Simon Hewitt Jones, Violinist Hello! I'm Simon. I play the violin. I also monetize soundwaves, wave my arms about, bend genres, blather at cameras, transcend souls, moan about apartheid walls, and create musical microeconomies. If you really need a list of all the famous people and organizations I've worked with, then yes, you can find one here. But if like me you get far more excited by music and original ideas, you should start with my blog, or by clicking here. - About Simon - Digital Press Kit - Personal Violin Tuition

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Is Classical Music still a valid term, and if not, what should we be saying instead?

[this is not referring to the Classical period, but to the use of ‘Classical’ to describe ‘Western Art Music’]

In response to Peter Tregear’s blog post, and the ensuing conversation on MusBook: ‘What’s in a name?’

Peter & I, like so many musicians and academics, are constantly grappling with the question: ‘Is Classical Music still a valid term, and if not, what should we be saying instead?’. We ask it not just with the motive of musicological enquiry, but also with the more practical question in mind of what terminology we use for MusBook.

I think the problem stems from the fact that, after a certain point in the 20th century, we can no longer define what ‘Western Art Music’ actually is. We’ve kind of reached a ‘credit crunch’ of musical style. [in fact, I blogged about this analogy some while ago: check out http://www.simonhewittjones.com/blog/2007/11/15/creative-tension-in-free-markets-long-post/]

For me, this begins with… I’m not sure, maybe music of the medieval times, or perhaps written notation? [neumes!], but most definitely ends with John Cage’s 4′33”, because as a conceptual work you simply can’t get any further than that end of the musical spectrum, where the silence is the music (ok I know 4′33” is more complex than that - am just making the general point about silence being seen as a lack of noise). I think it can be argued that every musical style can be placed at some point on a spectrum between pure noise, where pitch cannot be identified, and total silence.

So much music before 4′33” could easily be defined as ‘Classical’ or ‘Western Art Music’ because it is distinctly traceable to that ‘Classical’ tradition. Whether that means ‘presented as part of’ or ’seen to be descended from’ or whatever else. Contemporary ‘classical’ composers of the 1960s and their pop contempories The Beatles would not be presented together in the same concert. There were distinct musical segments.

Now, the boundaries that used to exist increasingly don’t. I have ex-Royal Academy of Music colleagues who you would recognize as ‘classical’ instrumentalists, who work with contemporary music groups that don’t have any kind of duty to any kind of boundary. Of course you’ll get Radiohead and Britten in the same concert. Of course you will have a collaboration in a nightclub that fragments late avant garde pieces with commissioned work from an electronica artist, processed through a digital interface via a laptop and punctuated with movements of a Bach cello suite. Of course… I could go on!

Now, you and I, and I guess the musicians involved, would all consider ourselves to be of a tradition… of a tradition of ‘classical training’, or something. But does that mean we are ‘classical musicians’? I simply don’t describe myself as a ‘classical musician’ anymore as I don’t know what it means. If anyone asks, I say I’m a violinist. Yes, of course I play Classical music. In fact, it’s most of what I do! But it is certainly not all I do!

I think the root of this change lies in the social changes that we have seen as a result of technological innovation. I speak as someone who is an early adopter — I remember the first prepaid mobile phones becoming available just as I was finishing secondary education, and rushing to get hold of one, but my more distinct memory is observing over time how the patterns of communication and interaction of the communities around me changed as the new gadgets and tools became more and more prevalent.

As the multiplicity of options increased, so a kind of creative anarchy of consumption and communication came into play, as it does with every disruptive technology (accompanied by the usual chorus of moans and ‘it was never like this in my day!’). But, out of the mêlée, emerges - after a few unsettling months or years of confusion - a clear pathway that becomes the new norm. Remember how SMS messaging caught on? And then smartphones? The iPod?

Consumption of information - especially media and in particular music - is probably as profoundly affected by this kind of change as anything else. The new ways of consuming and communicating that exist now have changed so strongly the ways in which we approach music both as listeners and as creators [or indeed as both — anyone is now empowered to create in a way that never happened before digitalization], that in the future - the existing canon of undeniably ‘Classical’ forms such as symphonies or sonatas excepted - the future of development of musical form and structure (and presentation and performance and everything else) cannot be isolated from external forces as it used to be. We no longer have linear development of musical style - now, we have fragemented-guerilla-social-network-cluster development of musical style!

The facebook generation, that’s perhaps everyone under the age of 30-ish today, does not see boundaries in the same way as the generation above them.

For a generation built up on ‘mash-ups’, facebooking, multi-stream media channels, and more importantly a world wide web where everything is hyperlinked and anything can be connected to anything else, there are far fewer taboos about the need to respect existing genres when connecting forms and structures. If you interact fluently throughout the day by phone, email, sms, facebook or other social network (musbook? ahem!), and face to face, then why on earth would you be bothered by mashing up two contemporary forms from rock and classical music to form something uniquely ungeneric, yet of definite value as a piece of music?

Eurgh… semantics!

So where does my vote lie? I really don’t know. For me, ‘timeless universal music’ is that which I celebrate above all. Sure, Beethoven’s Fifth falls into that category. But doesn’t also Sergent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? [any examples I use here will to an extent be subjective!]. I think this is the nub of the problem; that we have a useful kind of canonization of certain pieces of music that is made highly subjective by long-established boundaries of genre.

At the moment, two potential ways forward I see:

1) to completely reclaim the meaning of ‘Classical’ to mean not ‘Western Art Music’, but instead ‘music which is universally valuable over and above its original cultural context’. Hmm, even already I see several ways to pick that apart as an intellectually faulty statement. But even it were possible, surely to reclaim a word such as ‘Classical’ is a completely insurmountable task. Hang on though: isn’t that what ‘classic‘ means?

Do you listen to Classic music?

2) The other option is to find a new terminology, or indeed to avoid it completely (which is what we seem to be doing with MusBook, at the time of writing).

Is either of these effective? Or are they both completely futile?

I was walking along past the Royal Albert Hall one evening when I bumped into a line of riot police, as you do. Taken on their own, they’re not so scary, but en masse , they’re terrifying: men in big black suits and balaclavas, with hefty helmets, shields and batons; unknown creatures with a threatening power and no visible identity.

I didn’t realize they were blocking the road completely, so I walked up to them. Only when I was fairly close did I become aware of their ferocious beating; pounding on their shields, they were marching slowly forward to a rhythm, like primal warriors advancing into battle. Bang, bang, bang, bang, Halt! Wait!… Forward! Bang, bang, bang, bang, Halt! Forward! Bang, bang, bang…. And so forth. It was mesmerizing.

And yet so timeless. This wasn’t the modern Guerilla warfare we see so often in our lives now. The urban jungle of our modern existence thrives on fragmentation, pure cells of energy, many interdependent yet independent shards of intensity.

Primal beasts aren’t like that. The power comes from the mass, the subversion of individuality into the whole, the overwhelming force of something that holds its own momentum. You get something of it with an orchestra, but not entirely, as individuality is still at play. Not with riot police. Or so I thought.

"Mr Hewitt Jones! You’ll need to turn around. You can’t come this way!"

I’m not used to riot police knowing me by name. For a split second, I was in Orwellian big brother land. But the shock quickly passed. "Who are you?"

The creature shouted back his name; it was someone I knew from school, a singer. For a brief moment the chain of menace cracked. "Oh, Hi!" "Yeah, you’ll have to get out of the way now, you can get down that road there."

Immediately, the shouts began again: "Forward! Bang, bang, bang…" and on they marched. I scuttled out of the way down a side street, and watched as the big black creatures screamed at each other and swarmed to block it off, forcing the cascade of protestors to surge onward down the main road.

That brief glimpse of an individual personality, so quickly submerged back into the whole, just highlighted the raw power of the collective motion. No one person controlled events or was entirely able to stop them. Sure, there must have been someone controlling the hierarchy of the policemen, but the crowd behind them had no such organization. A big creative tension was at play: many large structures were grinding against each other, hanging aggressively in a sustained compromise.

You can sense when a structure is greater than the sum of its parts, even in the smallest groups of people. At the one extreme, string quartets talk of a fifth personality, the essence of the group; at the other, a massed crowed such as a protest or a big celebration can cause a sweep of emotion that everyone is at the same time subject to, part of, contributing to, yet unable to control.

What a beautful thing when it has inherant control and poise, when the mood and emotion and the speed and the motion come together in a coherant rhythm, when the synergy flows without a second’s thought.

And when it doesn’t have that harmony… what a frightening, raw, powerful, dangerous, yet gloriously primal surge of energy it is then.

Either way, the individual has to give way, and dedicate themselves to becoming part of the whole.

Said it before, say it again.

You can’t actively destroy something that’s totally entrenched, even if it doesn’t work.

You have to render it superfluous by building something greater and more effective.

Happy New Year, wherever you are!

All relationships end, so the best ending we can hope for is death. More premature endings happen all the time, whether by abrupt explosion or as the offtailing of an unfinished symphony, drifting apart, never quite remembering to call back…

And so with our music; some we take in phases, some we are friendly with for years, some we love passionately for a while, then never hear again, but for the occasional nostalgic indulgence.

Pop songs are generally the latter; they encapsulate the moment; like a first kiss, they represent something you’ll always remember. But you cannot bottle emotion; it soon fades away.

A step along is the angsty Goth and her heavy metal phase (or for you, was it  Shostakovich?), a confused thrashing to outside ears, but for her, an anchor in a sullen sea of rootlessness.

It’s no surprise the passion lasts a few years, and no surprise either that she goes into a steady job in banking and has 2.5 kids, but that prized Metallica disc will never be thrown out; it is part of where she came from, and it will always have a place in her heart.

Like a parent loved unconditionally, so Mozart and Beethoven and Bach - the universals - are there for you. Maybe the Beatles, for some. You’d never invite them to the ball, but you might go bowling with them. Only on a Saturday afternoon; bring the whole family! You’re in a safe place. The memories are so deep and close that they won’t fade with time or distance: don’t listen to a Beethoven symphony again and you’ll still feel solace from its imprint in your mind. If anyone knew this, it must have been the aging Beethoven: he was devoid of ears, but not of imagination.

And then there are the pieces that are deep and lasting favourites; for me, the Tchaikovsky violin concerto; a stalwart of years of listening. Every time I will find something new; a deeper layer will reveal itself. But also, when I relisten once more after a few weeks or months have passed, it still gives me that initial excitement again; the feeling that there’s more to discover, and there always will be.

But the Tchaikovsky concerto is also my old beloved winter coat, crumpled and worn… Characters merge; the coat is part of me when I wear it, its shape cannot help but be affected by how I wear it, how I play it. I’ll still have that coat-concerto when I’m 80, and even if I get too old to play it, I’ll pick it up and run my fingers over the violin, remembering bygone arpeggios.

I haven’t been blogging my current trip to Palestine*, where the Al Kamandjati Camerata has been touring a Baroque programme throughout the country, but my experiences on this winter’s journey have been just as fascinating, hopeful, hopeless and colourful as ever.

As well as a full selection of music for strings and solo instruments by Handel, Bach, Boyce, Telemann, Quantz and Fasch , I was also playing part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and it was a joy to perform as far afield as Nablus (so much more secure than last year), and Shaf’am, a mainly Arabic town in the north of Israel, as well as the usual haunts: Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and other cities.

Unlike last year, we didn’t have permission to enter the Gaza Strip, and unsurprisingly so: the situation there has deteriorated disgracefully at the time of writing, and the end of the latest ceasefire last week has only confirmed the continuation of hostility that never genuinely ceased.

But for all the terrible realities, other things improve relentlessly. It’s very moving to come back again to the same place - I have indefinitely committed to returning twice a year for festivals in December and in the summer - and see the young Palestinian musicians so much further advanced in maturity and skill. There is phenomenal promise in these lands, and although the future will never be bright until a lasting peace is assured, it is realistic to hope that when it does finally happen, a new generation will be ready to realize its potential.

As well as some fairly large scale concerts in Ramallah and Jerusalem, working with the renowned singer Waltraud Meier and the brilliant Jerusalem Symphony oboist Demetrios Karamintzas, we also toured extensively in communities such as Jericho and Bethlehem, where audience development is less about attracting people with an existing interest in music than effecting a wholesale transformation in the attitude of the community, and inspiring focus and concentration in listeners to increase their cultural awareness and quality of life.

This being Palestine, everything is tinged with a wildness that is absurd to a foreign visitor. More than once we were left in complete darkness mid-piece owing to power failure (candles and mobile phones to the rescue!), and the post-concert headcounts of the childrens’ choir were legendary ‘anyone not here? OK, let’s go!’

Palestinian contempt towards the formalities of military checkpoints might seem superficially like the harbouring of a death wish, but closer examination reveals a healthy black humour that is as inspiringly dogged as it is cathartic.

It was heartening too to talk to our Palestinian colleagues (or by now I should probably say friends), and to really reach a deep understanding of their political views. I find that beneath the panoply of conflicting opinions on the political situation - on which every one of us often disagrees - there is a deep rooted focus on freedom and peace that transcends any political arguement. More than once I heard Palestinians give sensible, logical advocations of a one state solution, but when pressed by me as to how they would feel if peace did eventually erupt in the shape of two states (for I believe, as do many, that Israel agreeing to a one-state agreement is about as likely as the celestial teapot being proven to exist!), gave incredibly eloquent answers that rose beyond personal belief. Their attitude: that ultimately peace and freedom are the important goals, and that those people not actively involved in shaping the political process should focus not on the political theories of tomorrow, but on the practical aspirations of today; seeding the creative thought, dialogue and tolerance that will educate the next generation to cope constructively and peacefully in an unknown future.

It’s worth repeating again the fundamental idea that it is often impossible to break down oppressive structures (literally or metaphorically!), and that the only way to overcome them is to build something positive from the grassroots that grows so influential that the old order is made obsolete. There comes a moment - a tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell would say - when mass awareness that something needs to give comes into being. And when that tipping point happens, change comes very quickly. History proves this: from the fall of the Berlin wall to the death of the record industry (and subsequent re-emergance of the music industry) and even the phenomenon of Barack Obama’s rise to power, it’s a reliable pattern for making insurmountable problems dissolve themselves.

I was in the office in Ramallah, articulating these ideas to one of the guest artists, when Ramzi walked in, and caught the end of my explanation. ‘Exactly’, he said, with his characteristically devious smile, and a glint in his eye.. ‘It is exactly what I try to do.’ Ramzi ‘gets it’, and so do so many others in the Palestinian education, culture, business and NGO sectors. I hope with all my heart that the same shift of awareness is happening in Israel too.

It can be argued that the imprisonment and psychological repression of the Palestinian people shares many methodological similarities with the injustices of the iron curtain, apartheid, and racial discrimination of the 20th century. It would not surprise me if it ends in a similar, peaceful way - but it will still take decades to happen. That’s the positive scenario. If the current ‘two steps forward one step back’ approach continues, peace in the Middle East will take another hundred years or more to arrive. But it can happen, and it will happen, however long it takes.

*Yes yes yes, I know it’s officially the ‘Occupied Territories’. I call it Palestine to make the point, don’t write in.

Photos by Kerry Olson. Baroque Festival image copyright Al Kamandjati.

How do you win an auction?

The answer is to work out exactly how much the item is worth to you, bid that, and then forget about it. Either way you’ve won. Think about it.

I find that day to day life in an Arabic environment is often like an ongoing auction. When I travel in the Middle East, I nearly always pay the most pure price for a product or a service. By which I mean, at the point of transacion, the actual price paid reflects the exact value that it is worth to both parties at that very moment. Prices aren’t often published, and they’re constantly in flux, so it’s a very pure/fluid commercial marketplace.

That means that the unknowing tourist WILL get ripped off, because they don’t know how much value something holds in the greater context of things. But in the limited context of what they ARE aware of, they figure that the price is OK, hence the transaction goes ahead.

The obvious fault with this particular Arabic system, and where I dislike it, is the point a which someone realizes that a previous transaction feels imbalanced, and thus seems like a betrayal.

But how different is that feeling of betrayal to the feeling you get when the used car salesman tries to rip you off to your face, or the starbucks muffin costs almost as much as the hourly wage of the person selling it to you?

I’m not saying the western way of ripping people off is any better; I think they’re both ethically dubious methodologies and that the more responsible members of each community set prices in a way that’s more similar to the way you win an auction (just in reverse): work out the cost of production, add in a proportionate profit, and set a price based on that.

I think it also shows that a totally pure transaction does not necessarily reflect any kind of human value; it has no sentience, and it has no morality.

Some form if regulation is nearly always desirable, therefore. Not too much… not too little. It again comes down to … you guessed it… balance and moderation!

My new commute takes me along Friedrichstrasse, from the south end of the street right the way past Checkpoint Charlie and into the centre of Berlin, following the line of the U-Bahn.

This was one of the lines with ‘Ghost Stations ‘, the mothballed underground stations in Eastern territory where West-Berlin trains didn’t stop, but just passed through on their way.

But those stations were never blocked up, or even altered. DDR guards just sat there in turn, rigidly guarding the empty platforms, glowering in the gloaming, as West Berliners glided past in their brightly lit U-Bahn trains. When the stations finally opened up again in 1989, they were like little time capsules; even the 1960s adverts on the Walls hadn’t changed.

I finally found time to visit Haus am Checkpoint Charlie , the famous museum that itself played a part in the 28-year drama of this most famous of crossings. I found the pictures of the late 1980s crossing-buildings especially interesting; they resemble more an English Channel ferry terminal check-in than a scarily disputed international border, and that approachability is disconcerting.

Disconcerting, because the everydayness of the architecture attempts to normalize something that is simply unnormalizable by others’ standards.

The DDR was speaking to the west, in the language of the west, in order to say something entirely not of the west.

In music, that’s called pastiche, and it has its place. But that place is not at the centre of a movement, or a the cusp of change. It’s not a forward movement, it’s a functional movement. What is function without forward direction? Stasis? I always think it ironic that Stasi Is one letter short of stasis .

What baffles me about the DDR is the state quest to instigate emotional stability…through repression! (and perhaps for some, oppression …). By imposing these ‘functional’ systems and strategies through social and civic planning, they endeavoured to create a framework of limitation that prevented self-expression and kept the peaceful majority submissive and benign.

But how can you possibly ‘impose’ emotional stability onto something and think that it will last? All you do by attempting to bottle something up, is increase the pressure on the inside. At some point, the lid will be blown off. So it proved in the American Deep South, and in South Africa, and in Berlin.

And that’s why divisive walls always come down… Even if it takes a hundred years.

Talking of which, I’m going back to Palestine later this month…

It’s funny what globalization does to your mind.

For the last couple of months I’ve been working in only two different places, but with interactions that are spread across a gamut of time zones. It completely does your head in.

Yesterday, for example, I was - as I am most of the time now - in Berlin, doing research work for my scholarship, working on a chamber music project (Brahms Clarinet Quintet! Nice.), and preparing some repertoire for next year.

But during the same day, I had to interact with MusBook-related people in Australia, a friend who’s working in Tokyo, the coordinators in the Middle East for the forthcoming Palestine concerts, several people in the UK about projects for next year, various admin people in New York, a tech support line in the Midwest, and a couple of technology people on the West Coast. Suddenly, time takes on an entirely different meaning.

When is tomorrow? How do you deal with the fact that the person you’ve just got off the phone to is well into tomorrow, whereas the person you’re about to call isn’t even halfway through today? If west coast people are working exceptionally late into the night, and people in Australia are up early in the morning, then it’s almost possible, but for a few hours, to end up talking to someone in Tomorrow on one line, someone from Yesterday on the other, and you’re sitting there alone: a sole representative of Today.

If you think too hard about it, you end up with a kind of macro version of the sensation of timelessness you get when you are ‘in the zone’, utterly focused, aware only of your immediate present. Suddenly, time seems to stand still. It is that moment when there has been a shocking incident, and for a few seconds there is nothing but silent chaos whilst your overloaded senses are numbed, frozen still, trying to comprehend what is real and what is not, in order to fathom a meaningful response.

A little while ago, I mentioned that I was working on a manifesto-like set of ideas about the future of classical music, but they haven’t quite reared their head. I have reams and reams of ideas on paper, filed nicely, but they are just too indomitable for me to really tackle in any meaningful way right now.

But they are informing my everyday work here in Berlin, and - like some kind of mutant academic - I am stress-testing these new ideas not with essays and theories, but with practical application.

In collaboration with Peter Tregear - himself an academic, having been lecturer at Cambridge University and until recently Dean of Melbourne University in Australia - I am test-launching MusBook.com later in the week, with the hope that we can properly launch to lots and lots of people before Christmas.

I won’t waste time here explaining it in depth, other than to say it is a Global Social Network for Classical Music. The Global Social Network for Classical Music , we hope.

Two initial aims. 1) Create a global microeconomy for Classical music, and 2) Deinstitutionalize music education. Crazy? Possibly. Risky? Well… kind of. (we’ve already proved it works, so we’re actually really confident). Addictive? I hope so!

Please check it out, send your comments, play around, tell us how to make it better.

http://www.musbook.com/

George Monbiot opines that many problems in the United States can be traced back to terrible structural problems with the education system there (and the consequent rise in religious fundamentalism).

It’s interesting for me to compare the Palestinian territories, where people are trying to fill a total vacuum with creative educational endeavours, to the USA, where it is almost the opposite situation: a skewed system needs to be completely regenerated, with creativity at its core. (The same could be said for much of the British education system.)

Which is more difficult - building creative/arts education systems from scratch, or persuading existing education systems to reassess their priorities? They both present phenomenal challenges. But don’t bet on the vacuum being the hardest to change: it’s amazing how hard it can be to alter other peoples’ views, and sometimes it takes a generation or more to really change the culture of an existing system.

Either way, it’s a question of creating tipping points of mass opinion, and changing entrenched attitudes. But with a vacuum, you have the space to create a grassroots-powered structure from the ground up. Whereas, when you’re trying to change a system, and you really can’t create something to take its place, you have to prove it works on a small scale, and then persuade people community by community to adopt it, until you create an unstoppable momentum of change that grows exponentially. That’s hard to do.

Question 3: If you had to pick the perfect essay question for your application, what would it be, and how would you answer it?

What motivates you as a musician?

I was lucky to be introduced to music at an early age, and for it to become a vocation whilst I was still young. So I have always been inspired by music. But increasingly, I feel that contemporary classical musicians – the ones who fuse traditional values and contemporary ideas – are the people who are most obviously equipped to inspire the expansion of awareness that will expedite the global changes that we’re beginning to see happening in our post-digital culture.

I believe that the creative arts should be at the forefront of all education systems, as they are the best way of nurturing the skills needed to survive and thrive in a digitally networked world that we cannot yet predict.

I believe that unrelenting development of a society’s culture is the best way to seed the kind of generational change that will positively alter that society’s direction over the long term.

I believe that the creative arts should lead the world in innovation and creativity. Arts that leave this to businesses, technologists and governments risk becoming just fun entertainments, or interesting museum-pieces.

I believe that global digitalization has entirely changed the context and therefore the role of art and cultural endeavour. Artists need to recognize this if they wish to remain relevant to their audience.

Because people often relate to music at a deep emotional level, I believe we as musicians have an opportunity – perhaps an obligation? – to be cultural leaders, not just entertainers, because the profound reactions we can provoke in our audiences give us an awesome responsibility. We have the possibility of infusing our world with musical revelation that leads to real raising of consciousness.

This is what motivates me as a musician. The belief that beautiful performances aren’t just transcendent experiences, but also experiences that can inspire people to strive beyond what is known to be possible.

You might think that an all-Mozart programme in the Berlin Konzerthaus would be the height of stuffy traditionalism, but you’d be wrong.

An 11am concert featuring just such a programme with the excellent violinist Daniel Hope looks fairly predictable on paper, but there were two critical things that this concert-concept had that so many similar programmes in England lack.

Perhaps you can guess which of my favourite buzzwords I’m going to use… Relationships and Experience !

There’s something about the purity of an all-Mozart programme that’s made for congregational consumption. Perhaps it’s that notion of breaking the bread: a feeling of ritual that’s both comforting and familiar, a cleansing, rejuvenative process that brings together the community and simultaneously soothes the individual spirit. Is Mozart the new Church?

The cementing of the experience through coffee and croissants is simply the glue that binds together the varied elements of the process… as is the Mozart. What do Mozart, Coffee, Croissants and indeed the Church have in common? They are all social objects ; all tailored to their respective audiences of course, but all reasons for an experience to happen; conduits for ideas and emotions and interactions. How often have you arranged to meet someone for coffee, with no intention of drinking coffee?

An experience is most powerful when it is authentic, because everyone involved in the experience is intuitively committed to it (there’s no messy fringe area where people sit on the side, awkwardly, like a high school disco). You’re either in, or you’re out.

That’s easy to achieve at a cinema, where there’s a screen, and the room is dark. It’s easy to find in a theatre or a nightclub, where you’re enveloped by your environment. There’ s no mental escape. You either snap out it and leave the room, or you submit to the experience, and it gradually envelopes you, floating you out of your brain, until you become part of the performance’s world.

It’s more easy to be distracted in a classical concert. There are sometimes penguin-tails there to take your attention away; listen too to the cough sweet rustlers, the programme-book hustlers, socialite flakes, connaisseur fakes, distractions of all sizes and flavours. Whose responsibility is it to overcome the plague of broken concentration?

A performance that entrances and enthralls needs no gimmicks to succeed, but to succeed, it needs the best environment in which to enthrall and entrance. And even the most committed audience member needs help to make that happen.

And to my surprise, the all-Mozart concert did just that. The lighting was perfectly honed to pinpoint the mini-orchestras spaced around the hall for a 4-group sinfonia. The personable conductor introduced everything over a radio microphone. There was no interval. Our attention was guided, expertly, precisely, through sharply engineered logistics. Tiny things, but they make all the difference in setting the atmosphere. And the platform that these details create, is the platform upon which the whole experience is built. When the framework of a performance is honed with the same care and attention that the performance itself receives, the experience feels organic. It feels truthful. You want to commit to it.

Was this experience perfect? Not quite. The quality of the croissants was very mediocre.

Eh?!?! The croissants? "You Bourgeois snob!" I hear you say…! How can I complain about croissant-quality without first commenting about the music, about the subtlety of the orchestra’s interpretation, about their shimmering variety of textures, about the charming interplay between soloist and orchestra?!

Ah… but aren’t the croissants just as integral to the experience as the Mozart is? Aren’t they just as relevant as the quality of the orchestral performance? I couldn’t care less about the quality of the croissants per se , but integrated into the two hours for which the experience lasts, they don’t feel of the same world as the crispy, fresh Mozart-interpretations. They are damaging the integrity of my experience!

If you pay 20 Euro for an hour’s music, that in itself is part of the experience… 20 Euro may be a significant ticket-payment for some people, but the excitement and value in return is far more. Handing that shiny 20 Euro note to the ticket seller is a metaphor, not a price tag; it is the wafting aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, the bite of the croissant exploding into your consciousness, the innocent, sparkly vigour of the orchestral exposition in K216.

It is your committment to experiencing the music. And his committment, and her committment, and their committment, too.

"It feels like there’s a shift in consciousness. It feels like something really big and bold has happened here, like nothing ever in our lifetimes did we expect this to happen." - Oprah Winfrey, yesterday, to BBC News

n.

a constantly-developing array of loosely associated creative ideas that affect issues relating predominantly to the arts or to social culture, some of which may gain critical influence and spread memetically as a result of many simultaneous instances of individual manifestation.

(I may revise this a few times… not at my most lucid right now…)

in other words: like, the stuff wot gradually comes to be the new stuff wot is the way the arts is thought about, like.

Homogeneity is not a combined blandness; it is an integrated separateness.

The importance of personal and group dynamics and of live recording in the creative process

I did some work recently for a seriously brilliant producer who works regularly with a major band, and we had a couple of conversations that I found very interesting. One of them was about the use, and the future, of using live musicians for commercial studio recordings.

I brought it up with him (tentatively - I wouldn’t want to become superfluous before we’re even established!) because I’m increasingly aware of how easy it is to use technology to create, or should I say ‘fabricate’, an emotionally engaging performance.

I know for a fact that there are forces, for example in Hollywood, who have London Symphony- quality samples at their fingertips, as well as programmers and technicians worthy of the finest Googler-algorithm-crunchers, and who are not afraid to use them. There is no doubt in my mind that at a certain point in the near future, it will be quite possible to fabricate an entire film score with pre-programmed instrumental samples, and be able to fool even the most experienced ear (it is, after all, ultimately a question of sound waves).

[UPDATE: I’m told it has actually already happened, within the last few weeks…]

So where is the value of ‘live’ if ‘live’ can be perfectly recreated in every way? This has been worrying me.

I’m not talking about live performance. Anyone who’s ever been to a concert (of whatever genre) knows the unique place that a live concert holds in the human experience. That won’t die. I’m talking about the fabrication of recorded music as a faux-live performance that creates a genuine emotional response.

The process of artificially manufacturing something genuinely moving and lifelike is all very well, but it is a strangely inhuman process (I would liken it to the genetically modified production of food: you might not notice the difference in the end product, but for a lot of people there’s something disturbing about the underlying process).

But if the end result sounds just as convincing as a genuinely live recording, why should we actually bother with live musicians at all?

The producer’s answer surprised me. "In a strange way," he said, "it’s more about the process than the end result".

What is the value of the creative process for the artists involved? I don’t yet have a brilliant answer, but the ability to learn, to discover things, and mature one’s ideas through interactions with other people must be a big part of it.

That’s not something you get by sitting programming an algorithm to get the same result. Because although you might get the same result that time, the next time you sit down and start to ‘program’ the next ‘live’ recording, your work is devoid of all the development and experience that you would have gained through a truly ‘live’ set of working relationships and recordings.

So let us welcome sample technology with all the possibilities it brings for enhancing mock-ups, amateur work, low-budget work, and emergencies, yet acknowledge that the process inherent in live recording has a lasting set of values that will stand the test of time.

What we want to do is to define and document how the profound social changes that have happened as a result of digitalization affect artists and artistic culture.

The thesis in a sentence:

The arts are no longer static offerings passed down from an assumed position of authority. Instead, they are now the starting point for engagement.

The thesis in a paragraph:

In the 20th Century, mastery of music, theatre, dance and visual arts was presented as the untouchable pinnacle of high cultural expression.

In the early 21st Century, new technologies are creating a new context in which the arts can be seen and understood. The relevance of artistic culture is now defined by a new paradigm of networked creative interactions between millions of people. They are no longer passive consumers of the arts, but they also engage with the creative process themselves.

This new dynamic demands that contemporary artists reconsider their position in a global, digitally connected society, and understand how their work sets trends, pushes the boundaries of possibility, and inspires communities of people around the world.

**********

Please join in as we begin to discuss these problems and challenges! Email address is on the left hand side of the page.

I’m pleased to announce a new side project that isn’t actually in itself a music performance project. It is in fact a manifesto-like set of ideas that I’m putting together in collaboration with Russell Bender, a theatre director (and old friend of mine) from the UK.

We’ve decided to move our work over here to my blog, and over the next 2-3 months I’ll be talking through all the material on here, and Russell will guest-blog from time to time.

We’ve got to the point where we’re keen to encourage interactions and opinions of other people, and my hope is that by re-blogging everything, we’ll be able to crystallize and distill the ideas into some kind of coherent structure.

We need a new name for the project that actually reflects what it’s about (see next post!), but for now all the posts will be labelled with our old working title, ‘Arts 2.0’.

More soon.

One meeting I had in New York was with a fascinating violinist, who is essentially an exact contemporary of mine at the Juilliard School, and now runs Cultures in Harmony , an organization that I strongly recommend you check out. If you find my work interesting, you’ll certainly like his.

William Harvey (who blogs here ) is a leading exponent of the emerging ‘cultural diplomacy’ sector, and his organization creates annual programs that bring people together through music, by forging connections across cultural and national barriers. They create dialogues where there were previously none. What startled me about Harvey’s outlook is the belief that music can be overtly used as a political tool.

Up until now, I have always thought of the arts as something that is best served up in an apolitical environment; you might go to a concert that inspires you in a way that ultimately affects your long term outlook, but you don’t necessarily go to a particular event and expect your worldview to be changed instantly.

This longer-term process, which I continue to believe is immensely valuable and important, is what John Harte of the Choir of London described as ‘engagement’: the tacet acknowledgement that anything can be interpreted as political simply by the fact that it is happening, and that is enough to begin to seed change without bludgeoning people over the head with political opinion as well. But is that just part of the picture? Do we also need a more proactive attitude to the social resonance of cultural program delivery?

At the other end of the scale, Daniel Barenboim is forever asserting that he comes ‘not as a politician, but as a musician’ - an absurd suggestion, for it’s quite obvious that a lot of what he does in the public eye outside of performances contains an element of political maneuvering. (This was very clear to me after our cancelled Gaza concert last year, when he immediately jumped on all the news networks to decry the situation. The facts as broadcast were very twisted and out of proportion to what actually happened, and done in the manner of the best politicians. With the best of intentions, of course. But it was interesting to note the compromises needed to reach a justifiable means for a noble end).

I suppose therefore, that through ‘cultural diplomacy’, William Harvey and his colleagues are only making clear what has really always been the case: that the presence of the arts on the international stage often has a political resonance. Examples: think of the cultural games played in the cold war when pianist Van Cliburn won the Tchakovsky competition in Moscow - these matters would be totally irrelevant now (international music competitions have become astonishingly irrelevant in the last 10 years, though that’s for a different blog), but then it was world news, as artists were shifted around as political pawns on a space-race-esque chessboard.

Equal exchanage - not cultural colonialism - is the key to making this work. Harvey and his teams of musicians approach each project as a mutual learning exercise, and I hope that we do the same in Palestine. Al Kamandjati , by recruiting international teachers now, is aiming to bring in the expertise that will help the younger generation of Palestinian musicians to have the skills to self-define their cultural identities, not to define that identity for them (this is a topic way too complex for this blog, and one I’d like to come back to, but suffice it to say this is frequently something that ‘interfering’ western influences often get accused of, often with good reason).

It should be noted that it is arguably a good thing to introduce the understanding of western culture to a place, in order that the people who live there gain a greater understanding of the global context in which they exist. And vice versa: the awareness of a foreign people picked up by cultural ambassadors should be taken back to the home country to increase understanding there. It’s very important to note that these cultural diplomacy projects are not all about outreach, although that does form a significant part of such work.

Where these projects work the best, are the times when they are delivered with a quality that speaks for itself, and that means the highest possible levels of performance. Any great performer can engage effectively with an audience in a way that a less experienced person cannot, and where is there greater need for effective performance than in intercultural situations, where a single performance can make or break a meme that will spread through a community for generations? In the words of one audience member at one of Cultures in Harmony’s events: "You’ve changed the image that I had about Americans because you’re completely different. You’re nice, kind, friendly, generous, awesome, beautiful.”

"We remain committed to music’s ability to dispel the clouds of ignorance that mar the relationships between cultures", says Harvey.

"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." - George Orwell

Discuss!

Palestinian Resistance: A Short History

1948 - throw rocks
1967 - fire guns
1987 - shoot missiles
2000 - detonate suicide bombs
2003 - start a viola ensemble