At what point should we draw the line when describing
somebody as “one of the finest” ? There
has to be a finite number of people whose skills exceed the average
sufficiently to place them in the implied elite group of “the finest”. Is that panoply of “finest” measured in the
tens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands? Is it a percentage of all those who claim to
possess that skill, and if so, what is a
realistic percentage; 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%?
Judging from musicians’ biographies, it seems as if just about anyone
who can touch a musical instrument can join the ranks of “finest”, and when I
read in a new disc sent to me for review that the performer is “one of the
finest organists of our time”, while among his repertoire he performs music by
“one of Britain’s leading composers”, I recoil in horror. The sad fact is that, not entirely
unacquainted as I am with the names of the great and the good in the organ and
composition worlds, I had never heard of either. I’ll keep you guessing, but warn you that if
you are thinking Olivier Latry, Cameron Carpenter, Thomas Trotter, Naji Hakim
or even Gillian Weir as the former, or Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen, John Rutter, James
MacMillan or even Judith Weir as the latter, you are not so much barking up the
wrong tree as in entirely the wrong forest.
The sad fact is that, when it comes to promoting musicians,
agents (and, increasingly, the musicians themselves) seem terrified of standing
out from the crowd. As soon as one of them pops their head over the parapet and
declare unequivocally that “x is the finest”, they lay themselves
open to all and sundry to take pot shots, rubbishing the claim and putting up
their own contenders. Of course,
“finest”, “best”, “most outstanding” and the like are subjective assessments
and, correspondingly, open to debate. To
describe in a biography a musician as any of these seems a daft thing to do,
and watering it down to the utterly meaningless “one of the…” simply diminishes
the artist’s stature. What no artist or
agent seems prepared to do when promoting a musician is to find and promote a
Unique Selling Point. For a reason which
defies all logic, their intention seems to be to show that said musician is
just like everyone else. Why otherwise
lump them together in the vast heard of “one of the…”? And certainly the vast swathes of standard
repertoire, concert venues and other comparable or better artists listed in
biographies seems only to reinforce the notion that the musician is one of the
crowd rather than an individual artist with something special to offer.
Read this real biography from a singer. The sad thing is, I have expunged his name
but left the entire biography intact. I
bet you nobody can guess who he is.
Worse than that, I wonder whether if he were to read it himself he might
not be too sure whether it refers to him or someone else, so totally anonymous
is it with its long lists of standard repertoire and famous concert
halls/conductors added to legitimise an artist who would seem to be, on the
strength of his biography, nothing very special:
“Xx has
appeared at many of the world’s leading international opera houses including
the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Glyndebourne Festival, Opera Bastille
Paris, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, La Monnaie Brussels, Teatro
Comunale Florence, Theatre du Capitole Toulouse, Staatstheater Stuttgart,
Teatro Real de Madrid and Teatro La Fenice. He has also sung leading roles with
all the British companies including ENO, Scottish Opera, WNO and Opera North.
Operatic roles have included Alberich Der
Ring des Nibelungen, Scarpia Tosca and
Paolo Simon Boccanegra for Royal
Opera House Covent Garden, Falstaff and Pizarro Fidelio for Scottish Opera, The Traveller Death in Venice in Lyon, Bregenz and Aldeburgh, Klingsor Parsifal in Nice, Faninal Der Rosenkavalier in San Francisco and
Chicago and Balstrode Peter Grimes at
the Bastille and in Geneva. Equally at home on the concert platform, he has
appeared in all the major UK concert halls and appears frequently at the BBC
Proms. Conductors he has worked with include Richard Armstrong, David Atherton,
Martyn Brabbins, Paul Daniel, Andrew Davis, Christoph von Dohnányi, Mark Elder,
Bernard Haitink, Richard Hickox, Oliver Knussen, Sir Charles Mackerras, Antonio
Pappano, Carlo Rizzi and Edo de Waart.”
Each year I set my performance students the task of creating
their own biography to promote themselves to concert promoters. They are told to confine it to 200 words and
to make it read as if they have something special to offer; to make them stand
out from the crowd.
Almost without exception, far from trying to stand out from the crowd,
they seem intent on burying themselves in it with the customary lists of repertoire
and associated artists and the inevitable “one of the finest…”
assessments. Only once has one of my
students come up with a biography which would make me think about hiring
him. An otherwise inoffensive young
Indian student added a photograph of him as a baby and began the biography,
“Since screaming louder than any of the other kids in his nursery, xxx has been
set on a career as a rock drummer”. I’d
book him for a gig on that alone; irrespective of his true musical talents.
I am drawn to ponder on all these matters after a week
spending revising, checking and editing artists’ biographies for the
forthcoming concert season. With the
demand to keep all artist biographies to under 250 words, I find myself
expunging pages of lists of “orchestras he has performed alongside include”,
“prestigious venues she has graced with her playing include”, “conductors with
whom he has appeared include” or, worst of all, “her repertoire includes such concertos as” (as if music was just one homogenous lump and none of it has any distinguishing features). But I have also
tried to farm out the ubiquitous “one of the finest”, be it “in the world”,
“of today’s” or “of their generation”. Too
often several thousand words boil down to less than 10 when I do this, so thin
are the unique selling points in any artist biography. And worse still, so intent is the artist on
listing one-off achievements that they forget all about telling us what they
do. How about this:
“XXX has
won numerous prizes and awards in international piano competitions including
the ‘ 28th Alessandro Casagrande International Piano Competition’ in Italy in
2008; the Fifth Prize at the ‘16th Leeds International Piano Competition’; a semi-finalist
at the 16th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, and the
Georges Leibenson Prize in the 67th Geneva International Piano
Competition. She was awarded numerous
scholarships including ‘The Robert H.N.Ho Family Foundation Scholarship’, ‘The
Coutts Bank Scholarship’, ‘Lee Shuk Chee Memorial Scholarship’ , ‘Hong Kong
Music Scholarship’ and was sponsored by the ‘Simon K.Y. Lee Foundation’ . In
2011, she was awarded the ‘ Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund
Scholarship’, ‘Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation Scholarship’, ‘Bernard van
Zuidan Music Fund Scholarship’ and ‘School of Music Staff Prize Scholarship’.
As a recognition for making outstanding achievements in the promotion of arts
and culture in Hong Kong, she was awarded the ‘Certificate of Commendation’ by
the Hong Kong Government in 2004. In May 2010, she received the ‘Award for
Young Artist 2009’ presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. She was
also invited to take part in many prestigious international music festivals
including the 9th Musical Olympus International Festival in Russia ,The
International Chopin Festival in Duszniki, Poland, Virtuosos of Planet 2006 in
Kiev, Ukraine, The Festival Transeuropéennes in Rouen, France, Miami
International Piano Festival and the Golandsky Institute International Piano
Festival”. Does this performer
do anything other than enter for competitions and win scholarships. Is there any evidence here that she has given
a public performance before a ticket-buying audience?.
Would any self-respecting advertising agency survive in the
commercial world spouting such drivel.
Imagine a similar sort of promotion for a chocolate bar:
“Cadbury’s
Dairy Milk is one of the finest
chocolate bars currently available in the market place. It can be found in shops such as Sainsbury’s,
Tesco’s, W H Smith’s, John Menzies, Waitrose, Cold Storage, Jason’s, Giant,
Fairprice, Carrefour, Woolworths and Coles, and on shelves alongside Belgian,
Swiss, American, Australian and Malaysian chocolate bars. It can be found at airports where flights
take off and land to such places as Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and the
Americas, and has been bought by members of the governments of the United
Kingdom, United States, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore and
by CEOs of the such companies as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation, the Boeing Aircraft Corporation, Ninja Plastics and China Waste
Management and the like.” Is there
anything in that which would make you prefer it over, say, a similar bar of
Hershey’s? I cannot imagine that any
advertising agency presenting that to Cadbury’s would keep their contract; yet
this is exactly the kind of mediocre drivel we use to sell musicians.
So when I read of the organist who “is renowned in the UK and
abroad for virtuosic, intelligent and engaging repertoire from the 14th
to the 21st centuries” and stands as “one of the finest organists of
our time”, I am profoundly unimpressed.
I am even less impressed by the fact that he “performs throughout the
UK, Europe, Australia and Singapore” (how can any organist “perform throughout
Singapore”? – but that’s by the by).
Which is all a bit of a shame since, on the evidence of his CD, Daniel
Moult is quite a good player and, ironically, far better than his over-inflated
biography suggests. I do, however,
remain unconvinced that there is any substantial cohort of composers who would
happily feel led by Graham Fitkin, despite his claim to be “one of Britain’s
leading composers”. His six-minute organ
piece Wedding despite claiming to be
“frequently complex” rehearses so much familiar territory that it loses all
sense of identity (the composer categorises himself as “post-minimalist”, which
I take to assume he studied composition by means of a very short mail-order correspondence
course).
While I wish all musicians and their agents would spend a
few months learning the real art of writing promotional literature in a proper
advertising agency, it can go a bit too far.
I wonder if anyone could ever take this psycho-babble seriously?:
“If one
word applies to Lang Lang, to the musician, to the man, to his worldview, to
those who come into contact with him, it is “inspiration”. It resounds like a
musical motif through his life and career. He inspires millions with
open-hearted, emotive playing, whether it be in intimate recitals or on the
grandest of stages –such as the 2014 World Cup concert in Rio, with Placido
Domingo, to celebrate the final game; the 56thGRAMMY Award, where he played
with Metallica; the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where more
than four billion people around the world viewed his performance, the Last
Night of the Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall, or the Liszt 200thbirthday
concert broadcast live to more than 500 cinemas around the US and Europe. He forms
enduring musical partnerships with the world’s greatest artists, from
conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel and Sir Simon Rattle, to
artists from outside of classical music –among them dubstep dancer Marquese
“nonstop” Scott and jazz titan Herbie Hancock. As he inspires, he is inspired.
As he is inspired, he inspires others. It is this quality, perhaps, that led
the New Yorker to call him “the world’s ambassador of the keyboard”. And the child Lang Lang was and who, perhaps,
is always with him, would surely have approved of the way he gives back to
youth.” As a famous editor of the
Sunday Express newspaper used to be
so fond of writing; “Pass the sick bag, Alice”.