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| Beach Boy Brian Wilson's Covid-19 Online Concert from his Parlour's Piano |
This summer, festival performers will do their set in front of a maximum audience of about five in their own parlour (aka sitting room - front room - living room) while relatives and friends interact with them there, face to face.
(((Faces six feet apart.)))
The greater, now global, audience is also in groups of five maximum, in their individual parlour (sitting room -front room - living room) potentially anywhere and everywhere: in both real and non-real time.
The performer and global audience can still interact with each other, albeit that the global audience's instantaneous response to the performer is limited to online chat texts which the performers then scans quickly between songs while trying to respond verbally and with their choice of the next song.
A variant of this activity (One-To-Many) is old news on Youtube for individual artists, but this collective parlours-to-collective parlours setup (Many-To-Many) is new and well worth watching as it develops.
Outdoor music is in major long term decline : rock being outdoor music par excellent, its fading popularity as generations of fans die off is driving the overall decline, because typical rock just doesn’t sound like typical rock if played in an typical-sized parlour, not with your typical-sized neighbours quick to call the fuzz if the fuzz guitars get out of hand, C-;
Parlour music from 1840s to the 1940s was never a genre by any traditional academic high art musical category, but it does fit a traditional ethnomusicology division : it was the ultimate version of indoor music versus outdoor music.
"Indoor" music - simply because it must be played by only a few performers and simply because some instruments (not just modern rock amps, but ancient drums and cymbals and brass winds) are hard to sound authentic if constantly played at the low volume required not to blast listeners in a small fully enclosed space - is quite different from the "outdoor" music of large orchestras in large concert halls, big marching bands in the streets, or Marshall-Amp-driven rock groups in outdoor stadiums.
Effectively then Parlour creates its own quasi-genre, based on selecting out from any and all music that is popular, those pieces that still sound well when played by just a few decidely amateur performers playing quiet, thin, linear (arpeggios) lines on naturally quiet instruments in an enclosed space small in terms of overall volume.
The traditional ordering categories like melody, harmony, rhythm, metre, tempo remain unchanged.
But instead, the art and craft of Arranging comes to the fore : very little of parlour music was truly original, it was almost always re-arranged to suit the limitations of creating a successful reproduction of the original with only a few amateurs playing quiet instruments in a small room.
Even if the parlour music appeared to be original on the sheet music, ie if openly labelled as "parlour ballads", remember the professional composers had pre-arranged it to be only published in easy keys and easy tempos, with easy chords and easy vocal and instrumental ranges.
If contemporary terms like 'acoustic covers' and 'unplugged' seem to fit, so be it.
But parlour has another very unusual characteristic, in fact its most distinct characteristic : it was/is truly 'all music that is popular', not just limited to what today we narrowly define as 'pop' music.
If your memories of AM radio in the 1950s and 1960s is only based upon what you read about it in a book, listen up, because 20/20 hindsight generally got it badly wrong.
Except in the biggest cities, most places had only one or two radio stations and so while they were multi-format on a 24 hour basis, their most listened to hours reflected the reality of the real Top Forty charts circa 1950-1980.
Jesus, Mary & Joseph : reading the Top Forties charts of those decades reminds one of a constant music Babel --- and those charts do also reflect accurately my personal memories.
I never ever heard Italian opera (except I did, in versions by Elvis) or Gregorian Chant on Top 40 radio but everything else was fair game.
Music today regarded as hard country, hard jazz, hard orchestral instrumentals, hard middle of the road pop, hard r&b, hard folk, hard foreign language hits (and all definitely more adult-oriented music) jockeyed for space on my childhood radio's local Top 40 Chart, along with today's much better remembered teen-oriented pop and rock/rock-n-roll.
Put simply, 1950s AM radio was the 1850s Parlour : catholic, even promiscuous, in its tastes, just as long as the hits 'from-around-the-world-and-across-the-genres' were catchy.
If you haven’t guessed, yes, my interest in 1850s and 1860s parlour reflects my love of 1950s and 1960s AM radio.
And yes, I hope that stadium rock never ever returns and we hear a lot more intimate indoor music, parlour music.
Because, never forget rocker guys & gals, we can still play music in the parlour that sounds louder than Hell, but really isn't : and we have for over 50 years.
I can give a personal example.
In 1972, I had a Silvertone bottom of the line open back cabinet amp, made out of high grade cardboard and probably delivering 5 amps into one cardboard six inch speaker at about 20% inter-harmonic distortion.
Ie, I could never turn it up very loud as the distortion was so unmusical.
But if I kept it at a nice musically low volume and stuck my Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi (sic) distortion device in between that and my very nice Silvertone (Dan-Electro) guitar, I got the sweetest distortion sound this side of rock heaven, at a volume even my granny wouldn't mid.
Parlour Rock - rock'n'roll modified to sound great in grannie's old parlour ----it can be done folks !
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