Le Flâneur

On television last night I watched Beethoven’s 9th symphony being performed by the BBC symphony orchestra and chorus at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the first night of the annual proms. It’s a classical favorite that everyone knows because it’s used to great effect in the first Die hard Movie, as well as numerous other films. I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Beethoven this summer and so I enjoyed having the visuals as well. It wasn’t long however before a few observations led to a rather negative train of though I’m afraid. I was struck by how old all the singers were. I would expect that Beethoven had in mind strapping young aryan men and women to perform this piece as let’s face it, the voice weakens with age. A large portion of the chorus were well beyond the age for being soloists and I couldn’t help but imagine what it would sound like if all the singers were in the prime of their life: surely louder, clearer, better. Here young singers were the exception and some of them looked to be well into their 60s. This doesn’t bode well for the future. The decline of Church of England community singing may have something to do with it (though it’s worth noting that evangelical churches are thriving in some inner city areas).

This all points to a wider reality: that there’s going to be increasingly fewer recordings of classical music made in the future. What does this say for the state of our culture? That we no longer feel the need to document newer performances of works in the cannon reflects both the shrinking market and the abundance of recordings already available. But it also reflects a wider malaise. The market is saturated, but there’s also little new music coming through that large audiences want to buy. In the first half of the twentieth century there were an abundance of popular composers that sustained the industry. They’ve all dried up now. The medium has been exhausted. And it’s not just music. Just look at the state of Hollywood and tell me there isn’t a crisis. Unfortunately we are living through the fag-end of Western civilisation. Our ‘culture’ such as it is, has become so complex it’s become unstable (it’s impossible not to think of black-hole analogies here). Something new will come through it’s just at the moment nobody has any ideas what forms they will take (I suspect it’s going to have something to do with new technologies). But we may all be dead by the time it happens.

I’m conscious that I may be laying myself open to the rejoinder that, well, “history is littered with people who thought that their particular age was crappy and we’re no different. Stop complaining, what we have now is a culture for the many instead of just the privelaged few. You’re just idealising imagined former glories.”

Perhaps I am. But for many of our ancestors, surely art and music actually meant something, and an even more fortunate few felt themselves to be heroic players in the unfolding human drama that had direction and purpose. Postmodernity has robbed us of this comforting illusion(?) Instead we have Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and torture porn. The end is nigh.