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. Sign up for our weekly email * 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 Why you should listen to Norwegian pop star Sigrid “I miss people. 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Show Hide image Q&A 30 January 2018 Margaret Hodge Q&A: “All politicians are failed actors and actresses” The Labour MP talks Audrey Hepburn, Rosa Parks and Dennis Healy. Sign up for our weekly email * Print HTML Margaret Hodge was born in 1944 in Cairo, Egypt, to Jewish refugee parents. The family settled in Orpington, south London, in 1948. She has served as the Labour MP for Barking since 1994, and fought off Nick Griffin of the BNP in the 2010 election. Her time chairing the public accounts committee led to a book about government waste, “Called to Account”. What’s your earliest memory? Coming here to the UK as an immigrant from Egypt and being allowed to go into the cockpit of this tiny little aeroplane, which had to land to refuel in Rome. It was a traumatic event in my life: I remember it being really squashed and the plane wobbling. Who was your childhood hero? Audrey Hepburn – I thought she was quite gorgeous and a little bit of an outsider. And Rosa Parks, who was modest and brave and changed the world. What was the last book that changed your thinking? Philippe Sands’s East West Street. It resonated with my own history and my own family. Which political figure, past or present, do you look up to? Denis Healey. I went with him when he led a very small group to Russia in 1992. He was an incredibly impressive man. We went to a library in Moscow, where he spoke for an hour without notes about the impact of his love of poetry on his politics. What would be your Mastermind specialist subject? Tax avoidance or Schubert. I play lots of Schubert – and I’d like to take on the tax professionals to show that I understand it just as well as they do. In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live? I’d love to be around the brilliant composers of the late 18th century: Mozart onwards. What TV show could you not live without? I never watch telly! I’m a Radio 4 listener – that’s how I consume most of my news. I watched The Handmaid’s Tale, though, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Who would paint your portrait? Gillian Ayres. She’s in her eighties and she paints in very, very strong, vivid colours. She’s incredibly optimistic. I met her when I was arts minister and I never tire of looking at her work. What’s your theme tune? I love Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”, which reminds me of my husband. The piece I play the most often when I’m working is Beethoven’s third piano concerto: the second, slow movement. It’s very simple and utterly beautiful. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received? Life is a marathon, not a sprint. The decisions I took, how I balanced my life – I’ve been really lucky. I’ve been able to do lots of things, as time has moved on. What’s currently bugging you? Brexit and the Labour Party. I’m not going to expand on that. When were you happiest? On holiday with my husband and four children. The oldest was ten and the youngest was one. I was pushing the buggy through the airport. I remember thinking, “God, this is utterly great.” I wished the clock could stop there. In another life, what job might you have chosen? All politicians are failed actors and actresses in my view. Are we all doomed? No. I’m always glass-half-full about the future. Things can only get better. This article first appeared in the 26 January 2018 issue of the New Statesman, How women took power More Related articles James Rhodes Q&A: “I feel like I have a less punchable face on canvas” Peter Carey Q&A: “Heroes are dangerous types in need of a damn good biographer” Mary Beard Q&A: “Rome would have been ghastly for a woman without a fortune” Subscription offer 12 issues for £12 + FREE book LEARN MORE Close This week’s magazine