Classical music marketing and hell (not related)
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Okay, so I think it’s very cool that COVID tests are a thing: thank you science for creating little easy-to-use kits that I can use at home to confirm that I likely do not have COVID.
But, science? A tiny suggestion? Maybe you can get on making an even better test where, if my result comes back negative for COVID, it tells me what is actually wrong with me. (“Hooray, you don’t have COVID, and the reason you feel like crap is because you’re stressed and you didn’t sleep well last night,” for example.)
I realize this might be hard for you, science, but I believe in you and, more importantly, I am very bad at figuring out at any given point why I feel unwell and I desperately need you to tell me.
Today’s newsletter will be short because I have felt not great all week and I have been experiencing terrible eye strain and constant headaches, and I still don’t know the reason. There is a small possibility that the incredibly tight deadline I have of learning a new concerto and getting it performance-with-an-orchestra ready in less than a month is causing significant enough stress that it is ~manifesting~ in my body, and if that’s the case…lol, because the tiredness and eye strain are actively making it more difficult for me to get the damn job done.
One thing that helped a lot, though, was that when Patricia heard that I was struggling to work with normal-sized music, she created a large print version of the concerto for me. Look how blessedly huge these notes are:
The sort of unintended side effect of having ABSURDLY BIG NOTES is that it makes technically difficult music look like a children’s primer, which kind of makes it seem easier in my mind. New life hack just dropped.
Earlier this week I was musing on all the philosophical discourse around AI-generated art and music, and can I just say how much I hate having to think about AI? I’m an analog girlie—I play acoustic piano, I drive stick-shift, I fill my fountain pens from ink bottles, and up until recently I gave musical feedback by writing pencil sketches on manuscript paper and taking photos of it. Do I have intelligible thoughts about machine learning, when pressed? Sure, but I’d much rather be left to play with my pencils and inks and an instrument that requires me to call an expensive technician whenever the levers in it start clicking. Please don’t make me think about how computers think and—argh, it’s too late.
I tweeted some broad thoughts about how classical music is marketed in the modern era and why I think it’s so often made to undermine itself, and I’m serious about wanting someone else to write about this because I really don’t want to have to write about it myself. [Proceeds to write about it]
Basically, I think so many of the stock reasons that classical music defenders provide for why it’s worth listening to (or, even worse, why it’s superior to other art forms) have only set the scene for the art form’s own devaluation. I absolutely do not mean this in a handwringing “AI will kill classical music!!!!!” kind of way—it’s more that the economics of music making (and listening) continue to shift and if we keep harping on things like “it’s relaxing!” or “it’s mathematically complicated!” it’s going to be harder to make a case for why the genre—which is ridiculously labor- and resource-intensive by design—should be valued and supported when technology (not just AI) continues to make it easier and cheaper to produce music along the “relaxing” and “complex” axes.
I think we’re seeing a similar thing happening in visual arts with NFTs and now AI. While I’m aware that NFTs began with the goal of supporting artists, the thing I saw in the NFT craze was that the people really going all in on the concept were not doing so because they primarily loved art and wanted to financially support artists—they were people who had bought into the idea of art ownership as a status symbol and believe that if you own the right works, you have an investment that will provide future financial returns. (I’m painting with a broad brush here—no pun intended. I’m not here to make aesthetic moral judgments, and I’m sure there were at least some people who found the Bored Apes very visually pleasing, and “bought” them for that reason.)
Art representing status and wealth is, of course, not a new concept, and arguably art has played that economic role since the dawn of humanity, and I don’t know how to reconcile my distaste with art as a vehicle for holding wealth with my belief that art is and should be valued highly in our society. But the very logical endgame of this line of thinking is this: if art serves an economic function, then logically the way to extract more value out of it is to reduce the human labor that goes into it—and that’s what I’m now seeing with the trend of AI-generated art.
Again, I don’t want to be one of those pearl-clutchers decrying AI as the ender of worlds. AI is a tool—one that’s fancier and more powerful than others, but a tool nonetheless. The part that troubles me is that the line of reasoning I’m seeing from a certain crowd is that AI art is revolutionary because you can now generate custom-made art for yourself without having to pay money to a human being who would have the audacity to charge you a lot of money for their skill and labor and time.
This is not technology suddenly appearing on the scene to destroy systems and livelihoods. This is technology enabling a logical progression based on values people have assigned to art. My very long-winded point: justifying the existence of art and artists by claiming that they serve some kind of function is inherently a losing proposition.
A while back I was looking into ways to promote my own recorded music and, after clicking through a trail of resources for artists, landed on a submission page for an all-classical piano playlist with a purportedly large following. This seemed ideal—after all, it would make sense to encourage people who already like solo piano music to listen to me.
My heart sank as I read through the submission guidelines: all submitted tracks, they said, had to be “pleasant” with no “loud,” “fast,” or “pounding” parts. (That instantly rules out…uh, most pieces written for the piano—even slow works usually build to at least one loud climax.) I realized this wasn’t a playlist for fans of solo classical piano—it was a playlist of soothing ambient background music, in which “classical” served as shorthand for “passive.”
I very briefly considered submitting the Farrenc etude I recorded, which does get loud, but not terribly so, then realized how depressed I’d be for all the passion and thoughtful research I put into that recording to be, in the end, mindless background fodder. (I also didn’t want to become algorithmically linked to the types of playlists and accounts that promote classical music as a calming aural backdrop.)
I make music in the hopes that somebody gives that music a moment of their attention and feels some sort of emotional resonance—and I never fail to marvel at how magical that ephemeral connection is. When someone messages or tweets at me about how a track I recorded brought them to tears, I think about how implausible this web of events is—that I encountered music written by someone long dead who could not imagine my existence, that I poured a lot of mental, physical, and spiritual energy into turning those notes into sound, and that that work would then cause a stranger in the future on the other side of the world to feel something so strongly that they had a physiological reaction. That’s a goddamn miracle. That’s what art is, to me.
(I am not completely sure if any of this train of thought connected in a sensible way—I’m typing through a headache and may very well be hallucinating the philosophical connections here.)
For related reading, a music writer on Twitter reminded me of Jennifer Gersten’s excellent article, “The music industry sells classical as soothing background music — robbing a great art of its power.” It goes into a lot of reasons why the “classical music is relaxing” line is so problematic, and also touches on the issues of selling it as something superior to popular music.
I also got a lot out of Jaime Brooks’ piece, “The Last Recording Artist,” which is long but a very worthwhile read—it puts AI and music technology in the context of larger issues in the recording industry, streaming, and the commercialization of music.
Thomas Adès’ Dante was one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard at the LA Phil (other all-time favorites: Nokuthula Ngwenyama’s “Primal Message,” Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations, and Xian Zhang’s Beethoven 7th which I still won’t shut up about). So imagine my sheer delight when I discovered that the entire work has been recorded and is now available to stream.
Earlier this week my head and eyes were so achey and I was so tired and useless that I turned off all the lights, put Dante on very loud, and lay down with a heated eye mask. Turns out, lying in the dark blasting Adès’ balletic depiction of Hell is my idea of having a good time, and I highly recommend it. While no recording holds a candle to the experience of hearing the work live in a concert hall, it’s still a solid, very enjoyable listen (good speakers or headphones/earphones are a must, as with all classical music, and frankly, the louder the better).
I am off to rest my poor noggin for a bit before I dive back into emails (so many emails!) and other assorted tasks. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!