New Age music and the taxpayer
New Age music used to be easy to avoid; you just steered clear of restaurants or shops with healing crystals in the window. Not any more. The glassy-eyed torpor of New Age music is spreading everywhere. It has already become the lingua franca of television theme tunes and film scores, and ambient musicians such as Brian Eno and William Orbit have lent to those throbbing basses and "spacy" chords the trendiness which, these days, passes for intellectual distinction.
Encouraged by the vogue for "cross-over" and the injunction to "break down barriers," New Age music is spreading its emotional and intellectual anaesthesia into the concert hall. Not to be left out of this exciting trend, the Arts Council of England's Contemporary Music Network is using taxpayers' money to tour one of its chief exponents to every corner of the land.
This marks a sad decline for what, back in 1972, started life as a brave enterprise to promote music which was genuinely new. Its then director, Annette Moreau, toured all kinds of musicians we had barely heard of: the Steve Reich Ensemble, the Composers' quartet, Lol Coxhill. True, the concerts were earnest affairs. The only spot of colourful presentation was Peter Maxwell Davies's floral shirt, fully worthy of the Bee Gees, which he wore when conducting The Fires of London in his own Mirror of Whitening Light. But that was a different era, when presentation was neither here nor there, and what counted was the music. These concerts were invitations to grapple with a different aesthetic, worked out in the severe medium of structured sound-a medium which gives no quarter to amateurism.
Compare that to this season's attractions, where the music, and the act of listening which judges its quality, are buried under every conceivable distraction-story-telling, circus, light-shows, dance, poetry, live DJs. The language in which the Network advertises these shows has a modish, slack quality, which communicates nothing beyond the hip credentials of the author. Drum FM, for example, is described as "...sonic theatre. The knife is a tongue, the anaesthetic an ambient sound." It continues: "Your nurse comes at night smelling of mango. The visuals blend waking and dreaming thoughts."
The Network defends its programme by pointing out that it's doing what the Network always did-reflecting current trends in music. Right now, the trend is towards precisely these crossovers. This might hold water, were it not for one clinching piece of evidence that when it comes to specifically musical values, the Arts Council has abandoned any pretence of a judgement of quality.
In October the Network will be touring a band led by Jocelyn Pook, the new high priestess of New Age music, the composer who took a sacred Hindu chant, mixed it with endless "cosmic" bass, and used it to accompany the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut. Why? There is a clue in the Network's publicity for the tour, which tells us that "Jocelyn Pook is fast acquiring a cult audience."
Schubert and the Holocaust
What lies behind all this is a fear of anything which demands sustained attention. What used to be thought of as art music's glory-its refusal to behave like film music, and its embrace of ambiguity and understatement-is now a "barrier" which must be "broken down."
One recent barricade-storming technique is the imposition on defenceless Romantic song-cycles of a theatrical interpretation. Some years ago the travails of the winter traveller in Schubert's Winterreise were illustrated by processions of sad-eyed refugees behind the singer and pianist. Their battered suitcases and shabby clothes were all too clearly meant to evoke middle-European 1930s Jewry. When I suggested to Norman Rosenthal of the Royal Academy of Arts-a great enthusiast for this particular show-that this might be an exaggerated response to a story of a man disappointed in love, he said: "Well, you know, the traveller could be said to undergo a kind of personal Holocaust."
Clearly, dramatising these latent musical dramas can cause a sudden rush of blood to the head, but fortunately Jonathan Miller kept his cool when directing Bach's St Matthew Passion for television. The human drama was brought out with great tact, forming a kind of halo round the music, like silverpoint on a Renaissance drawing. Will Deborah Warner be as tactful when she directs Bach's St John Passion for the ENO this month?
So-called Mozart effect
Mozart's supreme standing among classical composers, remarked by Fiann Coombs in April's Prospect, received a fillip from the Mozart Effect. This is the increase in cognitive powers brought on by listening to Mozart, demonstrated-apparently-by experiments conducted by Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin in 1993. Almost immediately she was challenged by Harvard neuroscientist Christopher Chabris, who claimed that the effect is small, and has nothing to do with the specifics of Mozart's music. Since then the argument has hotted up in scientific journals, with no consensus in sight.
But that hasn't stopped an entire Mozart industry riding on the back of this ghostly "effect." The former governor of Georgia provided Mozart CDs to new mothers, and Florida public schools are required to play daily doses of classical music to toddlers. The musical entrepreneur Don Campbell markets musical self-help kits called the Mozart Effect™, which teach you how to administer "musical caffeine" in the morning with up-tempo Mozart, and unwind at the end of the day with "slow Baroque."
The idea of using music as a pill is profoundly anti-musical: while one aspirin pill is like another, no two symphonies are. And though two G minor andantinos might be similarly grave and melancholy, and slow our pulse rate to the same degree, we don't value them for those similarities, but for producing their own kind of grave melancholy. That mysterious "X" factor can never be amenable to scientific investigation; it is unique to each piece, and science cannot deal with singularities. No wonder the Mozart Effect is proving so elusive.
