What Am I?
If you’re a musician who works in what used to be considered the classical end of the business you’ll know (or have been hearing that) you’re in the middle of an identity crisis. Or maybe it’s a marketing crisis. A crisis of community?
If all you’re doing is playing music from the 19th century, fair enough. But if you’re making new music – what do you call this thing, this what-once-upon-a-time-was-called-classical-music thing?
“Classical” reeks of not-now-ness, while everything else you can call it communicates try-hard-ism, bewilderment, selling out, or disengagement.
So: I am music that connects with the classical tradition in some way, possibly but not necessarily using instruments used in the traditional Western orchestra, possibly but not necessarily using forms from the classical tradition, possibly but not necessarily engaging with the intellect through sound, possibly but not necessarily anticipating audiences to listen attentively. This creative endeavour is possibly but not necessarily emanating from training my creators/practitioners may or may not have had in classical musical traditions and may or may not be supported by a classical music commissioning and performance-funding infrastructure.
What am I? Should I even have a name? Should I just go about my business without a calling card? Is description of what I am even possible? What AM I?
This blog is for exploring this question forensically, macroscopically, up hill and down dale, and all til the cows come home. Join in, rock out, riff, jam, harmonise, improvise, sample, mix, mash-up, download, sing in the shower and/or whistle while you work; there are marks for participation.
Classical music: if you’re doing it new, are you doing it wrong?
AnimalVegetableClassical 
One cannot help but envy Mozart and his cohorts who would have looked puzzled and said, “Is this not simply music?”
Can envy turn to emulation?
No, because there is the eternal, and very natural, human desire to put things in pigeon-holes in order to make sense of them in our minds. And it’s all the stronger now that we have a canon to take care of as well as new creations.
Besides, even Mozart had his pigeon-holes, although these tended to set out genres of musical composition rather than styles (opera, symphony, concerto, Nachtmusik… with the occasional reference to something being “old”).
But perhaps we could give thought to emulating the old manner. Rather than trying to pin stylistic labels on an increasingly fluid art form with versatile practitioners who don’t sit still, perhaps we should turn to more genre-oriented labels.
For example, there’s orchestral music, chamber music, electro-acoustic, opera, vocal or choral, concert music, theatre music, ballet/dance music, etc. (There would be many more, and they’d often overlap.) The goal would not be to pin it down, but to give an idea of the forces and the context.
What a great idea for a blog! I can’t wait to read your take on the “upheaval” in the classical word these days, what this means, and why is it happening now.
After being away from the piano for a while and then a few years of presenting a series of free-improvisation salon concerts and even performing in one by rolling rubber balls around inside the piano, I’ve returned to actually playing my favorite pieces of classical piano music this year and it feels like I’ve “come home.”
I’ve been thinking lately that just as Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” can be found in storytelling – movies and literature – it’s also present in the great works of classical music (just think of the sonata form).
Could it be that the classical music world is on its own “Hero’s Journey” and is now in the “initiation” stage and will eventually emerge changed, but somehow stronger?
I am not sure we need to label things, though it is easier to explain something new if it has a name. Can we just enjoy the new directions without a giving them a name?
I totally agree with Lynda Irvine here!