If we see a blind person in the street, most of us will feel
pity and either give a wide berth or offer a helping hand. If we see a deaf person we will either ignore
them, unaware of their disability, or assume that they are slightly unbalanced
mentally. This is a cruel but
inescapable fact and the clue lies in the very terminology I have just
used. We emphasise in our daily speech
the sense of sight above the sense of sound.
We would hear someone in the street every bit as clearly as we would see
them; it’s just that we have come to rely more heavily on our sense of sight
than on our sense of sound. We believe
what we see: we do not necessarily believe what we hear, and while that dreadful
old cliché “The Camera Never Lies” eventually died with the widespread use of
digital imagery, it was never true; it’s just that we had to accept the
evidence of our eyes otherwise our world collapsed around us.
There is a hierarchy of senses. We put sight at the top and smell at the
bottom, with hearing, touch and taste somewhere in the middle. My aunt has lost her sense of smell, and
finds it mildly amusing but in no way an inconvenience. My mother lost her sense of taste shortly
before she died, but still complimented the quality of the food she ate because
it looked good. My father has lost the
hearing of one ear and, even though he is a musician and still – at the age of
95 – sings in the church choir, he claims it is only a minor irritation. A
colleague wrote to tell me that he had caught his hand in an escalator and lost
all sense of touch in it – but he still managed to work unaided. Yet when my old friend Pete van Biene lost
his sight after attending a party where the punch was laced with methyl alcohol,
he was devastated and never recovered from the shock.
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| Blind and Invisible? |
But has it always been like this? Certainly in musicians loss of hearing has
been regarded as a more serious problem than loss of sight. Everybody knows that Beethoven went deaf, but
how many know that Bach went blind? I
doubt whether many of us would even have heard of Smetana had he not gone deaf
and, as a result, poured his energies into composing (including the hugely
popular Vltava), yet there is no
evidence that Delius’s blindness enhanced his compositional output (“It all
sounds the same to me”, is one harsh, but not entirely unjustified, reaction to
the music of Delius). Being blind has
certainly not prevented the emergence of great performers. On the organ, alone, one can point to a
veritable plethora of dazzlingly virtuoso French organists who were blind - Vierne,
Dupré, Langlais, André Marchal – and during the 1960s the Royal College for the
Blind positively urged its members to take up a musical career; my youth seems
to have been surrounded by blind piano tuners.
Suddenly, it seems, things have changed and music has become
a visual rather than an aural art. Which
brings me to the research mentioned in my last blog post. Chia-Jung Tsay, from University College
London, published a paper in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America in
which the results of some interesting research were revealed. Presenting non-musical volunteers with either
video-only or sound-only recordings of classical music competitions, the
volunteers were asked to identify the winners of each competition. (I
paraphrase the details in the interest of brevity, but you can read the whole
paper on http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/16/1221454110.full.pdf+html). Those who used the video-only recordings were
far more likely to get it right than those who used the sound-only ones. The conclusion to be drawn is that contemporary
audiences (and judges) rely more on sight than sound in assessing a musical
performance. As I’ve observed time and
time again in this blog, the current generation of music-lovers needs visual
images before they can appreciate a musical performance. Asked to comment on recordings, students
assume that one is talking about a DVD or YouTube. Asked about classical music coverage on the
media, and most will complain that there is not enough; assuming that by media,
one means television and forgetting the ready availability, thanks to internet
ubqiuitousness, of those classical music radio stations outside south east Asia
which broadcast 24 hours, seven days a week, intelligent and tasteful
programming. For today’s music lovers,
sound-only classical music is second best; and for many not an option at all. Hearing, for them, is seeing.
Thus the desire of record companies to sign up attractive,
young players, often of dubious musical quality, but who are, in the eyes of
those for whom superficiality is a three-dimensional word, attractive. What chance would the wart-faced Liszt, the cadaverous
Chopin or the ghoulishly gaunt Paganini have in today’s climate? None.
Brilliant as your playing may be, if your stomach bulges over your belt,
if your hands and face are smothered with liver spots or your eyes focus in
contrary directions, there’s no hope for you as a performer. Back in the 1980s there was a magnificent
British tenor called Ian Partridge, with whom I had the great good fortune to
work alongside in a memorable performance of the St Matthew Passion. His was
a tremendous voice, but I remember one record producer telling me that his
stage career never took off because he has "an unfortunate face". (He also described the
composer John Gardner as “looking like a bull dog with a harelip”, so
generosity of spirit was not part of his make-up.) Sadly, that record producer became a leading
figure in one of the multi-national labels which first started to market
recordings through pictures of the artist rather than through the descriptive
landscapes or abstract images which, up to that point, had adorned record
covers.
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| A Bulldog? |
 |
| An Unfortunate Face? |
Tsay’s research showed that pianists who looked to be
passionate while performing and who wore their emotions on their sleeves were correctly
identified by the volunteers as the winners.
Without the benefit of that image, those who listened to sound-only
recordings had only musicality and technique to go by – and they largely got it
wrong. So much, then for those great
musicians of the past who believed in maintaining a stern, unbending posture
and expressed no emotion or sensitivity in their faces. Rachmaninov, unfairly described by one of
music’s ugliest men – Igor Stravinsky – as “a six-and-a-half foot scowl” (it
was not true - as pictures of Rachmaninov proved – but he rarely smiled or,
indeed, showed any emotion while playing) would stand no hope in today’s
climate; the greatest pianist of the 20th century confined to the
dustbin of no-chancers by the 21st century appetite for clean and
sexy visual images.
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| Where's the Scowl? |
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| Music's Ugliest Man? |
I saw the late-night Prom in London where John Eliot Gardiner’s
Monteverdi Choir gave a scintillating account of some Bach choral works. Those around me commented on the “intimacy”
they brought to the Albert Hall and to the “authenticity” of the
performances. Authenticity my foot! There’s no way Bach would have recognised
these polished, neat and, above all, visually arresting performances. He wrote his music with the full knowledge that
nobody would see the musicians stuck high in a gallery, and would surely have
been horrified to think that the performers would one day become centre stage,
eclipsing even the God for whom he originally conceived his marvellous music.
Several correspondents to this blog, when I wrote a piece
about listening to live music, confessed that they listened with their eyes
shut, because they were distracted by what they saw. I confess to the doing the same. Interestingly enough, those correspondents,
like me, list a whole range of musical heroes at odds with those who are the
popular heroes of today. In the organ
world, a passionate following for Cameron Carpenter is not so passionate
amongst those of us who choose to hear rather than see (although I’m the first
to admire his phenomenal technique). Ecstatic praise for Sarah Chang seems
reserved only for those who like what she looks like on stage. And I’m inclined to question how many records
Kathryn Jenkins might have sold were she not so captivatingly photogenic.
 |
The Man on the Left is the Better Organist because he looks sexy in a
photoshoot |
For the great mass of people, music is no longer about
sound, but about sight, and while many would suggest that this is merely
“packaging”, a necessary route to the hearts and dollars of a 21st
century market, I would suggest that you only need study the reaction of
children to “packaging”. Spend a fortune
on their Christmas present, wrap it up, and you will find that they spend many
more hours playing with the colourful packaging than with the present
itself. Sadly, we have now reached the
stage where people prefer the packaging
of Classical Music to its content. This
research has shown that, so long as you can see, you can appreciate what now
passes as Classical Music.
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