“It sounded like the future,” begins a review of a recent installment in the Wordless Music concert series: a future in which classical music and indie rock occupy not opposite sides of a cultural divide, but rather the very same musical space.  Ronen Givony founded the Wordless Music series in 2007, and as he explains in the mission statement on the Wordless Music website:

Wordless Music is devoted to the idea that the sound worlds of classical and contemporary instrumental music — in genres such as indie rock and electronica — share more in common than conventional thinking might suggest. To illustrate the continuity between these worlds, the series pairs rock and electronic musicians in an intimate concert setting with more traditionally understood classical music performers. The goal: to bring audiences together, and to introduce listeners from both worlds to composers that they might otherwise not encounter, for a completely new concert experience. In so doing, Wordless Music seeks to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today — popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low — are artificial constructions in need of dismantling.

The artificiality of the boundary between popular and classical music was brought home to Givony when he asked a co-worker at Lincoln Center what differentiated an intimate instrumental performance at the Mercury Lounge from the chamber music concerts their institution promoted.  In Episode One of a 2008 radio series on Wordless Music, Givony recounted his co-worker’s answer:

As a definition of classical chamber music, silent audiences certainly seems inadequate.  Few would say that playing Brahms for noisy audiences at a bar or cafe, as musicians of Classical Revolution have been doing since 2006, transforms the music from classical into popular fair.  On the contrary, the idea that under any performance circumstances a certain canon of music remains classical – with all the social, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual values attached to that category – underlies the project of bringing it into less formal, more popular venues.  Those hoping to increase appreciation of classical music by this means often invoke history to justify listening to classical music not with the attention and reverence associated with the recital hall, but with the informality, sociability and pleasure associated with popular music.  In the same radio episode mentioned above, for example, composer David Lang told host Jad Adumrad:

Wordless Music, however, seems to be aimed in the opposite direction.  Instead of bringing classical music into bars and cafes, Wordless Music brings indie rock and electronica into recital halls and churches, programming it alongside works from the classical canon.  Givony describes this as an effort to “take indie rock a little bit out of its own ghetto and put it in a flower vase and see how it grows.”  The result has been some confusion: while seats or church pews seemed to say “sit still and be quiet,” the music – and sometimes the musicians – said “stand up, dance and shout.”  Here’s Do Make Say Think from WNYC Wordless Music Series Episode One:

And Beirut, from Episode Three:

These musicians smashed the vase Givony put them in – a good thing since flowers don’t grow in vases: they slowly wilt and die.  But the Wordless Music series has been quite effective at taking classical music out of its vase and planting it in ground where it can grow.  The most recent Wordless Music concert was weighted towards the classical, with orchestral and chamber works by Philip Glass, Ligeti and (rock representative) Jonny Greenwood.  There was no dancing or shouting to these works.  But there was enthusiastic clapping between movements.  And that, in a small way, sounds like the future.

Recommend listening: the Wordless Music Series on WNYC in its entirety.

A couple weeks ago, Alex Ross published a piece on the New World Symphony’s new home, the New World Center in Miama.  The Frank Gehry-designed building is a spectacular statement on what it means to be a 21st-century symphony orchestra.  Together with neighboring Soundscape Park, the new facility enables WallCasts – projections of concerts taking place inside the hall onto a 7,000 sq. ft. wall outside, with sound delivered through 167 speakers – that look and sound amazing, and make concerts accessible to a wider (more sociable, less reverent) audience.  But what really got my attention was Ross’s observation that the concert hall “is explicitly designed as much for the projection of images as for the projection of sound. The fusion of film and live music is so mesmerizingly seamless that I felt I was witnessing not just a technological forward leap but the emergence of a new genre.”

The combination of sight and sound in musical experience, and the use of technology to alter their combination, are particular interests of mine.  As I’m presently completing my dissertation on music and optical technologies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I spend a lot of time thinking about “old media” like magic lanterns and shadow-plays.  But in the days following Ross’s article, I found myself reading about new 3-D projection technology developed for Robert Lepage’s Siegfried at the Met next season; an article on the International Music Scores Library Project led me to one I had missed on the Borromeo Quartet’s use of laptops in place of printed parts (though it’s the projection screen that has me most intrigued); and an article on Hahn-Bin had me unexpectedly in the Fashion & Style (as opposed to Music) section of the NYT, with the Juilliard-trained violinist declaring “how I choose to express myself visually is equally important as the music itself.”

These articles were in the back of my mind when, two days ago, I attended a talk by Dan Cohen on The Ivory Tower and the Open Web.  His talk had numerous tweetable moments, but I was particularly struck by his comparison of the “academic way” and the “web way,” the former being to refine and polish one’s work to perfection before letting it out into the world (in the form of print), the latter being to experiment and iterate, allowing for continued dialogue and change.  As a writer, I have a lot of “academic way” in my life.  I could use a little “web way.”

Hence this blog: a space where I can collect musical/technological/cultural phenomena of interest to me, and do some thinking out loud.  We’ll see what it turns into – as is the web way.

So, what do I make of the New World Symphony, the Borromeo Quartet, and Hahn-Bin?  One take in broad strokes: the nineteenth-century embraced the Romantic, (seemingly) anti-visual practice of listening with eyes closed.  In the twentieth century, radio and recording technologies fostered the idea of musical listening as a purely auditory experience.  Now, amid proliferating audiovisual devices, the visual has reasserted itself as constitutive of musical experience: we have entered an age of listening with eyes open, and the classical music world is learning to adapt.  In this phase of experimentation, we can experience again and again the pleasure of the unprecedented – like the “emergence of a new genre” Ross felt he was witnessing at the New World Center, and the “I’ve never seen/heard anything like it” reactions elicited by Hahn-Bin.  But while much is new, we are also witnessing revivals of largely forgotten, previously outmoded forms.  The description of what the 3-D technology at the Met will do, for example, recalls Pepper’s Ghost of the late nineteenth century.  The competing claims of the old and the new will, I expect, be one of the themes of this blog, as will classical music’s ongoing competition for our eyes and our ears.