Here is an article from today's Daily Telegraph:
What will the music of the new millennium sound like?
Simon Rattle, who has championed the music of this century, looks
forward to the next with John Whitley OVER the past eight years,
Britain's best-known conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, has been living in
the past, working his way, decade by decade, through the music of
our century in a series of concerts called Towards the Millennium.
With a concert next Saturday at London's Festival Hall, he has finally
reached the Eighties, and he can now begin to look towards the future,
and think about what the shape of classical music is likely to be after
the year 2000.
"I have no doubt that there will be classical music concerts in the
next century," he insists. "It's much harder to predict exactly what
form they will take because things are changing in the way we perform,
and we must make them change even faster and more radically.
"But I'm quite sure that we'll want to hear music live - not just on
CDs or videos. There are all kinds of areas where the live experience
will be more important than ever. In Japan, you know, the idea of
the virtual girlfriend is very popular: many relationships are
suffering from the man having girlfriends that exist only in virtual
reality. And, just as I don't believe that the future lies in
cyber-sex, I do think that there are certain things - such as human
discourse, friendship and music - which are meant to be live."
Relaxed and slightly jet-lagged after a trip to California, Rattle
speaks with the directness and conviction that characterises his
music-making. Though, at only 44, his famous helmet of curly hair
has turned grey, he has lost none of the passion that saw him drive
his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra up to international standard
in 13 years, and refuse to compromise over his programmes of modern
scores.
Recordings, he argues, are an aid, not a substitute: "The problem
with the new technology is that musicians have used it for profit
rather than for lifting the art. Karajan was a great man, a great
conductor, but he's got a lot to answer for. His media empire built
up the expectation that electronic reproduction would provide the
best of all possible musical worlds. But to be limited to recordings
is like choosing snapshots of your children over the children themselves
- the point is the real, live thing."
Even so, Rattle acknowledges that modern live music is advancing
cautiously by comparison with the ferment of the 1890s, when new
music, painting and literature set the civilised world in a permanent
uproar. Only last year, several distinguished performers, led by
Julian Lloyd Webber, described the shortage of new work as a crisis,
and a huge cash fund called Masterprize was set up to entice previously
unpublished composers into writing music that the public might actually
want to listen to.
"People are trying to pull together strands of this century, and we
don't quite know where it's going. This is a time of consolidation
and a time of knowledge-sharing in every way," says Rattle.
Even the one-time radicals of the period performance movement are
now embraced by the mainstream. "It is certainly necessary to have
the extremists - to swing very far in one direction. Thank goodness
for people who will go way out on a limb and take risks to discover
something very valuable."
But these discoveries have been made at the expense of enthusiasm
for new music from a public alienated by the defiantly hermetic scores
of another set of extremists - Boulez, Stockhausen and those around
the Darmstadt School in the Fifties. "It was a time when people were
trying to create a new language because they felt that the old one
had let them down completely, that it had climaxed in tragedy.
'Stockhausen and co were the most extraordinary idealists of all,"
Rattle continues, "and I'm sure they felt that one could re-order
the brain enough to accept 12 equal tones. But it is not necessarily
true that you can completely re-educate people's brains. Still, they
provided some extraordinarily inexhaustible music on the way."
So he is clear that what we will hear in the concert hall at the
start of the next century will be a reaction against such remote and
wilfully difficult compositions: "There's no doubt that music is
becoming more accessible - it's aiming to include more. It's more
user-friendly, the surface is more beautiful. There's also now such
a wide range of references, of so many different types of music - so
many influences are changing composers.
"I loathe the term 'world music' - it must have been invented by
people trying to pigeonhole CDs. But there are so many different
types available. One does not have to wait, as in the 1890s, for
the orchestra from Bali to come to Paris to be stunned by music from
the East.
"I think its influence often goes in the back door - the way that
different types of music are put together, the way that, in Indian
music, rhythms are added to each other. That's been immensely
important and that will become even more important as the world
becomes a smaller and smaller place."
Indeed, Rattle's list of talents to watch for in the next century is
determinedly global: "There are all sorts of really tremendous things
arriving from outside Europe and America. Tan Dun has written some
very interesting music and Unsuk Chin from Korea is full of wonderful
potential. Takemistsu was such a powerful figure in Japanese music
that it may be only now that we start to hear of other Japanese
composers."
And Rattle has backed more local young lions with commissions -
Mark-Anthony Turnage, Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Ades: "That's just
three out of the hat. Each of them is really forging their own
language, using many elements of what has gone before, but absolutely
and immediately recognisable as their own.
"Turnage's Blood on the Floor is the most successful synthesis of
improvised jazz and classical music there has yet been, and it's an
immensely important step forward. He uses many different types of
music, spoken in his accent.
"Then, in the big orchestra piece that Ades wrote for us [Asyla],
there are references to Parsifal just as there are references to rave
music in the third part - basically deconstructed techno. There's
no reason why those two should not sit alongside one another. And
it may be that, in 20 years, we'll wonder what we were so worried
about; couldn't we have seen this generation of talented composers
coming? Maybe they couldn't see it in the 1890s either."
But even if there is a return to scores one can whistle along to,
how will they be performed, and will a 70-year-old Rattle still don
his tails to ascend a podium? "Certainly the new technologies are
going to change a great deal. If I was running Covent Garden, I
would say that there is a day every fortnight when this house is
entirely open to everybody on the Internet, when everyone can see
what is happening. This is where we would allow people electronically
into the house, to learn how things happen, to answer the question
'What do you do during the day?'
"But what will remain is that concert-giving will have an element of
ceremony about it. It will remind people in a noisy age that there
is a place where you need silence, and that places in the modern
world where there are 10 seconds of silence are shockingly unusual.
"That doesn't mean it has to be a 19th-century ceremony. It's likely
to be closer to Theatre de Complicite than to Sarah Bernhardt, with
that sort of rough vitality. You need to hear the rough edges - if
you have a chauffeured-limo drive through Beethoven's symphonies or
string quartets it means you have missed something."
Above all, this ceremony will be performed by a new kind of musician
and it is here that Rattle the peripatetic maestro, who commands
huge fees from appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic and his EMI
recordings, is transformed into Rattle the low-tech educationalist:
"Both the audiences and the orchestras have to be rejuvenated - not
necessarily by bringing in young people.
"The approach will be quite different, and education will become
as important as performance. In future, musicians will not only be
auditioned for an orchestral post on the basis of how well they play,
but also how well they can communicate their love and knowledge of
all types of music.
"The links with the local community are going to become more and more
important. There are very few places in the world where to be a
musician is like being a football star, where music is so important
to people that they will come to it whatever. We'll have to continually
present ourselves to people so that they need us in their lives."
In fact, Rattle foresees larger groups of musicians, and a lot less
jet-setting: "The idea of a community of musicians is probably going
to be the way forward - where people are involved in a range of
things, not only music but education, research, discussions. So the
body of performers may be larger rather than smaller - a company of
people with many different skills who are based in a specific area,
as we have tried to do in Birmingham."
One casualty of this shift to community work will be the star system,
with its inflated fees and drop-in performers, something that Rattle
welcomes, despite being a part of it: "I react very badly to this.
It is something that can't go on, just as the recording industry as
we know it can't go on. Things are changing, and it won't necessarily
all be bad."
This makes it a particularly appropriate moment for Rattle himself
to be looking for a new home. Since he left the CBSO last August,
he has had no shortage of rumoured offers - from Karajan's old band,
the Berlin Philharmonic, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Even
Covent Garden have made a bid, though it's clear he remains unimpressed
- "That is not something that I am eager to do."
So, with both his career and the millennium on the cusp, Rattle's
reflections suggest a different job description - one where a new
breed of conductor is given the time, the money and the virtuoso
performers to bring music back into the centre of their community's
life.
But, as he adds with a laugh, "We can't know what the next revolution
is. I cheerfully look forward to being considered grotesquely out
of date."
Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.
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