EnjoymentMusic: healing the rift by Ivan Hewett
The Western world must learn to sing again
By Michael Church
01 January 2004
Until recent times, says Ivan Hewett, music was everywhere, and always an authentic expression of the social situation that called it forth. The idyll was shattered, in the developed West, by the notion that music could be transportable: a mass could be taken out of church and performed in a concert hall. Then music began its long retreat from the public domain. It turned into something made en famille, then something listened to in the privacy of a room, until finally the Walkman reduced its operative space to six inches between the ears.
Hewett's book is fruitfully complex: I could have extracted several other narratives which would have summarised music's trajectory just as well. The 'rift' in his title denotes nothing so banal as that between classicists and modernists. His big theme is the falling-apart of the laboriously-constructed musical realm of the early 20th century, and the perennial desire, among composers, to make it whole again. As he makes clear, that crisis reflects a falling-apart in our entire culture. Putting it together again - if such a thing is possible - would benefit us all.
Mr. Church continues his review by commenting on the rise of the
programme note as recent composers feel compelled to explain how to listen to the music. Why are composers so intent on creating private musical languages? What is the social function of music? Mr. Church concludes:
What now? Hewett offers a brilliant tour d'horizon of music's multifarious new directions - aided by sampling tricks, fuelled by PC notions - but concludes that if we want to "heal the rift", we can't delegate the job to composers. We must all start making music again. If we play and sing, we will once more listen actively too. And that way lies musical health.
