The exchanges within this panel, and in conversation with small but serious audience, were in general very interesting; it was particularly enlightening for me to get a sense of how these new opera creators think about/talk about their work, about what they’re trying to achieve, etc. I want to use this post to do two things: first, give a little overview of some of the highlights (and lowpoints) of the event, as well as the key themes and concerns which I picked up on, and second, introduce what I saw as the central theme of the discussion – the idea of opera as collaborative process (along with the ‘roles’ of the various collaborators). The way that this idea is often framed, and the centrality afforded to it in the imagination of new opera creators, can be somewhat problematic. I would argue that, at its purest, it constitutes a fully-fledged ideology which, like all ideologies, presents itself as ‘normal’ or ‘standard-practice’, and therefore warrants some significant critique.

By the idea of ‘opera as collaborative process’, I’m talking about the idea that imagines opera as the ‘coming-together of elements’ – usually three elements: music, text and theatre – whose sympathetic, ‘synergetic’ combination is imagined to be the fundamental ‘problem’ of opera. I want to propose that our fixation on (and essentialising of) this particular ‘problem’ has warped our idea of the opera itself as an artwork which should make some kind of statement or elicit some kind of response, encouraging us instead to view operas as evidence of the relative success of a process (collaboration or creative dialogue). After reviewing and critiquing some of the panels own ‘solutions’ to this ‘problem’, I’ll revisit two significant historic ‘solutions’ – Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Brecht’s ‘Separation of the Elements’ – in order to reconsider the nature of this ‘problem’ (and its accompanying ideology) and suggest how it tends to distract from opera’s future potential.

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but first

HIGHLIGHTS , , ,

• Hearing both Jonathan Reekie and Judith Weir express the need to ‘interrogate your motives’ when you decides to write an opera, and to ask yourself questions like: ‘Why do I want to write an opera?’, ‘What is the reason for music in this piece?’ and ‘Why are these people going to sing?’. I agree that this is by far the most important consideration in approaching the creation of a new opera (and in restaging an old opera), so it was very encouraging to hear it expressed so clearly.
• Jennifer Walshe‘s discussion of her work – framed as auteur opera, with reference to the films of Lars von Trier and Werner Herzog – which, in its experimental reach and provocation came as a very welcome antidote to the mainstream (linear, narrative-driven, quasi-’naturalistic’) approaches represented by most of the other panel members. [Definitely one to check out: watch this extract from her Barbie opera XXX LIVE NUDE GIRLS!!! right now]
• An audience-member’s feminist challenge to David Harsent regarding his contemporary rehash of a Hardy tale for his recent opera with Huw Watkins - In the Locked Room - which had the fantastic effect of making everyone in the room palpably uncomfortable.
• Audience questions touching on some pretty weighty academic questions around the possibility of opera without staging: opera-as-recording, opera on the radio, opera in new media, etc. This is a huge and important area of discussion, especially for new contemporary opera, but it wasn’t really afforded any time in the conference, and these questions weren’t really taken up by the panel.

LOWPOINTS ` ` `

• Any mention of new opera ‘taking risks’ (and there was a lot of such mentions). I’ll keep my diatribe on this subject for a later post, but for now let’s just say that I think this language of ‘risk’ (which implies the possibility of ‘success’ or ‘failure’) is a very confused and dangerous way of thinking about new art production. Thankfully, some members of the panel (Reekie especially) did attempt to problematise this perspective.
• When John Fulljames called opera ‘fundamentally an emotional art form’. This is so obviously a massive generalisation, but it has managed to become a very powerful one, especially in the formulation of ‘canons’. It works to deny the continuing relevance of so many challenging twentieth-century avant garde works to which it very clearly doesn’t apply, and I believe it is doing a great deal to limit the potential of new opera and the way that opera is recognised and defined in general. [And for any skeptics, I hope to give a fuller explanation of this idea in a later post . . . ]

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Again and again, the discussion came back to this idea of

opera as collaborative process

which is the main issue that I want to address in this post.

Possibly due to the wide array of specialised artists on the panel, most of whom have extensive experience in working on large-scale projects as part of big-name collaborations, discussion kept returning to the question of how to approach collaborating on an opera. This is partly, I’m sure, an expression of the neurosis that an individual artist feels when – having mastered their discipline and cultivated a strong, controlled artistic style in their individual work – they have to give up some of this control to another artist, specialised in another medium, whose expertise and understanding they have to trust, just as they have to trust their own creative comprehension of that other artist’s contribution, in order to engage with it sympathetically and constructively. The fear is presumably that the various elements won’t ‘fit’ together or complement each other, that they won’t ‘add’ anything to each other and will seem mutually redundant, that one will overshadow or undermine the others. After all the revolutions and reforms, treatises and manifestos throughout operatic history, the combination of music, text and theatre has become one of the great fetishes of opera, to the extent that ‘getting it right’ seems to be the key ‘problem of opera’ for opera creators.

THE PROBLEM OF OPERA and its SOLUTIONS

And to some extent I would agree: in a way, of course, this is the key problem of opera. In my experience of new operas, too often the staging seems to be some awkward afterthought, taking pains to avoid interfering with the singers’ ‘real’ role of singing the music clearly and accurately, and unwilling to give them anything too complicated or vigorous (or interesting) to do with their bodies. Often, as well, music seems wholly unnecessary to a scenario, adding nothing but the arbitrary signification of ‘meaningfulness’ to some particularly banal or clichéd story, or slowing down and homogenising a potentially dramatic scene through imposed ‘conventional’ word-setting or instrumental interludes.

The experts on the panel seemed to offer two main solutions to this problem. Both were expressed most concisely by Martin Crimp (who was, after all, referring to his very successful recent collaboration with George Benjamin and Katie Mitchell on Written on Skin). The two solutions could be defined as a negative and a positive approach:

• negative::: To successfully collaborate on an opera, each individual element – and this invariably meant libretto, score and staging - had to be in some way ‘incomplete’ on its own, and should only make sense when added together. In this way, the final amalgamation of the three elements must require them all while, at the same time, one element shouldn’t be able to stand all on its own. Hence we heard statements like Laura Bowler’s that opera should be ’50% music, 50% theatre’, Crimp’s that a writer must ‘leave the music out’ of a text so the composer can put it back in, or Reekie’s that a composer might try to find an ‘unmusical’ play to set (i.e., a play that doesn’t ‘work’ as a play).
• positive::: Working together with other artists on the same operatic project should allow you to ‘reach a point that you couldn’t reach on your own’. In this way, music acts as a kind of added value to text, text as added value to music, and staging as added value to both (since, in this process, the staging always comes afterwards).

Both of these (related) approaches are valuable, of course, but only up to a point. They might safeguard the ‘successful’ creation of operas, preventing them from falling into a certain number of traps, but at the same time they promote the production of a particular type of opera along with a particularly narrow idea of what the relationship between the various elements must be. My strong issue with both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ approaches is that they are fixated on opera as a tripartite construction: as the coming-together of three different artists, or even three different, discrete texts, which then have to be combined in a tasteful and sensitive way in order to appear ‘successful’. In my opinion, this actually reproduces the conditions of the ‘problem of opera’, by further instilling a particularly limiting ideology of opera creation.

There is a difference here in our definitions of the word ‘problem’. I would define this particular ‘problem’ in the sense of a ‘negative issue’, something which is often wrong with opera, but not as a necessary ‘question to be solved’. Thinking of the ‘problem of opera’ as a conundrum which must always be dealt with whenever a new opera is to be created – a conundrum which is synonymous with the particular challenges of creating opera – places a certain constellation of structural, creative and semantic assumptions at the heart of the opera from its earliest conception, as a compositional project as well as an art work. This constellation of assumptions forms what I will call ‘the ideology of opera creation’.

\\ The Ideology of Opera Creation \\

I will now attempt to delineate the various aspects of this ideological constellation as I understand it. They may not all be present all the time, just as some may be more conscious than others. I don’t think any of them have gone completely uncriticised, but I do believe that their particular contemporary prevalence, in London at least, and the fact that they support and validate each other so effectively, leaves them still relatively under-criticised. I also think its important to state that, while many of them seem to have historical precedence, their codification as ‘ideal’ praxis has often been retroactive, the resulting anachronisms made all the more apparent when considering the huge upheavals in the languages and practices of theatre, literature and performance over the last hundred years . . . . . .

i. Opera as essentially tripartite

Opera is perceived as ‘the result’ of a three-way artistic collaboration, and this constitutes its raison d’être.

It doesn’t matter then whether music, text and staging have anything remarkable about them individually, it is their very concomitance which makes them automatically valuable. Their simultaneous expression over so many different sensory/cognitive dimensions will guarantee an enhanced effect. This might be a hangover of the legendary Gesamtkunstwerk concept (the Wagnerian ‘total’ art work) as much as it might be a symptom of the current obsession with ‘multimedia’ art works (the more media, the better). It suggests the presence of a particular kind of operatic ‘aura’, an ‘x factor’ of multi-disciplinary saturation, at which point whatever story, dialogue or music an artist puts forward, however banal, suddenly become incredibly meaningful.

In this way, new opera comes to resemble a kind of bare-twig teepee structure made from leaning three spindly sticks against each other so that they meet at the top and support each other in a kind of pyramid. Each of the three ‘artists’ has picked up their own stick and propped it up together so that the structure stands, and it is this ‘third dimension’ – the fact that the three twigs are all standing upright rather than lying supine in the mud like the other twigs – that constitutes ‘successful opera’. This multi-sensory saturation becomes a sort of virtuoso spectacular element, as marvellous as the saturation by through-sung musical drama, the classical voice and long-form musical development, which when combined have all the sublime thrill of IMAX 3D.

This actually goes against the principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk of course, which – if ideally achieved – should create its effect without the audience noticing, or thinking about, the fact that it’s being produced through the combination of different elements, and the work of different artists. In Wagner’s concept, any collaborative process would be so integrated that it would efface its own fundamental plurality, leaving only a central, strong, unified idea. But such a central, strong, unified idea – as an end-point – has little prominence in this ideology, which is more concerned with how one artist’s work will ‘fit’ with another artists’ work. In fact, I would go further to say that, in many cases, the accepted idea of ‘how opera works’ appears to go like this:

1) choose any (simple) story and turn it into dialogue, the more ‘universal’ it sounds (read ‘Romantic/symbolist’) the better,

2) add the requisite emotional/scenic musical signifiers to make it emotionally meaningful,

3) perform it onstage with the minimum amount of gesticulation and movement required to clarify the relationship between the characters, enough facial expressions to make it seem ‘natural’, and the maximum amount of stage machinery and spectacle that you can afford.

ii. Doctrine of servitude/redundancy

For centuries, critics have argued over whether ‘the music should serve the drama’ or ‘the drama should serve the music’, whether the ‘staging should serve the score’ or ‘the score should serve the staging’ etc. It is nevertheless now agreed that opera is a collaborative art form, the joining-together of efforts by different artists which wouldn’t ‘function’ on their own. It is important that there should be some reason for an opera to be an opera, not a play or a novel, not a ballet, not an instrumental piece or a song cycle. It must require all of its elements in order to produce its eventual meaning or effect. In that way, when held up to the final product, all of the individual elements should be (ever so slightly) lacking. 

This is how the theory goes, anyway. The problem is, quite often, it ends up meaning that each individual element is almost entirely lacking any semblance of serious significance or quality, while the ‘total meaning or effect’ – rather than a unified artistic statement accessible only through the interaction of text, music and theatre – seems usually to resemble the interaction of these elements for the very sake of their interaction. No one artist or text wants to carry the burden of meaning; sophistication is supposed to occur in the interaction of the various texts, so each artist is careful not to produce anything too multivalent or too committed to a particular meaning. There is general fear around disobeying common critical injunctions such as ‘don’t obstruct the storytelling’ and ‘allow the singers to express their emotions directly‘.

I would argue that this very often leads to a case in which none of these ‘three ingredients’ of opera really justify their own existence.  This is the risk when leaving a little something ‘lacking’ from your libretto (or from your music or your staging) that then requires explication or extrapolation within another sensory plane. If no-one commits to a particular idea or statement then there is nothing really to ‘serve’, and again, if everything is ‘serving’ everything else, everything is redundant. There must be at least one strong, original idea in the work, not just an endless cycle of sensitive servitude, or else at least some rich and boldly textured array of possible interpretations, so that what is intended to read as ambiguity doesn’t give way to vacuity.

To put it slightly differently, instead of music serving drama or staging serving score, everything should just serve the opera. In opera, the music is the drama, after all.

iii. The (unacknowledged) primacy of music

In spite of the above two doctrines of synergy and servitude, the most important element of the opera is still the music. This is the element from which the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the piece can be gleaned. It is the fundamental essence of the opera, manifest in the notes in the score which must stay the same even as the libretto is translated and adapted, and the piece is restaged (or recorded). It is the least revisable element, and therefore the most ‘essential’. For these same reasons, the staging is the least important element since it is the most changeable, and the one that can most readily be left out (in recordings or concert performances).

Although totally contradicting the above two tenets, of course, the predominance of music in opera is not really a secret; for all the talk of a three-way process, or of ’50% music, 50% theatre’, opera is understood by pretty much everyone as first and foremost music. It is a genre of music before it is a genre of theatre. Hence, phrases such as ‘Verdi’s opera’, or ‘the Verdi’ – ‘La Traviata, is that Verdi? Yes, it’s Verdi’ – but equally, the Adès, the Dove, the Barry, etc. Hence recordings of performances marketed as ‘an opera’, rather than ‘the soundtrack to an opera’, with no mention of the stage director of the performance on the cover.

This is partly all due to the mystique of music, as a more ‘magical’, technically impenetrable and ineffable language, but directors and writers are complicit in this: as mentioned before, it seems like sometimes any old text, film or staging will be laminated with music in order to appear monumentally meaningful. Its also part of the nature of opera culture, and of the institutions that claim ownership of the discipline. Few people interested in live theatre and written drama would automatically include opera in ‘their remit’, especially if they’re not particularly musically literate, while pretty much all fans of classical music would certainly lay claim to ‘the operas of Mozart, Wagner, Britten, etc’ as part of ‘their remit’. This ideology is particularly flattering to musicians; it claims that the magic touch of music can make the most clichéd of dialogue and banal of stories suddenly mean everything, and all this can be communicated without the need for clever choreography or expert acting.

Because of the fact that ‘opera is music’, the personality of the composer looms particularly large in the final production (alongside the principal singers perhaps), meaning that the other collaborators – director, writer, designers – have to expunge their egos to some degree. Very rarely is a libretto presented as a key work for a writer, or used as an opportunity to showcase their aesthetic personality or preoccupations most clearly, aside from a few writers who specialise in writing libretti and hiding behind their looming musical counterparts. I must conclude that most writers who turn to writing for opera don’t really consider the operas that they contribute to as ‘their work’, in the way that composers always do. They might also not reserve their best work for the opera stage, because they fear it will be misinterpreted and undone by the music, something that they seem to fear much less in the non-musical theatre.

But if there is such a thing as ‘opera’, which requires staging and text (or just ‘theatre’ in a broader sense) in order to earn its designation as such, then it figures that opera ≠ music (so to speak), and moreover, that opera > music, since opera requires its non-musical aspects as well as music in order to exist. It pays to be aware of what is being effaced or repressed when we use ‘opera’ as a shorthand for ‘the music of the opera’, and the different objects that we’re referring to when we start talking about ‘a score of the opera’, ‘a recording of the opera’, ‘a staging of the opera’, ‘a revival of the opera’, etc.

iv. Emphasis on process over product

The ‘success’ of opera, as well as its value, is largely determined by the moments of combination of elements: the disciplinary nodal points at which the various artists’ understanding of and sensitivity to the requirements of the other disciplines is judged. For the librettist, this might mean writing well for voices, constructing a narrative that would ‘work’ on the operatic stage, and leaving space for musical development and characterisation. For the composer, this might mean word-setting, expressing the text clearly and empathetically, and moving the action along in particularly dramatic sections. For the director, this might mean doing justice to the story, text and music by allowing them to come across clearly and directly, not obscuring them with too many visual ideas or extraneous effects, and rendering the characters and their emotions – already written into the libretto by the composer – as believable/direct/real as possible. Behind all this is a keen awareness of ‘craft’, of a number of familiar challenges which need to be approached in the right way, creatively but also correctly, in order to produce a well-crafted opera. What the opera is actually about, whether it says anything new, surprising or challenging, is much less important.

This is the most contentious of these ideological features, I must admit, and its the one in which I show my particular politico-aesthetic allegiances most strongly. I think the difference between ‘process’ and ‘product’ might be represented as the difference between something called ‘craft’ and something called ‘art’. No hierarchies implied here, obviously both would be very valuable, and politically useful in their own ways. When I talk about ‘art’ on this blog, I’m normally talking about revolutionary/critical art. This is art which, in the words of Alain Badiou’s Manifesto of Affirmationism (which is a key text for this blog), ‘is made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist’. ['Empire' is elsewhere translated as 'the West' or 'Communication', but is used to mean something like 'the acknowledged hegemonic discourse of global capitalism'] For Badiou, this is the responsibility of art in the 21st century, and he sees this potential coming strictly from the work itself, not from the artists’ manifestation within the work, or the traces of their skill in its production. Earlier on in the Manifesto, he writes:

‘The subjects of an artistic truth are the works which compose it. [...] The only true subject is what appears: the work, after which [the manifestation of the authors] is suspended. The affirmative subject of the non-manifestation is the work, and it alone.’

I’m with Badiou on a lot of things; there is a particular concept which he calls ‘art’, or ‘Affirmationism’, and I think it is important to privilege this if we want art to regain its potential to revolutionise consciousness and critique the world. There is, of course, a political place for other conceptions of art as well, ones which might have more to do with notions of ‘craft’ and of ‘tradition’. This is particularly interesting when you begin to critique operas as commodities, which they arguably also are.

I’ve argued above that the very fact of opera’s multimedia character – its ‘total’ combination of different art forms into one unified work – is fetishised as the marker of all its value and ‘success’ (with the third-dimensional ‘x factor’ standing in for surplus value). But this is a slightly perverse use of the concept of the ‘fetish’ since, in a way, this particular instance actually suggests the opposite of the Marxist ‘commodity fetish’. This is the phenomenon in which a commodity veils its own history and relations of production (the origin of its components and its necessary labour by other workers) in order to appear as a thing-in-itself, with autonomous qualities including a relative exchange value. It might seem that a focus on a work’s relations of production – the collaborative process between artists, performers and technicians which produced it – would be a wholly positive thing, reminding us of the true nature of its value as the creative labour of its producers. And this is all true, just as it is one of the reasons why live theatre, live music and opera are so important. If these art works can be counted as commodities within capitalism (and I believe that they can), they must be seen as models of de-fetishised commodities, with their history and labour process shining out of them, even if they aren’t always models of fair trade.

They’re not just commodities though, and nobody anywhere would ever suggest that they should be judged by the same criteria as fair-trade coffee or hemp trousers. Opera should be more than a particularly, ethical hand-made commodity, or artisanal craftwork. I believe it should aspire to Alain Badiou’s notion of affirmationist art: it should say something as well, and that thing that it says should be new or challenging or critical or outrageous or beautiful, even if it is trapped to some degree (because of the capitalist regime under which we live) within the commodity form. What’s more, while live opera might still seem resistant in comparison to more fully commodified, fetishised art works such as recorded pop music and Hollywood films, the huge emphasis on the presence of the artists and their creative work tips opera towards a quite different manifestation of the ‘fetish’, in the form of Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’.

Benjamin’s ‘aura’ is a kind of pre-capitalist ‘cult value’, infused with such notions as ‘authenticity’, ‘creative genius’ and ‘mystery’, which has been progressively eroded by ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’, which in turn ‘emancipates art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’ and opens it up to function politically and democratically. Live opera retains its aura through its liveness, but also – within this ideology – through the importance placed on the creative collaboration between its producers, the relative ‘success’ of which is the meaning of every scene. For Benjamin, as an early 20th-century Marxist, the advancement of capitalism throughout all society (including the eradication of such pre-capitalist concepts as the ‘aura’) would create the forces of production necessary for a socialist revolution. This idea has obviously fallen into complete disfavour now, but his discussion of the ‘aura’ in connection to potentially dangerous – and (paradoxically) increasingly commodifiable – concepts such as creativity, genius, authenticity and mystery is still very important.

The emphasis on process over product then becomes an emphasis on the creative moment of synergy (which is a horrible, but horribly useful, word), which shifts the ‘value’ of the opera from the (revolutionary/critical) truth-content of its final ‘message’ as received by an audience, to an assessment of the coherence, concision and subtlety of this ‘message’ itself, as assembled by the creative team. It’s not what they say but how well (or how unanimously) they say it, and even if we hear total unanimity, it’s the unanimity that is remarkable (or creative, ingenious, authoritative, etc.), rather than what the words might actually be saying.

v. Success judged against historic model

Most of our ideas about whether a collaboration has been ‘successful’ or not come from looking back at the ‘great’ operas of the past, and the way that they synthesise music, narrative and text in a manner that is undeniably successful – the definition of successful, even – especially as rendered in the most iconic productions of recent decades.

There is no escaping the fact that old opera is the key reference point for new opera. If the 20th-century avant garde in any way challenged the idea that opera should present a coherent narrative in a relatively ‘naturalistic’ way with music supporting and enhancing the story and characterisation tastefully and sympathetically, this has been largely ignored. Instead, the famous works of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, along with their conventional languages, scales, registers and even subject matters/character tropes, are considered the templates of good opera. And it isn’t surprising, seeing how regularly these works are re-performed and restaged. Most ‘good operas’ – on stage, on recording, on DVD, in the cinema, for critics and for audiences – are old operas.

As is the nature of canons, though, and of the peculiarly postmodern ‘heritage’ tradition of the opera establishment, a huge range of works, covering a span of over three hundred years, have been significantly homogenised in our imagination, as ‘the operatic repertoire’ from which we can programme our seasons and festivals, pick and choose our favourites, and compare and contrast the most ‘successful’ characterisations and strategies of word-setting and synergy. But these works all emerged from very different historical periods and contexts, with their own ideologies of opera creation, many of which will have gone unstated or uncritiqued. At the same time, they represent a tiny and highly curated (by taste, myth and reputation) minority of the works that were produced throughout this time, which again creates a sense that there have always been universally valuable ‘rules’ for opera collaboration and composition, which the ‘best’ composers and writers have always abided by, in order to create timeless/universally successful works. I believe that these rules have been projected retroactively on the canon as it exists now, and as it is has been conventionally staged in the last century, ‘deduced’ from years of studying the ‘great’ composers and their librettists, and then reformulated into the ideology which I am currently describing. Most significantly, I see no particular reason why we should need to look to hundred-year-old operatic works to inform our current opera creation practice anyway. It seems rather counter-intuitive, when there’s so much contemporary theatre around to learn from. Even contemporary music is often tempered in its structure, its conceptual grounding and its radicalism, in order to ‘operafy’ it, to adapt it to the role of music in the successful operas of the past.

There is a place for anachronism in art, but it should be used self-consciously and critically. Opera doesn’t realise how anachronistic it is being, by judging itself against stage works that predate cinema. Again, this is a big issue, and I hope to return to it in a later post.

vi. Collusion of the critics

Opera critics conventionally separate all these ‘elements’ in their reviews, allotting a paragraph outlining narrative and staging decisions, a few lines on the quality of the libretto, a paragraph on the ‘music itself’, and then a paragraph on the quality of the performances (neatly divided into singers, conductor and orchestra) which sometimes reads as completely disconnected from any wider assessment of the opera’s meaning and impact.

This approach to reviewing new operas is pretty much ubiquitous. I guess it comes partly from a critical reticence to make any kind of bold interpretive statement (this is left to the musicologists), partly from a double-edged generosity in giving partial praise wherever it might be due, and partly from the usual obsession with writing ‘accessibly’ for non-expert readers, by keeping to a prescribed template and vocabulary. This kind of lightweight, non-committal ‘consumer criticism’, which homogenises all art into a star-rated exchange value, will always be problematic, but it pays to notice what kind of problems are being perpetuated. In this case, it is an ideology which sees opera as a cluster of detachable elements which can be assessed on their tessellation as well as scrutinised individually.

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The Stage Notes conference was addressed to opera creators, and the ‘ideology’ which I attempt to outline above is one which impacts particularly upon artists, in particular specialist artists who are facing the unnerving prospect of a deep creative collaboration in order to produce an opera. Whilst audiences, performers, critics and scholars might not be implicated in these doctrines in quite the same way, the danger of this ideology would be its forcing new operas to be conceived, planned and produced in a certain way, imposing considerable limitations on the what the work might say, how it might look, sound and function, before the collaborative process has even begun.

Many might not agree with some aspects of my critique, some would probably reject all of it. But at a time in which artists across all art forms seem to be reluctant to commit to big new ideas, when the success and value of art is being increasingly rationalised and economised, and when there is so much being destroyed in our society, and such a great imperative to change the way we think and the way we live, I think it is particularly important to critique our own value systems. We must make sure that we aren’t taking for granted any arbitrary or conventional limitations, injunctions or assumptions which might prevent us from exploring new ideas, new approaches and new truths.

Firstly…

‘The Big Question: Are opera and ballet elitist?’

Apparently not the big question but a big question, since this debate was part of an ongoing series; such a designation wouldn’t be surprising though, given the obsession that opera institutions, artists and critics seem to have with the ‘E’-word. At any rate, this was a minor abomination of an event, a craven show trial with obscenely overlong performance intermissions that amounted to blatant propaganda for the ROH’s outreach programmes. You can watch ‘highlights’ online here: WATCH HERE WATCH HERE

The panel was comprised of three artists who’d all worked at the ROH, and one author who had nothing to do with opera besides being quite articulate in her dislike of it. The author, Dreda Say Mitchell, was (I assume) also chosen because she works in a decidedly ‘populist’ genre – the crime thriller – and she comes from a black working-class background. Her voice and views were largely ignored throughout, not least by the terrible chairperson – Sarah Crompton – who mixed abject bias with a distracting nervousness. In between presentations from the ROH’s children’s choir and a ballet workshop, an advert for one of their current productions and a collage of awkward vox pops apparently collected from within a 100m radius of the ROH itself, the panel arrived quite quickly at the conclusion that opera and ballet are not elitist. Repeat: not elitist.

So there we go, problem solved, back to work everyone. Until next month, when we have to have another debate about whether opera is elitist, and come to the same conclusion, and (presumably) earn our Arts Council access credits for the year.

As ever, there was no attempt at all to define ‘elitism’, or explore the plurality of its implications in detail. This is a proven way to completely invalidate such debates, and makes for a very frustrating hour-and-a-half. All of the following possible definitions of elitism were brought into play at times, but they were constantly conflated and confused, with the ‘disproving’ of one effectively ‘disproving’ them all:

• enjoyed by a socio-economic ‘elite’ (‘high class’)
• made by a socio-economic ‘elite’
• made for a socio-economic ‘elite’
• involves/requires specialist knowledge which is safeguarded and withheld
• uses a specialist language which is withheld, or which is taxing to interpret without education
• cultivates a specialist language which is purposefully hard for most people to interpret
• purposefully/circumstantially cultivates an ‘exclusive’ atmosphere of specialist knowledge/ritual
• purposefully/circumstantially cultivates an ‘exclusive’ atmosphere of upper-class signifiers and decadence
• purposefully/circumstantially too expensive to be consumed by most people
• ascribes itself/has been ascribed particular cultural importance/relevance/quality over and above other art forms (‘high art’)
• requires special skills/training/qualities to create and perform
• requires refined taste and aesthetic judgement to appreciate, or appreciate properly

There was the normal procession of bugbears which were picked off, shrugged off or ‘disproved’ with the normal mixture of paternalism, Romanticism and cautious conservatism:

- Too expensive.

- £10 student standbys!

- High vs. low culture?

- Reverse snobbery!

- Needs education.

-Start early!

- Why opera?

- Emotion! Childlike wonder! Beauty!

- Contemporary music?

- Decline of attention spans. Reality TV!

- Change it? Make it more accessible?

- Worth protecting! Resist the lowest common denominator!

- It’s all just an ‘image’.

- Let’s have a debate and stream it on the internet.

In this way, every possible ‘problem’ with opera can apparently be answered by following the example of the Royal Opera House itself, thereby ‘proving’ that there’s absolutely no logical reason why the chastised masses shouldn’t be pouring into every show, or at the very least transferring the blame to the people themselves (‘it’s in their minds!’), or state education policy.

Opera is Elitist

The obvious problem of such conclusions, their brazen irrationality, is that they beg the question as to why the debate is necessary in the first place. If opera ‘isn’t elitist’, as we’ve so objectively, empirically concluded, then why is the question so totally omnipresent in discourse about the art form. It must all be some massive misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity in the popular consciousness. The only conclusion can be that all of society/culture has misapprehended the true nature of what opera ‘is’ (i.e. universal, not elitist), apart from a select few who actually go to the opera and understand the importance (and universality) of the art form.

Is this not the essence of what is called ‘elitism’? The delusion that they – the minority – are totally right, and that everyone else – the majority – are totally mistaken, that they have failed to understand, that opera is not elitist and therefore they must be completely wrong, and that such a conclusion can be established in an internal debate among ROH-affiliated artists?

The Dream of Cultural Communism

I have to say, I’m not onboard with the whole ‘elitism’ debate myself. I think the term is a calculated repression of real class politics, and it reifies culture in the most pernicious way. Nobody in opera talks about class, that would be disastrous. Equally, the discussions of culture and class in this country have a particular character at the moment, in line with much of our neoliberal-, ‘creative capitalism’-infused ideology (see Grayson Perry’s work on class, taste and consumption, and also that BBC/LSE class calculator that’s been doing the rounds). My take is that, when we talk about elitism and ‘Culture’ (the capitalised version, with all its implications of ‘being cultured’, ‘culture vulture’, ‘doing something cultural’ etc., as opposed to more anthropological senses of the word) in our globalised, networked, multinational era, we are touching on a popular ideology of ‘cultural communism’, as opposed to the accumulation of ‘cultural capital’, or ‘cultural capitalism’. Now that the possibility of equal distribution of wealth/capital has been taken off the (official) agenda, good liberals are working hard to displace such ideals into the increasingly codified (imaginary) marketplace of cultural value/exchange/capital.

One of the dreams of postmodernism was applying relative exchange values to all ‘Culture’, in order to open up the cultural marketplace to everyone, not just those privileged enough to have access to ‘high culture’ (via education and knowledge, not money of course, that’d be crass economic determinism). The political value of such a project can only be assessed in relation to a real investigation of what ‘cultural capital’ actually amounts to, relative to ‘material’ capital. To what extent does this ‘knowledge’ equate to power, and power to wealth or happiness or domination? Culture, in this country at least, has been wholly commodified; it is something that is consciously made and consumed, something other than life (leisure? work?) that we can assess and enter into and partake of as if we were all anthropologists of ourselves. It has traded in much of its traditional value as ‘art’ and functions ‘officially’ as cultural currency, but unlike ‘actual’ currency, this is a currency that we want to be distributed equitably.

When liberals talk about elitism, it is in the language of ‘social mobility’ and of class identity being determined by cultural tastes and activities rather than the other way around. Elitism is the ‘unfair’ stockpiling of cultural capital, or of a monopoly on value or meaning, in a symbolic realm in which (unlike the socio-economic realm) ‘unfairness’ really doesn’t seem to make sense. It makes no difference to us that ‘cultural capital’, as recognised, treated and used in that manner, cannot be distributed equally, because it would then lose all its function as capital – it would no longer be able to ‘produce’ surplus power or respect or authority or authenticity.

The equitable distribution of cultural capital – of knowledge, understanding and access to various art forms – has become one of the most bizarre yet tenacious projects of official liberal democracy in the new millennium. It obviously takes its cue from identity politics in the 70s and 80s, from the fight for representation and the deconstruction of value systems and canons. It takes some inspiration from historic reformist movements in art, towards accessibility and understanding, sometimes centred on class struggle (making art to educate/agitate the workers), sometimes centred on moralism or paternalism (making art to civilise the urban poor or colonials). But, post-poststructuralism, in a world in which (arguably) nobody has more cultural capital than Beyoncé Knowles – a (rich) black woman – and you’d find yourself with a bounty on your YouTube avatar if you were ever to suggest that HBO dramas/street art/video games/Harry Potter didn’t really qualify as ‘art’, the state-sponsored, vehemently-upheld crusade of ‘access’ to the arts has become a particularly strange project.

Elitism, Universality and Cultural Entrepreneurship

In a way then, I can’t blame the opera industry for being confused. They’re being told that the very validity of their art form depends on its ability to be exchanged on the free market of prescribed Culture. They’ve inherited this situation for the twin reasons that a) the art form costs a lot of money and expects a lot of public subsidy, and b) they were certainly emblematic of that ‘high culture’ paradigm that took such a beating by identity politics in the 70s and 80s (and, unlike other disciplines, they didn’t really adapt by opening up a rich parallel tradition of feminist or postcolonial or radical queer opera). So opera is particularly vulnerable to the shifting ideologies of state cultural policy, which is currently wrapped up in the aforementioned dream of the cultural free-market (which is, we must remember, an ‘anti-elitist’ mechanism), perversely taking its logic from the dream of ‘cultural communism’ which – through its fantasy of a (national) cultural commons (which may or may not relate to fascist ideas of Volksgemeinschaft) - will help naturalise the horrendous socio-economic inequalities ripping through society.

Compare this situation to something like rapping and UK rap music. Sure, rap music doesn’t have a central institution to target, and it’s not really taking state money. But moreover, it is accepted as a form of cultural expression particular to a certain racial (and, although decreasingly, socio-economic) group. No-one is calling for greater (or universal) outreach and access to rap music, that would be ridiculous and not a little offensive. It’s important as a cultural form that empowers a marginalised section of society, even as other (more material) sources of power are withheld from that group. And it certainly isn’t labelled as ‘elitist’.

In introducing this analogy, I’m not arguing that rapping and rap music should be subject to the same demands as opera. I want to suggest that it helps us understand better the real nature of opera’s ‘elitism’. As mentioned before, ‘elitism’ – as it pertains to culture – cannot really be understood as an empirically quantifiable phenomenon, in the manner of wealth inequality, but is more a social consensus, made manifest in public discourse. It is, moreover, a term used as a tool in order to express some idea about who should be engaging in a certain institution, or what that institution should be achieving. Rap music isn’t called ‘elitist’, even if it is a particular minority (?) who enjoy/understand it, and an even more particular minority who have ‘permission’ to take part in its creation. Opera, however, is called ‘elitist’ all the time, which suggests that more is expected from it. There is an expectation that it should be understood by everyone, that it should be open to everyone to be consumed on an equal footing, or accessed for career prospects or the particular release of self-expression.

[Obviously there are other considerations at work: the 'elite' minority who enjoy/make opera are historically more wealthy and socially powerful that the minority who enjoy/make rap music. Opera also has a much much smaller audience than rap music, but this has a lot to do with digital reproduction, with corporate funding, distribution and publicity, and private enterprise in general. More significantly, the commercial potential of rap music production, its creation of profit and its valuable narratives of entrepreneurship, social mobility and individualism, 'prove' its value within the neoliberal ideology in a way that opera cannot. If 'popular' art forms like rap music, and 'high' art forms like opera are to enter the cultural commons on an equal footing, they both need to 'expand' in different directions, with the commercial model of pop music proliferation fitting more easily into the neoliberal logic of the age. But these details are totally repressed within the logic of 'cultural communism', of universal access to all Culture, for which money is an archaic, embarrassing or irrelevant extraneity.]

The curious fact remains that, for all the force of the discourse of cultural relativism – the utopian equity between club nights and stand up comedy and ballet and conceptual art and flower shows in Time Out magazine – there is a sense that opera is still expected to communicate universally (i.e. ‘everyone has the potential to be moved by it’), in a way that rap music is not. And it is this assumption, of its innate potential for universal communication, and of its essential possession (as a whole genre, not on a basis of individual works or of individual performances) of rare and universally-desired experiences and expressions of beauty and truth, which makes it more elitist than rap music.

I think it’s then possible to conclude that:

1) if the Royal Opera House has indeed ‘proven’ that it isn’t institutionally elitist (i.e. it isn’t more actively exclusive than any other artistic institution), then the opera itself can’t be said to communicate universally (or, if it can still be said to communicate, what is being communicated (truth? beauty?) cannot be deemed to be universally worth receiving, or universally worth spending money and time in order to receive).

Or adversely:

2) if the opposite is true and opera is both able to communicate universally and has something to be communicated which is universally deemed worth receiving, then the Royal Opera House must be significantly institutionally elitist. Where else would this pernicious ‘elitist’ myth have come from?

Trickle-Down Culture

The above is all largely playful ‘devil’s advocacy’. As I said, the ‘E’-word is an ideologically-charged term used to obfuscate the nature of class relations, the contingency of ‘Culture’ itself (which is most definitely not some rational-technical field of professional production that can be wholly assessed, shaped, tweaked and then consumed), and the political responsibilities of art. Concepts such as cultural relativism, the rationale of state cultural policy and funding, and the culture industry (not to mention artistic value and meaning) are all deeply problematic.

For one thing, what I’ve called the dream of ‘cultural communism’, the radical logic of ‘equal aesthetic rights‘ which relates to notions of web-based communism, the networked multitude, horizontality and the Open Source movement, has no real relation to current UK trends in cultural access and outreach. As with other ideas of communism, the fundamental alienation involved in the conversion into exchange value, the universal presence of money, of the ‘monetisation’ of cultural discourse and the burgeoning reliance on private funding, necessarily dooms the project. But I maintain that this ideology, in collusion with the mystifying/moralising tendencies of cultural/artistic discourse, underpins the logic of UK cultural policy. In this way, we aim to be able to sell experience, jouissance, social relations, truth, beauty and even ‘humanity’ as those extra commodities which are so obviously needed to supplement the material commodities which we once thought would bring us satisfaction, in order to complete the perfectly rationalised loop of a free-market economy of human happiness.

But the success of this project relies on a particular (elite?) group of culture-makers, who remain in control of the distribution of meaning. Cultural consumers need to know that what they are buying is beauty, truth, humanity etc., otherwise they might still find themselves unfulfilled. This would not be possible in the dream of ‘cultural communism’; people would be inventing and reinventing values and meanings left, right and centre, without any hierarchy of authority. Instead, it requires a good old-fashioned ‘trickle-down economics’ of Culture, with a universally-validated group of meaning-makers (cultural capitalists) designating this or that as meaningful, fulfilling, beautiful etc, and then filtering it down to everyone else with meaning/value intact. And this begins with the very statement that ‘Culture’ per se is somehow ‘good’ or ‘improving’.

This is an old project for sure – the essence of a paternalist ‘high culture’ paradigm – and is complicated both by the real action of private enterprise on cultural meaning (in mass culture) and by more genuinely ‘communistic’ models of cultural exchange (i.e. YouTube – if you can ignore its wholesale exploitation by Google). I can’t necessarily stake out my position on any particular ‘side’, because I have my own ideas about what kind of ‘art’ needs to be made in order to ameliorate positive change in the world, and it is one which certainly assumes some temporary authority over a medium and affirms its imminent truth content. This ‘avant-garde’ approach certainly qualifies for its own charges of elitism, yet it is the more powerful and prevalent ‘elitism’ of trickle-down Culture within an ideological framework of ‘cultural communism’ that is more serious and dangerous. This is because it manages to achieve the political goal of systematic censorship and effective preclusion of new radical art.

Prescribed Universality and Censorship

The ideology that all art must have a single universal message that is equally legible to everyone at the same register, no matter of differing backgrounds, education and politics – the necessary proviso of a universally-accessible Culture – is a calculated political move towards censoring politically effective, radical art. It is tantamount to agreeing on what new art can mean before it is made, and then making sure that only a) the requisite new art is made, or b) only the pre-arranged meaning is sensible. It has effectively achieved the proscription of the creation of all new critical art completely, hence the dire situation that we currently find ourselves in, where any resistance to the Tory class war and the accelerating course of alienation is effectively rationalised away.

The sad fact about rap music (and all commercially-distributed pop music), which reaches its widest audience through the processes of private enterprise and the market, is that any radicalism is automatically censored away through this process, through prolonged contact with branding, marketing and spectacle. The danger of publically-funded art is that it still has the potential to be radical on a big budget, so this quasi-market system of commodified culture, under the faux-liberal ideology of ‘cultural communism’ and total access, has become an effective way to recreate the innate censorship of the market without the controversy of removing state arts funding.

The Elitism of Not Taking It Seriously

While opera has, in theory, the capacity to resist such trends, the way it is set up (both institutionally and ideologically) leaves it particularly vulnerable to them. The catastrophe, for me, is that this po-faced working over of the totally meaningless concept of ‘elitism’ is used in place of a real discussion of the imperatives of opera as art form, and its relation to class, to truth, to spectacle, to the culture industry, to society etc. The mainstream media have hegemony over the discourse of art these days. The opera house is, no doubt, forbidden to let anyone onto their live streamed debates with opinions about Adorno or Badiou – it would be deemed ‘inaccessible’ (maybe even ‘elitist’), which just goes to show how perfectly the discourse reproduces itself.

I was galled by Mark-Anthony Turnage’s tenacity in suggesting that this discourse around opera, and the charge of ‘elitism’, was a symptom of dangerous ‘anti-intellectualism’ in Britain. This is true, of course, but the event itself was a perfect manifestation of this – one of the most patronising, anti-intellectual ‘debates’ that I’ve ever witnessed. Katie Mitchell’s aggravating recourse to her childhood experiences, and the endless parading of the children’s choir, patronisingly equated the hoped-for audience for this video (opera skeptics and newcomers) with children (bright colours, magical effects – if they love it, then you can too – opera is so magical!!). There was no real attempt to talk about opera as art; it was instead represented as spectacle, or entertainment, or ‘experience’. (This was particularly saddening in Mitchell’s case, because her recent production of Written in Skin so obviously displayed a much more sophisticated conception of the possibilities and aims of the art form).

This was the country’s most important, heavily-subsidised and respected opera institution, and one of its most respected newspapers, hosting a debate which they actually say (on the website) will bring ‘serious debate to the heart of the Covent Garden’. SERIOUS debate. And they don’t bother to get one academic on the panel (what else are academics for??), and the only person they engage to argue ‘for’ the motion is someone who knows next to nothing about the genre/institution because they hate it so much. This is what the ROH (and the Telegraph) thinks is ‘serious’. This is what the ROH thinks a ‘serious’ discussion of opera looks like. It all brings me back to my previous assertions that opera makers do not take opera ‘seriously’.

The Elitism of Panel Discussions

For all the impotence of the discussion, they did manage to answer the ‘big question’ as far as I’m concerned – although it wasn’t the answer that they themselves arrived at. If there can be such a charge as elitism, and if opera can be implicated in such a charge, it must surely be as an art form whose definition and meaning is safeguarded by a very small, insular number of centralised institutions – opera houses, conservatoires and arts desks – who can then hold debates in order to tell the rest of society why they’re wrong. Opera’s elitism comes from those who think they can designate what ‘opera’ looks and sounds like, how long it should be, where it should happen, how much it should cost, and who should be able to enjoy/understand it (even if the answer to the latter is ‘everyone’). Most of all though, opera’s elitism comes from those who think they can designate what opera means, what it should mean, how it should function, what it can and can’t do or try to do, and what value new works can/should have in relation to the old canons.

Herein we see the operation of cultural capitalism – the accruement of power over meaning which the whole panel (except the one dissenter) had accumulated – which is supposedly meant to be deconstructed through universal access (so that anyone is able to make ‘authentic’ opera). But if we all really felt full ‘ownership’ of opera as an art form, in a manner much more like ‘our’ relationship to independent pop/dance music or YouTube, opera would lose a lot of its residual ‘high culture’ mythology, as well as its claims on special forms of truth and beauty. ‘Accessing’ opera would then no longer be about sharing in an ideal ‘emotional’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘human’ experience, of the kind that all opera is supposed to aim for (although in practicality, a lot of opera has no intention of producing), it would merely be an exploration of the possibilities of sung theatre. This would be the ‘lowest common denominator’ which Turnage feared.

For all the lip service paid, I don’t really believe that these institutions, artists and critics have any interest in relinquishing their power over the institution’s hegemonic discourse. Hence the continual replaying of the old repertoire in the same way, within the same discursive context, hence the rehearsing of aristocratic signifiers which somehow entrench a sense of inherited knowledge/power, hence the conservatism, the self-curating and the canonising, hence the anti-intellectualism (resisting the lessons of progressive philosophy and political thought beyond the ideologies of the last few Romantic philosophers), hence the ghettoising of new music and the reticence to learn anything from contemporary theatre or popular music. Hence, in a phrase, the endurance of the ‘trickle-down’ mentality.

This attitude is made abundantly clear in the debate, when Crompton tries to reverse the meaning of ‘elitism’ to be ‘a good thing’ (Olympic sportspeople are elite because they’re the best of the best, and that’s a good thing, so why should we be ashamed, etc etc). The panel begin to talk, bare-facedly, about the ‘elite’ singers, musicians, designers and directors at the ROH, and the fact that they’re making the best opera in the world, and that they’re at the top of their ‘game’, and that should be something to be celebrated. Besides the fact that a lot of the opera I’ve seen at the ROH has been pointless boring dross – if at the top of any game then a game that has absolutely no reason to exist – this is the crux of elitism, the total arrogance of broadcasting a ‘serious’ debate in the name of access and outreach which does nothing but state that if such a thing as opera does exist then the Royal Opera House must naturally be its apotheosis.

The real tragedy for the ROH is that their project is doomed to failure too. Just like trickle-down economics, the trickle-down culture model – of keeping meaning/value centralised and pure and codified - cannot be reconciled with any genuine idea of fairness and equality (i.e. the dream that all children will have equal access to take part in and create opera). Very quickly, meanings will be adapted, hybridised and adjusted – which is the very nature of a decentralised notion of meaning-creation – and then will come the conservative complaints about ‘quality’, ‘dumbing down’ and ‘preservation of the art form’ which all popular co-options of traditional genres entail. The ROH can’t have its access-cake and eat it. They either open the genre up for everyone to understand, interpret, hijack and mutate as they see fit, or they retain ownership of the art form which is their bequest from history, along with its accompanying discourse of emotion, beauty, tradition and value. But they cannot then complain when people throw accusations of ‘elitism’ at them.

So…

So opera is ‘elitist’, perhaps, but I think ‘elitist’ is too weak. If we were to take opera, and its future, as seriously as it seems to want to be taken, then it wouldn’t be too strong to say that exercises like the ROH’s debate are violent attempts to naturalise culture in a way which places certain people in positions of great power, helps to validate their opinions, agendas and interests while silencing the opinions of others, censoring radicalism, silencing dissent, and bolstering a social system in which a vast majority is exploited by a tiny minority, to the overwhelming detriment of everyone involved. Something that the term ‘elitism’ doesn’t really capture.

This is a post about the possibility of performing and presenting politically-committed music, or trying to put across any set ‘meaning’ or fulfil a ‘purpose’ through music, which is sometimes cast into doubt even while similar assertions about political film, literature or theatre would surely be deemed ridiculous. However, it means talking about the nature of ‘meaning’ in music per se, which is a tricky topic but not one that I think we should be frightened of. For one thing, a lot of power is concentrated within certain institutions who are very quick to silence any discussion of ‘meaning’ in music, reckoned to be an impossible question to address, beyond the fact that it’s ‘emotional’ and probably sometimes also ‘spiritual’ (both mystifying, ‘silencing’ terms par excellence). This allows such institutions to effectively dictate the delimitations of musical discourse, and to ascribe what we should or shouldn’t expect from a musical performance.

For me, it’s much more rewarding to assume that music can be meaningful, that it is always – in fact – meaningful, and that it has the potential to say very specific and powerful things, in a way that no other art form can. This comes with the double-edged thesis that a) this is a much more respectful and honest interpretation of the particular and enduring power of music, and b) nevertheless, it can’t be said of music ‘on its own’, or ‘music itself’ – as an autonomous object – which is a purely theoretical concept anyway, and cannot exist if we define music as something which comes into existence by being heard by humans.

Meant to Mean?

In my previous post, I argued that Brecht and Weill, in this piece, have managed to put together an unusually direct, clear and cogent piece of committed music-theatre, with every ‘composed’ element coming together in support of a powerful, malleable exploration of the ‘intersectionality’ between class and gender oppression. If all of this is actually contained within the work, and is there to be deployed or reactivated, it ceratinly isn’t concentrated in ‘the score’, or ‘the music itself’. As with most such works, the ‘political’ potential is instead located in the interaction between music and text, text and performance, performance and structure, structure and music.

I see this as the dynamic relationship between media which ‘represent’ and ‘refer’ with relative precision (like text and bodily gesture), and more ‘abstract’ rhetorical, discursive or framing media (like music, spatial relations and architecture). In this way, sound is received and decoded in the listener’s head in conjunction with all the various visual and sensual elements, through an interpretive framework structured by all of the listener’s accumulated knowledge, understanding and prejudice, giving ultimate meaning to subconscious associations and libidinal drives, etc etc. It’s a complicated process, I know, but I think this is something approaching how music is ‘really’ received (at least to the extent that this can ever be imagined).

So, in the final ‘listening’ – the form in which the work is most tangibly ‘received’ – is the product of a combination of decisions (conscious, intuitive and contingent) by a range of artists, from the composer and librettist to conductor, musicians, lighting designer, architect/acoustician, clothes designers, stage managers, programme writers etc etc, not to mention the overwhelming creative input of the listeners themselves. Only certain aspects of this final ‘listening’ – the piece’s ultimate impact (or ‘meaning’) – are controllable. But if the piece is divined, by anyone at any stage with any considerable power over the performance, to have a clear meaning, or commitment or purpose or specific truth, there are a lot of different factors which can be bent towards the effective delivery of that meaning.

My gambit is that all pieces which are programmed in such venues are ‘meant to mean’ something. Most of the time, they are meant to mean what the composer ‘intended’ them to mean. Sometimes they are just ‘meant to mean’ what the hegemonic discourse of classical music would like them to mean – often something to do with a ‘universal language’, and ‘emotions’, and ‘higher truth’, and ‘spirituality’ etc. Often those two considerations seem, conveniently, to coalesce. Their potential meaningfulness is the prerequisite to their performance, it allows the performers and conductor to apply some sort of coherent reading of the work, it allows programme notes to be written, and audiences to spend their money and their time on it in good faith. Moreover, it allows us to actually conceptualise the piece as ‘art’ in the first place, and as a unique ‘work’ created by an artist, which has a genre and a style. So, in essence, those institutions who present music decide upon its meaning early on, even if this decision is largely in recourse to existing institutions, assumptions and contexts (i.e. if it’s a classical piece then it’s right and normal to perform it in a concert hall with orchestral players arranged in a certain way, dressed in a certain way, acting in a certain way, and that’s a safe guess as to a complimentary presentation for that piece’s meaning).

The Impossibility of Unstaged Performance

But what this means is that all performed music is ‘staged’, often by default. Not just because it’s on a stage. Wherever it is, if it’s being performed, it’s always ‘staged’, and the ‘normal’/'natural’/'neutral’ staging of orchestral music homogenises its meaning, especially when combined with the expectations of the audience and the desire for the audience to feel complicit with the producers as shared members of a unique ‘culture’.

Usually this doesn’t seem like an issue, because it seems like 1) the composers’ intentions for the piece, and 2) the hegemonic interpretations of those who set the frame of meanings for this kind of music (largely those with the cultural capital – artists, producers, presenters and critics) are that pieces shouldn’t have set ‘meanings’, or purposes or commitments, and that therefore they don’t and then the best thing to do is just to not think about it too much, not change anything at least, and let this performance of ‘negation’ (i.e. ‘we’ve done nothing special in our choices of how to stage this work’) serve the purpose of meaning that this piece doesn’t have a meaning.

This is often tempered, largely because it’s frustrating for audiences but also because it usually constitutes only one part of a composer’s ambivalent relationship with ‘meaning’. As soon as a symphony inherits a name, for example, it becomes super-charged with meaning. Historical performances and biographical details all become hugely meaningful, all the more so because of the enforced vacuum of ‘meaning’ in all the most famous works of ‘absolute’ music.

Problematic or not, none of this is news. What the listener eventually ‘receives’ can never be anything like what the composer’s ‘intentions’ are, as far as meaning is concerned, but if there is to be meaning, or purpose or interpretation or effect involved, it is the responsibility of all those different artists and producers and presenters to approach it together.

Semi-Staging is a Myth and a Lie

Which brings us back to The Seven Deadly Sins, finally. This was a rare performance of a highly committed, political work. In the event, it didn’t have much of an impact at all. It didn’t come across as an anti-capitalist artwork, or a feminist artwork. The reasons for this, some of which Mr Boo suggested to me, were primarily the fact that much of the words were unintelligible, because Shara’s mic was too low and there were no surtitles or printed words, and that the ‘semi-staging’ didn’t in anyway clarify the narrative. (Although to be fair, Mr Boo was also annoyed that they’d decided to perform the piece in English, not German, ‘without warning him’, so I feel some contradictions were at work there regarding intelligibility.)

To be fair, I don’t think it was even meant as a ‘semi-staging’, in the way that the term is supposed to be used (as, for example, in the performance of The Threepenny Opera the night before). It looked more like Shara Worden, quite naturally, had felt the need to put a little more theatricality into the role (which, after all, was initially designed to be half a dance role), and brought a bag of props and costume onstage for the occasion, rather than just stand at the front like it were an oratorio. But it achieved nothing, other than to accentuate the total lack of consideration for any clarification of the events, the structure, the narrative, or even the words. For example, in the ‘Anger’ scene, the long instrumental section in which the ‘injustice’, over which Anna 2 becomes righteously incensed, is supposed to occur, remained wholly ‘unstaged’. Shara just stood patiently at the front, waiting for her next cue. Presumably we were meant to refer to our programme notes to make sense of her following remarks, completely nonsensical otherwise, although they were almost inaudible anyway. As a semi-staging, it was certainly lacking, but the term is stupid anyway. It suggests that the only ‘right’ way to stage the piece is with a big stage full of set and expensive lighting and costumes, and that any less intensive treatment effectively gives you the licence to not give a damn about stagecraft/dramaturgy/whatever you want to call it.

‘Semi-staged’ is a Nothing, it’s a Negative; it’s basically just acknowledging that to put on a theatrical work staged as a classical concert – i.e. ‘unstaged’ – is frustrating and counterintuitive, so to appease the audience someone’s going to come in and add a few ‘theatrical’ embellishments, anything from a hat and a wig to full gestural characterisation but without a set, which all basically comes under the umbrella of ‘you should be happy that we bothered to do anything at all’. It suggests that the audience should not expect everything to be clear, to be thought-out or considered, but that we must just tolerate it. It’s an admission of half-arsedness. It’s a glancing gesture towards taking the work seriously as a dramatic work. If you think that the piece is ‘dramatic’ enough in its staging-as-a-classical-concert staging, that it means enough (or it means what you want it to mean, or what the composer intended) then that is a staging decision. It also kind of makes you wonder why bother putting it on with expensive lights and costume in the first place.

The whole ‘semi-staging’ concept, I believe, also partly comes from licensing laws, as a means of getting around the cost of ‘grand rights’ of stage works – i.e. you don’t have to pay for the visual aspect, the narrative ‘meaning’, any kind of cross-arts aesthetic richness, if you promise to give a substandard interpretation, which leaves bits out and consciously commits to not fully representing the artwork to its potential, or creating an interpretation that admits that it is ‘staged’. If it costs so much to ‘stage’ a work to fill out its ‘intended’ aesthetic dimensions, and presumably a little less to ‘semi-stage’ it, i.e. to purposefully paint an outline of what we ‘should’ get from a whole-hearted production of the work, then think about how little producers must actually care about the theatrical impact and effectiveness of ‘concert performances’ of operas or stage works. It figures that they would purposefully make them as untheatrical as possible, in order to avoid the charge of a ‘staging’ and thereby have to cough up money. This is just one instance of the utter irrational absurdity of intellectual property and copyright legislation, which is also just one instance of the utter irrational absurdity of making ‘art’ in a capitalist society, which all amounts to but one of the many instances in which the ‘logic’ of capitalism reveals its disgusting inner inconsistencies and irrationalities.

But this whole set-up also demonstrates how absolutely central the music is to our idea of the staged musical work – that somehow we can still call it by its name, we can still advertise it, identify it, hold it up as meaningful, when it’s completely stripped of its other disciplinary dimensions. The huge predominance of the musical element of music-theatre is clear when you consider the absurdity of putting out audio recordings of stage plays. The difference between writing theatre for stage and writing theatre for radio is very significant – when a playwright writes for radio, they will envisage the drama as being particularly suited to this audio-only dimension. We have nothing like the same distinction in opera. We like to talk about the inherent drama of operatic music, of the ‘theatre’ of text/voice (even in an unintelligible language or setting) interacting with structure sound, as heard on CD or on the radio. This ready, eager faith in the intrinsic ‘drama’ of music complicates our understanding of music theatre, of the role and requirement of the ‘theatre’ aspects beyond providing an excuse to perform the music and  the provision of the most rudimentary, clarificatory signifiers.

<<<<<<But is it Art?>>>>>>

A music-theatre collaboration by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, with no staging and inaudible words, is not a music-theatre collaboration by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. There is not Brecht present. But it isn’t even just a piece of music by Kurt Weill, because The Seven Deadly Sins is not that thing that we hear going on underneath the words and behind the visuals. It can’t be boiled down in that way, and retain its identity. It is dishonest to advertise it in that way, especially in a festival which is supposed to be placing these pieces in their contexts. The one of the most potent ideological trends in classical music is that the music mainly means on its own, and that as an art form we are all ‘really’ concerned with ‘just sounds’, and that the combination of sounds with other media – words, bodies, visuals, stories – is interesting but slightly besides the point.

What I would posit is that all musical meaning happens in the intersection between music and its context (because music is not meaningful on its own, or its meaning is learned via this process of contextualisation). Not only that, but meaning – or whatever we want to call it - is what we are interested in, not total abstraction which is a chimera anyway, and that the best music is made when artists consciously (or unconsciously) suggest meanings through the ‘artful’ combination/juxtaposition/contextualisation of sounds and other media. That is where the art is. There’s still meaning in concert performances of operas, bubbling up between surtitles and ‘emotive’ vocal performances and the faces of the singers and programme notes and Wikipedia synopses and facts about composers’ biographies and historical periods. But the artistic potential of such performances is limited.

I don’t mean to put ‘the composer’s intentions’ on a pedestal either, although – if such ‘intentions’ were to exist – then they’d certainly be violated by any concert- or semi-staged performance, no matter how nuanced an approach you take to the tempo markings or how much money you spend on hiring ‘authentic’ percussion instruments. But composers’ intentions would be too narrow here anyway. What I like to think about instead is taking the piece seriously. Which I don’t think a lot of classical institutions do. I think we can be very patronising to artists of the past, even while we feign reverence. We either try to fit their work into what is our ideological conception of how all ‘great’ classical music must be ‘best’ performed (i.e. if it doesn’t make its greatest effect in this context then it can’t be ‘great’, or possibly that it can’t be ‘classical music’), or we somehow think that we’re ‘recreating’ the piece by taking its markings and historical performance circumstances way too literally, and making it seem archaic or banal or irrelevant or ridiculous. What we should be doing when we perform music of the past, as far as I’m concerned, is trying to understand the specific intentions of the piece within its socio-cultural milieu, and then trying to find its equivalent potency in our own milieu. It’s a question of understanding the piece’s potential as art, not just as entertainment or history lesson which, as far as I’m concerned, most classical music has become. There is a strong sense that, because it ‘is’ classical music – aka art music – that it ‘is’ automatically art, but I think this is just a question of definitions – deciding after the fact what art is, so that a particular lazy field of banal production can be perpetuated, in order to maintain a certain cultural status quo, make money for a few people, and make a few people feel happy in the ‘knowledge’ that they know what’s going on, and that they’re in control of a whole ‘cultural tradition’, with all the kudos (and power) that this involves. If that’s what ‘art’ is then the category is too broad and should be narrowed if we want ‘what-we-call-art’ to retain its world-changing aspirations.

…but that’s another, bigger question……….

Brecht and Weill/Weill and Brecht

To return to the example: it’s hard, but possible, to perform (some) Brecht ‘convincingly’ without making a strong political statement, or engaging with contemporary socio-political events. It’s a lot easier to perform Weill ‘convincingly’ without explicit politics, but he was a composer, who wrote music, and it’s the standard attitude now to assume that composers really only want to write music, that music is their ‘real’ art (and by music we mean autonomous and meaningless), and that they would be happy if posterity were to dictate that, in the end, their music doesn’t need politics, that it ‘stands on its own’. Because the music is the thing.

This was clearly the ideology behind this concert, thereby delineating the ‘meaning’ which had been constructed and was being delivered. Forget all the ‘Rest is Noise’ stuff and the ‘Berlin in the ’20s/’30s’ stuff – none of that was present. What we were given instead was not only Weill without Brecht, but Weill without Weill. And not only Weill without Weill, but Weill-rescued-from-himself and his delusions of ‘committed’ music, or ‘music for use’. It’s not only a question of saving music from commitment to ‘invalidated’ socialist politics, by some openly reactionary cultural establishment. It’s a case of saving him from commitment itself, in the manner of all those old arguments against programmes and ‘representation’, which are really just power struggles over the right to a hegemony, or monopoly, of meaning.

This trend is standard in all canonic appropriations of socialist artists, most classically in contemporary stagings of Brecht, which make very little effort to rethink a 21-century Brecht’s possible/probable political stance, or to ‘commit’ his works anew to a contemporary praxis, in the way that he obviously would have wanted. Performing Brecht or early Weill as supportive of bourgeois ideology – and not even some perverse ‘emancipatory’ bourgeois ideology (free markets + social networking or whatever) but just a wishy-washy liberal-humanist chastisement of people from the past, and maybe the odd foreign dictator – should be viewed as a conscious, reactionary attempt to co-opt and delegitimise leftist art. And the thing is, I don’t think I’d mind as much if there was some recognition that this was what was being done – that it was on purpose. But the fact is that they continue to do this while making out, and possibly believing, that their performance practice is in keeping with the ‘proper’, ‘neutral’, ‘standard’ practice of observing the ‘composers’ intentions’, being ‘faithful to the score’ and treating the music seriously and respectfully. In this case, not only are both Brecht’s and Weill’s ‘intentions’ clearly being quite extremely violated, a fact about which one may or may not care, but it is also very obviously not taking these pieces seriously at all – disregarding their intended effect, their nuanced cross-disciplinary dialectic, the particular potency of their style – by deciding that they can ‘communicate’ just as authentically by being totally dismembered and deactivated.

The BBC Concert Orchestra’s performance of The Seven Deadly Sins was part of the Rest is Noise festival’s ‘Berlin in the 20s/30s Weekend’, programmed alongside Hindemith’s Symphony Mathis der Maler and Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film-Scene. The ensemble was conducted by André de Ridder, with Shara Worden (aka My Brightest Diamond) singing the role of Anna, and members of Synergy Vocals singing the ‘Family’ quartet.

It is a piece that I feel quite strongly about, that I’ve directed in a ‘staged’ production, and that I consider an exemplary model for ‘politically-engaged’ operatic/classical music. As much as I like Shara Worden, it has to be said that the performance itself in no way justified this opinion. I might have tried harder to enjoy it, had I not been sat in front of a man who was clearly indignant throughout the performance, and booed loudly afterwards. Booing in concerts and operas is a fascinating phenomenon that I want to discuss in another post; on this occasion I managed to talk to the man briefly after the concert and find out a little about what had offended him so deeply about the performance (he was far more positive towards the Schoenberg and Hindemith). A lot of what he said I disagreed with entirely (as discussed below), but some of his complaints sort of made me think about why it hadn’t really worked for me either. I’ve kept my negative reflections on the performance for the next post – entitled On Semi-Stagings – because I want to talk more about positive things, about why I love the piece so much and why I think it’s important – what I consider to be the work’s potential, as someone who’s directed it before and would love to direct it again.

‘The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petty Bourgeoisie’

This is the full title of Brecht’s libretto, which was his last text written for Weill (in 1933), and in some ways the simplest. Their larger dramatic works, The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (from which the Mahagonny Songspiel is also taken), are rich, multi-registered examples of epic theatre, which lend themselves to all sorts of contemporary readings and ingenuitive re-stagings, through the comparative looseness of their overall allegorical structure as well as the vividness of certain details (especially the song lyrics themselves, which often retain their political power when detached from the drama). Smaller-scale works like Lindbergh’s Flight and He Said Yes are more concentrated but arguably more obscure allegories. All of these examples, like so much of Brecht, beg to be quite consciously ‘re-activated’ within a contemporary political narrative, through staging decisions or performance context. They make nuanced socio-political points with reference to distanced parables, which is what still makes them so useful and relevant. But, paradoxically, this ‘universalising’ distance also risks their de-politicisation if performed ‘straight’ (i.e. detached from Brecht’s own theory and stagecraft, or at least the intentions behind it). This tendency is made all the more risky with the addition of the mystifying veil of (historical) music – what Brecht called its ‘narcotic effect’ – which seems to ‘make sense’ even while it flows ‘apolitically’ and ‘autonomously’ through its self-contained patterns and structures of convention, frustration and desire.

The Seven Deadly Sins is different, I believe. It’s more resistant to this process of de-radicalisation which is so vital in a work’s canonisation. It’s a formalist satire in seven movements with prologue and epilogue, each movement totally committed to a beautifully unified détournement of bourgeois morality. As a whole, it retains the brilliant rhetorical clarity and sting of his poems over the eclecticism of his librettos. It is not classified as an opera, but as a ‘sung ballet’, with the protagonist – Anna – split into two ‘persons’: a singer and a silent dancer. The basic synopsis is that Anna (a young woman from Louisiana) is sent out to seek her fortune, in order to send money home to her family so that they can build a new house. America, as in Mahagonny, is used as a quasi-fantastical setting for its embodiment of bourgeois ideology at its most Utopian (individualism, opportunity, the American dream, etc.).

This synopsis is fitted into an ‘epic’ framework in which each of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ are addressed in turn, as Anna navigates each new city, finds work, success and money. It is the dancer, ‘Anna 2′, who is the ‘real’ Anna-as-agent/subject/individual. Her experiences, reactions and decisions are narrated, commented on and judged by the singer – ‘Anna 1′ – and her Family, sung by a male quartet. In each new city, Anna 2 – as she tries to find work and make money – is met with an ethical dilemma. In each case, she pursues what she believes to be the ‘right’ course of action – which we might recognise in terms of justice and fairness – even though in each case it involves her going against the established system, and thereby not profiting financially. In each case, her solution is then roundly condemned by Anna 1 and the family as ‘wrong’ using the ‘moral’ terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, and her actions are ‘corrected’ by Anna 1, who acts as a sort of conscience. Of course, we as an audience recognise in each case the basic irony that, in each case, Anna’s ‘sin’ is clearly the ‘right’ course of action, and the ‘moral’ terminology used by her family and her alter-ego is deployed exploitatively.

In this way, the piece simply and effectively suggests how bourgeois morality can co-opt elements of a pre-capitalist ideology (the ‘capital vices’ codified by Pope Gregory I and then Dante Alighieri) in order to give it the appearance of historic validity. It also makes a point about the nature of all ideology; the signifiers (‘Lust’, ‘Envy’) are very familiar, we can easily list them, but the practical meaning of these under new material conditions are shown to be highly unstable, and their ‘definitions’ can be set by whichever group has the greatest mastery over ‘official’ language and its allocation of meaning (what Pierre Bourdieu might call ‘linguistic capital’). The basic elements of satire are in play, the ironic disjuncture between the commentary and our understanding of the real nature of the events and experiences, along with humorous/grotesque exaggerations. In this case, the disjuncture between the ‘authoritative’ narrative voice, with its casual deployment of clichés and moralistic jargon, and the unspoken suffering embodied by the dancer through movement, uses the two disciplines (text-with-music vs. physical gesture) as symbolic stand-ins for two mutually-dissonant ‘levels’ of consciousness: official-ideological and affective-biopolitical. This is the sort of approach that multi-disciplinary art is made for.

The music takes a vital role as well, of course. It functions on a number of levels:::

• The music, associated as it is with Anna 1′s and the family’s voices, is used to express the dominating power of the singers’ ‘moralist’ framing. As a ‘material’ which permeates the whole of the work, and structures its interpretation, it is the perfect analogue for a (Lukácsian) Marxist conception of ideology, yet its transparency – the fact that you can sense ‘through’ it – makes it a particularly effective tool to express a critique of this ideology, or even to construct a multi-sensory ‘dialectic’.
• Rather than expressing Anna 2′s suffering, frustration or anger in the standard empathetic/cathartic way, the music undermines it with levity (marches, waltzes, foxtrots), allowing us to perceive Anna’s situation without enjoying it on a sensual level (classic Verfremdungseffekt).
• As a through-composed, stylistically-cogent score, with recurring motifs and a ‘framing’ prologue/epilogue theme, the music helps structure this unashamedly formalist work, taking its episodic nature from the imposition of the seven distinct vices, whose numerological weight remains a key part of their enduring power in our cultural imagination.
• In its smoothness, its popular genre references and melodicism, it suggests the perceived ‘totality’ of an ideological perspective, as theorised by Marxist thinkers at the time. This is tempered by Weill idiosyncratic ‘wrong-note’ harmonies and subversion of genre clichés which, while avoiding the all-out disruptiveness of expressionism, suggests that the ideological ‘narrativisation’ to which the singing characters subscribe isn’t completely stable, that it contains contradictions, irrationalities and potential loose threads from which it might be unravelled.
• As with all Weill’s musical treatments of Brecht texts, it can’t be completely reduced to the ‘set-a-really-dark-text-to-a-really-banal-populist-melody-for-satire’s-sake’ school of political music. There are dark and dramatic moments in the score, for sure, but these correspond to Anna 1′s narrative framing, which is far from utterly insensitive to her sister’s suffering. Much of the effect of the piece comes from the fact that there is empathy expressed, there is the pretence of understanding behind the cynical pragmatism of Anna 1′s advice. For all the work’s bald formalism, this is no shallow caricature of capitalist ‘realism’ – which would certainly miss its target – but a far more sensitive investigation of the power relations at work in love and kinship as well as in hate and coercion. In this way, we are offered – through the music – the possibility for real empathy with Anna 2, through brief identification with her struggles. But while Anna 1′s moralistic advice, and the accompanying music, progresses and resolves itself into brighter conclusions, Anna 2 remains marooned in her hopeless situation. I find this kind of musical feint an important reminder of the deceptive potential of music in precluding our clear judgement (again, what Brecht calls its ‘narcotic effects’).

21st-Century Weill

Beyond all of these considerations, there is also the more well-known aspect of the ‘mass appeal’ of Weill’s music, which borrows from jazz, cabaret and popular dance idioms. This is one instance in which I’m happy to use the word ‘accessibility’, because I believe it is clear that there is something which needs to be ‘accessed’ in this piece. This aspect was brought home to me at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, after I talked to the booing man, who was no fan of the vocalist Shara Worden. He expressed annoyance that she’d been invited back onstage to play one of her own songs, or – as he put it – ‘try to sell her record’. Now, I think Shara is a very interesting vocalist, and has becoming a singular presence in the intersection between pop-inspired classical and classical-inspired pop worlds. I like her voice, although her mic was turned down way too low, and I think she was an excellent choice to sing Anna 1, following in the clear tradition of various jazz and cabaret singers and Marianne Faithful before her.

But on reflection, I was mainly pleased with the choice of Shara as Anna because, for once, it showed that the programmers were genuinely identifying with the intention behind Weill’s music – its use of popular tropes – and the ‘accessibility’ principle behind it, geared towards delivering the piece’s political message. The massive danger with such a piece, especially as framed by the ‘Berlin in the ’30s’ weekend, is to present it as a piece of period-exotica. Thirties jazz and dance musics are certainly no longer ‘popular’ musics, as they were back then; they are funny old styles which have become infused with very specific connotations of time and place. The period-specificity of pop music, which evolves so quickly with the accelerating pace of commercial production, certainly runs the risk of fixing a work in a particular ‘zeitgeist’ and suggesting that it is relevant only in relation to that zeitgeist – a little bit of socialist chic.

However in this case, I don’t believe that Weill’s populist aesthetics have lost all of their power. They’re still ‘accessible’ styles, pop music doesn’t change that fast or that profoundly, and it does keep coming back in cycles. By asking Shara Worden to sing the role, rather than a jazz singer (let alone a trad jazz singer), the programmers were taking far more seriously the contemporary value of Weill’s popularism – not to express some particular sort of ’30s-specific message, but to open the work up to people at the time. And I know for sure that a certain proportion of the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, maybe not a huge proportion but certainly not insignificant, came because Shara Worden was singing. This is taking Weill’s intentions (and the music itself) seriously, not going all out to find a perfect Lotte Lenya sound-alike.

Intersectionality in Anna’s Exploitation

I began by calling this a feminist work, and I want to briefly demonstrate how explicitly it combines a critique of capitalism with a critique of patriarchy.* It is not just a case of patriarchy ‘representing’ capitalism allegorically. The two are combined quite complicatedly – maybe not quite enough to satisfy post-structuralist, anti-Marxist feminists, but still, far from simplistically. To argue this, I’ll break down the work into its constituent movements:

• Sloth: Anna is berated by her family for being lazy, sending her out to labour in order to send her earnings home, so they can build and expand their house.
• Pride: Anna starts to work as a cabaret dancer. She wants to be considered an artist, but is mocked by the men at the venue who only want to see her body. She is charged with pride for having too much self-belief in her work, and too high an opinion of her ‘craft’.
• Wrath: Anna gets angry at an act of injustice (not specified: it is normally taken to be the ill-treatment of an extra on a filmset on which she’s acting, but in our staging it was an incident of sexual harassment). She is charged with wrath for taking offence, and told that she has to ‘turn the other cheek’, especially when there’s money to be made.
• Gluttony: Anna is pressured into losing weight for her job, charged with gluttony for her enjoyment of food.
• Lust: Anna is expected to marry for money, and is charged with lust when she has an affair with a man she’s in love with.
• Greed: In sharp contrast to the previous movement, the family now charge Anna for greed, for taking too much from the men who support her, for making them unhappy, and for living too decadent a lifestyle.
• Envy: Anna is miserable, and expresses desire for a better life, which is chastised as envy.

Almost all of these scenarios could be used to address very contemporary feminist concerns. While some of the ‘bad morals’ invoked are expressive of the ‘protestant ethic’ ideology which underpinned early capitalism, particularly redolent of the so-called ‘American dream’ and still very present in the UK ruling class ideology of today (something-for-something culture, strivers/shirkers, aspiration/incentive, entrepreneurship, etc.), most of them can also be used to invoke some of the more obvious ‘demands’ made of women under patriarchy: to look pretty, to get thin, to be sexually available, to not complain or take offence, to accept economic subservience and dependence, to not have too much self-worth or self-belief, to not try and change their position. When we staged it, we focused on its relevance to women in the media, particularly to female-celebrities-as-women, and the furious double-standards with which we demand them to play an impossibly idealised role, in their lifestyles, attitudes, bodies and sexualities.

It is here that the ‘split personality’ of the Anna character becomes most interesting. The fact that Anna 1, who’s voicing all this chauvinistic ideology, is a woman herself might seem problematic. It’s hardly ‘sisterly’ in any sense of the word. But she represents the ‘ideal’ attitude of the woman as constructed by patriarchy, the ‘conscience’ that women are taught to have about how they deport themselves, how they relate to others and how they live their lives, and the fact that all this might be ‘internalised’ and ‘naturalised’ by women themselves. Anna 2 is the real ‘human’ Anna – the dancing, material body. Anna 1 is just the internalised, idealised, ideological conscience of the character. This point is made even clearer by Weill’s decision to cast the role of the ‘Mother’ as the bass singer, within the Family’s ‘barbershop quartet’ – a quintessentially male ensemble type. The Family do not represent ‘real’ people but the ideological apparatus of the bourgeois family. Yet, in a nudge towards a feminist reading, this is explicitly rendered a male ideology, and moreover it is shown as a private, patriarchic domain which nevertheless articulates her decisions and actions in public, in the workplace.

For Anna 2 – worker and woman – we can perceive a relationship between her oppression by patriarchy and her oppression by capitalism, which plays well towards ‘intersectionality theory’: a very popular concept at the moment, which expresses the idea that individual systems of oppression (racism, ablism, sexism, etc.) do not act independently but interrelate. Brecht regularly uses sex workers as stock figures in his plays, as exemplars of individual entrepreneurship and giving an explicitness to the biopolitical aspects of Marx’s designation of the proletariat as those who can only sell their bodies (labour) as commodities. In this figure of the “whore”, there is a very complicated combination of class and gender exploitation, as well as (for many) the suggestions of new, gendered forms of power and resistance. Brecht’s sex worker characters are rarely as complicated or nuanced as they could be, considering this, and are often instrumentalised for their symbolic potential, but I do think that – in the figure of Anna – there is a striking, malleable and incredibly useful exploration of the intersectionality of gender and class oppression which is certainly as relevant as it ever was. While the relationship between Marxist and Feminist theory has been somewhat fraught over the last few decades, it seems that serious, inventive and committed new stagings of works like this, which thematise aspects of intersectionality theory while leaving many aspects open for interpretation, might provide a valuable site for discussion and exploration.

— — — — — — — —

* And I appreciate that it might seem perverse that, after complaining in my last post about the lack of female composers on the WOW festival programme, I’m now celebrating a ‘feminist’ work written by two men, but I like to think I take feminism seriously enough as cultural praxis to feel comfortable in my own judgement about what does or doesn’t seem relevant, interesting or problematic.

…all, or even a significant portion, of what musicologists do by way of analysis or evaluation, I am struck by how much does not receive their critical attention, and by how little is actually done by fine scholars who, for example, in studying a composer’s notebooks or the structures of classical form, fail to connect these things to ideology, or social space, or power, or to the formulation of an individual (and by no means sovereign) ego.

Edward Said on musicology, in Musical Elaborations (1992)

This weekend, the Southbank Centre is hosting an event called the Women of the World Festival (WOW). It is described as ‘a festival of talks, debates, music, film and comedy celebrating women’. As a feminist festival in a classical music venue of national importance, it seems like a very good opportunity in which to think about and discuss women and classical music. I might even go so far as to say that, if there were ever an event at which it might be appropriate to seriously consider the role of women in today’s mainstream classical music culture, this would surely be it. Surely…

Alongside a plethora of debates and talks ranging from discussions about rape, pornography and race, via fashion and hairstyles, to economics, entrepreneurship and power, there are a number of musical events. There’s an all-women hip-hop and spoken word evening, performances by female singer-songwriters such as Angelique Kidjo and Cold Specks, and experimental/alternative music from Seaming To.

There are also three classical events, the most fitting of which is a recital by the Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble performing works from two contemporary female composers Lola Perrin and Thomi Baltsavia, at 1pm tomorrow (Friday 8th March), which I’m sure will be great and is also free. So far so good…

The other two classical events in this Women of the World festival are a recital of Schumann, Schoenberg and Bach by the renowned pianist Mitsuko Uchida (on Wednesday), and a concert entitled Queens, Heroines and Ladykillers: Curtain Raisers + High Drama performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conducted by Marin Alsop, on Friday.

The programme of this concert is as follows:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Overture, Idomeneo, re di Creta

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: ’O smania! O furie! O disperata Elettra!’ from Idomeneo

Ludwig Van Beethoven: Overture, Leonore No.3

Ludwig Van Beethoven: ’Abscheulicher, wo eislt du hin … Komm, Hoffnung’ from Fidelio

Carl Maria Von Weber: ’Ocean! Though mighty Monster’ from Oberon

Robert Schumann: Symphony No.2 in C

It is fantastic that these two very important women musicians are taking part in this festival. Marin Alsop, especially, is a phenomenal example of a woman doing great things in a discipline which is overwhelmingly anti-women, one of the most male-dominated jobs in Western society: orchestral conducting.

Yet that in no way excuses the fact that we have a concert here which features no women composers at all, in a festival which is supposed to be ‘celebrating women’. This point needs to be taken further though. Working our way down the OAE concert programme:

1. We have two extracts from the opera Idomeneo by Mozart (man), featuring an aria by the (fictional) character Electra (words by librettist Giambattista Varesco (man), sung by the (real) soprano Emma Bell (woman)), who is an absolutely classic example of the artistic/operatic/social trope of the evil, vengeful, hysterical ‘sorceress-type’ woman. Electra (an invention of men) is jealous of the heroine Ilia and her blossoming love for Idamante, she’s hungry for power, she shows cruelty towards enemy prisoners, she’s obsessed with revenge, and when Ilia and Idamante get married, she wants to kill herself. She’s hardly a woman to celebrate, even though (in comparison to the meek virgin, fallen victim and tender, impotent mother) she seems like the closest that the often-misogynistic operatic stereotypes get to a ‘strong’ female character.
2. Then we have two extracts from Fidelio by the other ‘great male genius’ of classical music, Beethoven, featuring an aria by the (equally fictional) character Leonore (words by librettist Joseph Sonnleithner (man)). Granted, Leonore is a better example of a strong female character in opera. She finds a way to rescue her husband from imprisonment and execution against all odds, and saves the day without much help. But she does it all while dressed up as a man, whose made-up name – ‘Fidelio’ – becomes the title of the opera, while her own is consigned to the accepted titles of the various spin-off overtures. Problematic?
3. Then we have an aria from Oberon by Weber (man), with ridiculous orientalist libretto by James Robinson Planche (man), in which the exotic (fictional) princess character Reiza gets kidnapped over and over again, falls in love with her kidnapper, tries and fails in a limp attempt to save his life, spends some time in a harem, and ends up bound for matrimony. So yeah, pretty radical stuff.
4. Finally, most absurdly, a symphony by Robert Schumann (man (or mann?)). Not only does this not fit in with the aims of the festival, the whole ‘strong women arias’ things, or the silly title of the concert (or wait, is he supposed to be the ‘ladykiller’?), but it’s a particularly enraging choice because Robert Schumann’s wife was a composer. In fact, she is one of the very few (maybe two?) female composers pre-1900 who has been allowed anywhere near the ‘canon’. She was also an incredibly important figure in cosmopolitan musical life in the mid to late 19th century, a world-class pianist, and as good a woman-in-classical-music as any to celebrate, if (like the OAE) you’ve decided that the last hundred years is far too vivid in our memories to warrant an audience.

It is so absurdly ironic a programme choice because Clara Schumann’s compositional career, and her potential place in history, was curbed and compromised by the chauvinistic dictates of the day. It was considered natural and necessary that her husband’s career was put before her own. Robert Schumann once wrote: ‘Clara herself knows that her main occupation is as a mother and I believe she is happy in the circumstances.’ And then, we hear from Clara:

I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up on this idea; a woman must not wish to compose – there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that. That was something with which my father tempted me in former days. But I soon gave up believing this. May Robert always create; that must always make me happy.

(The irony-bru is extra bitter here, since the festival is being sponsored by Bloomberg, who are currently detoxifying after a lengthy lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that they’d systematically discriminate against mothers returning from maternity leave, was recently overturned, to mixed opinions. The Women of the World thank you, I’m sure, Bloomberg.

(Plus, their accelerating spew of financial data is the fizzing, spitting Duracell lodged deep in the anus of finance capitalism. bleurgh…))

To make matters even more outrageous, the pre-show talk (‘OAE Extras, 5.45pm’) has nothing at all to do with the festival or with women, even via the tenuous ‘theme’ of the concert. Instead, it is ‘part of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Bicentenary celebrations’, and ‘looks at what concert life was like 200 years ago and how the recognised classics of today, including Schumann’s Symphony No. 2, were introduced to British audiences’. So: no women, no Electra, no Leonore, no Alsop, no Clara.

But, but, but…

If we’re going to take this Festival seriously, we can at least consider it a good opportunity for us to think, talk and learn about women’s involvement in classical music, now and in the past, alongside the reasons behind their disproportionate lack of involvement in classical music, now and in the past. So to keep the ball rolling, I’ll move immediately on to the arguments that I assume I’d have to make to counter what would be the programmers’, and classical establishment’s, vehement reprisals. I imagine that they would come in the following genres: idealist and pragmatist…

• the idealist reprisal = “Classical music culture is rooted in a rich tradition of music from the 17th to the 19th centuries, times in which European societies were very different, and the kinds of freedom and equality that women have now were quite unthinkable. It’s unrealistic to expect classical music to embody such anachronistic ideas with the same explicitness as other musics; operatic heroines like Leonore may seem problematic now but at the time they were bold and subversive.” and/or “Even when men held literal ‘authority’ over musical composition, women performers have always been able to reclaim power/agency/rebellion, subaltern-style, through their performance interpretations, cf. McClary/Koestenbaum/Clément, and this programme is a celebration of that tradition.” and/or “Music can’t be sexist. All music is abstract, transcendent, humanist, blah blah, whatever the composer’s gender, and by performing it we can use it to celebrate our own freedoms.”

• the pragmatist reprisal = “OK chill out, this isn’t exactly a one-off special event, it’s part of the OAE’s season and a pretty standard programme for the artists involved, which just happens to fit into the festival going on at the time. It needs to be seen as part of the ensemble’s wider programming, attracting the necessary demographics and ticking the necessary boxes, and it should be as a positive sign that they’ve decided to make an effort to engage with this festival at all - not to mention that they’ve made a whole concert series out of exploring arias written for the female voice - since audiences would have come to hear these big-name artists perform basically anything.”

I know I’m risking a show trial of straw men here, but I’m pretty sure that these are the kinds of arguments that would be levelled against my criticism, and at any rate these are the kinds of mindsets that I most want to challenge. And I think both can be challenged in the same way, by taking a step back and looking at the WOW festival (and its other events) and then the concert in turn, noting all the discrepancies, and asking – just for once - why?:

• why is this the only event on the programme which exclusively features artistic works by men?
• why is this the only event which features any artistic works by men?
• why - when there are plenty of women writing music today – does the festival choose to fill one of its biggest events with the music of ‘great men’?
• why do operatic stereotypes, like mad vengeful Electra and voluptuous exotic Reiza, escape the deconstruction and the criticism of programmers and feminist alike?
  
• why is it deemed OK to include this concert in a festival that ‘celebrates women’ if it 1) showcases outdated tropes of women in art, 2) could make the effort to feature female composers but doesn’t, 3) opens with a talk that has nothing to do with the festival, 4) focuses (in the second half) on a piece which has nothing to do with its purported theme?
• why is this classical event the only instance of such extreme cognitive dissonance (Mozart + Beethoven + Weber + Schumann – Women = Women of the World)?
• why invite the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to play if they never play any female composers’ works (e.g. Weir, Gubaidulina, Panufnik, Oliveros etc.)? There are plenty other resident ensembles that could have been asked.
• why not use this occasion of all occasions to feature some works by women from the past (e.g. Clara Schumann, Barbara Strozzi, Hildegard von Bingen)?
• why not – if there aren’t enough ‘appropriate’ pieces floating around in history, between all those poor male geniuses (“how could they know they were being chauvinistic if chauvinism hadn’t been invented as a concept?!”) – ask some living female composers to write music for the occasion? And get an orchestra to play them who aren’t solely capable of playing music composed under Enlightenment patriarchy?

Condescending to Music

The answer to all of these is that classical music is different. Some might think it’s a ‘special case’. It doesn’t need to make the effort. Nobody’s asking it to make the effort. This is not solely an indictment of the Southbank Centre, or of the OAE or Marin Alsop. This is an indictment of classical music in general. It is not that it is a ‘special case’, that Mozart and Beethoven are the only men special enough to be celebrated in a feminist festival. The sad truth is that classical music doesn’t feel like it has to bother, to try at all in fact. And this is because, as I’m beginning to realise more and more, those people in charge of programming, performing and perpetuating classical music culture just don’t take it seriously.

So, in response to the ‘pragmatist’ argument: that may well be the case, but why – when someone has gone to great lengths to put together a multi-faceted, multi-textured festival which adheres quite faithfully to its stated intention of ‘celebrating women’ – was whoever was in charge of choosing the big ‘classical’ tie-in allowed to be so unimaginative, so lazy and so insensitive to the rest of the weekend’s events, to merely assign some pre-existing plan (Marin Alsop doing Schumann 2 with the OAE) and add on a bit of lame woman-flavoured garnish? Why is it OK for the classical event to do that and no-one else, and why do people not balk when they look at the programme, or rub their eyes in disbelief? It just seems very offensive to all women composers, that the one time a programme of women composers is surely absolutely imperative to a concert, not even one of them is deemed good or appropriate enough. It’s like casting a blacked-up white woman as Rosa Parks in a biopic. Tell me why it isn’t like that, and while you’re at it, tell me why you’re desperately trying to think of reasons why it isn’t like that.

And in response to the ‘idealist’ argument: does it not seem strange that the presumably thriving, still-existing art form of classical music has to fall back on all these disclaimers and provisos, in order to provide one orchestral event for a festival whose simple purpose is to focus exclusively on the achievements of over 50% of the world’s population. It’s not a hard task, at least it shouldn’t be. There might at some point be a festival of remembering historic chauvinism, or a festival of denouncing misogyny, but this is not it. It might have been something if there were some explanatory talk, appended onto the concert, discussing the historic predicament of women in classical music, as well as its current state. But no.

The Queens, Heroines and Ladykillers series of concerts by the OAE, of which this is part, focuses on women performers in opera, and the history of the prima donna, which is an interesting and important subject in the narrow field of classical music history. But compared to the role that women have in new music now, and certainly compared to the role that women should have in music, this history – in which women were paraded around a stage in beautiful clothing and jewellery (in front of men in serious formal wear and other women in beautiful clothing and jewellery), then stripped of their virtue and killed or married off in fantastical scenario after fantastical scenario – is hardly the straight-up emancipatory movement that they seem to think it is. And the fact that it is the go-to for a proper festival of contemporary feminism in all its many guises (except the most radical ones, it has to be said) just serves to underline how little the culture has actually changed, compared to most other Western art forms. It is a weak attempt at putting a programme together worthy of the festival. And what it seems to shows us (considering the relative prominence, acclaim and success of the institutions and ensembles involved) is the following three things:

1. That it is very difficult to put together a ‘feminist’ or women-centred mainstream classical concert. This suggests that mainstream classical music culture, and its tradition, is sexist.
2. That mainstream classical programmers will not go to great lengths to put together ‘feminist’ or women-centred concerts, even when it is the most appropriate occasion you can possibly imagine, and there are plenty of appropriate composers to choose from. This suggests that mainstream classical music programmers are sexist, or accept a sexist consensus as natural/necessary/acceptable.
3. That classical events and programmers can get away with being non-women-centred whilst saying that they are, even where it would be very inappropriate and offensive for anyone else to, and that it doesn’t actually seem strange or inappropriate to anyone, but quite the opposite, people actually think that putting on a concert of ‘great men’ composers, at the exclusion of women composers, in a feminist festival is tantamount to ‘celebrating women’. This suggests that either everyone already expects classical music to be sexist, or that classical music culture and the ideology of its initiates is sexist, or (probably) both.

Most of all though, it shows just how unimaginative classical programming is, and just how shallow some of these attempts to make music accessible and relevant and engaged actually are. I’ve complained about the Southbank Centre in this respect before (as well as the OAE). These days everything at the Southbank seems to come as part of a festival. This is both a good and a bad thing. In theory it should mean that concerts have to make some sort of commitment as to the broader ‘theme’ of their programme, or its purpose or slant or logic. But in reality, it also permits instances, like this one, where just by including it in a festival schedule seems to automatically validate its purported engagement or logic, meaning that it doesn’t need to make any effort to really engage with the questions and issues presented.

This programme is a standard example of classical culture’s patronising attitude to its own art form. They apparently don’t believe that a concert programme can engage with the complicated issues surrounding feminism to the extent that any of the other talks and performances can. They assume music’s shallowness – regard the titular ‘Queens, Heroines and Ladykillers’ and ‘High Drama’ – it hardly sounds like a contemporary feminist event, and you certainly wouldn’t get any other artistic discipline offering such a crass, basic attempt to engage with a rich and rigorous tradition of thought. They refuse to critique and to deconstruct the tradition that they’ve inherited – perhaps they’re worried about what they might find, perhaps they think there’s nothing to deconstruct – either way, they seem not to hold it in very high intellectual esteem at all. Theirs is, in general, a consensus which suggests that a classical music programme wouldn’t be able to contribute any serious ideas to the festival as a whole, that it must consign itself to the role of after-dinner entertainment, that it should just sit there and look pretty, as it were. Why else would they decide not to include any compositions by women? Why else decide, in all conscience, that the traditionally-sanctioned, often condescending and objectifying role of onstage performance – of looking and sounding pretty – is the only proper or feasible way for this so-called ‘living, breathing’ art form to ‘celebrate women’.

So…

As we all know, these days such attitudes aren’t surprising. Nobody expects anything more from classical music, ‘doing its bit’ in between the real business of repeating the same rituals and motions over and over. ‘All that it’s really good for’, if we take such weak reforms by (state-funded) institutions as sincere. No wonder reactionary fans decry these meagre attempts at being ‘hip’ and ‘PC’ and ‘engaged’, since they so often amount to so very little. The lesson, in all these instances, is to endeavour to perceive classical music’s lack with clarity, not to expect nothing from it but to expect everything from it, not to condescend to it and its audiences and institutions, nor to essentialise its failings and naturalise its backwardness and parochialism, but to hold it up to everything that we want art to be, and see through the gaps, and then work hard and fast to create all the exciting potential music – yet to be considered possible – which will fill in those gaps and finally take the art form seriously. The solution, as ever, must be in new music, and in new forms of new music.

Here are some of the biting point‘s most anticipated music events:

• As a kind of short-circuiting alternative to the slow, teleological trudge of the Rest is Noise, Nonclassical presents their Pioneers of Electronic Music festival, which encompasses eleven days of events (6th-17th March) and looks to be a totally fascinating undertaking. Spread across various East London venues, the festival combines screenings of documentaries and feature films with talks, a ‘synth lab’ workshop, a performance from Peter Zinovieff and Aisha Orazbayeva and a night of music inspired by the work of Daphne Oram. The centrepiece of the festival is another of their superbly-curated nights at XOYO on 14th March, probably the most exciting yet, with electronic offerings from Stockhausen, Messiaen and Varèse, an original film by Le Corbusier, and a 30-piece electronics ensemble called Dirty Electronics. Oh, and Alex Paterson of The Orb. Go. (Obviously.)
• The classical blogosphere was rocked in early January (to the extent that such a thing is possible), by a press release from the Royal Opera House declaring an intensified commitment to the production of new work, with ’15 new operas’ to be staged between 2013 and 2020.

[To be clear, this press release is replete with the usual over-placatory language, this time from Director of Opera Kaspar Holten, who hopes that 'opera audiences will share our curiosity and come with us with open minds along this journey' (ugh!), cautioning that 'there is not and should not be a guarantee of success for every single piece, only for innovation and risk-taking'. And it must be emphasised that despite his admirable claims that new work is 'at the core of what and who we are', not 'at the periphery', this will still amount to a significant minority of work within their whole programme - an average of two new works a year - most of which will be consigned to the smaller Linbury Studio Theatre. This should be the absolute minimum proportionate amount of new work for a key publically-funded institution like the ROH. I'm not sure it quite merits the orgy of back-patting that it seems to have induced.]

• However, it’s certainly not bad news. There are quite a few interesting things lined-up, beginning in 2013 with Benjamin’s Written On Skin, directed by Katie Mitchell, as well as the first UK staging of Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It gets crazier next year, with new commissions from Matthew Herbert and Ben Frost, the latter of whom is directing his own adaptation of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (!!). Then, looking further into the decade, there’s a revival of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole which, alongside Birtwistle’s recently-revived The Minotaur, represents one of the ‘surprise’ contemporary successes which presumably gave the terminally-reactionary ROH honchos the courage to attempt such a ‘risk-taking’ ‘journey’. And things get even more exciting by 2017 (if you can wait that long), when Thomas Adès is set to bring a new opera to the main stage based on Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel. By far the most intriguing (and potentially ‘risk-taking’) project is, predictably, the most distant: a set of four full-scale operas made in response to questions posed by (biting point hero) Slavoj Žižek. Sounds too good to be true, really.
• Over at ENO, the upcoming production to watch out for is Michel van der Aa’s Sunken Garden, a multimedia opera with a libretto by David Mitchell, featuring the use of 3D film. It’s on at the Barbican in mid-April.
• Also at the Barbican, the very successful Reverberations marathon festival which brought Bang on a Can and other Reich acolytes to London in May 2011, is to be followed up by a similar marathon festival curated by Nico Muhly and entitled A Scream and an Outrage. The line-up isn’t completely finalised, but many of the artists involved in 2011′s festival are set to make a return, while there’s a fitting tilt from Reich to Glass in terms of lineage, and hints of Muhly’s own involvement in the Icelandic music scene and the British choral world. I really hope this ends up becoming a regular thing.
• Also at the Barbican, on 16th March, the LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel present the European premiere of John Adams’s The Gospel of the Other Mary, a new oratorio and Barbican co-commission, exploring the story of Lazarus, with direction by Peter Sellars.
• One of the weirder looking events of the next month is the BBC Concert Orchestra’s FREE event at the Roundhouse on the 11th March, Baroque Remixed – ReWired : ReStyled : ReFreshed. Sure, it sounds kind of awful, but it’s not one of those sneaky, silly-named Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment affairs where they play two hours of Bach and ten begrudging, patronising minutes of new music. Crazily enough, there is no straight-up old music involved at all; everything’s somewhat processed (or ‘remixed’) from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, via Adès, to Matthew Herbert and a Moog Ensemble. And Lauren Laverne presenting, apparently… (And it’s free.)
• Even while The Rest is Noise is going on, there is other stuff going on at the Southbank, and for the London Sinfonietta, the rest is Reich. On the 26th February, they’re continuing the Landmarks series with Netia Jones, which I touched on in the last post, with a multimedia concert that situates the birth of New York minimalism within its socio-historical context. Then, on the 5th March, we finally get to hear Reich’s ‘Radiohead piece’ Radio Rewrite, in a concert that also features the composer’s Double Sextet.
• Later on in the year, ENO are set to produce Philip Glass’s latest opera The Perfect American – imagining the final years of Walt Disney’s life – as directed by Phelim McDermott of Improbable, the company behind ENO’s spectacular recent Satyagraha. Then in September, it’s an American Lulu from the Opera Group and Olga Neuwirth, a ‘radical reworking’ of Berg’s famous work from a formidable composer and company.
• If I’d been quicker off the mark, I would have mentioned the one-two punch of classic London fringe opera malarkey which was Opera in Space‘s Dido and Aeneas in the Bussey Building, and Silent Opera‘s L’Orfeo at Trinity Buoy Wharf. I missed both these shows, and with them any potential answers to the obvious question why anyone would want to stage either of these works ever again. Please no more fringe-promenade-warehouse Dido and Aeneases. Or L’Orfeos. Just because they’re kinda short and simple and small-scale. And also please no more Bohèmes or Traviatas either. Just because they have parties in, and they’re sort of gritty, and you can have fun dressing up as sex workers. These are all clichés now. Let this be our late resolution for 2013. Thank you London.

I’ve posted about the festival before: it represents a year-long programme of concerts, talks and events, a collaborative venture between the Southbank Centre, London Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC and the Open University, which periodises 20th-century music into week-long, chronologico-thematic mini-programmes, each including a set of concerts involving a huge range of ensembles (subsuming much of the standard Southbank rosta), along with a weekend of talks.

The Museum Brand

We can assume that the festival as a whole was envisaged as an experiment in a relatively new branding strategy to attract audiences to the supposedly ‘risky’ and ‘difficult’ music of the 20th century, which is often resistant to the usual ‘Classical Greats/Maestros and Masterpieces’ labels. It’s not technically a completely new and crazy tactic; it’s a common approach in modern art exhibition, for example. To generalise, it’s the kind of curation strategy in art that separates the ‘museums’ from the ‘galleries’. Rather than the ‘White Cube’, ‘art-speaking-for-itself’ of standard classical ‘gallery’ programming, this is the info-packed, periodised and thematised ‘museum approach’.

It is actually fairly new for classical music. True, there are normally some elements of the ‘museum’ from concert to concert, with programme notes and historically-informed performance practice and the kind of ‘curator’ concerts which aim to ‘make a case’ for obscure juvenilia from Great composers’ least significant years (I touched on these elements in my discussion of postmodern historicism and ‘heritage’, in opposition to the more modernist conceptions of essential musical autonomy). But for the museum to be such an explicit, foregrounded and totalising force – the unapologetic curatorial strategy of a whole year of music – is surely unprecedented.

The strange fit of this strategy with respect to classical music begins to show when you consider just how much money you would have to spend if you want your ‘journey through the 20th century’ to take on any actual shape, in the way that it does if you read Alex Ross’s book. The answer is a lot of money (there are £500 year-long festival passes, which are ‘good value’ but also considerably more than the price of Ross’s book). This is, of course, due to the fact that listening to a piece of music takes time, while you can ‘journey’ through art history pretty quickly, depending on your own mobility. The overarching ‘progression’ throughout the whole year, and the interlocking of all the various events, is really driven home in the textbook-style programme and website, but in order to get any sense of this musical ‘century’ – which is quite meticulously programmed, I have to say – you’d have to go to a lot of concerts.

The Universal and the Particular (or, The Base and the Superstructure?)

So we can interpret the festival as an attempt to test a quick and effective way to package modern music programmes ‘accessibly’, to find a new (less classically-smitten) audience, to incorporate enough blockbusters (New World Symphony, anyone? (?!?)) to keep the core audience engaged, and to do it in a way that demands multiple ticket purchases in order for the event experience to function ‘properly’. Sneaky sneaky…

All this means that most of my main reservations about the structure of the festival as a whole – what is excluded (not only musically but historically), how things are framed, what is privileged etc. – arguably won’t be registered on the level that most people can afford to experience the event, i.e. at the level of the single concert. And don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of reservations about the structure of the festival, in particular about 1) branding music in this ‘historicist/biographic’ way, and 2) approaching history in this totally reified one-thing-after-another greatest-hits theme-park way. But I’m yet to decide how I feel about approaching a single concert as themed around a particular socio-political idea as pinpointed in time and space, which quite a few of them genuinely are. I think on the whole it’s a good thing, but maybe not as good as using a concert to approach a socio-political idea as it is manifested across different times and spaces (i.e. Leftist music from 1920 to now, nationalist music from the end of Imperialism to Perestroika, imagining nature musically across the 20th century: things like that (which may well have already been done), but with each necessarily including contemporary manifestations of the same theme).

What do two world wars, votes for women and a moon landing sound like?

- publicity for The Rest is Noise festival on Southbank Centre facade

Let’s return to those reservations though (because you know I love a gripe). the biting point has called, in the past, for a greater appreciation of socio-political and broader cultural factors in approaching classical music. Our complaint has been aimed at the privileged ideology of classical music as essentially transcending ‘worldly’ concerns – so universal that its ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ must be situated way beyond its particular material/historical context, to either ‘the human condition’, or ‘the spiritual’, or some other vague ‘universal’ ‘outside’ of individual human experience, or even to a total absence of meaning. This complaint was made, in particular, against the limiting impact of this ideology on conceptions of what new classical music could/should be, and the role that new music could/should have in our society.

Having said all that, my main reservation in The Rest is Noise principle, contrary as it may sound, is actually that it is too specific. It not only pins musical compositions to singular circumstances in history, but also to singular biographies of dead composers, and their purported relationship to these circumstances.

I would certainly allow that music is more universal than that. As I see it, the whole point of (good) art is that it renders sensible/perceptible(/audible) some previously unseen/unseeable ideology, relationship, dynamic, drive, force, aspect or quality (sometimes called a ‘truth’) which cannot otherwise be sensed or acknowledged in the material, everyday world. Even reactionary (or ‘bad’) art involves some laying bare of ideology, of assumptions or of prejudices – its own particular ‘truths’ – through that key ‘poetic’ process of ‘subtraction’. It operates between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, pertaining to neither extreme as a reified field of signification, but always (dialectically) mediating between the two. The philosopher Alain Badiou, in a series of 15 Theses for Contemporary Art which I love and have been quoting a lot recently, said:

Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art : the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn’t exist.

(By ‘Empire’, he means something like ‘the contemporary imperial force of multinational capital’. See here for more explanations, if you’re interested.)

This is a good injunction for new art (and music), but was it true for the art of the day? And, could that music in its re-performance – its ‘reactivation’, which is surely the closest we can get to its ‘essential’ substance (i.e., in sound, in time) – have the same effect? Can it show us something about our world that is denied by the surface-level ‘reality’ of ‘Empire’, of the status quo, of hegemony, of liberal-democratic capitalism?

The one-dimensional view of music-in-history, as something which might illuminate one of those key Hollywood ‘moments’ of the 20th century (or at least the ‘moment’ as experienced by one dead artist), denies the music’s continuing power as art (as defined above and in the Badiou, since this is what I think art should be/do).

History of Music vs. Music of History

I admit, I’m sure that no-one involved in conceiving the festival would deny that the contemporary audience’s reflection on the relevance and relationship between these historical events and their current situation is obviously a key aspect of presenting the music in this way. But this aspect should be at the absolute forefront of this kind of historicising art festival. By organising both the music and the history in such a fully-integrated, large-scale, highly teleological, highly narrativised structure, these possibilities are largely disabled. The result is a kind of play of signifying between ‘music’ and ‘history’, each referring to each other and invoking each other, locating the other within itself in a pre-loaded way, as a sort of foregone conclusion. The actual point of why a composer might want to write music in the first place, this ‘third’ domain of explication and reflection within the triangulation resulting from the intersection of art and history – which is, incidentally, that ‘difficult’ part of music so resistant to branding and so frightening to audiences, and the source of all art’s most powerful and radical political potential – risks being explained away or ‘filled in’ by tautological ‘background details’.

[Radical side-note (ironically aligned to the Right): And sure, potentially this aspect of the music will 'speak for itself', and perhaps the rest of the museum branding strategy is purely to trick the public - who have been trained to understand and trust only the one-dimensional language of publicity and commerce - into exposing themselves to this otherwise inarticulable factor which is the raison d'être of art. But (again with the But...), there are ways in which to encourage an engagement and understanding of this aspect of the art, and there are ways in which to obfuscate it, to pretend it isn't there or isn't important, or to suggest to the audiences that all you need is enough biographical details and some black-and-white photographs to 'understand' a piece of music completely. The former strategies are, I believe, the key strategies of a politically-potent music and my theory is that they must be couched within some frame of 'newness' or contemporaneity: alongside new compositions or with new staging techniques or interspersed with contemporary media, etc. The latter strategies are, dare I say it, attempts to disarm all political potential from this art, to remove all its utopian vision/drive towards change/radical difference/withdrawal/revolutionary engagement/conflict with the status quo. So it isn't actually surprising that it represents the new tactics of a big, central state-subsidised arts institution which, conscious or not, will automatically be inclined to serve the interests of the ruling classes...                  (There, I said it.)]

At the heart of The Rest is Noise dilemma is the festival’s (necessarily?) ambiguous, self-contradictory conception of the relationship of music to history, retrospectively and as ‘consciously’ constructed and mediated throughout the 20th century. The programming (of the first half of the festival at least) is greatly skewed towards 1) ‘Great’ events (the World Wars, Stalin, the end of Empire), and 2) the broader ‘cultural zeitgeist’ as manifest in art and popular culture (expressionism, the ‘Jazz Age’, Surrealism in Paris, cabaret in Berlin, etc.). There is little (musical) consideration of all the stuff in between: socio-economic factors, everyday lives, class relations, technology as it pervades society, transformations in work, in leisure, in the media, in the way that we relate to our environment, our psychology as individuals and groups, etc etc., which not only ‘leads to’ these great events, but also manifests the effects of such great events in cultural zeitgeists.

(And this is part of my standard criticism of all music that resists interdisciplinary engagement with more linguistically/visually ‘specific’ media, ‘on principle’ (i.e. because of some belief that ‘good, real’ music doesn’t ‘need’ any other discipline to do what it’s ‘supposed to’ do, or whatever…(still trying to get to grips with this ideology. Heavy stuff…)))

Now, perhaps this will all be relegated to pre-concert talks and weekend ‘events’. And, obviously, any purported ‘history of the 20th century’ must necessarily be extraordinarily narrow to fit into a few weeks of concerts and 45-minute talks (not to mention the ridiculous problems of trying to tell the ‘story of a century’ through an art form endemic to only two continents (and ghettoised within a few urban centres in a few countries within these)). But I think it also comes down to the music which, as I’ve said before, very rarely explicitly engages with any of these ‘in-between’ concerns, with ‘materialistic’ concerns perhaps, but tends to surrender official autonomy only in broad responses to grand events and semi-autonomous responses to the aesthetic aspects of more engaged artistic movements in other media. (For example, I’m intrigued to find out how a talk on the highly-politicised but visually-focused Surrealist Manifesto will fit into a discussion of the concerts programmed in the ‘Paris’ week. Will it be just a tokenistic thing? Will they start discussing Adorno? Is it all just for ‘local flavour and colour’? Or are the audience supposed to figure out the connections all for themselves? We shall see, I guess…)

The Musical Story of the Music of the Century of Music

As a good way of summing up, I want to draw attention to a few quotations from the opening pages of the festival’s programme, which should illustrate why I find this whole thing so interesting:

1. Alex Ross, quoted saying:

I wanted to tell the story of the 20th century through its music.

2. Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank, calling the festival:

A ground-breaking programme of concerts, talks, dances, films, debates and exhibitions that lets us see music in the round; that brings in the history of science, technology, philosophical and political movements; that gives people the chance to really delve into the ideas and individuals that shaped the 20th century and the music that was its soundtrack.

3. Timothy Walker, artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, writing:

Even if the composers of the last century claim to have written ‘music’ rather than a reflection of events, there can be no doubt that their work is a product of the socio-political environment of which they were a part and that we sense both prescience as well as inspiration.

Here are three extremely different ways of framing the relationship between ‘music’ and ‘the 20th century’. Which will it be? The ‘story’ of the 20th century ‘through its music’? Music ‘in the round’ (i.e., ‘contextualised’ on all sides)? The 20th century ‘and its soundtrack’? Composers ‘reflecting’, ‘foreseeing’ or ‘inspired by’ events? Or these events ‘producing’ the music?

I think this very multiplicity of relationships – some appearing contradictory, all potentially valuable – say a great deal about the immense difficulty of constructing a festival in this way, and about the need for keeping a critical awareness of its elisions, assumptions, prejudices and ideology. In all, The Rest is Noise represents a very interesting experiment in music programming, even if it is a desperate scheme by a nervous institution to maximise ticket sales from an audience enamoured with postmodern ‘period flavours’ and colourful Hollywood nostalgia for those days before the ‘End of History’.

A few other thoughts:

• Talking of ‘music in the round’, some of the London Sinfonietta’s contributions come from their Landmarks series – a collaboration with the director Netia Jones – which ‘sets musical works and movements in the culture in which they originated’, through multimedia projections. I’m interested to see this but also fairly ambivalent, for all the reasons outlined extensively above. Does a simultaneous, performative multimedia aspect, rather than a more narrowly didactic series of ‘talks’ and framing explanations, allow for more links to develop between this ‘original context’ and what the work might be able to tell us about our contemporary situation - our context? Does a simultaneous, visual rather than discursive ‘unfolding’, placed alongside the music, allow the triangulated ‘explication’ (the ideology of the aesthetic) to loom larger in the room, or does it risk simply suggesting 1:1 explanations for each piece (i.e., this piece is ‘about’ this one specific place at this time, and can only be interpreted as such)? Perhaps it just depends what other media they choose to include; it’s hardly a neutral process.
• Can you imagine if they did a ‘history of the 19th century’ programme? Or a ‘history of the 18th century’? I reckon people would think that was crazy (not least because we don’t need any more of that music programmed, thanks). But I don’t think it’d be any less valid. In some ways, music in those centuries was more tightly linked to the kind of ‘great man’ history which The Rest is Noise emphasises, with all its actual material ties to aristocrats, to empires and kings and the power of the church. It was more functional as well (unlike a lot of later 20th-century music which purposefully exempted itself from a public, non-academic audience). However, I think the real factor here is that this is the music which is perceived to be ‘universal’ – ‘absolute’, ‘abstract’, etc. – and I think the pre-existing audience would find a lot of problems with an attempt to link it to specific historical moments and trends. So where do 20th-century autonomy and universality principles sit in relation to 18th/19th-century autonomy and universality principles? Are they comparable? Are they attempting the same things? Do they achieve the same things? Do they have similar political potentialities? Are they both susceptible to co-option by reactionary ideologies and to instrumentalisation by the ruling classes, etc.? (questions questions questions…)
• Is The Rest is Noise the desperate instrumentalisation of the increasingly venerated yet notoriously ‘unframeable’ 20th-century music by the cultural establishment, music whose very radical ‘inaccessible’ autonomy continues to make it unpalatable and unusable by the conservative classical fans who feel validated by the ‘transcendent’ emptiness of ‘their’ music?
• Or should we just put our optimism hats on and consider the festival as a wholly positive institution, encouraging the conscientious of 20th century music concerts finally, not just slipped in as filler between Bachs or Haydns, and possibly setting a happy precedent for future years, by proving that dissonance isn’t so financially ‘risky’ after all? And then, we can trust that the true radical ambiguity of music will mean that some progressive aspect of the work will always still slip through all the explaining and contextualising, in that way that it’s generally supposed to?
• Also, we were supposed to be exploring the musical century through ‘race’ and ‘sex’. So, does that mean… women? Cos… to be honest I think the idea that a festival of classical music might suggest what ‘votes for women might sound like’ is kind of taking the piss. Maybe there could be a discussion or two about why there are basically zero women in the programme?
• Bitching aside, I’m reeeally looking forward to Shara Worden doing Seven Deadly Sins. And Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel. And the Aurora Orchestra playing Antheil. And Modern Times with live accompaniment.
• Most of all though, I’m looking forward to September. The real truth of the festival will come out once it gets past 1950. Music from the first half of the 20th century was never that inaccessible or unappealing anyway, and the historical events are much bigger, more colourful and more extensively Hollywood-ised. The way that the festival organisers deal with electronic music and total serialism, the complicated politics and philosophies around Darmstadt and Fluxus and the Scratch Orchestra and ‘experimental music’, to what extent they bring in pop music, and whether they make any attempted investigation into neoliberalism or state capitalism or Maoism or the May revolts: these are the things I’m interested in. The simple links to political/economical history often disappear in classical music around these times (as they’re superseded by pop music), so the manner in which the organisers attempt to associate the two must certainly become less intuitive. And what music are they going to choose from the ’80s and ’90s? And how will they manage a ‘political’ approach as they get perilously close to the present day? How exciting, I can’t wait to write another ridiculously long a priori assessment in September…

Programme:

• selections from Kafka Fragments (Kurtág) - Shie Shoji, soprano/Aisha Orazbayeva, violin
• Restraint for Handcuffed Pianist (Harry) - Eldon Fayers, piano
• Scars (Whitley) - a new chamber opera presented by Carmen Elektra Opera Collective
• new chamber pieces by Laurence Osborn, William Marsey, Gregor Riddell and Thom Andrewes, based on texts written by survivors of torture and organised violence as part of Freedom from Torture’s Write to Life workshop

Freedom from Torture’s month-long festival, scheduled to coincide with International Human Rights Day last Monday, features a huge number of artists and performers working across different genres, volunteering their time and talent to raise money and awareness. But in programming this event, we wanted to engage more directly with the particular work of the charity, in ways that the other nights weren’t necessarily able to.

Our starting point was the idea of collaborating with Freedom from Torture’s writing therapy group – Write to Life – a workshop in which survivors of torture and organised violence are provided a creative outlet for their experiences. It was suggested to commission a series of new works setting texts written by Write to Life writers, on the theme of the ‘Kafkaesque’ in relation to the UK asylum process, and the often-dehumanising, alienating bureaucracy faced in dealing with the Home Office.

Music and Human Rights

As I’ve stressed repeatedly on this blog, classical music is oddly reticent to deal with such issues on a specific, personal or political level. It is assumed (and constantly restated) by many in the classical world that their music has a lot to say about the ‘human condition’, about the overcoming of adversity, about resilience and strength of ‘spirit’, about how our humanity will win through and how there’s always hope to be found, etc etc. Basically universal humanist ideas which can be vaguely linked to most political backgrounds in some way. Even at its most ‘political’ or ‘engaged’, canonical classical music rarely has much to say on a specific or personal level (beyond what can be mapped onto the composer’s own biography). While a work might make a statement ‘against war’ or stand as a monument to a particularly horrific event, or to victims of violence or suffering, it normally makes these statements in very broad affective strokes – ‘horror’, ‘outrage’, ‘hope’, ‘reconciliation’. It’s very rare that a work seems to feel capable of taking a more nuanced stance, or making a more complex argument, about such events or experiences, beyond: ‘this was bad’, ‘we must remember’, ‘there is hope’, ‘they couldn’t take our humanity/pride/faith’ or whatever. And even these works are pretty few and far between, even in the twentieth century. [initiate rant... feel free to skip over...]

[Of course, for many, it's the very abstractness - the 'universality' - of such stances which make them worthwhile, and prevents them from being turned into propaganda for, or against, a particular political movement. Such pieces are instead supposedly autonomous repositories for transcendent humanity - grief, sorrow, anger and reconciliation - which are open to all, providing no solutions besides catharsis and an opportunity to feel collectively. Classical music is supposed to have the virtue of communicating across political ideologies (speaking instead to some kind of innate, shared 'humanity' which is supposedly separate from society but also more spiritual than biological), and for this to function it would need to be absolutely apolitical, and outside of ideology (which is, according to theorists such as Louis Althusser, impossible - we're all always already within ideology). There might be some value to this kind of autonomous 'bipartisan' space (were it actually possible), but it would also be very limited indeed, and - as far as I'm concerned - far more susceptible to co-option as propaganda: glossing over the vital specifics of historical events, their material causes and effects, the real people involved and affected, in favour of an impartial 'Well of Affect'.

For example, in an old New York Times article: 'What "high art" music can resist better than other comparable art forms is being used as a specific instrument of propaganda. The adoption of the Beethoven Ninth by the Nazis, grotesque as it was, did not damage that work's power to function in the future as a celebration of human solidarity.'  But what is this 'human solidarity' that is apparently still being 'celebrated' by Beethoven's Ninth? Is it democratic liberalism? Is it the integrating powers of free-market capitalism? Is it globalisation? Is it socialism? Is it the United Nations? Is it just good old-fashioned Republicanism? It is, of course, all and none of these things, although I would argue that most humans on the planet don't know what Beethoven's Ninth sounds like, and a good number of those who do wouldn't necessarily recognise its melodies immediately as 'a celebration of human solidarity', until they're taught that that's what it is, and even then the specifics of who is included in this solidarity, and who is even considered a 'human' (fans of Beethoven?), are unclear. If classical music is so autonomous and free from the material world of society and politics, why shouldn't it be as suited to Nazi ideology as it is to Western humanism? Beethoven's Ninth was only 'not damaged' by the Nazis because we say it wasn't (or the Classical establishment says it wasn't), just as it's only a 'celebration of human solidarity' rather than a 'celebration of German supremacy' because that's what we want it to be. Because we like the piece, and want to keep hearing it, and we also like human solidarity (but not communism, of course. There is such thing as too much solidarity...). I'd concede that it's a 'celebration' of something, but the specifics are purposefully evaded, in order not to disturb the universalism (which is, by the way, in some way 'innately' humanist-liberal-democratic). In this way, its 'ethical' or 'political' value is highly debatable. And some people prefer it that way, I'm sure, but to say that that's how classical music 'should be' is unnecessarily restrictive, especially if you believe that art can be used as a force for positive progressive change in the world.]

As I’ve also said repeatedly on this blog, I really do think that classical music is incredibly well-placed to make these arguments, to get into complex issues and combine the affective with the intellectual and the ethical, in ways that other art-forms are expected to do. And so it might need some sort of linguistic frame – either a text to be set, or titles, or a written text to add specific associations or contextual details to a musical model or rhetoric – but you have to stop expecting that all of the potential of music must be expressed completely abstractly in sound for it to be valid, just because some of its potential can be interestingly and uniquely expressed in that way.

Much of canonical classical music’s potential for ‘political’ comment comes from the manipulation and combination of its most established ‘affective’ materials: minor keys vs. major keys, larger forces vs. solo voices, military tropes vs. lyrical, song-like tropes, borrowings from nationalist, traditional or religious musics which are the most obvious way of referring to a particular group or context. This kind of thing might have spoken volumes in the revolutionary 19th-century period, during the turmoil and wars of the early 20th-century period and (as is most commonly cited) in resistance to Stalinist totalitarianism, but such techniques can only say so much about a situation or scenario and can (ironically) be culpable of severely simplifying, to the level of propaganda, some very complicated political situations and eras – the perfect artistic equivalent to war memorials and monuments.

Getting specific, getting personal

Since its beginnings, pop music has been a lot more interested in exploring the extremely complicated politics of our age than classical music has, and the use of original lyrics has, of course, been crucial to that. But there are plenty of exciting instances, very recently, in which composers have taken ‘verbatim’ texts and set them in order to bring out political nuances or make statements both critical and emancipatory, or just accord these texts the particular significance of ‘performance’. Examples of this include Ted Hearne‘s Katrina Ballads, David T. Little‘s Soldier Songs, Corey Dargel‘s Last Words from Texas and Melissa Dunphy‘s Gonzales Cantata, and also Steve Reich‘s WTC 9/11. Even on the relatively apolitical UK scene, on the Nonclassical label itself, we can hear Tansy Davies‘s ‘Greenhouses’, a setting of an email home from activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed while defending a Palestinian family’s home from illegal demolition by an Israeli military bulldozer.

It is with this recent tradition of ‘verbatim’ text settings in mind that we should approach the five new works being written for this event. There are very particular and interesting differences to these settings and their performance on Thursday, of course. The texts themselves are poems and accounts written to express terrible experiences and difficult emotions in a creative, constructive manner, not recorded statements. The writers will be present at the performance, and will themselves read some of their work. The whole process in this way is more collaborative, yet there is potentially an even greater potential for misrepresentation, since these texts were carefully composed (and published in anthologies) to stand as testimony of the writers’ memories, impressions and interpretations of their lived experiences.

So the process of transforming them into performed musical events is a similar one to the verbatim texts explored in the pieces listed above. It is a process of restatement, of re-engagement, of constantly returning to these accounts not as evidence to be acknowledged but as personal cries of outrage or defiance, telling of present, ongoing tribulations rather than memorialising past events. Performed musical or theatrical works cannot exist as documents filed in a cabinet somewhere, they only exist in their reiteration (be it live performance or playback of a recording), and it is in this reiterative aspect that the core value of such projects must lie.

I like to think that this process will also invite a reassessment of the importance of the writing as poetry, not just as the byproduct of therapy or as a record of past injustice, but of its role in the work of this ‘human rights’-focused charity and especially in implicating the personal (and therefore political) aspects which cannot be dealt with simply by the charity but must be highlighted and targeted through society if positive change will ever come, in this country and internationally.

The composers that have been commissioned to write these pieces come from quite different stylistic backgrounds, while the ensembles involved vary quite drastically, and I’m very excited to hear the different ways in which this undeniably challenging composition brief is met by each.

Kafka-esque Fragments

…

Minding the Gap by Amina Abdalla

 

Some days 

it is harder than others

to Mind the Gap

between life

and death.

…

The ‘Kafkaesque’ theme of the writings selected immediately suggested having György Kurtág‘s Kafka Fragments as our headline set. In its full form, Kurtág takes forty fragments from the writer’s letters and diaries, and forges them into miniatures for soprano and violin, which play with the syntactic and grammatic forms of these beautiful little aphorisms, as much as with their content. About half of the fragments deal in some way with the writer’s trademark alienation and quiet, laconic nihilism, while there are a good deal of more upbeat images and witticisms.

It was the ‘fragments’ aspect, as much as the ‘Kafka’ aspect, which turned me on to this as a lead piece. The autobiographical musings, wrought in fantastically poetic, sometimes proverbial form, seemed to rhyme meaningfully with a lot of the Write to Life poetry, which give us fragmentary glimpses into lives and memories which we know to be full of hidden troubles and probably more complex than we could conceive of. Kurtág’s settings, which take a few listenings to get into, take each fragment as a standalone idea rather than searching for some more significant biographical place within the bigger ‘work’ that is the writer’s life. The concatenation of fragments, linked by instrumentation, does give us the impression of a larger form, but it is an impression which comes from the multiplicity of fragments, rather than from the sense of something bigger which remains unheard.

This is all that these new pieces can hope to achieve. There is no ‘bigger work’ which is the lives of any of these individual writers, far too real and expansive to render into a mere musical composition. We have only these poems and stories, and what they add up to, and that is more than enough – I believe – to show us something of the huge problems facing statehood, nationhood, international migration and the ‘global community’ when it comes to deciding what or who is to be considered fully ‘human’, when we become ‘asylum-seeker’, ‘citizen’, ‘person’, and the problems that such categories might cause as the sea levels rise and resources diminish…

New Amsterdam are responsible for albums from the likes of Corey Dargel, yMusic, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Ted Hearne, NOW Ensemble and Newspeak, among others, as well as organising the ‘indie classical’ collaboration-extravaganza Ecstatic Music Festival. Apparently they didn’t have flood damage cover, and incidents like this can be really threatening to small, independent organisations like New Amsterdam, so do consider donating a few dollars at the link above (or otherwise maybe downloading some albums and spreading the word).