{"id":54,"date":"2008-08-05T18:11:06","date_gmt":"2008-08-05T18:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=54"},"modified":"2008-08-05T18:11:06","modified_gmt":"2008-08-05T18:11:06","slug":"yes_we_can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2008\/08\/yes_we_can\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes We Can vs Vibrato Wars: No Mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hiclass.jpg\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Are avant-garde music fans too apathetic for the field’s own good? (And here I clearly don’t mean you, Jim Altieri<\/a>.) Audience passion for this music clearly must exist–you have to work to access it in real life, whether in concert or on recording, and then work some more (generally speaking) to access it intellectually and emotionally once the music is right there in front of you. But in our fandom, we rarely express our passions out loud for the world to see and hear. Is that a mark of high-art class or intellectual apathy?<\/p>\n

I bring this up because just the other evening Darcy<\/a> and I were discussing the challenges of blogging about new music vs. blogging about, say, the presidential campaigns or the hoo-ha that attends the leaking<\/a> of a new Nas album<\/a>. Typically in these cases, an incident is reported and every blogger worth his or her salt weighs in with an opinion, thought, or call to action. Blood pressures rise in tandem and cross-blog dialogue ensues. <\/p>\n

In our particular musical pastures, this tends to not happen so much. A small gathering might get riled over the abstract issue of complexity in music<\/a>, but it’s a rare day even in Gotham that we all jump on a bandwagon together. (Anyone ever leaked a Reich album?) I’m not saying it would necessarily do us a great deal of good to emulate the TMZ paparazzi, but it strikes me as a curious MO for people supposedly obsessed with the new that we don’t really fixate on the very latest. Maybe we simply can’t manage it because each and every one of us is doing something so completely cutting edge that there are few common roads to travel. Or maybe it’s that we expend our energy carefully rather than flinging it in what we see all too clearly are worthless\u00c2\u00a0pursuits. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

That said, the early music crowd isn’t shy about getting tongues wagging.\u00c2\u00a0In an article that on quick read seems like it could only have appeared in the pages of The Onion<\/span>, England’s Observer<\/a><\/span> reports startling news of vibrato-lacking performances at this year’s Proms:<\/p>\n

The chief conductor of one of Germany’s most famous orchestras, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, [Sir Roger] Norrington has a history of provoking a passionate and polarised response among audiences. As a vociferous advocate of the controversial ‘pure tone’ or ‘musical authenticity’ movement, Norrington believes music should be played on period instruments and often at radically different speeds to the way it is usually heard. But musicians and audiences are now concerned that Norrington has taken his crusade too far. Norrington shocked Prom audiences last week by conducting a vibrato-less rendition of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, a piece written in 1908.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Are avant-garde music fans too apathetic for the field’s own good? (And here I clearly don’t mean you, Jim Altieri.) Audience passion for this music clearly must exist–you have to work to access it in real life, whether in concert or on recording, and then work some more (generally speaking) to access it intellectually and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-54","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}