In this text I would like to think about how performance venues are connected with the music that is played in them. From there the question arises of what kind of places music needs today in order to develop new forms of expression and new content. To begin with, a little game can lead us into the subject. Below is one list of venues and another of pieces or styles of music. Which go together?
- Samba group (“Batucada”)
- Piano piece for children
- Salon orchestra
- Gregorian chant
- Mozart Mass
- Brass band
- Symphony
- Wagner opera
- Rock concert
- Gospel choir
- Jazz quintet
- Techno party
- Concert hall
- Stadium
- Gothic cathedral
- Street carnival
- Jazz club
- Church in the American South
- Bavarian village square
- Discotheque
- Music school hall
- Coffee house
- Bayreuth Festspielhaus
- Baroque church
When you try to find the right music for each place (or the right place for each kind of music), two things become clear. First, forms of music are tied to particular places for reasons of style and of performance practice. A small room cannot take high volume; a large orchestra needs a correspondingly large space to unfold acoustically; the long reverberation in churches makes it hard to play music with groove and accented rhythms; playing in the open air requires a sound that carries well enough; and so on.
Second, the combination of venue and music also creates a level of meaning, and this changes when you change the place. Gregorian chant in a church creates a meditative atmosphere; it is a musical form of prayer. Transplanted to a street carnival, it becomes an act of mockery and blasphemous belittlement. Conversely, a samba band in a carnival procession is an impressive demonstration of collective vitality and joy in life. If you moved it into a cathedral, the overlapping rhythms and the volume (entirely appropriate in the open air) would create an acoustic muddle that could, with some justification, be called “an infernal din”. So two forms of music, each coherent in itself and artistically valuable, would lose their character through the change of place, to the point of absurdity.
The same goes for all the forms of music listed above. A piano piece for teaching only develops its charm in a setting that suits it, say at a pupils' recital. African music is often embedded in particular religious rituals and the places that belong to them. Taken out of that context, its dramatic shape remains incomprehensible, and it seems like a museum piece, emptied of meaning. The same is true of European Mass settings, which lose much of their power in concert performances. A symphony, with its strong emphasis on structure and form, needs concentrated listening in a sufficiently large concert hall. The relaxed and more intimate atmosphere of a jazz club, on the other hand, suits and supports the means of jazz: improvisation and groove.
Every form of music, then, has places where it can present what it has to say most clearly and distinctly, places with which it shares a common substance. Often these places came into being together with the style of music, either because an existing place gave rise to a fitting form of music, or because a musical genre found or invented a place that suited it.
New places for new music
Anyone thinking about new, stimulating and socially relevant forms of music has to take into account the connection described above between musical style and venue. Perhaps the search for new and fresh musical styles seems so half-hearted and directionless precisely because the places where music is presented today allow only half-hearted and directionless music. The internet, radio, television, jazz and rock festivals and classical music festivals, as places where music is heard today, have one thing in common: the actual music performed matters only as a “musical colour”, as one facet in an overall spectrum of sound that is defined either by its entertainment value or by its character as an event. Whether alone in front of the computer or the radio, or as part of a crowd at a cultural event, the relationship between musician and listener remains that between service provider and consumer. This kind of relationship leads musicians to use superficial stylistic attractions deliberately, so as to arouse the listener's interest instantly in the competition between service providers. Music like this cannot be expected to have any power to shape life, let alone change it.
A place where stimulating and authentic music can come into being would have to be a place where musicians and listeners truly come into contact with one another; where music is related, together, to a vision of life. This is by no means about a superficially didactic theory spelled out in words. It is about questions that are inherent in music in the deepest sense. How do I move, how do I perceive my body? Which feelings do I allow myself? What place do categories such as freedom and community, or ease and discipline, have for me? How open am I to cultural forms of expression that are foreign to me, and how far can I take them in?
All these questions are asked and answered, without any detour through words, in the process of making music, in which musicians and listeners take part in different ways. The question is: where today can we find, or create, places that offer this possibility of exchange? Places where a contemporary musical style can offer the chance to identify with it and to interpret life together?
Four places: music school, jazz club, concert hall, record player
1. The music school
The music played in instrumental lessons and in the ensembles of music schools is often smiled at, and in any case not taken seriously as an artistic statement. This attitude rests on the often quite unexamined assumption that a work of art stands on its own, that only the objective quality of a performance counts, and that listeners are basically not needed for the work of art to come about. In reality a work of art, above all in an art form bound to time such as music, has a particular place in a process of communication. The artistic value of a piece of music matters only to the extent that the listener actually perceives it. Two conclusions follow from this. First, what the music school passes on – a feeling for melody and rhythm, a knowledge of styles and forms – is an indispensable help for pupils in learning to hear more complex musical structures properly. The music school lays the foundations for being able to perceive art music as such at all.
Second, good teaching material, for instance by Bach, Schumann, Debussy, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, the Beatles and many others, contains a great deal of the musical substance that also makes up the large and complex concert works of these composers and musicians. The apparent “smallness” of the format, say of a two-part invention by Bach or a transcribed chorus by Charlie Parker, is more than made up for by the pupil's intensive work on the piece over weeks. In this way pupils get to know the music of Bach or Parker far better than would ever be possible in a concert.
This should also be borne in mind when a composer writes new and larger works for music school or amateur ensembles. The “objective” quality of the performance will certainly fall short of a professional concert. But because the participants (who are, after all, listeners at the same time) identify with the project, the content of the composition is conveyed better and more lastingly than it would be by hearing it once in a concert. I experienced this myself at the premieres of my cycles “Psalmen und Lobgesänge” , “Pangäa” and “Mirrors”. So there is no reason not to regard the music school as a place of creative new beginnings and of shaping the world through art. It certainly is one, to a greater degree than many streamlined cultural events that leave little trace in the minds of those who attend them.
2. The jazz club
Even though the aspect of art as a process of communication must never be left out of the picture, music also needs room for radical complexity, for structures that resist immediate understanding, and for the wholly other, which at first alienates and provokes. In jazz, the space for such experiments at the highest level has always been the jazz club. In a relaxed atmosphere the musicians do not need to deliver a finished and perfect product, as they do in a pop concert or a classical performance. They have room for improvised interplay and for experiments with sound and rhythm. The physical closeness and the dense atmosphere of such a concert draw the listener into the creative process, too. Even if listeners cannot follow the principles of construction, they sense the inner coherence of the music through the presence of the musicians. I have often found that even people to whom jazz on record remains foreign find a spontaneous way into this music at concerts. And because it is possible to talk, even during the concert, a direct exchange about the music can come about.
To be able to make more and better jazz, it is indispensable to build up and support venues like these. The aim should be to take the jazz club out of the realm of mere nightlife and to reinvent it as a place of cultural encounter. Jazz concerts in this setting could link up with the work of music schools. In their lessons pupils gain practical experience of the music, which allows them to attend such concerts as listeners with more understanding, and therefore with more enjoyment.
3. The concert hall
If you look again at the venues in the list at the beginning, you see that the concert hall is far less specific than the other places named. Most forms of music could conceivably be performed in a concert hall. The reason lies in how this kind of venue came about. The concert hall arose in the 19th century as a place where orchestral music was played for a middle class interested in culture. In keeping with the artistic ideal of the time, music was meant to work as “absolute music”, detached from all functional or social ties. This made the concert hall a place where the structures, forms and compositional ideas of music are perceived with particular attention and concentration.
Earlier on I said that the relaxed atmosphere of a jazz club particularly suits the improvisational flow and rhythmic intensity of jazz. Yet for European jazz musicians especially, engaging with Europe's compositional traditions is an exciting and, in a certain sense, unavoidable field of work. Writing in score offers inexhaustible possibilities, and it is a difficult but rewarding task to write complex compositions for larger ensembles that are open to the ruptures and developments of the 21st century (see: Composition and Improvisation). While there are a few big bands at the public broadcasters that regularly put on demanding concert programmes with international improvisers and composers, the idea of having jazz compositions performed by symphony orchestras is still almost hopeless. This is due to the entrenched thinking in the camps of so-called E-Musik and U-Musik (the German division into “serious” and “entertainment” music) and to the cultural traditionalism of a large part of the audience for classical orchestral music.
Even so, combining through-composed music, with its complex melodic and formal structures, with the improvisational potential of jazz is far harder to achieve in a jazz club than in a concert hall. That is why jazz musicians should not shy away from taking on the subsidised classical music culture and GEMA (the German performing-rights society), which plays an important, extraordinarily traditionalist and destructive role here. The ongoing development of musical sensibility in society as a whole, and of cultural awareness among people interested in music, will in the long run make it impossible to banish jazz and jazz-related music from the bourgeois concert world. So it is always worthwhile to take up the artistic challenge and write music for larger ensembles, even if it cannot be performed successfully straight away.
4. The record player
Since the gramophone record spread in the 1920s, individual listening to recorded music has also been one of the places of performance in a wider sense. The record, together with the possibilities and conditions of recording technology, led to a new aesthetic of sound. This aesthetic of the record in turn influenced the sound of music performed live. The record also gave rise to a new kind of historical awareness. Whereas music history used to be a history of the harmonic and formal elements of music, since the 20th century there has also been a history of rhythmic feel (groove), of instrumental sound and of styles of improvisation.
Against this background, the decline of recording formats since the end of the 1980s is extremely problematic. The highly developed analogue recording technology of the LP was replaced by the CD, which at the usual 16-bit resolution sounds cleaner, but also a few shades harsher and colder overall. With the rise of the internet the CD format was pushed aside by mp3 files, which need less storage space but restrict the sound quality considerably further. Listening on carefully assembled hi-fi systems has given way to listening on cheap powered speakers at the computer.
Alongside this decline in sound quality, the awareness was lost that a record is a work of art in its own right, documenting the history of music. In the heyday of the long-playing record, not only were creative recordings of high sound quality made, but artistically convincing covers were designed too, which turned the LP into a total work of art spanning several disciplines. It is no accident that there are still collectors of vinyl records today, and that first pressings of famous recordings fetch high prices. The CD documents the creative process that goes into producing a record far less. This has to do with the fact that a CD can be copied effortlessly and instantly. A CD also ages in a very ugly way; one could rather speak of it rotting, much as a plastic building material does compared with stone or wood. Long before it stops working it becomes unsightly, and the little booklet offers nowhere near the graphic possibilities of an LP cover. On the one hand it gives the impression of being indestructible; on the other, minor damage can make it completely useless. Accordingly little respect is shown to this format. The music industry's desperate attempts to halt the fall in sales are only one sign of this. The mp3 files from the internet are in any case stored only on media whose lifespan does not exceed five years. An awareness of the history of music, including in relation to one's own life story, cannot possibly arise in this way. (With most of my LPs, for example, I can still say exactly when I bought them and in what situations I listened to them.)
It is certainly unrealistic to expect a large-scale return to analogue techniques of preserving recordings. But it is certainly possible to design CDs more creatively and with greater care. It is also possible to use analogue recording techniques; I have personally had good experiences recording on tape machines. Just as important, of course, is how listeners behave: recorded music should be listened to just as attentively as music in a live situation. Music playing everywhere as background wallpaper does not bear witness to a love of music but, on the contrary, to indifference and lack of interest. The record as an object must be seen as what it really is: a small work of art documenting a moment in the history of music; a document that makes it possible to hear today's sounds and grooves in 50 years' time and relate them to other styles of music.
Conclusion
I have singled out four places here where musical development and renewal can happen today. There are surely more; others come to mind straight away, for example the church, or places where migrants in Germany make their music. What is and remains important, though, is that new music should not be understood merely as a “colour”, as a superficial sonic attraction presented in places resembling supermarkets, but as a creative element in shaping processes of social or personal development.