Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Musical Labels

Arnie Lawrence once told me he didn't like playing "I Can't Get Started," a great standard by Vernon Duke (whose real name was Vladimir Dukelsky), because the lyrics (by Ira Gershwin), were self-defeating (and Arnie was not a man who had trouble getting started with women).
I myself strongly dislike "Love for Sale," by Cole Porter, a song I just heard on a streaming site for big band music because it romanticizes prostitution. Though objectively, as it were, I have to concede that it's a great song, a classic jazz standard (and it can also be performed straight, as the show tune that it originally was).
This morning I was in the mood for big band music, which has evolved from strictly dance music to a serious composer's idiom without losing it's drive. Old classical music would never be labelled "jazz," but a lot of contemporary classical music is influenced by jazz, and some of the great jazz musicians and composers, like the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin collaboration, have definitely produced music that is classical, meaning long-lasting, complex, original, influential, and of perennial interest. Does it help to call it jazz?
Last night we went to a classical concert of the Carmel Quartet, entitled "The Magic Flute" (kind of a cliche, but who cares?), featuring three of the members of the quartet (Yona Zur and Rachel Ringelstein playing violin, and Tami Waterman playing cello) and a fabulous flute player: Roy Amotz, who was the reason why I was so anxious to hear the concert.
One of the themes of Yona Zur's explanations (the Carmel Quartet's concerts feature commentary by the musicians) was that the classical composers who rebelled against late baroque, didn't think of themselves as "classical," but as "galant." I wonder when we started calling them classical?
Classical music can be a narrow or a broad term. Narrowly, it means European art music between the baroque and romantic periods, broadly, everybody more or less knows what it means, but most people would find it difficult to provide a watertight definition of it. I guess we need labels, so that when we log onto a streaming website and have to chose what music to listen to, we can get what we want. But that doesn't always work.
Once I made the tactless error of asking a young pianist what kind of musician he was, and he said, simply, that he wanted to be a musician, unrestricted by a definition. But obviously, musicians do get to be better at playing one kind of music rather than another, and listeners have legitimate generic preferences, for which they need labels.

1 comment:

Raanan said...

I heard Roy Amotz only at his recital for an Artist's Diploma.I was very impressed.