Our new neighbours invited us to dinner the other day and showed us their latest musical toy. It's called Sonos and it is a wireless hi-fi system. It's controlled by a little palmtop remote computer thingy. All you need is a subscription to something like Spotify or Napster and a speaker in the right spot, and bingo: you have, literally at your fingertips, a vast library of music of any and every genre.So here's the game. You choose a theme along which you'll make your selection - our host decided we should do "Guilty Pleasures" - and you pass the Sonos to the left, each taking a turn to add a piece of music to the queue, without letting anyone see what you've chosen. It's easy to use, though you have to watch out for those guests who like to click "Play next" instead of "Add to queue", hence overriding everything programmed beforehand, and simultaneously manage to set the thing to the whole of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
But once you've rapped that particular person over the knuckles, you hear Joseph Calleja right beside Tom Jones, Elvis next to a Schubert Impromptu, a selection from The Nutcracker beside a track sung by a pleasant, distinctive voice I didn't recognise, who turned out to be SuBo.
You get chocolate brownie points for choosing something on the evening's theme that nobody expected from you. It's not always easy to predict reactions: my Serge Gainsbourg choice seemed to leave everyone cold (how?), but I earned a round of applause for 'Careless Whisper' (we were all young in 1985...). And a bottle or two of Merlot later, our hostess, who says she listens mostly to rock music, astonished us all by singing along to The Queen of the Night.
Novelty value? Undoubtedly. But it's a little more as well. Like blogging back in 2004, this is a whole new and revolutionary notion. The old divisions can vanish: a Bach fan can admit fondness for Billy Joel, but also a rock chick can can discover she enjoys a spot of Wagner. Instead of "classical music" being ghettoised beside a soaring quotient of different popular genres, everything becomes fair game in the Sonos game.
Let's get rid of the division of music into popular and classical. Let's just have music as music. Just as Saint-Saens said, there is only good music, bad music...and the music of Ambroise Thomas.
4 comments:
Now this sounds like one fun dinner party! Similar to a book or movie discussion but much better because of the sheer volume of music and the fact that it is immediately accessible and ready for sharing. Wish I had neighbors like yours...
It would be lovely if classical music could break out of its ghetto, so more people would be able to enjoy it unselfconsciously. Perhaps one way of breaking down those barriers would be to discourage people from using the term "guilty pleasure". Snobbery, though you'll find it in most art forms, unfortunately seems to attach itself to music more than the rest, and to every genre. Social groups in my son's secondary school define themselves by the music genres and artists they like, and even more importantly by those they despise. A jazz fan I know was being quizzed by another to determine if he was worth talking to "Who is your favourite singer?" "Ummm Billie Holiday I…" "Correct" was the reply. Some of the worst can be found in the audience (and ahem naming no names even among the critics) for classical music and opera. Earlier this summer one such said to me at Glyndebourne, dripping with condescension "I only come here for the singing" and complaining that he could see nothing funny in something that had the rest of the audience rolling in the aisles. Indeed any overtly entertaining production will often initially attract slightly sniffy reviews (not from you Jess of course) that accuse it of pandering to it's audience.
We all enjoyed the Olympics this summer without being experts. Though the best commentary deepens your understanding, you didn't need to know about lactic acid build up in a sprinter's muscles, you understood at a gut level what was happening. People should not be put down if their musical appreciation is similar, because that gut level response is the only one that is truly real, and is what makes music bring us together. And yet too often a classical concert audience is less than welcoming (e.g. http://www.theartsdesk.com/classical-music/opinion-how-much-noise-too-much-noise-classical-concert-hall ).
Perhaps the tribalism that underlies all forms of snobbery is too deep rooted to be rid of it entirely, but I don't believe it has to be quite as bad as it is here in the UK. The French seem much more relaxed. Maybe it goes back to Debussy and Ravel incorporating elements of ragtime and jazz in their compositions, and of course they have always treated jazz musicians with a respect that is rare elsewhere. They also have a radio station that plays the kind of musical mix your party enjoyed. It's called FIP http://www.fipradio.fr/player where you might hear Scarlatti, Sinatra, Salif Keita, the Skalites and Shakira and a whole lot of stuff you won't know in the same playlist, (e.g. this pm I heard this bit of silly fun, Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" by Pink Turtle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7uj7RW7YuY ).
James, I do agree about musical snobbery. But to be fair, I don't think the term "guilty pleasures" is a problem: it wasn't directed solely at our musical tastes. Music can build up associations with...well, other stuff. Like what we were up to in 1985. :)
Back in the late 40's and early 50's before the big boys really got to work stratifying and segmenting the music market lots of us for whom gramophone records were very expensive simply tottered along to the local halls to see and listen to whatever was on. We did not worry too much whether it was Mr. Halle's band, trad jazz, mod jazz, dance music, screen stars or popular song. The local music hall was fun too, if you could understand the jokes in an era of censorship.
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