{"id":276627,"date":"2014-01-16T10:08:41","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T15:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newmusicbox.org\/?p=25172"},"modified":"2022-04-13T18:26:13","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T22:26:13","slug":"how-to-be-culturally-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/how-to-be-culturally-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Be Culturally Relevant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sharing<\/a>
\nComposers spend an awful lot of time worrying about whether or not what we do is culturally relevant. Many discussions start from the assumption that it\u2019s not; the only question is how we\u2019re going to make<\/i> ourselves relevant before our art form shrivels away like a neglected houseplant.
\nWhenever I hear words like “relevant” or “important,” I always want to ask, “relevant or important to whom<\/i>?” When that detail is left out, these words become codes or shorthands: “important” means “important to Serious Art People,” and “relevant” means “relevant to Real-World Audiences.” But “Real-World Audiences” is a code too, because the people who use the phrase seem to have a pretty narrow idea of who counts as real. Other musicians? Not real. Artists in other media? Not real. College students and faculty? Not real. People over 40? Not real. You can sell out a huge concert hall, but if everyone there falls into one or more of the above categories, you\u2019ll still have people citing your show as evidence of classical music\u2019s imminent demise. Because when people say “culturally relevant,” what they really mean is “relevant to young people with mainstream tastes.” And “mainstream tastes,” unfortunately, doesn\u2019t include classical music.<\/p>\n

No other form of experimental music-making holds itself to this kind of standard. Japanese noise artists<\/a>, for example, don\u2019t seem to worry about whether or not their enthusiastic but small audience is a \u201creal-world\u201d one, and I\u2019ve never heard anyone say that in order for them to justify what they\u2019re doing, they have to appeal to people who aren\u2019t interested in what they\u2019re doing<\/i>. “Why should non-mainstream music reach out to wider audiences?” asked Masami Akita in a recent interview<\/a>. “These days, everything is diversified and it’s OK to have many different non-mainstream musics for non-mainstream music lovers.”<\/p>\n

I actually do think that outreach is important and valuable. And I think the audience for classical music, and new music in particular, could be larger than it currently is. But our habit of dismissing the audience we already have as “unreal” has made me pretty skeptical of “cultural relevance” as a concept.<\/p>\n

And yet something happened recently that made me reconsider. I\u2019d been listening to Weird Sister<\/i>, the newest release from a post-punk band with the wonderful name of Joanna Gruesome<\/a>, and at a certain point I noticed something odd. The album reminds me by turns of Sonic Youth, Pixies, Bikini Kill, My Bloody Valentine, Splendora\u2014but nothing that\u2019s happened since. It\u2019s not that the band doesn\u2019t have an original voice; it\u2019s that they sound like a band with an original voice from 1993<\/i>. I like them, but I can\u2019t figure out how to plug them into the cultural landscape of 2013.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s bad to make something that seems like it\u2019s from another era. There\u2019s room in the world for all kinds of art, and that includes retro art. But I also think that “how does this relate to other things from its own time?” is a more productive question for composers than “does this appeal to young people with mainstream tastes?” And those relationships can pop up in unexpected places. Sometimes, if you zoom out far enough, even the most seemingly hermetic avant-garde music sounds like it\u2019s having a conversation with other styles and genres from the same era. Just look at Boulez\u2019s Le marteau sans ma\u00eetre<\/i>, whose instrumentation\u2014including alto flute, guitar, vibraphone, xylorimba, and bongos\u2014wouldn\u2019t be too out of place on a 1950s exotica or lounge album. I also remember listening to a 1973 recording of Andr\u00e9 Boucourechliev\u2019s open-form composition Anarchipel<\/a><\/i> and suddenly being struck by how much certain dense, skittering passages reminded me of Alice Coltrane\u2019s Universal Consciousness<\/a><\/i>, released two years earlier. Were those connections intentional? Probably not\u2014but there was something in the air.
\nThose are isolated examples, but sometimes a single idea will show up again and again, across multiple styles and media, in a particular period of time. For example: the collage boom of the 1960s, which showed up in avant-garde composition (Berio\u2019s Sinfonia<\/i>, Stockhausen\u2019s Hymnen<\/i>), in psychedelic rock (“Revolution 9,” early Frank Zappa albums), in Pop Art (Tom Wesselman<\/a>, Robert Rauschenberg<\/a>), in films both experimental (Jan \u0160vankmajer\u2019s “Historia Naturae, Suita<\/a>\u201d) and mainstream (the acid-trip scene<\/a> in Easy Rider<\/i>), and even in advertising (“The Paperwork Explosion<\/a>,” an IBM promo by a young Jim Henson).<\/p>\n

Another example, which doesn\u2019t get talked about as often: all the art from the 1980s that depicts a world made inhuman by suburban sprawl and global technological networks. You see it in contemporary opera (Robert Ashley\u2019s Improvement<\/i> and eL\/Aficionado<\/i>), in New Wave (Gary Numan<\/a> and Thomas Dolby<\/a>), and in whatever you want to call Laurie Anderson\u2019s Big Science<\/a><\/i> (“take a left at what\u2019s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they\u2019re thinking of building that drive-in bank”). You also see it in the hyperreal domestic photographs of Tina Barney<\/a>, the ultra-stylized suburbia of Bruce Charlesworth\u2019s installations<\/a>, and the Talking Heads\u2019s film True Stories<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

All the articles I\u2019m writing for NewMusicBox this month deal with the issue of composers drawing on sources outside the perceived mainstream of “new music.” Last week<\/a>, I took issue with one of the common arguments against it, but I didn\u2019t say anything about why someone would want to do it in the first place. Different composers will give different answers, of course. But one possible reason is that when artists who work in different styles, in different media, and at different levels of mainstream exposure share ideas, they can create something larger than themselves\u2014a complex tangle of interconnections that links their work together and gives it extra layers of meaning. And I\u2019d like to think that if composers participated more often in these artistic conversations, they might not worry so much about being culturally irrelevant.<\/p>\n

One final note: a few people were concerned that my previous article didn\u2019t address the political and ethical issues that come up when different artistic cultures interact with each other\u2014and I\u2019m sure some of you were thinking the same thing as you read this one. No need to worry: that\u2019s exactly what my next article is going to be about. See you in a week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I hear words like “relevant” or “important,” I always want to ask, “relevant or important to whom<\/i>?” While I do think the audience for classical music, and new music in particular, could be larger than it currently is, I\u2019m usually pretty skeptical of “cultural relevance” as a concept. But something happened recently that made me reconsider. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":862,"featured_media":434608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1632,440,1004],"nmb_categories":[6],"how_to_category":[],"nmb_tags":[],"internal_taxonomy":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow To Be Culturally Relevant - New Music USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/how-to-be-culturally-relevant\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How To Be Culturally Relevant - New Music USA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Whenever I hear words like "relevant" or "important," I always want to ask, "relevant or important to whom?" While I do think the audience for classical music, and new music in particular, could be larger than it currently is, I\u2019m usually pretty skeptical of "cultural relevance" as a concept. 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