This post is written by network member Dr. Penny Brandt.

The Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy has been tracking representation of music by women composers in “regular season ‘Classical’ programs” of the top twenty-one orchestras in the United States for the last three years. Their research reveals a very slight trend upwards in the numbers, which are delineated by different metrics (composer numbers vs. works numbers, for instance) on their website.[1] WPA notes that the numbers would be different if they included non-mainstage performances. “For example, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has a fantastic new music series titled Green Umbrella . . . [with] many exciting new commissions by contemporary women.” Similarly, the Seattle and National Symphony Orchestras are presenting music by women in “Family Concerts.” The trend of including women in non-mainstage programming is not exclusive to orchestras. The Metropolitan Opera of New York announced last year that it will be working with composer Missy Mazzoli, but added that the company will “venture beyond the walls of its opera house to collaborate with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Public Theater” — an admission that the Met Opera production of Mazzoli’s chamber opera is slated to take place outside of Lincoln Center.[2]

In his 2005 Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin recommends the practice of “mainstreaming” — an activist practice of including lesser-known works by women composers in order to advance the political and social causes of women in present times.[3] He credits this practice for his inclusion of a cantata by Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677) in his History of Western Music in lieu of one by “the more famous and prolific [Giacomo] Carissimi” (1605–1674), with the hope that “mainstreaming may constructively counteract the unfounded assumption that women are lacking in innate capacity to compose.”[4] Many scholars (particularly the so-called “new musicologists” of the latter half of the twentieth century) have worked to identify the ways in which our aesthetic sensibilities have generated an exclusive canon full of “dead white men in wigs.”[5] Taruskin correctly identifies ways in which our societal concept of “greatness” is closely aligned with maleness, but while we can applaud his decision to “mainstream” women into his textbooks in 2005, we can also see the damage done when he framed his decision as a choice with the goal of performing activism and by immediately comparing Strozzi to Carissimi.

Artistic Directors and scholars must take care that they do not undo their own activism in the course of executing diversity initiatives. Advocates and allies for inclusion in music negate their own efforts when they tokenize and “other” composers through clumsy programming and marketing efforts. If music organizations want audiences to embrace diversity in programming, they cannot apologize for inclusion of composers from historically underrepresented groups by over-justifying their decisions or by relegating their music to lesser spaces. How can anyone expect audiences to believe there is great music by composers from historically underrepresented groups if audiences never see these composers programmed in series a titled “Masterworks” or “The Great Classics”?

The Institute for Composer Diversity, in addition to its award-winning database of composers and their music, offers resources for “Best Practices” in programming for inclusion and diversity. Utilizing these resources can help groups to avoid a misfire that inadvertently reinforces the canon. These resources are available on the Institute for Composer Diversity’s “Best Practices” page.

Notes

[1] “2019-2020 Season: By the Numbers” at Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy Blog. Accessed November 29, 2019 at https://wophil.org/2019-2020-season-by-the-numbers/?doing_wp_cron=1560916321.2888329029083251953125

[2] “The Met Is Creating New Operas (Including Its First by Women)” in The New York Times. Accessed November 29, 2019 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/arts/music/metropolitan-opera-bam-public-theater-women.html

[3] Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 78.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Sophie Fuller, “Dead White Men in Wigs: Women and Classical Music,” in Girls! Girls! Girls! : essays on women and music, ed. Sarah Cooper (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Dr. Penny Brandt is Adjunct Lecturer in Musicology at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin, the Artistic Director of the Women Composers Festival of Hartford, and a freelance musician, scholar, and writer.

This post is written by network participant Doug Bott.

The National Open Youth Orchestra (NOYO) is a world first, an ambitious ensemble launched in September 2018 to give some of the UK’s most talented young disabled musicians a progression route. NOYO promotes musical excellence, empowering disabled and non-disabled musicians aged 11-25 to train and perform together as members of a pioneering orchestra.

NOYO is co-delivered by Barbican / Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Bristol Music Trust, the National Centre for Inclusive Excellence and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Young disabled musicians have come to NOYO through a range of other accessible programmes including Orchestras for All, Drake Music and Open Orchestras. For NOYO to succeed we need to continue building a national ecology of accessible opportunities in music, together with an expanding number of partners, to ensure that young disabled people nationwide:

1. Have equal opportunities to learn a musical instrument, acoustic or electronic
2. Can develop their musicianship through a range of programmes at different levels
3. Have the option to pursue a career in music

NOYO aims to create the conditions for young disabled musicians to shape not only their own future, but also the future of orchestras. Here’s Jamie, NOYO saxophonist, on their first six months with NOYO:

I feel powerful. Like, the preconceptions that other people have had, and that I have had about myself, I’ve beaten those. Because I’m now part of this group, I can beat those ideas.

At NOYO, we believe that young disabled musicians can redefine the very idea of ‘the Orchestra’, tackling inequality, inspiring new musical instruments and creating new musical forms for the 21st century. NOYO can be a catalyst for the evolution of the orchestra as a vital artistic force in contemporary culture.

NOYO is informed by a Sound Connections Feasibility Study and rooted in the Social Model of Disability, aiming to remove barriers that might otherwise prevent talented young disabled musicians from fulfilling their potential. Such barriers can include:

Instruments: musicians who may not be in a position to play traditional orchestral instruments are excluded by the four conventional sections of an orchestra (strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion). NOYO accommodates a wide range of both acoustic and electronic instruments including the Clarion, which can be played with any part of the body, including the eyes.

Music: the inviolable nature of much orchestral repertoire presents barriers to disabled musicians who may require more flexibility (reasonable adjustments) in certain aspects of their music-making. It also limits the potential diversity of instruments that orchestras might otherwise include. NOYO commissions ‘modular’ [1] repertoire to enable a greater diversity of both players and instrumentation.

Entry requirements: many young disabled musicians haven’t benefitted from a music education that can equip them with musical qualifications. NOYO is developing a more equitable but still rigorous set of entry requirements to recruit young musicians who can demonstrate musical ‘passion, potential and perseverance’, without the need for ‘grades’.

Low expectations: a lack of disabled musical role models hampers the expectations of young disabled people, their families and teachers. NOYO aims to create new role models by publicly showcasing the excellence that young disabled musicians can achieve, through a progression route that develops the professional disabled musicians of the future.

Overcoming these barriers presents significant challenges not only for the National Open Youth Orchestra, but also for the ‘orchestral sector’ as a whole. I look forward to discussing these challenges with other network members.

Notes

[1] Please note, our use of the word ‘modular’ in this context doesn’t follow the definition coined by Stefano Vagnini. It’s possible that we need a new name for our approach.

This post is written by network contributor Dr. Emilie Capulet.

 “Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century”

–Michael Crichton, Timeline (1999).

Never more than today has the search for authenticity been headline news. It affects our political choices (Shane, 2018), the music we listen to (Peterson, 1997; Speers, 2017; Barker and Taylor, 2007; Dolan, 2010), the artwork we appreciate (Benjamin, 1969; Jenson, 1994), the food we eat (Zukin, 2008), the holidays we go on (Reisinger and Steiner, 2006) and the way we portray our lives on social media (Salisbury and Pooley, 2017). In fiction, authenticity is, for obvious reasons, a more problematic concept, and we find that authenticity is not just linked to notions of plausibility (Stoltzfus, 1988), realism (Funk et al, 2012) and historical accuracy (Brantly, 2017), but it raises the issue of a particular understanding of the text in relation to the figure of the author (Gunning, 2012), or what Ana María Sánchez-Arce has argued is “the discourse or grand narrative that legitimizes knowledge on the grounds of it originating from essential identity characteristics or subjectivities” (2007: 143). Authenticity is felt when in the author’s personal voice, we recognize our own unique individuality, often within a community of individuals who share that same narrative. For this reason, authenticity is strongly linked to the notions of identity and common shared values. Speaking about authenticity in the performance of popular music songs, Allan Moore has argued that “authenticity of expression […] arises when the originator (composer, performer) succeeds in conveying the impression that her utterance is one of integrity, that it represents an attempt to communicate unmediated form with an audience” (2002: 214). In other words, if we trust the legitimizing framework of a shared perception of an artist’s artistic sincerity and their integrity as a story-teller, we consider their voice as being authentic, even if the work itself is an artificial construct.

Authenticity is a concept which plays a significant theoretical role in two particular artistic areas: transnational and transcultural writing (cf. Dagnino, 2012; Brantly, 2017) and musical performance. As musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued, authenticity “is knowing what you mean and whence comes that knowledge. And more than that, even, authenticity is knowing what you are, and acting in accordance with that knowledge” (1984: 3). Moving away from the objective reality/authenticity correlation of the positivist approach which searches for (an elusive) truth within the work itself, from a constructivist point of view, authenticity will be found at the crossroads of subjectivity and social networks. Within this context, in the words of Allan Moore, “in acknowledging that authenticity is ascribed to, rather than inscribed in, a performance, it is beneficial to ask who, rather than what, is being authenticated by that performance” (2002: 220).

Contemporary novelist, Booker Prize and Nobel Prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro is at once considered a transnational/transcultural author (Walkowitz, 2007), and one who is profoundly musical. He once said that:

I used to see myself as some sort of musician type but there came a point when I thought: actually, this isn’t me at all. I’m much less glamorous. I’m one of these people with corduroy jackets with elbow patches. It was a real comedown. (2015)

Here, Ishiguro is arguing that the authentic Ishiguro is fundamentally musical — having only rejected the craft (or “glamour”) of the musician (music’s inauthenticity) to keep the essence of music within his writing. So doing, his musical inspiration serves to validate the authenticity of his writer’s voice, and also serves to affirm the notion that music is intrinsically authentic as a true representation of our subjectivity and emotions.

In this presentation, I will be focussing on Ishiguro’s five short stories, Nocturnes, subtitled ‘Fives Stories of Music and Nightfall’, published in 2009, and the way in which he creates a correlation between the musical experiences featured in the stories and his characters’ ambivalent relation with concepts of authenticity and identity. I will be arguing that Ishiguro is challenging the traditional representation of classical music by placing it within a popular music framework and using authenticity to blur the traditional distinctions between art cultures. Whilst Ishiguro offers us a mise-en-scène of musical practices/authenticities within the fictional worlds he is creating, he is also encoding the authenticity of his own voice within a metanarrative on artistic creation understood as musical performance.

References:

Barker, H. and Taylor, Y. (2007) Faking it: the quest for authenticity in popular music. New York: Norton.

Brantly, S. (2017) The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era: Presenting the Past. Abingdon: Routledge.

Benjamin, W. (1969) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, In: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay. New York: Schocken Books.

Dagnino, A. (2012) ‘Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of Global Modernity.’ Transnational Literature Vol. 4 no. 2

Dolan, E. I. (2010). ‘“…This little ukulele tells the truth”: Indie pop and kitsch authenticity.’ Popular Music, 29 (3), 457–469.

Funk, W., Groß, F. and Huber, I. (2012) The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Gunning, D. (2012) ‘Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Empathy in the Realist Novel and Its Alternatives, Contemporary Literature’, Fiction Since 200: Post Millenial Commitments, Vol. 53, No. 4, 779-813

Ishiguro, K. (2015) Interview in The Guardian with Kate Kellaway

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/15/kazuo-ishiguro-i-used-to-see-myself-as-a-musician[accessed 30 Aug 2019)

Ishiguro, K. (2009) Nocturnes. London: Faber and Faber

Jenson, R. (1994) Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-siècle Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moore, A. (2002) ‘Authenticity as authentication’. Popular Music Volume 2 1/2, 209-223

Peterson, R. (1997) Creating country music: fabricating authenticity.Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Reisinger, Y. and Steiner, C. J. (2006). ‘Understanding existential authenticity’, Annals of Tourism Research 33 (2), 299-318.

Salisbury, M. and Pooley, J. D. (2017) ‘The #nofilter Self: The Contest for Authenticity among Social Networking Sites, 2002–2016’. Social Science: 6 (1)

Sánchez-Arce, A. M. (2007) ‘Authenticism/ or the Authority of Authenticity’, Mosaic 40.3 (2007): 139-55.

Shane, T. (2018) ‘The Semiotics of Authenticity: Indexicality in Donald Trump’s Tweets’, Social Media + Society, 1–14

Speers, L. (2017) Hip-Hop Authenticity and the London Scene: Living Out Authenticity in Popular Music.Abingdon: Routledge.

Stoltzfus, B. (1988). ‘The Language of Autobiography and Fiction: Gide, Barthes, and Robbe-Grillet’. International Fiction Review, 15 (1).

Taruskin, R. (1984) ‘The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalistic and Dehumanizing’. Early Music,12 (1), 3-12

Walkowitz, R. L. (2007) ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature.’  Novel 40.3, 216-39

Zukin, S. (2008) ‘Consuming Authenticity’, Cultural Studies, 22: 5, 724-748

Emilie Capulet is an award-winning international concert pianist, lecturer, writer and musicologist. She regularly performs as soloist and chamber musician in festivals worldwide and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Radio Canada and France Bleu Provence. She has recorded works by Beethoven, Chopin and Henri Tomasi. Holding an interdisciplinary PhD on musical aesthetics in Modernist literature, her research on transmediality, historical and contemporary performance practices, pedagogy, and music in healthcare has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals as well as other high-impact media and public events and has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Arts Council UK. She regularly appears on Sky News International as one of their music experts. Emilie is Head of Classical Performance and MMus Performance Course Leader at the London College of Music, University of West London. 

This post is written by network participant Dr. William Gibbons.

Perhaps the most memorable scene of The Fifth Element (1997) takes place at an opera performance on a spacefaring cruise ship. Seeking help from the opera singer Plavalaguna, protagonists Dallas (Bruce Willis) and Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) catch up with the blue-skinned diva at a performance that begins with “Il dolce suono” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, then segues into the newly composed “Diva Dance.”

Plavalaguna’s alien body is exoticized in a visual counterpart to the literally inhuman sounds that emanate from it; to create the “Diva Dance,” composer Eric Serra wrote music that exceeded the upper and lower range of a human soprano, then digitally manipulated the singer’s voice to render it “alien”—the alien-ness of the music and its performer perfectly matched. At the same time, however, this scene is also one of The Fifth Element’s most poignant moments of humanity. Dallas’s hardened emotional walls soften enough to allow him a moment of introspection with major consequences for the plot—only when he can admit his feelings for Leeloo is she able stop the film’s villain.

This scene from The Fifth Element thus brings together two seemingly opposing aspects of how the genre is often represented in contemporary media: opera as “alien” and opera as profoundly “human.”

On the one hand, opera—and the singing voice in particular—creates alien experiences. Michal Grover-Friedlander, for instance, describes the sound of operatic voice as “artificial, stylized, eccentric, extreme, extravagant, exaggerated, excessive, grotesque, bizarre, irrational, and absurd. It is a voice at the limit of human capacity, bordering on the unnatural. It is ‘superhuman’ in its pyrotechnic acrobatic display.”¹

On the other hand, The Fifth Element also exemplifies what I call the “teardrop” moment in media—moments when a spectator (typically an emotionally unavailable opera skeptic) experiences a visible, visceral emotional response to opera, revealing their hidden emotional depths.² These “teardrop” moments capture the second half of Grover-Friedlander’s assessment of the operatic voice: it’s also “seductive and irresistible, and engenders states of ecstatic listening, passionate identification, introjection, the play of fantasy, and secret yearnings. It elicits physical, bodily, erotic responses…”³

The Fifth Element showcases all these: exoticism, eroticism, and emotionality. Although Plavalaguna is clearly marked as “alien,” she is nonetheless eroticized in both her appearance and in the way the “male gaze” of the camera approaches her. And the frequent cuts between the diva and close-ups of Dallas’s face suggest the emotional impact of the music; it’s not quite teardrops, but close enough.

By juxtaposing opera’s capacity for alienation with its capacity to humanize, this example exhibits extreme versions of two cinematic tropes: the “alien” opera singer is literally an alien, and Dallas’s teardrop moment literally saves the world. Perhaps the most remarkable thing, however, is that this scene isn’t alone in this kind of extreme juxtaposition.

My research for this project identifies several other examples from post-1990s sci-fi media in which the blending of opera’s “alien” and “human” elements creates crucial opportunities for characterization. In examples encompassing three Star Trek series and the Mass Effect trilogy of video games, I illustrate how opera scenes emphasize contemporary perceptions of opera and its performers as “inhuman,” yet also employ opera as a way to “humanize” emotionally distant male characters.

Notes

[1] Michal Grover-Friedlander, “Voice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 318–319.

[2] Examples of the “teardrop moment” would include Moonstruck (1987) or Pretty Woman (1990), films in which operaphile men take their love non-operaphile love interests to the opera (Puccini’s La Bohème and Verdi La Traviata, respectively), and in both films the women are visibly moved by the experience, illustrating the emotional depth lurking beneath their characters’ hardened exteriors. In both cases the characters specifically attend Italian opera—Puccini’s La Bohème (Moonstruck) and Verdi’s La Traviata (Pretty Woman)—perhaps calling to mind stereotypes about the emotionality of Italian opera in particular. On Moonstruck’s use of opera, see Marcia Citron, When Opera Meets Film (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 5. On what I call the “teardrop” scene, see also Kordula Knaus, “Emotions Unveiled: Romance at the Opera in Moonstruck (1987), Pretty Woman (1990) and Little Women (1994),” Muzikoloski Zbornik (Musicological Annual) 48 (2012), 117–128.

[3] Grover-Friedlander, “Voice,” 319. Moreover, as Nicholas Till observes, “if opera is customarily exoticized, and queered in film, it has also consistently been feminized, being associated in particular with the ‘feminine’ attributes of emotionality.” Nicholas Till, “Opera and Our Others; Opera as Other,” in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 318.

Dr. William Gibbons is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. His interdisciplinary research explores topics including musical canons and repertoires, as well as the history and interpretation of music in multimedia. His newest book, Unlimited Replays: Classical Music and Video Games (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the complex relationship between these two media from a variety of perspectives, addressing topics from the prominence of classical music in early game soundtracks to the rise of orchestral game music concerts. His 2013 book Building the Operatic Museum (University of Rochester Press) addresses similar topics in a very different time and place, exploring issues of nationalism and historicism culture through the evolution of the modern operatic repertoire in France. In 2014 Gibbons co-edited the essay collection Music in Video Games: Studying Play for Routledge Press. He is currently co-editing a second volume for Routledge, Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies, to be published in 2019.

This post is written by network participant Dr. James Cook.

The use of pre-existent music in visual media such as film, television, video games, and stage productions is certainly nothing new. Attitudes towards this have shifted over time and differ greatly across media, and yet it is my contention that a broad consensus can be viewed for approaches to what we might call ‘art’ music, which cross genre boundaries and can be linked to aesthetic – and indeed historiographical – approaches to the framing of certain musics. My starting point today is therefore what we might describe as ‘classical’ or ‘art’ music.  I strongly prefer this latter term since, as well as avoiding chronological confusion with either the classical period of music, or classical antiquity, it also hints towards the unique aesthetic position in which this music is held.

For my argument here, I borrow heavily from J. Peter Burkholder, whose description of the ‘historicist mainstream’ in music of the past hundred years is important in understanding a number of aspects in the apparent use of art music in popular media. According to him, for largely nationalistic reasons linked to the birth of German nation and the need for its social and cultural justification, a body of past works (by German composers) were lifted from their position of historical works and reified as eternal and immortal works of genius. Through analysis built predominantly to diagnose and justify this ‘genius’, the belief that these works were autonomous and could be understood purely in and on their own terms, grew up. New and (sometimes) non-German works were gradually added to the canon by using precisely the same analysis to find similar traits – eventually forming what is generally understood as our canon of ‘great’ works. There is more too it, especially with reference to tendencies in newly composed work following the canon, but the most salient part of his argument for present purposes, which I find very persuasive, is that ‘art’ music is held to be autonomous – it has and indeed requires no links to history, culture, or external programmatic narrative in order to have meaning or power. It is, in short, music for eternity – not for the time in which it was created. We see the after images of this viewpoint everywhere, from the belief in the universality of western art music and its power to ‘improve’ the lives of other cultures, the tendency for art music concerts to programme works from across history with no apparent need for explanation of context, and the (often problematic) clarion call to focus ‘on the music itself’. In visual media, this equates to a tendency for art music to be treated as entirely ahistorical and a-cultural – the use of pre-existent art music in general is more likely to be used to refer to a number of things, for example, a reference to high culture or the upper strata of society, or genius, or indeed psychopathy.

There are, of course, many examples where this is not the case. But I would argue that each of these are related to particular attitudes towards this music – namely a desire to historicise it. In these cases, the music which might usually be described and understood as ‘art’ music, is instead treated as Early Music. In these cases, recordings used are more likely to use period instruments, to utilise historically informed performance practices, and indeed to treat the music diegetically. A good example is the BBC film Eroica which focuses on the composition of Beethoven’s symphony, and makes diegetic use of Beethoven’s music performed on period instruments. Importantly, this music does not necessarily need to be from the ‘right’ period in order to be historicising. Take, for instance, the coronation scene in the pilot of Showtime’s The Borgias, which makes use of ‘Zadok the Priest’ centuries too early, or the use of Bach for a collapsing medieval Cathedral roof in The Pillars of the Earth.  In both cases, the music is nonetheless explicitly historicising, making use of historically informed performance and period instrumentation to demonstrate that this is taking part in the past.

I would argue that these tendencies play out further still – to repertoires not normally considered ‘art’ music, often through the careful interplay of diegesis. In these cases, some popular musics are treated as ‘art’ music – namely those which have gained an almost canonic status (generally through in-depth analysis). This interplay of crossing functions between ‘art’ music, popular musics, Jazz, and Early Music is the current focus of my research.

Dr. James Cook is BMus programme director and lecturer in early music at the University of Edinburgh. He works on music c.1300-1600, as well as popular medievalism, and more broadly on music in TV, film, and especially video games.

This post is written by network participant Martin Cullingford.

Classical music is still explored today with rigour and expertise, and in great depth, in the specialist media – in print magazines, on radio stations, and online.

In the general media, however, the situation is not so encouraging. There are newspapers that devote feature space to covering classical-music-for-classical-music’s-sake. But not as much as once was the case. And rarer today is the time when classical music is covered in a general news or even features section in articles whose aim is to celebrate or explore the music itself. There needs, now, to be another angle.

You may think I protest too much, but greater coverage is given to, say, literature (the winners of leading prizes), to theatre (the opening of a major play), and certainly to pop concerts and artists. For classical music, it’s generally only given when there’s a story: sometimes a scandal, but more often when something challenges preconceptions. After all, journalists know their audience and their craft: at such times they’ve simply seen a story with wider resonance.

So rather than bemoan the current situation, what I’ll instead be exploring is what insights can be gained, through looking at how, when and why classical music does feature in the general media, into how the artform is perceived in the wider world. Some of those perceptions may be inaccurate – but some might actually prove rather on the mark.

Just these past weeks we’ve been offered two intriguing examples. An unsigned Guardian editorial both equated classical music today with exclusive society events such as Ascot and Wimbledon, as well as describing it as a means for dispersal of trouble-makers. And an Evening Standard column by the CEO of English National Opera argued that its next artistic director should be as well-versed in Love Island as in bel canto composers. Both generated much comment.

But it’s also worth reflecting that if I’m asked by a mainstream outlet to comment on the appointment of a female conductor, and not for equally (musically) exciting appointments of men to podiums, then that is because there are few female conductors. That’s not just a perception problem, that’s a difficult fact.

There are canny promoters who know that the unexpected can grab column inches which would otherwise cover other subjects, but there are also genuinely inspired initiatives and events that deservedly stand out, for challenging public perceptions, but also for perhaps rightly challenging the classical music world itself.

How much does coverage of classical music in the general media reflect perceptions, how much does it reinforce them, and how accurate are those perceptions?

After all, sometimes it can be healthy to be reminded of how the rest of the world sees you…

Martin Cullingford is the Editor and Publisher of Gramophone.

This post is written by network participant Dr. Carlo Cenciarelli.

In view of the network’s interrogation of the significance of twenty-first-century representations of ‘classical’ music, what should we make of this?

Uploaded in 2010, the video shows two girls in their teens, in front of their laptop’s webcam, pretending to be singing to a recording of the ‘Brindisi’ from Verdi’s La traviata. The image is distorted by the effects of Photo Booth, a software available on Macintosh computers of the time. The girls introduce themselves to their imagined audience and, with their bodies warped by digital effects, start their performance. They try to lip-sync a few words, they bounce around the camera in time with the waltz, make funny faces and laugh at the way the digital effects hunch their backs and twist their features. At one point they comment on the music: ‘God knows why we chose this’, one of them yells. Displaying a distinctly domestic performance, including opera for no obvious reason, using standard consumer technology, and enjoying very limited circulation, the clip is an example of the most transitory kind of YouTube material. It makes no particular claims in terms of aesthetic value, and has an unstable ontological status and uncertain materiality (will it still be online by the time you read this blog?).

Indeed, it would be tempting to brush off the video as an inconsequential cultural object, an accidental, inconspicuous instance in La Traviata’s rich and complex on-screen life, if it wasn’t that this kind of cultural detritus is characteristic of YouTube’s origins as an ‘aggregator of ephemeral media’ and that this kind of detritus still provides much of that media outlet’s critical mass. Aside from sponsored videos and professionally created media content, ‘classical’ music is found online in a plethora of amateur creations with low production values and relatively limited visibility. Opera’s new media afterlife breaks into snippets of ambiguous aesthetic, cultural, and legal status: popular arias transcoded from old VHS recordings and TV broadcasts of live performances; amateur tenors, audio recordings of famous divas accompanied by photo slides, synthesiser versions of instrumental overtures and, it seems, lip-syncing teenagers. If we want to understand ‘classical’ music’s place in twenty-first-century visual culture, we also have to start making sense of this kind of material.

My presentation in Exeter will begin to unpick some of the complexities of dealing with this seemingly intractable material, outlining two logics underpinning the music’s presence in this amateur video. One will pertain to the way in which film franchises can provide a link between classical music and unlikely consumers. The second one consists in the way in which operatic singing lends itself to YouTube’s recombinatory practices and to particular forms of automediacy.

Carlo Cenciarelli is a lecturer at Cardiff University. His research focuses on music, sound and the moving image, and particularly on the way in which cinema provides a cultural interface for engaging with musical repertoires and audio technologies. His main publications have been on the cinematic afterlife of J. S. Bach and on opera and digital culture, with essays published in edited collections and in journals including Music and Letters, Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. He is currently editing a large volume on the history of cinematic listening (the Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening) and is working on a monograph that explores the relationship between listening cultures inside and outside the movie theatre.

This post is written by network participant Douglas Knight.

That multiple forms of eighteenth-century classical music serve as a unifying element across many texts of post-war European art cinema, remains widely unappreciated by scholars within both musicology and film studies.  In evidence, we might cite films by canonical auteurs, including figures such as Bresson, Pasolini, Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Godard. The use of music, by composers such as Bach and Mozart, in these and other directors’ work can be historically contextualised as a cinematic-modernist reaction against the countervailing late Romantic soundworld of classical Hollywood cinema that had persisted from the preceding decades. Nonetheless, this collectivised response was also partly an attempted act of cultural re-legitimation. Cinema as a mass-participatory art form had heretofore been primarily associated within the public imaginary as pleasurable and narratological. It did not involve ascetic intellectualism or any cinematic variant of the Russian Formalists’ notion of ‘literariness’ in a medium-specific, or ontological, sense.

Such historical preconditions cannot as easily explain the continued use of classical music — again, primarily from the long eighteenth century — within contemporary twenty-first century art films, by directors such as Haneke, Dumont, Reygadas, von Trier, and Lanthimos. It is possible to view these auteurs as legatees of their earlier, post-war generation and as modern-day proponents of the artistic tradition of cinematic modernism. Whilst European art cinema waned in cultural influence throughout the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, the New Hollywood blockbusters of Spielberg et al appeared to rejuvenate the studio system and the classical Hollywood underscore seemed to re-materialise once more. In this sense, the tension within cinema, as a cultural institution, between European modernism and demotic New World romanticism — as played out on their often highly different soundtracks both formally and materially — has never full dissipated.

The work of Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (1995 – present) provides a fascinating example of this persisting reciprocal relationship between contemporary art cinema and pre-Romantic classical music. However, Ceylan’s use of music by Bach, Scarlatti, and Schubert, for instance, is interesting at a national level vis-à-vis his emergence within the New Turkish Cinema of the 1990s. This neorealist school arose against the backdrop of the waning influence of Yeşilçam, Turkey’s studio-based equivalent to Hollywood genre filmmaking, thereby offering comparison with the geo-cultural cinematic tensions identified above at the level of a single nation-state. Amongst his auteurist compatriots, his continued use of classical music from the Western art music canon sets him apart. Whilst Ceylan’s use of classical music can be explained through recourse to biography, namely in relation to his education and professed personal tastes, specific points of historic audiovisual reference delineate his extant oeuvre. Early autobiographical films evoke Tarkovsky with the use of Baroque classical music, and more recent films are modelled on Bresson’s use of a refrain-like ritornello as evidenced in his 1950s and 1960s work.

In my talk, I will highlight the use of Schubert’s piano sonata D. 959 (II) on the soundtrack of Winter Sleep (2014), which is closely modelled on Bresson’s film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) to the point of an audibly intended formal intertextuality. I will argue that the film presents a maturation of the director’s aesthetic vision away from the affective evocation and pastiche of antecedents in his formative ‘Clouds’ quartet. Instead, I maintain, in sympathy with other scholars, that Winter Sleep provides a political critique of social relations, and specifically the class violence of rentier capitalism in contemporary rural Cappadocian society. However, this is enacted aesthetically through the symbolic functioning of fragments from Schubert’s piano sonata, and its own narrative, which are brought into audiovisual play.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilloch, Graeme Peter and Hammond, Craig and Diken, Bulent. 2018. The Cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan: The Global Vision of a Turkish Filmmaker. London; New York: I.B. Tauris.

Harvey-Davitt, James. 2016. “Conflicted selves: the humanist cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan.” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 14, no. 2: 249-267

Zıraman, Zehra Cerrahoğlu. 2019. “European co-productions and film style: Nuri Bilge Ceylan.” Studies in European Cinema, 16, No. 1: 73-89.

Douglas Knight is currently writing up a Ph.D. in musicology at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is supervised by Professor Julie Brown and supported by a Crossland Research Scholarship. His doctoral thesis concerns the use of eighteenth-century classical music in post-war European art cinema and its contemporary legatees. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Oxford, and is active as a Director of Music and organist at a North London church.  

This post is written by network participant Dr. Annabelle Lee.

The impact that social media marketing has had on the music industry within the last decade or so cannot be ignored. Social networks provide an efficient yet effective way for artists and organisations to promote performances and projects. In addition, social media can drive revenue, alongside traditional income streams such as subscription-based marketing and box office sales.

Audience development, too, has become a preoccupation within the classical music business in order to target digitally-inclined demographics vis-à-vis the older generations and middle-classes, typically associated with classical audiences. Take leading violinist Ray Chen, who has attracted “millennials” via comedy videos on his YouTube channel and mini masterclasses for aspiring violinists on Facebook, amassing over 114,000 views for one such tutorial. Attaining new, digital audiences for classical music, though, is often a reaction to commercial pressures or funding bodies. For example, the production team behind Eurovision and Glastonbury are presenting this year’s Proms television broadcasts, and are devised particularly with young people in mind, a demographic “raised on popular culture”– this youth-orientated media strategy includes promotions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The Royal Opera House, meanwhile, implements a content strategy to capture certain social profiles and international markets– the ROH is also funded by the Arts Council, which has developed a digital media policy for cultural organisations in order to engage a wider audience.

But despite trend-driven marketing campaigns and social media success stories, social networking may not necessarily have the democratic reach many classical practitioners desire in order to secure the industry’s future. It is important to remember that using social media requires a computer device, Internet access and payments for online data. Although numerous artists, orchestras and venues have extended their presence by live-streaming content and performances via YouTube, UK viewers must purchase a TV licence to watch these live broadcasts online. “Wealthier and time-richer audiences are undoubtedly able to access great diversity,”as David Hesmondhalgh opines.

This links to the “digital divide,” a term referring to limitations that prevent certain people from accessing the Internet. With specific reference to classical music, it concerns not only physical access to web-based technologies but financial, educational and socioeconomic access too. The cultural construct of the bourgeois concert hall pertains here, and indeed, classical audiences often use social media to demonstrate their class privilege, musical knowledge and levels of cultural capital, which are seen as typical prerequisites for classical music appreciation. For instance, posts may incorporate technical terminology from music theory, reinforcing the image of classical audiences as a knowledgeable, albeit distinctive group. Similarly, Chen’s aforementioned video tutorials imply that viewers already need a certain level of musical understanding and violin technique to benefit. Classical audiences also post about intellectual, perhaps, highbrow pursuits such as politics and theatre, and even recall travelling abroad to see a specific concert or opera. Furthermore, there is an uptake in social media-enabled devices by the middle-aged and retirees, the archetypal classical audience who possess the time and money to experience their beloved music more frequently – these users are affectionately known as the “silver surfers.”

By utilising social media in an attempt to alter traditional business models and concert audiences, the classical industry may only be perpetuating elitist conceptions surrounding its art form. A final proposition from Hesmondhalgh appears to elicit a call to those working with social technologies in a classical context, “the rise of digitalization is unlikely in the medium and long term to lead to any profound democratization of musical creativity and innovation without transformation of broader economic and social conditions.”

Dr. Annabelle Lee graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with a PhD in Musicology, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her thesis investigated the effects of social media marketing on the music business, with a focus on the classical music sector. Towards the end of her doctoral studies, she commenced work as a marketing professional in London over a two-year period, specialising in social media strategy. She has also worked as a freelance flautist and a Visiting Tutor in Music at Royal Holloway University. Annabelle will now be working as a blogger on a variety of topics about the music industry for Burstimo Music PR, a leading UK music marketing agency. She also hosts Talking Classical, a new classical music podcast focused on interviews with industry professionals, as well as performers and musicologists (soundcloud.com/talkingclassicalpodcast).

This post is written by network participant Dr. Adrian Curtin.

At the upcoming network symposium on representations of classical music in the arts and media in the twenty-first century, I will give a presentation on what is probably the most well-known play about classical music – namely, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979). Shaffer’s play, adapted into a hit movie in 1984, tells the sensational, fictional tale of how the Italian composer Antonio Salieri plotted against Mozart out of jealousy and spite. Amadeus has helped to sustain and popularise the legend about Salieri’s involvement in Mozart’s death. The play also contributes to the mythology surrounding Mozart’s exceptionality, confirms the cultural cachet of classical music, and buttresses the authority of its musical canon. Re-mounting Amadeus in the twenty-first century is therefore not inherently challenging to the cultural status quo.

In 2016, the Royal National Theatre staged a new production of this play, directed by Michael Longhurst. One of the distinguishing features of this production was the casting of the British-Tanzanian actor Lucian Msamati as Salieri. To my knowledge, this was the first time a black actor has played Salieri. The production was a critical and commercial success. It was part of the National Theatre Live cinema screenings in 2017 and was revived at the Olivier the following year. Msamati, whose casting Shaffer approved shortly before he died, received critical acclaim for his performance.

The cultural significance of Msamati’s casting was not widely discussed in the media, although it is arguably noteworthy. It prompts a series of challenging questions. For example:

• What ideological values did this casting convey?
• Did it support or subvert popularly held conceptions and misconceptions about classical music?
• Could it have perpetuated rather than refuted racist stereotypes?
• How does the casting relate to contemporary efforts to increase the visibility and presence of classical musicians of colour as well as acts of historical recovery that seek to diversify the canon?

I will endeavour to answer these questions by examining production reviews, online commentary, and interviews with the production team, and by referring to relevant scholarship. I’ll use the embodied provocation of Msamati’s casting to outline cultural and historical resonance – associations that the casting brings to mind.

Shaffer’s play does not register recent efforts to dismantle the stranglehold that select white, male composers have had over the canon of classical music and, consequently, over who ‘represents’ the art form in the popular imaginary. However, the casting of Msamati as Salieri in this recent production symbolically acknowledged the involvement of musicians of colour (historically overlooked and disenfranchised) in Western art music past and present. I hope to show that this casting prompts some intriguing lines of thought about how a historical composer is represented in a theatrical context and how this connects to larger debates about cultural memory, myth-making, canonicity, diversity, and inclusivity.

Adrian Curtin is Senior Lecturer in the Drama Department of the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019). He is one of the organisers of this research network.