Quote, and be damned

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What is the solution? Music journalists resort to a variety of methods, generally divisible into two principal branches: the knowledgeable and the enthusiastic. The better will use a mix of the two, and the best will know how to use the language to do so.
A third branch is the journalist's failsafe: quote and let someone else be damned.
Westwood in his preview of The Shock of the New concert series makes a reasonable job of disguising the absence of branch two by a heavy use of branch one and a curiously inept use of the failsafe.
The article begins with an amusing story about Diaghilev's initial response to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (all grist to the mill). Then we are treated to a little historical analysis, followed by an enticing suggestion of a point of view: "And the chasm between the imaginative realm of composition and the conservative nature of the concert hall remains".
Hmm. This could get really interesting. But, no, we are left alone with the echoes of the evocative words "chasm", "imaginative" and "conservative", supposedly juxtaposed with a dialectic in mind but retreating when the moment for elaboration arrives.
Which makes the clumsiness of the transition from scene setting to introducing the topic of the essay, the series of concerts, so much the worse. We are informed that, "although audiences are nervous, one of Australia's rising young conductors, Luke Dollman, looks to the longer term". What's wrong with this sentence? Let me illustrate: "Although Mad Max is an excellent movie, I have a new hat."
But, really, isn't that being a little literal and finicky? We all know that Westwood means that Dollman is nervous about presenting contemporary music to the classical crowd, don't we? Well, if that is what he means, let him say it. If that is not what he means, then he means nothing; because the connection between the two parts of Westwood's sentence is as tenuous as that between Mad Max and my new hat.
The remainder of the article oscillates between branch-one knowledge and branch-three quotation. So we are informed that Sydney Symphony chief conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti "tacitly acknowledges the difficulty audiences have in accepting new music." Extremely tacitly: he says nothing, at least is not quoted as saying any such thing in this article. Perhaps - and my interpretation is open to grave objections, given the paucity of the source material - the tacit acknowledgement of this concern for the neurasthenic modern audience member comes in a later quote from Gelmetti: "People still think of Stravinsky as 'new'; can you imagine!" This Gelmetti says "with a flourish". Can you imagine? I can; and I can see the nature of this flourish: laughs up his sleeve.
And so it goes; on and on. Excerpts from the "best of" genre of the history of modern music with quotes roughly sown in with not even an attempt to reconcile contrary points of view. To wit:
"People are much more canny about how they listen, and the music has to be correspondingly complex to express what it is that the 21st century has to say," he [Antony Ernst] says. Yet contemporary music has also been accused of pretentiousness, of complexity for its own sake. The more that music broke with convention, the less audiences were able to grasp. "The old categories of music - melody, harmony, tempo, form - cannot be simply wished away," [Ivan] Hewett says. "Audiences will always read those things into any collection of sounds, and if the sounds refuse to be read under those categories, audiences will reach the obvious conclusion, which is that what they're hearing isn't really music at all."
To paraphrase Westwood, music journalism will continue to deliver its shocks to the system. However, they'll be shocks I don't want to feel again and again.

Read the original review .

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She's the voice

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Cornelius' guitar playing is a competent driving support, though you can tell she really wants to be up there with a solid band that can match that voice (she often gigs with her full band, the JC Disorder). Her lyrics point consistently downward - love gone wrong, escape, difficult men, the temptations of suicide - and her voice carries the authority of one who has been through it. God knows what it will be like when she's forty - Marianne Faithfull perhaps (and I mean that as a compliment).

The general erotically-tinged angst is enlivened by touches of wit - one song has a title and chorus along the lines of "It's amazing how clearly I can see things considering you beat me with a stick and tried to take my eyes out" The same song carries the line "They say that love is blind but this is ridiculous".

Which brings me to one of my criticisms. That line is witty the first time it is sung. Unfortunately, Cornelius repeats it four times. She does this kind of overloading in a couple of other songs. I'm being picky here because, with that great voice, she has set herself a very high standard which the other elements of her music must live up to.

Her melodies, though never less than competent and sometimes inspired, tend to be a little same-y, although her most recent material seems to have more melodic movement - a good thing. Tune-wise, she's generally better than Patti Smith (whose most tuneful song was, after all, written by Bruce Springsteen), and much better than, say, Morissey (who only has one tune and endlessly recycles it) but it mostly sounds as if it all comes from the same musical. And a bit more variation of key would be nice - perhaps the use of a capo from time to time?

But picky criticisms aside, there is a sense of dramatic adventure and emotional expression in her writing and delivery that keeps you listening. And, of course, that gorgeous voice...

Her chat between songs was incongruously cheerful and very confident, in the face of an indifferent and mostly empty pub that she gradually won over, more listeners drifting over from the bar as the set progressed.

To sum up: she's drinking well now, with some extraordinarily striking dark notes, rich colours and stunning intensity, will cellar well for many years, gaining further in interest, complexity and maturity. Will go well with a band or solo. Sample her when you can over the next few years- she will not disappoint.

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