Phoney professions

Hans Keller

A boring introduction is necessary : in 27(X) words' time, it may not seem all that boring. There is a thing called Recontres de Tenerife. Spanish Radio organise it every year, inviting sundry radio organisations to take part in discussions of real radio problems. This year, I was asked to read a paper on Music on Radio. What follows is an extract : my lecture wasn't only about radio. Perhaps it wasn't even chiefly about radio. But -as will be seen at the end of this essay.-radio people took it to heart. Whether they also took it to mind is a question which only the future can answer; one of them did, anyhow.

.Groups and individuals alike develop in proportion as they retain the power of self-criticism, while groups are even more endangered by self-praise than are indiiduals----for the simple reason that an individual will feel guilty after a time if he praises himself too much, whereas a group won't, since .the group-self-praising individuals which go on praising their own group always have the excuse, vis-A-vis their ovs n consciences, that they are praising, not themselves, but other members of the group. I propose to do the precise opposite—to criticise both myself and any member of a radio organisation's music department to which such criticism might apply, as well as many a radio organisation's music policy. So far as radio is concerned, the development of self-criticism has not yet progressed far beyond adolescence.

Before I go into the delusions under which we, radio people, would seem to labour, delusions of grandeur which professionalism readily produces, I want to examine the more sinister side of professionalism itself. It is always assumed that professionalism is something good--but there hardly is a good thing which hasn't a bad side to it, and there are few good things which are as reluctant to recognise their own bad sides as is professionalism. Within its social context, professionalism inevitably is oneup-manship, and there is no one-up-manship without underlying inferiority feelings. The concept of professionalism, which is relatively new when we compare its history to that of the concept of mastery, has not yet reached the stage of easy self-confidence. Ultimately, the professional defends himself against the amateur; he wilt have grown up when he does not feel the need to do 5o.--when, in fact, he will recognise the amateur's advantages over him.

What, is worse, inasmuch as the concept of a 'profession (as distinct from professionalism) has a long history, it isn't all that spotless either. As a matter of fact, it seems inevitable that at its more developed stages, a civilisation throws up what I describe as 'phoney professions'. My description is by no means wilful; I mean something hard and demonstrable by it : a phoney profession is one that creates grave problems which it then fails to solve.

My prototype is the then highly-respected profession of the mediaeval witch-pricker. Years of medical studies were the first requirement, after which the post-graduate had to go on a two years' witch-prickers' course. Thereafter, he was professionally qualified to decide, when he pricked a girl, whether she was a witch or not. Now, if there had been a genius witch-pricker, or at least a very talented witch-pricker capable of independent thought, he would have been in an ideal position, professionally equipped, to discover that there weren't any witches. Unfortunately, there weren't any genius witch-prickers.

Jumping ahead in history, and closing in on my own world, that of music, we find a veritable galaxy of phoney professions. You know them all, but you have never suspected them of phoniness: it is indeed of the essence of a phoney profession that it assumes a high status within its civilisation. Until the earlyish twentieth century, for instance, the profession of viola-playing did not exist—nor, needless to add, did the problems of violaplaying, about which we nowadays talk and read a great deal. A good violinist automatically was a viola player at the same time; the fact was hardly worth mentioning. None of the history books tells us that Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn were viola players as well as violinists; they couldn't not have been. As a result, the phoney problem of changing between viola and violin had never struck anybody. Today, the problem is explained by the fact that the distances between the notes are greater on the viola than on the violin. So deluded can we become by phoney professionalism that nobody has stopped to think—to discover the basic fallacy that the difference between the first position and the fifth position on the violin, in terms of distances between the fingers, is greater than the difference between the first position on the violin and the first position on the viola. It follows that if the phoney problem were a real problem, there should be, not only professional viola players, but also professional first-position players and professional fifthposition players.

Again, take the case of the opera producer. Like the viola player, he did not exist in the nineteenth century, nor did the problems of opera production. What is even more striking is that the greatest productions of which the history of opera seems to know, i.e. those of Gustav Mahler, were achieved by a 'mere' theatre musician, Mahler himself. He had a stage manager, to be sure, who looked after the technical side, but the basic production ideas, which included considerations about where the singers ought to, and ought not to move, and how they ought to move, were Mahler's own. It was when the opera producer appeared upon the scene that the problem of opera production was created—and we have never seen the end of it : whenever an outstanding conductor prepares an opera, you will find him in conflict with an allegedly 'outstanding' opera producer, although this conflict is invariably glossed over in public. The greater the conductor, the greater the conflict ; Wilhelm Furtwiingler used to provide plenty of evidence for this proposition. 'Great' conductors? There have, of course, been great musicians amongst conductors, but conducting itself is a phoneY profession too—which has created the p?oblem of orchestral playing. There was no such problem when the profession as we know it did not yet exist ; orchestral musicians were intelligent enough—had to be— to cope with the problems of ensemble playing and tutti playing. The conductor has, necessarily, stupefied the orchestra, in a successful attempt to justify his own existence. As a result, we are now faced with unsolvable problems of orchestral playing— above all, with the eminently modern problem of making an orchestral player like his work.

There isn't a single musical orchestral player in the world who would not dearlY love to get out of the orchestra if he could— because under the influence of the conductor, orchestral playing has, in fact, become an unmusical occupation. The disintegration of the permanent large symphony orchestra, which we are currently witnessing, is the latest sign of a crisis which was created by one of the most powerful phoney professions in the entire musical world. Critics and musicologists, though less powerful, are no less phoney—which is not to say, of course, that there aren't great musicians (very few!) amongst both groups. The concept of the 'professional broadcaster' covers yet another, very powerful phoney profession, which has done untold harm to the arts, and could do untold good to them —if professional broadcasters could bring themselves to have the kind of insight which I expected from my genius witch' pricker who never was. As in all the other phoney professions, it is terribly easy t° distinguish between a radio man who accepts his profession's phoniness, and one who fights its bogus aspects. The radio man who accepts his profession's phoniness knows that radio is a means, not an end. He does not make 'good broadcasting' a primary aim, to which, the art of music, or any other art, has to adjust. He does not, in fact, talk about 'the art of broadcasting' and its self-created problerhs at all : this delusion is reserved for the

phonily professional broadcaster who knows that if he were not a broadcaster, he Would be nothing. It is he who creates the Problems of broadcasting, and who has forgotten that a straightforward broadcast Of a Beethoven quartet, without any gimmicks and without any twaddle, can be tuned into a major artistic event. That I take a string quartet as an example will, I hope, anon prove its full significance.

Meanwhile, the history of radio has, in my submission, shown beyond any shadow of doubt that where music has been made to serve broadcasting, instead of broadcasting serving music, the ultimate result has been failure, even though there may have been temporary, journalistic success. Of course, It has happened that the attempt to make Music serve broadcasting has failed journalistically because the music in question Proved too strong to be turned into a Servant, and in such cases, there has been artistic success. But all compositions snecially written for broadcasting can be Shown to have failed artistically in proPortion as they succeeded in their aim—to serve the non-existent art of broadcasting. Broadcasting is a craft, not an art—and an art is a specific system of Communication through which new truths are conveyed which could not possibly be conveyed, or be conveyed as well, by means of any other system, any other language. The phoney broadcasting professional .debases the concept of art in an unsuccessful attempt to elevate the craft of broadcasting.

Of course, it is quite often said that more than one leading composer has written Music specifically for radio. Quite true, but those leading composers weren't leading anybody or anything when they accepted or undertook such a task, and once they had established themselves, they forgot all about the art of broadcasting'. Their specific radio Music, meanwhile, has survived, or not, according to the degree of its musical weight alone. Can we name a single well-established Composer who has reached late middle age, and who has kept his early enthusiasm for radiogenic music alive? And even if we believe we can actually think of one, we and that the work in question could just as Well be reproduced on disc or tape for home Ilse, and therefore has nothing to do with any specific 'art of radio' at all—nor, of course, with any specific art of the gramoPhone, or with the art of the loudspeaker. Mixed media which exclude the visual dimension seem, of course, eminently suitable for broadcasting, but broadcasting Must remember that it's really it that is e‘inmently suitable for them if it doesn't want nt'0 go megalomaniac: chamber music seems eininently suitable for a chamber, but that uoesn't turn the chamber into an art form.

At the same time, broadcasting can do for CL amber music what not even the chamber

itself was capable of doing. Take the most ,kPressive instrumental genre altogetherIbhee string quartet. The crucial difference s tvveen a great string quartet and a great YlnPhony is that the string quartet can afford to be more symphonic than the symphony because it need not worry about its effect on an audience—and hence about sound effects, sound as sound, however justifiable musically. For the great classical string quartet is not, in the first place, addressed to an audience at all : it speaks to the player in the chamber, the listener being a more or less welcome eavesdropper. And the ideal listening position in the string quartet is the viola, with the texture of the quartet unfolding before your ears on either side. It is for this reason that all the great player-composers enjoyed their quartetplaying most when they played the viola.

Now, in a radio studio, you can, as it were, turn the radio listener into a viola player. With the help of a sensitive studio manager, and if you are a real musician on top of being a phoney professional broadcaster, you can make the quartet sound as it sounds to the viola player; you can move the listener right inside the quartet and thus abolish at least some of his mere listening status: you might even make him want to play. You thus achieve a total amalgam of a radiogenic and a musico-genic exercise— where professional broadcaster and professional musician usually spend their sterile time arguing what they think are their conflicting interests: there isn't a radio organisation in the world whose managerial radio planners and music departments don't think of each other as a bit of a rum lot. A plague on both your houses, I say, my friends: the radio musician who entrenches himself upon an anti-radio position is, in that respect, as much of a phoney as his pet adversary, the professional broadcaster.

From the point of view of programme structure, too, musically meaningful operations can be undertaken on radio which could not possibly happen in the course of ordinary concert life. For example, there is the contrast between chamber music and orchestral music with which we have been experimenting in the European Broadcasting Union's Concert Seasons, and which opens up perspectives on the relationships between different types of creativity utterly concealed by commercial concert life. Indeed, the development of symphonic thought can never be understood if one confines oneself to thinking about sym

phonies: the juxtaposition, in live performance, of string quartets and symphonies, belongs, purely artistically, to the most rewarding experiences, but in our ordinary concert world, such juxtapositions are rarely, if ever realisable—rarely affordable even.

Another type of contrast—which, again, the EBU Concert Seasons are trying—is that between new and old: in everyday concert life, it can only be realised to a very small extent, in view of various sources of resistance—the performer's the listener's, the purse's. In radio-aided performance, you can have as many performers as you need for the purpose, you can do without the listeners who dislike mental activity, and you can, nevertheless, provide the necessary money. Our age's crisis of musical comprehension will never be cured without the tangible relations between the present and the past being thrown into relief.

A third type of contrast is that between live performance on the one hand and taped and gramophone performance on the other. Once we keep the possible mixtures of these media in mind, endless possibilities of highly significant, eminently musical programmes arise which, without radio, the history of musical comprehension would have to do without. (How can one talk about the history of music without taking the history of musical comprehension into account?) All these contrasts, moreover, are combinable, interpenetrative, and a vast variety of new musical events can thus be constructed which prove as radiogenic as they are musico-genic.

In Tenerife, I continued to specify ways in which radio musicians could turn the phoney end into a real means, forget about being 'professional broadcasters,' and rest creatively content with being musicians who have mastered the minor craft of handling a mass medium. Here I submit that my implications go far beyond radio : if you are a man of talent, plunge into the middle of a phoney profession, not only in order to show that there are no witches, but also in order to discover what makes a witch-pricker tick and a witch suffer, and utilise the discovery towards truthfulness and helpfulness. The politician, the teacher, the psychiatrist and the editor are amongst our time's important phoneys who must not remain unmolested by esteemed, professional colleagues.

The effect of my paper was explosive— perhaps traumatic. It was the only one that was applauded—whereupon several applauders • started criticizing it. ('What have I done? I've applauded an attack on me') Not a single speaker following me during the rest of the conference failed to refer to phoney professionalism—ambivalently so. But to my knowledge, only one professional broadcaster took a practical step : the Head of Music of the Israel Broadcasting Authority distributed copies of the paper amongst all music producers. Hats off—sorry, on. Without the phoney professionals' own active support, my thesis, however cordially applauded, is useless.