This cover kept appearing in the MYL over yonder:
For some reason it really bugs the hell out of me. Completely devoid of any sexuality and it just looks awkward. I'm all in favor of sexual covers when done right (which this one clearly isn't). I still remember my disappointment when The Strokes' This Is It finally came stateside and they had replaced the awesome original cover:
As for the cover that started this thread - I couldn't even get past the tragedy that is it's typography...
Mentioned on 17dots today, the cover art for Dark Meat, When the Shelter Came needs to be mentioned in this thread. If you want to see it, though, you'll have to find it on your own.
For some reason my inner ear has for the last week been dragging me to classical music more than has been my habit in the past. For that reason I have been musing on and off on my relationship to classical music, the feelings and preconceptions that I have about it. While browsing pianists I came across this:
I found it arresting because to me it epitomizes what generates one set of reactions to classical that I think got ingrained in me at some level at an early age. To me, this cover is saying "I am more superior to you than you are capable of conceiving, you miserable uncultured snot. If my miserably sardonic expression should make the arcane mysteries of my art seem stuffy and intimidating to you, it is because you are too degenerate to appreciate them. Now lick my shoes."
Granted, it's Soviet, which adds a whole cultural layer to the pose (and the four words before "orchestra" intensify the effect, signalling music as the tool of monolithic power and erudite distance). But either way this does not make me want to listen one bit. It's the kind of cover that acts as a prophylactic against me ever wanting to hear the music.
GP - do you think it has something to do with the English ( I almost put British, but that would be making assumptions) education system as it used to exist? I have a very similar attitude to classical music, that I am sure was fostered in me when I was at school, as superior to the kind of music I listened to then and now. Of course it would also link it to the class system prevalent in grammar schools then.
Yes, I am certain it's in large measure an artifact of my English boys' grammar school experience - perhaps even more specifically the experience of going to such a school from a rural working class family with no cultural pretensions (the musical culture of my household did not extend much further than my father over-playing Tammy Wynette and Jim Reeves, which is why a swathe of country music remains closed to me). That combination of a school experience bent on inculcating high-culture aspirations and a bit of imposter syndrome coming from family background left me with the nagging feeling that listening to classical music would mean admitting that my own tastes are uncultured and would improve if I only learned more. Going on to Oxford (from a family with no history of higher education) I suspect only compounded the feeling. Now that I am in a spell of getting into baroque music more intensively than before, starting to research different pianists and whatnot, I can feel this fear at the back of my mind that if I really get to fully appreciate Bach I will have to leave other things that I love in my existing music collection behind, in the same way learning to read Shakespeare can spoil cheap novels. Irrational, but deep-seated, and kind of interesting to untangle.
Actually, that makes me remember a specific event that has stayed with me in the dim recesses of memory. It was at a parents' evening at the school, while my mother was talking to my English teacher. As a young teen I read every single novel by Alastair MacLean, prolific author of what Wikipedia aptly identifies as "popular thrillers and adventure stories". Loved them to bits. Somehow this came up in conversation between my mother and my English teacher when I was maybe 16, who commented with words to the effect of "I should hope his tastes have moved on above Alastair MacLean by now." I think he meant it as a compliment because I was doing so well in English. But the thing was, I still liked them. I felt shamed in a complicated way - half of me protesting that no, I had a right to like them, and just because I now knew how to read Chaucer did not mean I had to give up fun things; the other half of me deeply identified with the aspirations that my English teacher, a rather good teacher, had helped shape in me and guilty at still having attachments to things that should be beneath me; yet another part of me perhaps dimly aware that my mother was also implicitly being placed on a lower tier and/or exhorted to push me to a higher one, that my family world and my school world were meeting uncomfortably in a grinding of the class gears. Such moments (and doubtless there were others now forgotten) can be very formative, I think. I hope I have tried to be careful with them in my own teaching.
All you non-UK emusers, welcome to the British class system, and its effects on the musical perceptions of the middle-aged.
I'm a regular on a classical music forum, and I can assure you that a large chunk of classical listeners do indeed regard classical music as inherently better than any other music. But it's not a class thing there, at least.
Though I've never had that attitude myself, I did find that once my "casual" listening could be the intricacies of a 70-minute-long Mahler symphony, your average rock or pop song came to seem rather empty. I had to learn how to apply the appropriate "filters".
I've found that "good-for-you, take-your-medicine" type "classical" music
is really not that much different than pop music (structurally, socially, etc).
It just goes on for, sometimes, an interminably longer time.
Coming from an American, and a little bit younger perspective, my first thought was "boring poorly designed classical cover", and that's what I thought the post would be about; there is a certain prevalence in classical of pictures of boring looking stuffy stodgy old white guys. My reaction to classical is totally different too; my main fear with classical is that I will be bored by it (and I will admit that at the wrong time of day or in the wrong mood, classical will make me feel a bit sleepy), but the fear doesn't go much into a fear of what that says about me. Maybe I'm slightly embarassed that intellectual music sometimes bores me, but it never really makes me feel like less of a person. My thoughts about classical replacing other things are similar; I don't foreclose the possibility of coming to listen to more and more classical and less and less other things (although I don't necessarily foresee it either), but the idea doesn't scare me or feel like it would mean anything about me other than that I had come to appreciate classical more. But that's Americans for you; we know everyone else thinks their better than us; some of us even believe it's true on an intellectual level. But on a basic gut level knee jerk reaction, who's better than me?
Great moment at (exciting young violinist) Stefan Jackiw recital last week, when audience spontaneously applauded at very stirring end of movement of Franck concerto. But Horrors - It was the second movement! Audible harrumphing by non-applauders, visible embarrassment by applauders. So emblematic of the stick up the butt of classical music, which discourages people from becoming audience members.
I can totally go along with all you are saying GP, as another first generation person to grammar school, and first generation into HE. It has taken nearly 40 years for the next person in my family to go to university. My niece got her degree last summer and is now doing her masters. I'm the only one in our family that she can relate to in terms of her experiences, although her sister and cousin both started this September. I still think of classical music as something upper class and not for me. Literature is different. When doing A level Eng Lit we were regularly taken to plays and films at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, not far away, that has developed a lifelong love of theatre. But it was through a music teacher that I was introduced to the Blues that has stuck with me. Certainly though at grammar school in the late 60s the class system still existed, and for a working class boy, classical music was a bridge too far.
On a long drive this afternoon I found myself recalling and pondering Nereffid's comment above:
Though I've never had that attitude myself, I did find that once my "casual" listening could be the intricacies of a 70-minute-long Mahler symphony, your average rock or pop song came to seem rather empty.
Some of the things it made me think about:
#1: If "intricacies" and "empty" can be taken as a complex/simple comparison, this exists within classical music as much as between it and other genres; there are things I take to be pretty great classical works (say, P
Just to clarify my comment a bit.
The common classical music snob is
often the one who likes the easy and
common digestibles of the various forms:
the somewhat ubiquitous allegro/adagio/scherzo/allegro
form of the symphony or the often heard
tonic/subdominant/tonic/tonic of the string quartet.
Add to that the usual need for it to be consonant
(which is actually inherent in the original meaning
of the word "symphony," but I could imagine a Diaphony in C Minus by Johann Amadeus Matetsky - ha!)
Anyway, the way pop music has its own expected
verse/chorus/bridge-like elements and the usual
expectations of understandability shows that there's
not a lot of difference between the two in terms of
expectations and social desires. So, you could say that
anything that may deviate from the expected "norm" of
either form could produce a kind of snobbish backlash
from both kinds of listeners (but neither group would
probably admit to this methinks).
I'll take the unusual/unexpected/creative/what-have-you
from both of these worlds as well as the many others out there.
Music that poses "questions" and often leaves them unanswered
are the most compelling to me.
---
Now playing: Giya Kancheli - Theme From Hamlet Var. I
Comments
If by beret, you mean pants, then the answer is no.
For some reason it really bugs the hell out of me. Completely devoid of any sexuality and it just looks awkward. I'm all in favor of sexual covers when done right (which this one clearly isn't). I still remember my disappointment when The Strokes' This Is It finally came stateside and they had replaced the awesome original cover:
As for the cover that started this thread - I couldn't even get past the tragedy that is it's typography...
Let's just say Walmart won't be carrying it.
Craig
I found it arresting because to me it epitomizes what generates one set of reactions to classical that I think got ingrained in me at some level at an early age. To me, this cover is saying "I am more superior to you than you are capable of conceiving, you miserable uncultured snot. If my miserably sardonic expression should make the arcane mysteries of my art seem stuffy and intimidating to you, it is because you are too degenerate to appreciate them. Now lick my shoes."
Granted, it's Soviet, which adds a whole cultural layer to the pose (and the four words before "orchestra" intensify the effect, signalling music as the tool of monolithic power and erudite distance). But either way this does not make me want to listen one bit. It's the kind of cover that acts as a prophylactic against me ever wanting to hear the music.
You might as well listen to Rachmaninov
or, better yet, Scriabin.
---
Now playing: Herbert Eimert & Robert Beyer - Klangstudie 2 (1952)
All you non-UK emusers, welcome to the British class system, and its effects on the musical perceptions of the middle-aged.
NP: Talk Talk - It's My Life
Though I've never had that attitude myself, I did find that once my "casual" listening could be the intricacies of a 70-minute-long Mahler symphony, your average rock or pop song came to seem rather empty. I had to learn how to apply the appropriate "filters".
is really not that much different than pop music (structurally, socially, etc).
It just goes on for, sometimes, an interminably longer time.
Some of the things it made me think about:
#1: If "intricacies" and "empty" can be taken as a complex/simple comparison, this exists within classical music as much as between it and other genres; there are things I take to be pretty great classical works (say, P
The common classical music snob is
often the one who likes the easy and
common digestibles of the various forms:
the somewhat ubiquitous allegro/adagio/scherzo/allegro
form of the symphony or the often heard
tonic/subdominant/tonic/tonic of the string quartet.
Add to that the usual need for it to be consonant
(which is actually inherent in the original meaning
of the word "symphony," but I could imagine a
Diaphony in C Minus by Johann Amadeus Matetsky - ha!)
Anyway, the way pop music has its own expected
verse/chorus/bridge-like elements and the usual
expectations of understandability shows that there's
not a lot of difference between the two in terms of
expectations and social desires. So, you could say that
anything that may deviate from the expected "norm" of
either form could produce a kind of snobbish backlash
from both kinds of listeners (but neither group would
probably admit to this methinks).
I'll take the unusual/unexpected/creative/what-have-you
from both of these worlds as well as the many others out there.
Music that poses "questions" and often leaves them unanswered
are the most compelling to me.
---
Now playing: Giya Kancheli - Theme From Hamlet Var. I