Who Will Remember Me, When I’m Gone?
Well, not me obviously, because the answer to that is no-one. But Mrs. Toad and I were purchasing a little wine on our way home from the pub tonight and instead of going into some sort of warehouse off-license we ventured into the Edinburgh Wine Shop, which is small, friendly and, I suppose, slightly dorky. It’s the sort of place where the staff know about wine, where they sell lots of real ale and no fucking Fosters whatsoever and where, generally, they play classical music.
Classical music has always kind of baffled me, not out of general dislike or anything, more out of pure ignorance. I don’t know it, understand it, or anything. Nor could I hope to intelligently critique it. However, I wonder sometimes about what causes stuff to stick in the memory, or to stand the test of time. Great classical musicians, once they achieved fame, found their music performed to royal courts; to the largest audiences available at the time. A bit like Britney Spears.
So was Mozart really the best available to his time, or was he just Madonna – some pushy, stringy old lady whose thirst for celebrity and knack for manipulating the press far outweighs any measurement of talent. I don’t, as I’ve said, have the knowledge to really answer that question, but the people who read this blog are all fans of alternative music. Not alternative in the sense of being NME readers rather than MTV fans, but in the sense of genuinely loving really alternative music.
Even fucking Celine Dion has performed to royal audiences. Britney Spears, Take That, Madge, all these people have achieved something akin to the twenty-first century equivalents of patronage – the barometer for the best and best-remembered classical composers. So, without wishing to enter into an argument about which classical composers truly deserve to be remembered at the expense of which others, what have we actually lost?
Where are the Nick Caves of that era, compared to the Coldplays? Do we really need to remember Eric Clapton? I mean, his politics are fucking detestable, but was he good enough to deserve immortalisation? And even if you take the attitude that might means right – that being that popular is justification enough in itself – then what of the bands who would be the equivalent of Jeffrey Lewis. Or the Wave Pictures. Or even Wilco. How long will these guys live in human memory without that massive groundswell of popular approval which ends up sanctifying an artist for all time. And what of the likes of Daniel Johnston, for example, who is barely known in his own era and might so easily disappear within a couple of decades, once he passes on, because apparently All fucking Saints were invited to perform at the fucking Royal fucking Variety Show and he was not.
Pearl Jam – Jeremy (Yeah yeah, Nirvana, yadda yadda…)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Giant Sand – Flying Around the Sun at Remarkable Speed
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Eef Barzelay – Ballad of Bitter Honey
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Thing is, Mozart wasn’t really a celebrity in the same way that Madonna, Britney, All Saints or whoever are. He was a composer as much as a performer, and that tends to live on a lot long even over the space of a handful of decades. Can many people remember who sang the songs in the original film version of ‘Oliver!’ No, most of us can’t (or don’t care one way or the other, I should imagine) but the songs live on, as does the fact that Lionel Bart wrote it (and his name is wonderful for rhyming slang). Do we rate Bob Dylan primarily as a songwriter or performer? I know what I do.
In his own lifetime, Mozart was the child prodigy (possibly like Spears) who became part of the establishment for a time but then was considered too unruly, musically and personally. His final opera ‘The Magic Flute’ was premiered in a Vaudeville theatre (the equivalent to Oasis’ final tour taking in North Edinburgh Arts centre rather than Murrayfield). It’s generally believed that he was buried in an unmarked grave outside of Vienna, having died in poverty. His rival salieri got the fame in his lifetime but always knew mozart was better (think Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn).
So…umm, I guess what my barely remembered studying of Amadeus and GCSE music is trying to suggest is that the decent stuff stands the test of time, goes beyond celebrity and dying in obscurity does not mean people will discover it later (see Nick Drake, or Jeff Buckley, as Mrs. 17 Seconds has just reminded me).
Sorry to bring up feminism again, but I’ve always been struck by the masculine domination of “classical” music, so much of which was made at a time when women simply had no means at all to get their music heard, unless they were nuns like Hildegard von Bingen who composed music solely to be performed in church by other nuns. How many female Mozarts and Beethovens and Bachs died in obscurity, never to be heard? What a loss.
As for those whose music has survived the centuries, I think it says something that we still listen to that music today even though it was composed and first performed sometimes hundreds of years before anyone had the capacity to record it for public dissemination. Some of Bach’s greatest pieces (the Goldberg Variations for example) were completely unheard during his own lifetime, and were only discovered decades after his death in a drawer somewhere. There’s got to be something to a tune that can survive as a “meme” for so long just by word of mouth.
I’d second some of what Ed said, but the underlying assumption behind both his comment and the original post–i.e. that the (classical) musical landscape of yore must bear some kind of structural resemblance to the (popular) musical landscape of today–seems pretty tenuous to me, for all sorts of reasons.
One thing worth mentioning is that the work of classical composers you’re talking about constitutes an enduring source of creativity; people can perform it, interpret it, etc. This is surely a big part of the reason for their living on in human memory. This doesn’t apply to most popular music, and certainly not to most contemporary alternative music. It’s there simply to be listened to. (In fact, there’s often an open hostility to covers of songs by cherished artists, as well as to people who simply want to perform rather than write.)
I’m not really sure what my point is. I have no idea whether or not Wilco, Jeffrey Lewis, etc., will live on in human memory. All I know is that if they do wind up having some kind of enduring appeal, it will be for different reasons than those for which the great classical composers have endured. Anyway, it’ll definitely be interesting to see in, say, fifty years how people think about the popular music the last century.
*of the last century.
Also, I didn’t point out that the fact that the music of the great classical composers is routinely performed by groups of enormously talented musicians is a reasonable argument for its being more interesting that the work of Celine Dion or All Saints. These people would probably have tired of it many decades (/centuries) ago if this were the case. Moreover, the fact that some of the composers really weren’t that well respected as composers during their lifetimes (e.g. Bach, Schubert) again goes against seeing them as equivalent to the artists mentioned above. This is all pretty close to what C&B was saying, though.
Another important factor, however, is the effect of placing one type of music above another as being more genuine or noble or authentically musical. That, alone, accounts for the staying power of composers/performers like Mozart and for continued investigation into their unpublished work.
We can’t seperate the product from its cultural setting. Pop music will have less staying power simply because we deem it to be a lower form of music. Mozart’s music was never, as a whole, considered popular music. People didn’t go around singing his songs in the pub :p
so enough sociological musing for a Sunday via Iphone
xoxo
Tart
Been reading Adorno lately, Tart?
I always get the impression that Chopin was just showing off. ‘It sounds like crap, but look what I can write and play on the piano’.
Ok, I admire classical composers though I don’t own much classical music. Some Beethoven, and some more modern classical composers like Max Richter, Olafur Arnalds, Ludovico Einuadi. I think what appeals to me about their music is the simplistic beauty. What stuns me about the composers of old is that they wrote and arranged ‘pieces of music’ that can last for serious periods of time. It’s not 4 minute pop songs. It’s serious pieces of music. And it involves all parts of the orchestra. No offense to pop princes Madona but I don’t think she could write the bass line to one of her tunes let alone figure out the intracies of when the timpany should play. There is no comparison between people who can dance and mime and people who sat down and put together an hour or so of techinically complicated music for every instrument in the orchestra. You should watch the film Shine.
Shine rules. Sad but very good.
Oh, and Mozart’s Requiem is one of the first goth records ever (that’s a commendation, btw).
obviously my spelling is to shit. but you get my point.
Ed, agreed, shine is sad but is very good and, Matthew, if you haven’t seen it you really should.
I haven’t heard much Mozart other than Mozart for babies which is currently a regular on our stereo!
Aye! Adorno indeed, you fellow over-educated monster, xoxo
Oh fuck me, what a tool. Only when drunk can the random thought ‘I wonder who the classical equivalents of the obscure indie bands we listen to might be’ turn into an entire, slightly pompous post.
As an excuse, me and Mrs. Toad were about four bottles of wine down for the evening by this point, going on five.
Were you still holding hands?
We always hold hands, you cynical old fucker, because we fucking like each other, so there.
That applies in reverse, as well.
…in reverse?
We like fucking each other.
Ta-daaah! Yes, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
I couldn’t figure that one out either.
How much did you have to pay Chutters to set that one up for you?
Christ.
Tee hee. Well it was all getting a bit fucking intellectual, so I felt the need to reduce the thread to my own level of superficial ignorance.
Mission accomplished. Well done.
I just felt a little pompous, pontificating about subjects about which I know nothing at all, when the whole thing was simple an idle thought in a off-license one evening.
but you’d already said you liked each other….thats what made it sound so fucking stupid!!!
Erm, read the two again, Chutters. There’s a subtle difference between the two statements.
oh i get it now…..dirty boy
It was barely funny at the time, but god it seems crap now I’ve waited almost two days for you to get it.