We recently were listening to The Scissor Sisters first album, it was on top of the display in my local library so I thought, what the hell! They are a group about which I've seen and heard a lot but never really sat down to listen to their music, except for the odd track.
What struck us, when listening was how much we'd heard it before. The sound world of the disc is very reminiscent of the original gay disco boom, which of course was when D. and I paid a lot of attention to popular music. It is fascinating the way pop culture constantly needs to re-invent itself, re-using elements of the past. Its not just music, but fashion does something similar.
Whereas Western art culture is heavily based on the unchanging artefact (a score or work of art), the idea being that things develop towards the perfect artefact, in pop culture there is no such development, the moment is all. It matters not that the artefact might have been used before, what matters is what you are doing with it at the moment.
This, of course, has had a big influence on some of the major names in modernism, where the move away from the fully notated score and the concept of an artefact, is quite important.
But there is another fascinating parallelism, the world of the baroque. Where composers were constantly pressured for something new, it was newness that mattered. Everyone recycled and re-used pre-existing material, whether it was your own or someone else's. If you read about the constant pressures on Handel, you can see parallels with our own pop culture. Not only the expectation from the audience to produce something new, but the constant striving to make each revival of a work new and different, no matter what the total effect on the work's artistic integrity.
What is fascinating is that nowadays we decry some of Handel's revivals of his works, where he cut and pasted all manner of music to create new versions which were weaker than the original. But to contemporaries do not seem to have worried about this in the same way, they were concerned for the ephemera of the moment, whether the singers were good and whether the songs were knew.
Reading biographies of baroque composers you often feel that their lives were closer to key figures in pop culture than contemporary composers. Handel as George Michael!!!
Technorati tag:classical music, Handel
Monday, 15 January 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts this month
-
What about blowing the box to pieces: composer Eímear Noone on writing for video games, films and TVEímear Noone (Photo: Andy Paradise) Dublin and LA-based composer Eímear Noone is known for her scores for video games, films and TV. She re...
-
Georges Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles ; Julie Fuchs, Cyrille Dubois, Florian Sempey, L'orchestra nationale de Lille, Alexandre ...
-
Britten: Peter Grimes - Nicky Spence - Welsh National Opera, 2025 (Photo: Dafydd Owen) Britten: Peter Grimes; Nicky Spence, Sally Matthews,...
-
Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro - Sarasota Opera, 2025 - (Photo: Robert Millington for Sarasota Opera) Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro , Verdi: Stiff...
-
Bach: Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen - Olivier Stankiewicz, Lucy Crowe, ensemble led by Maria Włoszczowska - Wigmore Hall (taken from live s...
-
Libertas : Beethoven, Schubert, Beach, Marx; Äneas Humm, Doriana Tchakarova; Rondeau Production Reviewed 19 April 2025 The young Swiss barit...
-
Prokofiev: Suite from Semyon Kotko - Vladimir Jurowski, London Philharmonic Orchestra - Royal Festival Hall (Photo: Marc Gascoigne) Prokof...
-
Natalie Burch, James Way and Annemarie Federle at St Mary's Parish Church, Haddington where their recording of Britten's Canticles ...
-
Sunwook Kim & Chamber Orchestra of Europe - Barbican Centre (Photo: Ed Maitland-Smith/Barbican Centre) Anna Clyne: Stride , Beethoven: P...
-
Martin Owen, Manchester Camerata, Gábor Takács-Nagy at the Stoller Hall (Photo; Rob Everett) When horn player Martin Owen and I met to chat...
No comments:
Post a Comment