Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The popular notion of new music?


I love this video. It's a remarkable parody not only of a good amount of actual music, but of the new music stage aesthetic/presence we've seen so often. (I especially love the way Carol Burnett turns and walks to the piano).

The Carol Burnett Show was on from 1967-1978, and had a live audience. As I see it, the video can be interpreted two ways, depending on the viewer's exposure to new music. One, it can be very simply silly, a bunch of very serious "artists" who have no idea what they're doing, but are putting everything they have into it nonetheless. Two, it's a spoof of atonal music. But in order to know that, you'd have to have some exposure to the original. (We had a Carter piece on last summer's In Frequency concert, and one of the musicians felt that there was a strong resemblance between it and this...) My question is, would a television studio audience in 2010 react the same way? Would they understand why it was so funny? I'm sure there are no actual statistics, but how many studio audience members in, say, 1972, had been to multiple classical music concerts, enough to hear a range of repertoire? And how many in 2010?

This is not a lament about some mythical by-gone time in which audiences were enormous, new music was appreciated, patron money flowed through the cities, and unicorns frolicked in fields of cotton candy. I'm just wondering what a "lay" viewer sees when he or she sees this.

Now watch it again. It's still hilarious.

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