10 Music Peeves I’d Throw Down a Black Hole
Wired’s Raw File photography blog recently published a list of 10 Photography Pet Peeves they’d throw down a black hole.
I think it’s a great list, and since I’m in a bit of a creative rut while searching for a new job, here’s 10 Music Peeves I’d Throw Down a Black Hole.
1) Blatant mistakes in recordings
Having been involved in a few semi-professional recordings, I understand that sometimes you are under time pressure and that you might not have enough of whatever storage medium your audio engineer is using to document the performance. But seriously, in professional, commercial recordings there is no excuse for huge mistakes. It’s like leaving a blooper in a movie instead of taking it out and putting it in the “extra features” on the DVD. For an example, watch (and listen to) the last episode in Fantasia 2000. Towards the end of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, a series of loud timpani strokes separate brass chorales. Tension builds as the brass chorales lengthen, but suddenly there’s a huge aural hole as the timpanist just completely misses, forgets, or neglects to hit the low E-flat (just as the green flying lady opens her wings to shower colored leaves everywhere), in some ways the most powerful note of the entire piece. I can’t imagine what James Levine had to say about that.
2) The over-romanticization of soloists
Yeah I know, the artist-as-hero conception has been around since Beethoven. While some credit does need to be given for those who decide that a career as a section instrumentalist is not for them, what people need to realize is that in many cases the concert master or mistress is just as technically adept as Joshua Bell. Not all instruments are equal in this regard- the piano is, by nature, a solo instrument- but the label of “virtuoso” seems to be overused these days and in my opinion takes away from the status such a title implies. Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninov were virtuosi; Lang Lang is an exceptional pianist. There’s a big difference.
3) Audiophiles
Audiophiles are those who listen to their equipment more than the music they should be listening to. Newsflash: no matter how “good” your speakers are, they’ll always be limited by the room you put them in. Headphones and sound cards “help,” but sound in the absolute sense doesn’t exist. “Concert hall quality” means nothing- there are outstanding concert halls and utterly horrible ones. Concentrate on the music, not the equipment.
4) Overpopulization of bad music
This happens in every genre I suppose, but due to the somewhat abstract nature of classical music it’s particularly damaging. George Gershwin wrote other music on a significantly higher musical plane than Rhapsody in Blue. While Geoffrey Rush certainly played David Helfgott brilliantly in Shine, the second and fourth piano concerti are generally more highly regarded than the third. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture really deserves to go the way of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (that is, totally forgotten and never played) yet despite the ridiculously and almost insultingly crude transition towards the end of the piece (you know, the boring sequence of four-note descents played by the strings just before the coda) it still gets played at every Pops concert on the planet. I could go on, but you get the picture. Just because it’s played often doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.
5) Conductors becoming bigger than the orchestras they conduct
The celebrity conductor is not as old as the celebrity composer (Mozart) or the celebrity soloist (also Mozart), but the celebrity conductor seems to have taken off in recent years. I’m not saying that this very exclusive club is undeserving of praise, I simply would like to point out that their success is possible because of the immense collection of talent following (most of the time ignoring) his or her baton. CD titles that read, “Rattle conducts Britten” or “James Levine and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra” have their precedence reversed.
6) Modern Classical
This is definitely a taste issue, but I honestly can’t stand modern music. When I was playing with a semiprofessional orchestra in Boston they had commissioned a piece from a local composer and were premiering it at NEC. I remember getting the part and literally not knowing which way to place the page on my music stand. Time signatures alternated at 60 Hz and there was no discernable structure that I nor my colleagues could find. One day I was helping the director move equipment and he asked me what I thought about it, and wanting to be polite all I could manage to say was that it was “certainly different.” He then told me in no uncertain terms, “I can’t believe we wasted our money on this.” To each their own.
7) Collection junkies
Everybody knows one guy or gal that constantly keeps you updated on the size of their music library. “Man my iTunes library just passed 90 gigabytes.” Wow, great- hope you don’t get your bandwidth throttled from overusing bittorrent. Even if it’s acquired legally, nobody cares. You cannot possibly listen to all of your music on a regular basis, and if you’re human your listening preferences will fixate on a very small fraction of your collection for a while and then move on. Don’t use your large music library as a starting point for a discussion about Apple “needing” to come out with a larger iPod, and don’t use it as a conversation starter.
Ensembles that aim high. Too high.
Setting aside all of the “reach for the stars” rhetoric, you have to know your limits. Enthusiasm only goes so far, and if you’re in a skill-deficient ensemble you should not be shooting for the moon. Ensembles that overreach sound terrible, it’s embarrassing for the musicians and the conductor, and it makes the audience exceedingly uncomfortable. To any student ensemble director: choose your pieces wisely and hold admission auditions.
9) Weird Album Compilations
“Best of” and “mood” albums drive me nuts. Usually they’re poorly thought out with a jumble of unrelated works thrown together and sold without a second thought. Who wants to listen to 80 minutes of Adagios? Individual movements of symphonies or concertos are seldom intended to be listened to individually without context, even if a movement is “separated” from the rest of the work. Do yourself a favor and buy or listen to complete works. Avoid compilations like the plague!
10) DRM
I understand why DRM exists and what it intends to protect against, but everyone knows that it doesn’t work. Recording companies like to post big statistics about slashed revenue and the total evaporation of the traditional, physical-media based industry- but somehow they’re missing the obvious (or perhaps they’re in denial) fact that the market is leaving their system in the dust. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if they stopped paying software engineers millions to develop easily-circumvented electronic protection systems that and instead hired a few economists or industry leaders to sit down and think about how to revamp their entire business model and bring it into the 21st century.
Those are my ten biggest musical pet peeves. Do you have any? Leave them in the comments.
Technorati Tags: DRM, Stravinsky, Firebird Suite, James Levine, timpanist, recording, media, audiophiles, soloist, Lang Lang, Vladimir Horowitz, 1812 Overture, Shine, Geoffrey Rush, David Helfgott, Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto, symphony, modern music
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