Face the Music

Another day, another rant in the music office at Ye Olde Academy.  Mssr. Maestro and I (especially Mssr. Maestro) never seem to run out of music-related topics to fuss over, debate, argue, complain about, etc. as we enjoy the best coffee to be found on campus (something I've enjoyed seeing to personally the past several years).  Not surprisingly, a favorite subject (target?) of these rant sessions recently has been the Kashima Philharmonic.  Mssr. Maestro never seems to run out of reasons to complain about it even though he has officially severed all ties.  However, today something has come up that is far more disturbing.

When I first overheard Mssr. Maestro and our choral director talking about "Kamisu Daiku", I completely misunderstood.  The word "daiku" in Japanese normally means "carpenter".  The discussion was obviously about a concert of some kind, so I naturally wondered if it were perhaps a Japanese cover band of The Carpenters.  [Fudd]Noooo.[/Fudd]  It turned out that "daiku" in this case was really a combination of "dai" and "ku", words meaning "big/great" and "nine".  It's apparently the Japanese nickname for Beethoven's 9th Symphony.  

It seems that there is an annual tradition in Kamisu of hosting a performance of the 4th movement of Beethoven's 9th sung by a mass choir open to anyone that wants to participate.  (Unfortunately, they only use piano accompaniment.)  It's an event which has apparently grown as more and more people have come to join in.  It has also attracted enough of a following that they are able to charge admission.

It all sounds well and good on paper (or HTML, whatever), but after hearing about this year's Kamisu Daiku concert, it sounded like someone had some seriously loose screws when planning the thing.  The problem was that the giant open choir had very little time to rehearse, so they ONLY intended to perform the 4th movement of the 9th.  Of course, that hardly amounts to a concert, especially one with an admission charge.  So what did the planners do?  They opened the show with two rock bands.  Yes, you read that right.  A piano-accompanied, classical choral performance opened by two (apparently very loud but not necessarily very good) rock bands.  Needless to say, a lot of people both on and off the stage were seriously upset.  Whoever organized the event basically insulted it.  

I like both peanut butter and sashimi, but I would never eat them together.  By the same token, loud rock music and classical choral music, while both quite enjoyable by themselves, have no business being lumped together under a single billing.  The people that paid the money to see the show, whether they came to see the bands or the "Daiku", were seriously ripped off.  That's bad enough.  The performers were also insulted, which is even worse.  However, the fact that the organizers obviously paid no attention whatsoever to the content of the performances, i.e. the music itself, is by far the worst, because it means that they were giving the music no value.  They were demeaning it.  Yes, I have a problem with that.

I also had a bit of a problem with Enya's appearance on a recent TV event.  Every year, as part of the New Year celebrations, one of the TV networks always hosts a "Red vs. White" competition, where various performing artists and TV stars group together into two teams (Red and White) and face off against each other.  It's a series of heats in which one representative from each team gives a performance, and then a panel of celebrity judges chooses which they liked best.  Sometimes a pretty bad performer can win his or her heat simply because the other team's representative is even worse (and believe me...some of those TV stars' attempts at singing are almost unbearable).  It's all a lot of fun to watch, and I usually enjoy it, but I was especially excited to hear that Enya would be appearing.  She has been among my favorites for over twenty years now, and seeing her perform live on TV sounded like the chance of a lifetime.  Except that she didn't.  They cut to a video of her being interviewed in a massive, old, castle-like building in the Irish countryside that was probably her home.  Then the performance started, also in the home.  Wearing her red "Amarantine" dress to represent the Red team, she stood behind a mike in front of a full string orchestra with harpist and proceeded to sing her all-time greatest hit, "Orinoco Flow".  However, as the string players madly plucked their instruments and the harpist danced through those fast passages, what we actually heard was the original recording, i.e. nothing but synthesizers!  Meanwhile, Enya herself looked a bit bored and bewildered, especially during the "badum badum (pause)" parts of the song.  To make matters worse, the song cut off in the middle, and she suddenly started "singing" a tune from her latest album, with her orchestra busily toiling away as we listened to the mostly-electronic studio recording.  Frankly, I was appalled.  I don't know if Enya herself was even aware that all she was doing was providing visuals for a CD performance, but as far as I'm concerned all those musicians were being insulted.  And considering her competition in that heat was actually on stage performing, I felt that the whole idea of the contest was being insulted and the music demeaned.

I know all too well that, in this day and age, music is taken for granted.  Unlike in earlier times, when it was either live or nothing (and definitely NOT Memorex), all we have to do is hit a button or switch, and there it is.  In the iPod age, music seems to be merely part of the atmosphere rather than the focus, i.e. no more significant than an air freshener.  In Japan of a thousand years ago, there were specific scales used depending on the season, the type of instrument you used carried all kinds of significance, and how you played said a lot about both your own character and the mood of the moment.  In other words, when it came to music, one didn't mess around!  In modern Japan, on the other hand, I've had the dubious honor of playing in and directing both a community band and a community orchestra, most of whose members never took it even a little bit seriously and were perfectly content to skip rehearsals, show up to the concert unprepared, turn in a mediocre performance, and get high on themselves for it.  In the interest of "having fun", they're perfectly willing to insult both the audience and the music itself.

Call me old-fashioned, if you will, but I wish people would value music a bit more, or at least stop treating it so cavalierly.

That student I hear practicing a barn-burner of a Mozart piano piece in the next room certainly isn't!