AM

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KB7DQH

The following link was shared on the Facebook page of my local Classical music station and thought it relevant...

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/21/pop-belongs-last-century-classical-music-relevant-future-paul-morley

Quote

    Culture
    Music
    Classical music

Paul Morley: 'Pop belongs to the last century. Classical music is more relevant to the future'

For years, this rock critic viewed classical music as pompous art of the past. Now, tired of pop, he explains why classical is the truly subversive form - and selects six favourite pieces to convert the unbeliever

   


        Paul Morley   
        The Observer, Saturday 20 September 2014   


During the 1970s and 80s, I mostly listened to pop and rock music, when even the likes of Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow and Popul Vuh were filed under pop. However far out I went as a listener, though, classical music seemed connected to a dreary sense of uninspiring worthiness that was fixed inside an ideologically suspect status quo, lacking the exhilarating suggestion of new beginnings, a pulsating sense of an exciting, mind-expanding tomorrow. There was something monstrous about it, as if in its world there were lumbering dinosaurs and toothless dragons, refusing to accept they were extinct. Next to Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvets, it sounded frail; next to Buzzcocks and Public Image, it sounded pompous. While I wrote for the NME between 1976 and 1984, interviewing stars from Lou Reed and John Lydon to Sting and Mick Jagger, I didn't think about classical music – it was from the past, back when the past stayed where it was and wasn't as easy to access as it is now.

I owned hundreds of albums and thousands of singles by the early 1980s, and then replaced them with thousands of CDs, many of them the same rock albums. Now I am rebuilding once more as compact discs become as anachronistic as 78s. I have a rapidly expanding virtual library – in my head as much as inside the cage of Google – that might date as much as the vinyl and CD libraries did, or might last me for ever.

I now listen to much more classical music than I do pop or rock and on the surface that might seem like a classic, cliched, late-life move into a conservative, grown-up and increasingly remote world. For me, though, it has been more a move to where the provocative, thrilling and transformative ideas are, mainly because modern pop and rock has become the status quo.

If you are going to go back to the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s to find music that still sounds new and challenging – because then it was an actual risk to look and sound a certain way, whereas now it is the norm – you might as well go even further back in time, to the beginning of the 20th century, to the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. Now, with all music available instantly, and pop more a nostalgic, preservative practice rather than one anticipating and demanding change, classical music comes to fresh, forward-looking life.

The alluring, addictive sound of pop does still evolve, but what is sung about remains more or less the same; the poses, controversies and costumes repetitive and derivative. It is machines that are now the new pop stars, the performers and singers like travelling sales workers whose ultimate job is to market phones, tablets, consoles, films, brands and safely maintain the illusion that the world is just as it was when there was vinyl and the constant, frantic turnover of talent, genre and style. There is today a tremendous amount of sentimentality in making it seem as though things are as they once were, a desperate future-fearing rearrangement of components that were hip 40 years ago. But pop and rock belongs at the end of the 20th century, in a structured, ordered world that has now fallen apart.

For me, pop music is now a form of skilfully engineered product design, the performers little but entertainment goods, and that is how they should be reviewed and categorised. The current pop singers are geniuses of self-promotion, but not, as such, musicians expressing glamorous ideas.

Most rock is now best termed trad. I like a bit of product design, even the odd slab of trad, and have not turned my back completely on entertainment goods, but when it comes to music and working out what music is for, when it comes to thinking about music as a metaphor for life itself, what tends to be described as classical music seems more relevant to the future.

Once you make it through the formalities of classical music, those intimidating barriers of entry, there is the underestimated raw power of its acoustic sound and an endless supply of glorious, revolutionary music, all

easily accessed as if it is happening now. Now that all music is about the past, and about a curation of taste into playlists, now that fashions and musical progress have collapsed, discernment wiped out, classical music takes a new place in time, not old or defunct, but part of the current choice. It is as relevant as any music, now that music is one big gathering of sound perpetually streaming into the world. If you are interested in music that helps us adapt to new ideas, to fundamental change, which broadcasts different, special ways of thinking and warns us about those who loathe forms of thinking that are not the same as theirs, classical is for you.


This is only a partial quote of the whole article...  however his thesis is compelling, and certainly for the "King of Instruments"... Pity the organ does not feature in the descriptions of the six pieces he selected to review in support of his thesis statement...

Eric
KB7DQH
The objective is to reach human immortality—that is, to create things which are necessary to mankind, necessary to the purpose of the existence of mankind, and which have become the fruit that drives the creation of a higher state of mankind than ever existed before."

David Wyld

Give the poor dear time - he's only a 'newbie'!  When he discovers the  "underestimated raw power of its acoustic sound" that our preferred instrument develops........ :o

DW

KB7DQH

The objective is to reach human immortality—that is, to create things which are necessary to mankind, necessary to the purpose of the existence of mankind, and which have become the fruit that drives the creation of a higher state of mankind than ever existed before."