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Beat by Beat | Choral Scene
The Not So Grand
Good Old Days
BENJAMIN STEIN
In december 2 0 1 2 a photo essay appeared in the New York Times
showing the destruction of a piano abandoned on a New York sidewalk.
A series of successive photos told a putatively moving story,
accompanied by music sombre and dramatic by turns, in which the
piano was stared at, played idly by passersby and ultimately destroyed
and carted away.
What was more illuminating than the photos themselves were the
comments posted online as the essay travelled over the internet. A
number could be paraphrased as “What a sad comment on the current
state of the arts, as the piano is trashed just like the culture.” The mixture
of ruefulness and self-satisfaction was galling.
In art and everywhere else, the good old days were never good,
folks. Culture is always in flux, and time alters our view of art that
is initially considered trashy or meretricious — like Shakespeare,
Delta blues or cable television — into something elevated and timeless.
Anyone nostalgic for an Elysian epoch in which classical culture
was ascendant throughout the West and there was a piano, a violin
and a Beethoven score in every humble home, simply hasn’t read
any history.
In 2009 American music historian Elijah Wald published How the
Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American
Popular Music. Once you get past the misleadingly quarrel-picking
title (good for generating a bit of buzz, anyhow), this book has many
excellent insights about how we listen to music, and how our perception
of it evolves over time.
Wald makes the point that the ability to record music irrevocably
changed our experience of it. John Phillip Sousa coined the
term “canned music,” and felt that recorded music would degrade
people’s ability to create it themselves. In many ways he was correct.
Wald states: “virtually all dancing is now commonly done to recordings.”
Singing of lullabies at home and at religious services, two
areas in which live music still functions, can easily be replaced with
recorded music.
At the same time, Wald observes that we now have instant access
to “the finest artists, alive or dead, who have ever been recorded
anywhere in the world, and we can hear it whenever we want, wherever
we go, in whatever order and whatever volume we please.”
This has given modern musicians “a breadth of experience and created
a wealth of fusions that would have been unimaginable” in the
past. From the point of view of cross-cultural awareness and opportunity,
you could argue that the good old days are right now. Let us
look at the stylistic mixture of several concerts coming up in the next
few weeks.
Tcc on the move: Perhaps I am not especially sympathetic to
pianos, abandoned or otherwise, because I regard them as such a
PETER MAHON
Sales Representative
416-322-8000
pmahon@trebnet.com
www.petermahon.com
February 1 – March 7, 2013 thewholenote.com 13