Classical Music versus Classic Rock

"It’s only lately, now that pop and rock has become the status quo, less a home for possible radical sentiments and creative surprises and more an insular venue for nostalgia, processed hipness and banal emotional comfort, that I have been attracted to classical music, and the idea of the orchestra." -- Paul Morley, keynote speech at the  2014 Conference of the Association of British Orchestras 

 "My recent move into the classical orbit seems like the classic clichéd middle age move from rock and pop ...  For me, though, it has been more a move to where the provocative, thrilling, actually adaptive ideas are, more because rock music and pop culture have themselves settled down and become the status quo. The majority of pop and rock musicians have run out of ideas....  Rock has become predictable, ordinary and obvious, increasingly recycled and narrow in its concerns and expression, its stars more and more slick and shallow.... Rock music, the festival culture, the repetition and rehashing of poses, riffs, rhythms and ingredients seems more closely related to the future fearing sentiments and sentimentally that have led to a revival in baking that anything socially and culturally revolutionary....  

"I find myself in my disturbing mid 50s bored and frustrated with all this glittery orthodoxy, these old fashioned values crudely disguised as rebellion...  I reached the stage where I decided, if I was listening to pop and rock that was up to and over 50 years old, I might as well listen to music that was up to and over 100, 200, 300 years old. I found that the music from the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century, let alone the 20^th, made a lot of the rock of the 60s and 70s sound very quaint and dated...  

"When I was younger, orchestral classical music seemed to be all about the past, it was a museum, collecting and freezing culture, routinely recycling repertoire, adrift from ideas and the future... It is pop music that is now about its past, about anniversaries and retrospection, and more and more about its revered dead or nearly dead icons, and from where I listen and think, it is classical music, whether from the 18th century or last week, that seems to be more about challenge, mystery, metamorphosis and the essence of what it is to be human.  At a time when what it is to be human is threatened by the emergence and speedy mutation of machines and the provisional emergence of an unfathomable machine consciousness, it seems increasingly important, if just for old time’s sake, that the human isn’t completely lost...


"… But the music we look towards for this human presence should not sound as though it has been made to serve machines, and complete their mission to turn reality into a tightly coordinated  sequence of pulses, rhythms, patterns, clichés, climaxes and abbreviations – or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, into an explosive utopian paradise where all our unruly needs our instantly catered for… 


"To those of us paranoiacs resisting the shift into a compressed, spaced out utopia constructed by engineers, game makers, publicists and statisticians,  classical music, with its emphasis on patience, imagination, privacy, progress, wonder,  paying attention, layers of meaning, making connections, epic historical detail, seems part of the alternative, seems to represent a better form of the idea of progress..."


There is a small paradox buried within the argument of the whole piece: it is the collapse of linear time (past/present/future) that allows classical music to seem no less new than anything else, certainly no more dated than 99 percent of rock .... As Morley put its: "as we are breaking free, for better or worse, from traditional, modernist notions of distinct, easily measured progress...  the orchestra is freed from the museum - or everything else has joined it in the museum, otherwise known as the internet"

YET  classical music and the mental-cognitive-perceptual skills it requires to understand and enjoy as long-form abstract narratives, is all aboutsustained attention, development through time, ie. linearity.  And this linearity, this depth and difficulty, work towards the preservation of our humanity, in the face of the  attention-span shrivelling info-blitz, the anti-culture of instant-gratification and digital twitch.  This music and its culture educates us cognitively but also emotionally - teaching us how to feel, rather than just be prisoners of sensation and affect.