Feed The Animals (Music)

The Rite of Spring is a century old this year. Does contemporary music have the same ability to shock its audience?

One hundred years ago in Paris saw the opening night of Stravinsky's seminal Rite of Spring, in which a young Russian woman uncomplainingly danced herself to death to ensure a good harvest for the coming year. The music appeared to forewarn of the impending crashes and booms of war a year later. Subtle violence was to be found in its pounding rhythmic propulsion and predictably the reaction was one of outrage, hostility and fury, with many in the audience loudly complaining throughout.

Leaving aside even that reaction, which as far as I can recall has not happened in high art for 28 years (I'm 28 now. And I'm backing my baby memory and toddler years) and reading of Skandalkonzert in Vienna months before the uproar in Paris, I was struck by the thought that this particular form has effectively lost the ability to shock when put into historical context.

A bold statement, one I don't wish to extrapolate upon in huge detail right now (I'll return to it again) but I feel a true one when comparing notes in Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise (which now appears to be running a festival at the Southbank in London for an entire year) and Kevin Jackson's Constellation of Genius, which both point to a fomentation and a formal displeasure with the status quo amongst a significant number of composers, painters, writers etc.

It seems that music now occupies a different sphere. There's plenty of irony in making music as ubiquitous as an advert via online streaming and leaving aside the democratic element of that it also partially why shock factor has been diminished.

I'd argue many record executives - pragmatists at heart, naturally - recognise the hand they have been dealt and understand what not to play. The simple challenge of currency in an insane warp-speed environment is the overriding impulse of production and release, which goes a long way to explaining the lack of Stravinsky moments. Heidegger no doubt has something to say here arguably and ironically the death of archaic movements like Romanticism served to further undermine (although this particular position may never have offered anything outside the wilfully conservative - speculation is disingenuous and fun)

But how to explain the lack of artists willing to undertake what, in 1913, was recognised as outrageous chance? That's another blog.

If you're ever interested, TRiN and CoG are both fantasic reads. More on them another time but as a jumping-off point for seismic cultural events you'd do worse than read these two. Ross chews over all the A listers and many more; he also 'does' Wagner as a sort of origin story in typically erudite detail and deftly weaves the threads linking many of the greatest composers and their relationships. He's also very good at clearly showing where the bend in the road took place with modern composition when discussing Berg, Webern et al.

In CoG Jackson chooses Joyce and Eliot as his progenitors of a modernist revolution in 20th century Europe but lets the political and artistic community of 1922 - Hemingway, Matisse, Radiguet and Cocteau, Brancusi, Lenin, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence - even Aleister Crowley - intermingle on the page as if it were a Parisian café. Format helps - it is written as sort of world diary checking in at some of the hubs of culture and delivers fascinating morsels alongside judicious commentary with regular aplomb.

As a final note, interesting that that historically much of the great works in art appear to have been formed from the bloodiest decades as civilisation moved at a head-spinning pace (Jackson's regular check-ins on an increasingly sickly/exhausted Lenin throughout 1922 offer a neat microcosm here) from 1914-1922 saw a Soviet revolution, WW1, Irish unrest at it's colonial cousin, wars in Peking (now Beijing) the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the independence of Egypt, the gradual crumbling of colonial rule in India, amongst dozens of other events. There's more in that...

ANYWAY
My album of the year = Frank Ocean's Channel Orange. Considering the themes, a record that feels really intimate and places the listener at the centre of the experience - it's hard to get that right without still coming across as a narcissist but this is a wonderful effort.