It’s usually a forest, or a mountainside, or a beach. Ideally, it’s an otherworldly volcanic terrain, maybe in Iceland. A piano sits conspicuously in the middle of this landscape, as a pianist with eyes closed exaggerates the effort required to present some familiar arpeggios on the white keys. This is Neoclassical music, a genre I may have birthed, and I hate myself for it.
There was no algorithm in 2004 when I released the first Solo Piano album. It felt conceptual to me to surprise my electro-hipster audience with a record that the ear could enjoy equally as ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ music. I had been a restaurant pianist, so I had respect for the functional use of music and if the electro-hipsters wanted my album as a soundtrack to their dinner parties, so be it.
I suspected that if they listened closely, they would hear a complex musical point of view behind the Satie-esque persiflage. Most of all, a piano album liberated me from the pressure to generate a radio single to succeed. I didn’t need to consider the major-label gatekeepers, for this was a new golden age where the internet would connect me with my audience-in-waiting.
For a while it worked. But capitalism always finds a way, and with the streaming era of the mid 2010s, something came along to replace the radio single: the Spotify playlist.
Playlists like Peaceful Piano or Music for studying have turbo-charged the monetisation of functional background music. These playlists pay, albeit badly. And when the playlists pay, the industry pays attention: together with their midwife, the media, they gave it a name and conspired to serve us the term “Neoclassical”.
When this wave first began to move around 2014 I was torn: on one hand I had been a defender of background music throughout my career. I was taking a stance that provoked and challenged the pretentious snobbery of cultural elitists. On the other hand, much of this Neoclassical music only succeeded as background music and didn’t seem to stand up to closer scrutiny, failing as foreground music.
I always thought great art should have an appealing surface as well as envelope-pushing depths: the novels of Iris Murdoch are page-turners that also reveal dark emotional realities. South Park hooks us with juvenile humour and we stay for the edgy political satire. Catchy melodies can lead us by the hand toward unfamiliar nightmarish harmonies. Surely everyone agreed with my philosophy that music could (and should) work on multiple levels?
Well…. the algorithm certainly disagrees. Instead , it promotes pieces that lack surprise. The algorithm’s taste tends toward the repetitive, the static, the stillborn, and the faceless. All atmosphere and no melody, a freeze-frame, an opening shot of a movie that never starts.
Now instead of the holy grail of a radio single (catchy chorus, upbeat tempo, universal lyrics), record labels are pressuring artists to make something for the playlist (soothing chords, no dissonance, inoffensive electronic textures).
A musician friend of mine worked painstakingly for years on a complex and challenging album only to hear from his record label that “we love it but we feel we could invest more of our time, energy and money if you would add something for the fans of Ludovico Einaudi”. In other words, to become Zweinaudi or Dreinaudi.
It’s difficult to resist this pressure. It wasn’t long before my friend went back to the studio and aimed a few more pieces squarely at the “peaceful piano” bullseye. And worst of all, my friend and the label were rewarded mightily for their capitulation.
In this way the process reinforces itself, a vicious circle of repeating arpeggios and stream counts. It is an imposition of capitalist calculation onto a musical community that thinks of itself as “uncompromising”. Who saw this coming? Back in 2004 my music business contacts saw my Solo Piano transformation as career suicide. Nobody thought of solitary piano music as a potential gravy train. But here we are, the algorithm has spoken and background music is now big business.
In the normie business world they already knew this, MUZAK was invented in the 1950s to manipulate shoppers to linger longer in supermarkets, or to fill the silence while they waited on hold on the telephone. Neoclassical music is just MUZAK for the attention supermarket. Linger as long as you like, the chords won’t change.
Neoclassical music doesn’t cut through the noise of our society, rather it is camouflaged within it. It is superficially calming and pleasing and gives only the illusion of escape from “these uncertain times”. But to my ears it has a numbing quality, the musical equivalent of living blue-pilled in the Matrix, of ordering Deliveroo or of mindlessly swiping on Tinder. It is a substitute for real art that should be (at least occasionally) uncomfortable. In the old days, the elites had private chauffeurs and listened to actual classical music. But these days ordering an Uber and listening to the Peaceful Piano playlist has scaled that luxury to anyone with a smartphone.
In its attempts at aping the codes of high culture it masks the dominance of the algorithm itself. It erases all traces of a point of view, a simplification of music that will willingly invite Artificial Intelligence to take over its composition and production. If we don’t hear a real person behind this music, why should a human even be involved in making it? If this epidemic of low attention-span and facelessness continues, the more artists will willingly debase themselves, and the more they deserve to be replaced by robots. It’s already happening.
Neoclassical music is the ultimate soundtrack for the age of the algorithm, so it reads as especially hypocritical in its constant use of nature imagery. In the forest a piano magically appears (just imagine the carbon footprint to transport such an object) as if to say “this music is as uncorrupted and uncalculated as an innocent tree”. The attempt to hide ambition with a sunset on a mountainside may be the internet’s greatest trick. There is truly nothing faker than the performance of authenticity.
I never intended it to end this way when I decided to take a chance and release a piano album in 2004. It’s 20 years later and I’m rapping more than I’m piano-ing these days, perhaps because rap is honest about its ambitions, both artistic and economic. I will undoubtedly write piano music again one day, but I still believe there are multiple levels of listening I can offer, and that people want to hear a real person – a complex ambitious, arrogant person, but also a sensitive, generous idealist who believes the gods of music deserve better than faceless pianists chasing the endlessly spiraling numbers of code that power the corporate streaming algorithms.
