When I was a kid, being the musical geek that i was, I used to listen to a lot of violin players, along with all the other classical music I listened to. I was a big fan of some of the violin "greats," such as Heifetz, Kreisler, Szeryng, and Toscha Seidel.
If I ever heard a recording by Heifetz or Kreisler or any other of the early 20th century fiddle greats, I could identify the player instantly, as they all had unique signature sounds. Even on 78 records, these guys all delivered amazing tone and performances, still worth listening to, in my humble opinion.
Sadly, things have changed. When I turn on the radio and hear a violin concerto being played, I cannot for the life of me identify the soloist. There is no doubt that the top fiddle soloists of today have astonishing technique, and they play with amazing accuracy, but sadly, they all sound pretty much the same.
I am sure it is not that they can’t play in a unique style. But they choose not to. In this case, virtually every one of them sounds, stylistically, like Isaac Stern. Apparently, this is what the committees of violin competitions want to hear. So ok, I can see that– Why buck the system, when you can make so much dough by going along?
Beyond the lack of originality of sound style, the other thing that really bugs me is, whenever you hear any of these new superstars play the Beethoven violin concerto, they always play the cadenza that Fritz Kreisler wrote almost 100 years ago. For you musical novices out there, the cadenza is a part of a concerto where the soloist is supposed to take off their own and "wail" (i.e., improvise) for a few minutes. Playing someone else’s cadenza is like playing from sheet music in a jazz club. It’s just wrong. And I could list endless such circumstances in classical music where nowadays everyone does it "just like the record."
One would think that, given the massive competition in the music industry, that "market forces" would produce new superstars every day, but in fact, the bloating of massive numbers of students in the music business, along with the force of endowment money, has led to a massive effort at regimentation and unification of standards. While this makes sense from some perspectives, in the final event, we have the musical version of wonder bread. At the superstar level, every loaf is perfect, and is exactly like every other.
It used to be you would buy new classical recordings because they were different. But now there is no longer any reason to buy new recordings of classical music pieces, as every orchestra and soloist is apparently only in the game to demonstrate that they can conform to the one single standard just as well as or better than anyone else.
What really kills me is the whole "original instrument" movement– these people play, for example, Bach’s music on the instruments that Bach had in hand at the time (violins and pianos have changed a lot since then, fyi). So far so good, but all of these groups sound amazingly similar as well. Can you really expect me to believe that even though most people in 1725 never ventured more than 10 miles from home in their whole lives, somehow, amazingly, every musical group in Europe agreed on one single playing style? Right. Thank goodness the cheese people didn’t go to that meeting.
I have relentlessly learned this lesson in my life, that when you ask someone’s advice about how to do something, rarely will they say "do something that has never been done before." Instead, the advice you get is always to imitate something that HAS been done before. Since it exists and has had its own success, one can ever-so-knowingly point to it with confidence and say "do it that way." Such safe conformist thinking exists in high concentrations everywhere, and if you want to be creative, well, you have to learn to accept this attribute of the general environment and work around it as best you can. (This is actually easy to do– since everyone is doing the same thing, this leaves an infinite number of undone things to choose from.) No one ever conformed to greatness. Being great requires being different. Being "different" is an emotional risk that most people are taught to fear, and to avoid at all costs.
Ah. I hear the Beethoven Violin Concerto coming on the radio. Pass the Wonder Bread, please.
