Interesting article, but I wonder if the author has gotten carried away with his conclusions: that “classical music ennobles bullshit, encasing turds in gold that glitters without masking the stench” and about “the rot at the heart of the classical music industry, where name-dropping passes as a substitute for ability;... and where a résumé is grounds for utter suspension of disbelief.”
My own contact with classical music these days is limited to listening to recordings I enjoy and occasionally watching concerts on YouTube. From this distance, it doesn’t seem to be bullshit or name-dropping; the performers seem talented and dedicated (and almost certainly underpaid), and the contemporary compositions seem thoughtful, creative, and ambitious. Does anybody here closer to the creation and performance of classical music than I am have any thoughts about this article?
I came away with the exact same conclusion as you. The article describes a rather commonplace career of fraud; more or less every industry has them. There’s nothing unique to classical music here; it’s human nature to generally take people at their word about their past accomplishments, to be impressed by famous names, and to allow their critical judgment to be influenced by what they think they know.
I think the author did quite well at explaining how Classical music's industry engenders this though: Foision was literally being given awards and prizes based solely on his made-up CV rather than his actual music. Sure that's not inherently unique, but it was convincing enough to me that there are structural problems inherent to how credential-and-"fame" focused the classical industry is, based on the articles arguments.
That said, I think the fraud itself is small, so perhaps the conclusion is too grand; but it's not out of nowhere either, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the arguments made.
These sweeping conclusions are extreme. As a regular listener (and occasional, amateur, performer) of classical music, I find it dismissive and ignorant that the author chooses to paint so many talented musicians with the same brush.
He is instead critizicing that so many talented musicians go unheard because of the name dropping culture of those credentialed enough to be at the top.
Or worded differently, there's no innate talent at the top unless it has been "certified" by insiders.
Indeed. Yuja Wang is such a talent on piano that she makes some old things like Prok 2's cadenza sound new just because she plays every note perfectly with wonderful musicality and doesn't just pedal and slam her way through it like everyone else does. Many such generational talents are giving performances at an orchestra near you!
Hum, from the conclusions of the somewhat parallel case of Hans Franke (which is about a catalog of ca. 800 "lost" works and 87 "preserved" works, and a fraudulent CV, as well), already referred to by @dfan in this very thread,
> All in all, the impression one gets is of a complacent, incurious German musical establishment which was not interested at all in Franke or his music but was happy to help Franke's daughter establish her foundation and secure funding from it.
Also my conclusion. Not from personal experience, but the article itself doesn’t seem to justify that classical music ecosystem enables such bullshit. It seemed the fraud had a pretty small impact, which the fraudster being caught pretty quickly.
I feel that any industry or community are vulnerable to some small scale fraud like this.
The fraud investigation and story were pretty interesting and well written though
A bit of an older story, but apparently Beethoven was also plagued by copycats throughout his career, from Steibelt to Gelinek. It got so bad that Gelinek would drop by unannounced and actually eavesdrop on Beethoven while he was composing, then hurry home to create themes based on the motifs he heard. It got to the point where Beethoven actually had to physically flee from his home.
Tangentially related (since Steibelt was a bit of a plagiarist himself) but the piano duel between him and Beethoven must have been a sight to behold.
Weird piece. First, the "name dropping" claim comes after an event in which no name was dropped. It was plagiarism of a work that had been (almost) forgotten. That's certainly something that plagues classical music. There are many wonderful composers whose works are rarely performed. It's as if there are scores of emporers, all regally clothed. That adjective doesn't really work here, does it?
Name dropping in program notes and cd liner booklets (which are still being made for downloadable music, by the way) is a thing, that's true. But it's one of the few objective things you can say about a musician. People like winners. It's advertisement.
But then comes the "WTF" moment of the article:
> Many classical music lovers still reject aesthetic developments made over a century ago
Here, the author seems to think he has the high ground, and discredits everyone who doesn't like 'modern' music. I don't think it suits anyone to judge someone over taste, and it certainly doesn't help the popularity of classical music. One could just as easily argue that people who listen to modern music are poseurs who aggrandize their importance by name dropping the difficult pieces they pretend to enjoy.
See how easy that is? No facts or logic needed, and the accusation is almost irrefutable.
So, whatever the point of the article is, I think the author doesn't manage to lend it credit. Rather, it's another empty piece, in the style so common of art criticism, where haughty dismissal of common opinion passes for knowledge and understanding.
(No one has written up an article about Franke to my knowledge, so if you're curious you'll have to read through the thread. It's interesting to see the investigation occur in real time, though.)
This thing happens a lot in other fields. For example, once a scientist is discovered to have committed fraud by manipulating a photograph of results in a paper, people immediately start looking at their other papers and find other examples as it is very unlikely that someone will do this only once.
In general it seems regular pattern in fraud. All sorts and specially financial. Things start small and then they are either repeated or grown in scale and eventually are caught. There is probably lot of one time fraud that does not get caught. But serial cases are the pattern when caught.
This is common in cases of plagiarism, fabulists, & serial fabricators: "there's never just one cockroach in the kitchen". The same way Elisabeth Bik will spot one falsified image in a scientific paper and then immediately flag another dozen papers by the same author.
Once you start looking with the assumption of bad faith, the problems often jump out. Before that, no one wants to look, and there's preference falsification and silence. It's likely that some people noticed both of those before, but decided not to die on that hill. Similar to how apparently quite a few Democrats had noticed Joe Biden's decline over the past year, and concerning incidents back at least 5 years, but kept silent until it became safe to leak to journalists or go on the record once everyone else was too.
So, when you don't see clusters exposed, and people getting away with the usual excuses like 'it was just an isolated incident, a single misjudgment', you know they are still there - that just means that they are going undetected. Many fabricators similar to Francesca Gino or Dan Ariely have gotten away with it because 'oh no, the original data was lost / proprietary / confidential / mere summary', and it's just not possible after the fact to find the smoking gun, rather than some acrid smoke and an empty shell casing, which could have been dropped by anyone. (This is why 'plagiarism' is such an effective audit and the DNA testing of academia: because a plagiarist is probably doing those other things too, but you can't prove that as easily as you can 'this paragraph is identical to a previously published paragraph but there was no citation to it'.)
Classical musicians train for decades to develop good musical memory and the ability to audiate scores (read them and hear what they should sound like). Combine that with the fact that the crowd that likes new music is highly-educated and tight-knit and it's no surprise.
The same goes for professors who spend decades learning to understand experiments who can sniff out bullshit in papers.
>Though two decades old, Foison’s brief success reveals the rot at the heart of the classical music industry, where name-dropping passes as a substitute for ability; where many audiences would rather be coddled than challenged; and where a résumé is grounds for utter suspension of disbelief.
It goes deeper than this. Modern audiences largely don't understand or appreciate the music as anything other than an excuse to break out the fancy clothes and have a night out. That's not a problem per se, but it does lead to things like complete hacks getting big as performers (Lang Lang) or composers (Max Richter). Because why would a modern audience watching Lang Lang on late night television understand that he's flubbing half the notes and stomping all over the quality of the music?
It's very interesting to think back to the Rite of Spring and how the audience rioted over it, as audiences were quickly trained into eating shit and thanking the composer for it. Part of the death of modernity was that cultural expectations and norms ceased to be, and so the kind of cultural expectations (that were subverted) that Rite of Spring's audience held just don't exist anymore. Every piece is now the composer telling you something about themselves in particular, usually in an overly programmatic way, not a composer trying to write a compelling piece in a particular style.
So once you lobotomize your audience, what do you expect? You train the critical aspect out of them, turn music appreciation into an academic affair so lofty that harsh critical statements like mine are viewed as "snobby" vs people saying "Nickelback sucks!" being treated as normal and reasonable.
Poptimism came for the classical music world and had about the same effect as it did on the rock/indie scene.
Classical music was never mainstream. I dont have a number, but I guess the number of people performing and, more important, enjoying classical music today is way way more than in the past.
I was under the impression that Beethoven and the other famous composers after him were pretty big and known internationally in a word without internet. I would call that “mainstream”
If you are talking about 20th century, then I would agree with you
This was before radio or recordings, and only the very top of wealth and power could listen to one of the few symphony orchestras performing Beethoven's compositions.
Within that small privileged world he was indeed famous across the planet.
> only the very top of wealth and power could listen to one of the few symphony orchestras performing Beethoven's compositions.
Oh?
From The Education of Henry Adams:
"""
When his companions insisted on passing two or three afternoons in the week at music-halls, drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and
looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played dull music, Adams went with them for the sake of the company, but with no
pretence of enjoyment; and when Mr. Apthorp gently protested that he exaggerated his indifference, for of course he enjoyed Beethoven, Adams
replied simply that he loathed Beethoven; and felt a slight surprise when Mr. Apthorp and the others laughed as though they thought it
humor. He saw no humor in it. He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. Sitting thus at his beer-table, mentally impassive, he was one day surprised to notice that his mind followed
the movement of a Sinfonie. He could not have been more astonished had he suddenly read a new language. Among the marvels of education, this
was the most marvellous. A prison-wall that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell, of its own accord, without so much
as his knowing when it happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new
sense burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that he
could not credit it, and watched it as something apart, accidental, and not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly
become intelligible to him, but he was the more inclined to think that Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily
followed. This could not be called education, for he had never so much as listened to the music.
"""
The Haus-Frauen had the fortune to be in Berlin. Still I think you underrate the reach of musical culture in general.
You're still talking about essentially an aristocrat. I think the question remains more whether contemporaneous non-aristocrats, the vast majority of the population at all times, had exposure to this kind of music.
This talks about how enthusiastic his fans were, but still nothing to indicate that his fandom extended beyond the sphere of aristocratic power that was the main audience for classical music at that time.
The historical record tends to be overwhelmingly biased towards the interests of the ruling classes, mostly because they were the ones creating the historical record. But taking that into account while reading this, and remembering that people outside of this class were the vast majority of people, I don't see any reason to think he had a massive body of fans outside of this small powerful group.
The claim was that "only the rich and powerful could listen to [classical music] played by an orchestra at a dedicated concert hall" thus limiting the general awareness.
While that's as aspirational as having the time off and the money and the luck to attend a taylor Swift Concert today, the hoi pollai were indeed familiar through d/loads today and, in past times, through sheet music in beer halls and smaller parlours - music was widespread throughout society beyond just grand concert halls, it was played by "gypsy" trios and quartets who played their own styles and riffed on motifs by "the greats", Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt, etc.
There were many types of music during the time of Beethoven, he himself embodied at least three distinct styles; Viennese classicism (early), heroic (middle), quartets, chamber and solo (late).
Maybe leave the empty inaccurate quips to other forums?
No, it was not. Well, kind of depends of what you mean by “back then”. But the term classical music is not a modern creation talking about old music.
The term was created while people were creating this genre of music. Classical originally was meant to refer to things from Antique Rome. But, unlike other art forms, like literature and sculpture, no music from Antique Rome survived, no one knew how it sounded.
This kind of created the opportunity to redefine what “classical” meant in music, so a few people decide, centuries ago, that this genre of music would be called “classical” at that time already, not now.
On the contrary, instrumental concert music was a relatively new phenomenon and many people considered it inferior to vocal music or even called it empty noise. The idea that Classical symphonies or sonatas were the popular music of that era is completely wrong. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalmusik (sorry, German only).
Ooh, Now do photography … or abstract painting … or fine wine … or hedge fund. Any field where the judgement of quality is subjective is going to be full of hailed charlatans and unrecognized geniuses. It's one of the true ironies of art.
The story about a two-bit plagiarizer is interesting, but the author doesn't really make the connection between hoim the rest of the music world. He refers to the Lera Auerbach Sonata as "pretentiously banal" but in the same breath says her "work has been performed by some of the best soloists alive." What are we to make of that? That the author is a good judge of the music and performers are poor judges of the music, even though they are presumably more intimately familiar with it?
Maybe it's the music critic who has no clothes, rather than the composer. Maybe we're all naked.
This is your reminder that Claudine Gay is still a professor at Harvard despite the fact that her entire (unimpressive and short) research CV was built on plagiarism.
It's weird how, in the the second-to-last paragraph, the author takes the opportunity to attack a few unrelated composers he just thinks are overrated. Almost as if they were guilty by an association that exists entirely in his mind.
Many threads with the same doubts abt this article. Welcome to the Baffler being the Baffler. Spoiler: It's an ivy league troll newspaper.
While it may make some points along the way, it tends to troll itself as hard as its readers, dazzling all with projected pretentiousness. Don't take it too seriously and you'll be fine. Or if you dare, supplement their trust funds and coastal comedy writers' salaries and subscribe to read some of their other articles.
What a spectacularly dumb, arrogant, hostile article. Yet another critic that assumes that anyone that doesn't love Schoenberg is a reactionary philistine.
Modern composers that aren't opposed to melodies on ideological grounds have found their way into the performance repertoire.
Paper Tigers aren't at all uncommon, particularly away from their domain "hot spots". Australia suffers a great many British types who swan out to the (former) colony and big note their achievements to take top jobs on the basis of bullshit.
eg:
UK-born former West Australian state Labour politician Barry Urban was not so lucky. Since November last year, he's been behind bars.
Urban entered the Western Australian police force in 2005 before moving into parliament in 2017.
He's since been convicted of a number of counts of forgery in relation to the academic degrees that he proffered in his applications to become a police officer.
He claimed to have, and attached to his job applications, a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Leeds and a certificate of higher education and policing from the University of Portsmouth. He also claimed to have been a war crimes investigator in the former Yugoslavia.
None of the claims were true.
Before it returned to China in 1997, plenty of underachieving British people found high-paying jobs in Hong Kong (as well as other colonies and former colonies). They had the acronym "FILTH": "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong".
My own contact with classical music these days is limited to listening to recordings I enjoy and occasionally watching concerts on YouTube. From this distance, it doesn’t seem to be bullshit or name-dropping; the performers seem talented and dedicated (and almost certainly underpaid), and the contemporary compositions seem thoughtful, creative, and ambitious. Does anybody here closer to the creation and performance of classical music than I am have any thoughts about this article?