Class(ical) Traitors of the Month: Archive 2009
Click on a Traitor to read the indictment. (For technical reasons there was no award for October 2009.)
December: Listen magazine
November Joshua Bell
September BBC Last Night of the Proms
August Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/RSC)
July Deutsche Grammophon
June i DC Philharmonic orchestra (Washington, USA)
June ii Classic FM (UK)
December 2009 Class.Traitor Listen magazine
Indictment
December's Hall of Shame investiture goes to Listen, not for its hideous domain name, but for the big cover photo and loving interview of pop crooner and naked emperor 'Sting' in its November-December '09 issue.
Music lovers will know 'Sting' as the man who repeatedly murdered John Dowland (abetted most recently by Joshua Bell - see last month's Class(ical) Traitor), but to the global media industry he is a cash cow - one who, according to Listen, has 'gone classical'. Which means that "North America's premier classical music magazine", like many other supposedly 'classical' magazines, is more than happy to toe the industry line and propagate its propaganda - undoubtedly to keep advertisers sweet.
In economically harder times principles are always quickly adjusted, of course. But even describing 'Sting' as a singer, let alone classical, suggests a name change is in order for Listen. No serious art music magazine has any business even mentioning 'Sting', let alone carrying a headline interview with him.
November 2009 Class.Traitor Joshua Bell
Indictment
This month's Class.Traitor was trendy American violinist Joshua Bell, for his stomach-turning new 'Christmas' album (on Sony, where else), 'Joshua Bell: At Home With Friends', on which he 'fulfils a lifelong dream' to record saccharine duets with various musical inepts, including the aptly named 'Sting', a rapidly becoming ubiquitous pop crooner who seems to have persuaded the global media industry that he can sing. And to record himself karaoke-style playing along with Rachmaninov, who must be spinning in his grave at such nauseating company inflicted upon him by Sony.
Sony know by now that they can bank on Bell to sell out.
September 2009 Class.Traitor BBC Last Night of the Proms
Indictment
Traitor for September is the BBC's Last Night of the Proms, not only for its sheer and ongoing mindlessness, but also for showing yet again that it will go to any length to draw in the punters.
As usual, the memory of a fairly commendable schedule of Proms concerts, featuring a number of excellent new works, was tarnished by a finale which once again brought shame on the BBC, and Proms supremo Roger Wright.
Not only were extra-musical goings-on at the Royal Albert Hall as gormless and pointless (or 'fun', in conemporary parlance) as ever (given an extra touch of fatuousness, as always these days at the BBC, by the inclusion of a few so-called 'celebrities' to supposedly enhance Malcolm Arnold's 'Grand Grand Overture'), but the 'Proms in the Park' schedules were filled with acres of crossover and pop pap to please the plebs. And they did seem pleased, though many were by all accounts intoxicated; at Hyde Park in particular, a crowd of about 40,000 were 'treated' to a large set by geriatric pop crooner Barry Manilow, the crossover banalities of Katherine Jenkins and Escala, and a torrent of pub-pop pap; elsewhere, 'Only Men Aloud' were inflicted on Swansea, James Galway yet again on Northern Ireland, whilst the Salford masses heard Chris de Burgh, outrageously described by the BBC as a 'singer', perform a selection of his greatest hits, leaving anyone with a love of music at least thankful he didn't 'sing' any of his lesser ones.
August 2009 Class.Traitor Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/RSC)
Indictment
The CBC/RSC Board and management enter the Hall of Shame this month, for their recent evisceration of the Corporation's Radio Two (now styled 'New 2' - slogan: "Everywhere Music Takes You").
The pressure group Stand On Guard For CBC, well supported by various political, cultural and educational bodies and individuals, has done an excellent job in gathering together and laying out all the facts, opinions, options for action etc; and an outstanding news-tracking service by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting keeps anyone interested abreast of the latest developments. Musoc.org needs do no more than summarise here the shenanigans.
Fundamentally, the CBC — in particular Richard Stursberg (executive vice-president of English-language services) ("we take the view that the biggest cultural challenge facing English Canadians is ultimately our failure to produce entertainment shows, Canadian shows that Canadians actually want to watch"), Hubert Lacroix (President and CEO), CBC Radio music director Mark Steinmetz and Jennifer McGuire, ex-executive director of CBC Radio programming ("classical music [...] is still the most represented single genre on the service" [italics added]) — instituted and carried through a program which has turned the historically important, unique Radio Two from a 'classical with jazz' station to one playing what CBC call "an exciting and diverse mix": pop, jazz, roots, urban, world (in other words, anything).
All this ostensibly to reflect the changing, multicultural nature of modern Canadian society as mandated by the 1991 Broadcasting Act; but in reality, as always, to save money (death by a thousand cuts) and then to make money (privatisation/commercialisation). By what may or may not be a coincidence, the Canadian government appoints the Board of Directors and President of the CBC; and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is (among other things - see ex-MP Garth Turner's recent book 'Sheeple: Caucus Confidential in Stephen Harper's Ottawa') a rightwing apologist for slash-and-burn economics.
CBC Board and management (many of whom have media backgrounds) and the Tory government know very well that the broadcasting market has nothing to do with supplying audiences with whatever they demand, but about supplying (competing) advertisers with audiences - the bigger and more materialistic the better.
Radio Two was, in this light, long overdue a commercial overhaul (its French-language equivalent, 'Espace Musique', had already had a 'ratings rebrand' in 2004). In the big-business world inhabited by the CBC bigwigs, reasonable expenses can be upwards of $500 dollars per executive just to attend a staff meeting in the city (building?) you work in (see also the Winnipeg Sun). That money has clearly got to come from somewhere.
Details of the evisceration:
- 2007: 'Radio Two' becomes 'Radio 2'. First cuts made to the amount of art music played; some (popular, but not poular enough) programs ditched. Regional performance programs & recording sessions slashed.
- 2007-08: CBC makes drastic cuts, of around two thirds, to the broadcasting of art music on 'Radio 2' (the only place it was ever heard), including live concerts. All previous programs, together attracting over a million listeners, are axed - Music & Company, Here's To You, Studio Sparks, Disc Drive (30 years old, now replaced by a pop show presented by a hiphop 'artist' of 'international acclaim'), Sound Advice, Music For A While, Two New Hours, Symphony Hall, The Singer And The Song, Northern Lights and In Performance.
In their place: 'Tempo', a 5-hour weekday show, from 9am to 2pm, hormonally hosted and frequently interrupted by the vapid but (of course) attractive Julie Nesrallah ("big hair is definitely my friend"), and playing 'warhorse' repertoire, including many bleeding chunks; a couple of daily hours' worth of more bleeding chunks, mainly around 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning; an opera on Saturday afternoons; and a few hours of choral and pre-recorded 'live' concert music on Sunday mornings/afternoons. No peak-time or evening listening slots.
- Early 2008: suspension (in all likelihood scrapping) of the CBC Young Composers Competition (a showcase for up-and-coming Canadian composers) and the CBC Young Performers Competition.
- Early 2008: Abandonment of art music recording by the in-house recording label, CBC Records.
- March 2008: CBC announces the scrapping of the 70-year-old CBC (Vancouver) Radio Orchestra, North America's last of its kind, behind closed doors without any kind of public consultation, and purportedly on financial grounds - though since rebranding last year, CBC Radio 2 manages to scrape together a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. The CBC RO was an iconic Canadian cultural institution, the only orchestra dedicated to performing the music of otherwise rarely-heard Canadian composers.
- September 2008: 'Radio 2' becomes - of course - the 'New Radio 2'. Still more schedule tweaks in June 2009, brought on by more of what management calls 'painful' budget cuts.
Footnote: John Doyle, journalist for the Globe and Mail, is also being tossed into the Hall of Shame for his singularly pompous remarks over the Radio Two protests in Note to classical music fans: Get over yourselves; soundbite: "There is hardly a shortage of classical music for consumption. The stuff is everywhere."
July 2009 Class.Traitor Deutsche Grammophon
Indictment
The award this month goes to DG, above all for their outrageous website rubric 'Deutsche Grammophon Is Classical Music', which surely warrants consideration for prosecution under trading standards legislation.
This once illustrious label, a pioneer in the recording of art music, has long abandoned any fleeting commitment to living composers (hard to believe that it once marketed the likes of Berio, Maderna, Takemitsu, Ligeti and Stockhausen), and although its renowned imprint Archiv Produktion still produces a handful (only 4 so far in 2009) of high-quality early music CDs (predictably, mainly Bach, Handel and Vivaldi), it nowadays dedicates itself to squeezing as much money out of the general public as possible.
It does this through the relentless promotion of a select squad of stars; the re- and re-re- (and re-re-re-) recording of the same narrow field of repertoire pieces (e.g. the concertos and symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, but above all arias from the big 19th century operas) in as many compilations as it can get away with (and then some); and occasionally marketing crass poppy crossover (what music-lover can forget the assassination of John Dowland's songs last year on 'Songs from the Labyrinth' by 'Sting', an inexplicably famous popster who can barely sing by pop standards, let alone those of art music; or the unremitting awfulness of the '[Sophie] Von Otter Meets [Elvis] Costello: For the Stars' album in 2001? Brought to you by DG).
Once owned by Siemens, the infamous German industrial giant which notoriously funded Hitler's Nazi Party and made big profits out of concentration camps, DG is now a subsidiary of Universal Music Group (along with Decca and Philips, and itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of the huge French-based multinational Vivendi), that monolithic trafficker of ultra-commercial pop pap, whose rebranded Jazz and Classical website gives a clear indication of the corporate world's opinion of art music: it doesn't contain a single item of non-jazz*.
Many of the biggest (i.e. most hyped) names in the 'classical' music business, such as Anna Netrebko, Bryn Terfel, Rolando Villazón, Gustavo Dudamel, Hilary Hahn, Lang Lang and Plácido Domingo, are all on highly-paid DG contracts and lead sub-superstar jet-setting lifestyles, as PR teams fly them all over the world in pursuit of artistic perfection (i.e. to sell concert seats and CDs). So successful is the DG/UMG marketing machinery that such artists dominate the online and traditional news outlets; no occasion is missed to plaster their brooding, pouting photos everywhere there's a sniff of a sale opportunity — with Netrebko, Villazón and Domingo particularly lucrative foils in this kind of media manipulation.
Without denying the great talents of the individuals involved, it's hard to believe that DG would have been interested in Netrebko, Villazón, Ivo Pogorelich, Hélène Grimaud, Cristobal Repetto, or recent signings Alice Sara Ott and Ildebrando d'Arcangelo, if these had been ugly, fat or otherwise without immediate and highly marketable sex-appeal. Via the DG website you can (really) purchase a Rolando Villazón T shirt, Gustavo Dudamel shopping bag or Lang Lang mug; but Mercedes Sosa merchandise is out of stock.
In fact, DG's website confirms its own prejudices: on Elīna Garanča's biography page, for example, the single music critic quote runs: "Ms. Garanča has all the goods: musicality, technique, voice, confidence, smarts, dramatic range - and movie-star looks" *; and similarly for Magdalena Kožená: "With her dazzling looks, Magdalena Kožená is surely one of the most glamorous women on the operatic stage" *.
All those who are performers in DG's media circus (including also otherwise-respected figures Claudio Abbado, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Martha Argerich, the Berlin Philharmonic, Musica Antiqua Köln, Pierre Boulez, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Esa-Pekka Salonen) should be utterly embarrassed to associate with a company which prostitutes to such a degree the art its logo tagline ridiculously implies it represents; yet money has a habit of silencing as many tongues as it loosens. Luckily for DG's 'classical celebrities', there are plenty of mirrors in musoc.org's Hall of Shame.
(* Retrieved/confirmed July 10th 2009 from www2.deutschegrammophon.com)
June 2009 i Class.Traitor DC Philharmonic orchestra (Washington, USA)
Indictment
Newly formed to tap a specific 'market': according to John Baltimore, founder, conductor and artistic director, a "unique [to Washington] demographic of educated, upper-class, recession-proof government wage-earners that, if this music was marketed to them and they could see that this music is for them, they would be supportive of it. [...] You just don't find this level of educated upper-middle-class African American income anywhere else in the United States." *
In other words, the orchestra's motivation is economic and political rather than artistic, and its sole object appears to be to provide concerts of worthy music for the African-American community's Great and Good in DC; an opportunistic new ensemble paying court to social privilege and promoting old-school sociocultural elitism with a twist that borders on racism.
The DC Philharmonic's inaugural concert was due to be held on April 9th, 2009, but at the last moment it was postponed till 'later this year' because of "low ticket sales". So much for 'recession-proof'. At the time of writing (June 09), Baltimore's unpopularity (over financial and musical issues) with the original musicians makes it unlikely the orchestra will actually ever perform; but happily its place in the Hall of Shame is secure.
Final word from Baltimore again: "We're entertainers, just like Garth Brooks or Bruce Springsteen." * (* Washington Post 5/3/09)
June 2009 ii Class.Traitor Classic FM (UK)
Indictment
What with the recent Sony Radio Academy Awards, Classical BRIT Awards, and 2009 Hall of Fame all spotlighting the UK radio station Classic FM, it's nothing short of the height of timing and appositeness for musoc.org to bestow upon the station this long-overdue award.
"Classic FM is a butcher; easy-going and smooth-talking, but ultimately repetitive, disingenuous and highly materialistic. It has little genuine interest in the origins or content of its meat, just as long as people buy it — with all the trimmings."
Read how musoc.org arrived at this conclusion in Classic FM's Countdown to the Hall of Shame.