Music & Theatre 23 July 2012 The pernicious rise of “indie-classical” If you think classical music is snobbish, just take a look at indie culture. Print HTML Last weekend Andrew Mellor wrote an emotive piece about concert hall snobbery and class positioning in classical music for the New Statesman’s Cultural Capital blog. His observations on the particular obsessions of opera and concert programmes, “stuffed full with adverts for private schools”, were spot on. I have already blogged about the distressing cult of the concert hall, and how a new generation of musicians are looking for ways past this via a radical recontextualisation of classical music. Having been a part of this myself, I would say that this movement is mostly motivated by a more utopian desire to build a better musical culture for classical music’s new age, rather than solely as an angry reaction to the outmoded performance practices of past generations. Only a day before Mellor’s piece, I joined over 100 musicians in a performance of John Adams’s epic orchestral poem Harmonielehre in Peckham Rye Car Park. But I do disagree with Mellor’s focus on how the exercise of superior knowledge is something peculiar to classical music. Mellor writes: “At so many concerts and operas in the UK, if you don’t look and sound like you know what you’re talking about you may well be stared at, judged and made to feel uncomfortable by someone who thinks they do”. But this kind of behaviour is far from the sole preserve of the “arrogant dinosaurs” of the classical music world. Hipsterdom, rooted in the contempt for consumerism of Nineties indie culture, has created an aesthetic predicated on the perfection and superiority of taste. Hipsters have recently displayed a knack for picking up on all kinds of “retromania” trends – from lo-fi photography to collecting vintage typewriters. In his damning critique of indie music for the literary magazine n+1, Richard Beck examined how hipsterdom has produced a pastoral culture – exemplified by the wild carousel music of experimental indie band Animal Collective. Much of this pushed at a kind of cultural decadence: “So long as they practiced effective management of the hype cycle, they were given a free pass by their listeners to lionize childhood, imitate their predecessors, and respond to the Iraq war with dancing”. In fact it’s worth looking at how classical music has the potential to become yet another site for hipster posturing. One way of exploring this is to examine the spate of recent articles hyping the idea of the “indie-classical” genre. Earlier this year Jayson Greene wrote an article on "The Emergence of Indie Classical" for the music website Pitchfork, the hipster publication and indie music kingmaker par excellence. In his “examination of the ever-melding worlds of indie and classical music”, Greene’s enthusiastic rhetoric was turned up full-blast: “indie-classical has grown past the point where it’s some miraculous new fruit on pop culture’s Big Tree,” he gushed. Complete with recognised labels and names, including Nico Muhly, Hauschka and Owen Pallett, “indie-classical” is a “high-functioning cottage industry now”. “The new generation is pouring in: eager, collaborative, as invested in indie rock as they are in the nuts-and-bolts arcana of composition,” Greene exclaimed. “Lately, it’s become hard to even tell an indie rock musician and a composer apart.” This kind of self-congratulatory literary excess, obsessed with naming musical influences, is singular to the publication – Pitchfork above all others knows how to work cultural capital and its whole signature style is geared towards investment. Of course this may just illustrate a pseudo-scientific propensity among music journalists to come up with spurious names for pop genres and trends. Recently I’ve encountered “hypnagogic pop”, “digital maximalism” and “witch-house”. I’m still not sure what any of these really mean, and certainly you’d be hard-pressed to find any musicians who would willingly describe themselves as part of these “scenes”. Nevertheless the sentiment behind these terms is clear – they form a significant part of a music critic’s cachet. The composer Nico Muhly has blogged about this: “I did a show in London that I thought was pretty great, and then online it was all indie-classical this and indie-classical that and I was like, do you know? Forget that. Nothing is gained by that description”. So the term “indie-classical” may not mean much, but the very desire to coin such a term is interesting. I am concerned that the prevalence of the “indie-classical” branding comes as part of a more problematic attempt to subject classical music to the shallow posturing and exclusionary logics of indie scenes, where Pitchfork has built a culturally anxious readership. While, in part, this is just an inevitable side-effect of broadening audiences, classical music already offers a tempting heritage, social ritual and professionalised elite performance. It has even cultivated the idea that it is somehow an “underdog” compared to today’s popular music trends – it could not be a more perfect hipster’s wet dream. Watch out for the new snobbery. › Misaligned incentives in the Australian immigration system, or: moving to jail The new snobbery: Pitchfork Music Festival (Photo: Getty) En Liang Khong is an arts writer and cellist. Follow on twitter @en_khong More Related articles Reversing the muse: musician Laura Marling on her quest for more women studio engineers A new generation of pop stars is queering and subverting the high school music video trope How tour merchandise became high fashion
Show Hide image Music & Theatre 15 August 2016 Reversing the muse: musician Laura Marling on her quest for more women studio engineers The singer-songwriter is campaigning for more female representation behind the scenes in the music industry. Print HTML It has often been said that Laura Marling is wise beyond her years. Her debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, came out days after her 18th birthday to immediate critical acclaim. Just eight years down the line, she has released five albums, experimenting with influences from folk, country, indie rock, jazz and Indian raga. But when I meet her in north London, she is more preoccupied with gender roles in the music industry than which genre she will dabble in next. The Hampshire-born musician is in the midst of working on a project called Reversal of the Muse, which is born out of a series of conversations with female musicians and professionals she has had, and aims to highlight the stark lack of women working as studio engineers in the industry. For Marling, it’s simple: “Reversing the muse means taking away the subjugating role of being the object.” A conversation in her adopted home of America with the Haim sisters led her to talk to the band’s engineers. In turn, she spoke to Vanessa Parr, a rare female in-house engineer at Village Studios, Los Angeles. Reels of these conversations – taking the form of interviews – are due to be released as podcasts this week. These discussions are at the heart of the Reversal of the Muse project. Back across the Atlantic, Marling has put her experiment into action, arranging sessions in Urchin Studios, Hackney, where she recorded her 2015 album Short Movie. Each day a different female sound engineer has been in to record with all-women acts including current successes Shura, Marika Hackman and The Big Moon. Marling will later tell me that fiery indie four-piece The Big Moon are one of the few contemporary bands she is currently listening to. “They haven’t actually spent much time in a studio, but they are making their [debut] record with Catherine Marks, which is really unusual. They’ve only ever worked with a woman, and that’s so cool.” I ask what the outcome of this time spent recording in a female-dominated environment is. Any breakthrough gender theories? Marling laughs. “The funny thing was that, in my mind, I thought we would discover that there was some great big hole in female creativity that’s been missing from the studio environment,” she says. “But actually, with the engineers that we’ve mostly been focusing on, we discovered that women are obviously just as capable as men at doing that exact job.” Marling seems amused at this rather unexciting outcome. She continues: “It seems really silly because it was a comfortingly mundane result. It’s not like we discovered something huge. It’s just like ‘uh!’, we did it. It was really easy. Simple.” But gender isn’t simple. It’s a topic Marling has been focusing on for a while now, reading, admiring the works of and listening to interviews with a succession of inspirational female creatives. Beaming, she tells me “Lou Salomé, Anaїs Nin and Leonora Carrington – they are my Holy Trinity.” Lou Andreas-Salomé was the first female psychoanalyst in a male-dominated industry; she worked alongside the likes of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. She was a woman who took control over her own sexuality and “used it to expand her academic and intellectual work”, according to Marling. Anaїs Nin was the first woman to, from the 1940s onwards, write extensive works of erotica. The explosion of the 1960s feminist movement made Nin’s published writings important feminist works. But it was Leonora Carrington who inspired the title of the project. The surrealist British painter, who had fallen in love with the German artist Max Ernst before the outbreak of war, ended up in Mexico after fleeing mental asylums. Marling insists on Carrington’s genius. “She wasn’t insane; she was just really far-out. Her whole thing was: ‘I have no time to be your muse’. She was obsessed with becoming the most capable painter possible.” Marling has long toyed with the idea of the muse. In fact, the first track on 2011’s A Creature I Don’t Know is “The Muse”. On “Saved These Words”, the final number on 2013’s Once I Was an Eagle, Marling bellows: “He was my next verse”. It is a lyric that considers those surrounding Marling as her calculated artistic inspiration. Has she had a muse herself? “I don’t know if I’ve done it consciously. But sometimes you just meet people who are extraordinarily vibrant, in some way. And you don’t have to possess them, you can just observe them.” She recalls Carolee Schneemann’s 1964-67 short film, Fuses. “It’s a piece of art that I saw quite young, maybe too young, because it’s quite saucy. It’s her making love to her partner. They’re being witnessed by a cat,” she says. “Quite a lot of the camera is focused on them both: it doesn’t fetishise the female body in any way. It’s not at all sexy. It’s definitely not pornographic but you can’t really put your finger on why. “I remember there’s a scene where she’s kind of looking towards the camera, or past the camera, and there’s a possessiveness over her lover. I always found that image really intriguing and I’ve sort of subconsciously embodied that in my writing quite a lot because, well – Leonora Carrington was the one who put it into words, but I was never interested in being anyone’s muse either.” More Related articles A new generation of pop stars is queering and subverting the high school music video trope How tour merchandise became high fashion Has the Mercury Prize become so alternative that we can guess which musicians won’t win?
