Give us some good music
In a recent blog concerning the poor quality of test-pieces at major contests, Cory Band MD and former BBW Editor, Philip Harper, argued that ‘artistic sophistication and creativity has been substituted for musical thuggery and charlatism’. In BBW’s June Let’s Debate article, Philip Harper expands his blog spot concerns with the detailed context of his strong views – below is an extract…
After our recent win at the European Championships, I set out some of my thoughts about music in my blog on the Cory Band website. My thoughts had not just occurred to me, they have been growing uneasily in my mind for a few years and have been the subject of many conversations with my contacts over quite a long period, but the time seemed right to air them. It seems that my blog has caused quite a stir and I have had many messages of support from all quarters.
‘At last someone has said publicly what we’ve all been thinking for a long time,’ has been a familiar refrain.
The motivation to dust off my soapbox was caused by the proliferation of occasions where, as Musical Director of Cory, I am being asked to spend a month of my musical life studying, preparing, rehearsing and then performing music that is simply not good enough. Of the 12 major contests that I have now done with Cory (four each of British Open, ‘British National’ and ‘European’), I consider only five set test-pieces to have been of the required quality. The remaining seven just haven’t been up to scratch at all in my opinion.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not talking about music that I like or dislike. Everyone has certain tastes in music - as we
all know; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. No, I’m talking about a general issue in a lot of our contest music: music that reveals weak compositional technique and poor artistic judgement. Examples of this are: tonal music that demonstrates only a scant knowledge of the laws of harmony and relies too heavily on primary triads; music that doesn’t understand the tension and resolution of large-scale tonality (and often stays in the same key for a long time); music that is scored badly, without appreciation for either the homogeneity or colouristic possibilities of the band; music without ambition; music that doesn’t develop its musical themes, but just presents them and repeats them one after another; music that confuses innovation with gimmickry. The list is longer than this column will allow.
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