Junior Dowie/Staff Photographer
Kathy Brown says playing classical music does not provide sufficient income for a musician.

Krista Henry, Staff Reporter

Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Bach - sounds strange to the average Jamaican, as classical music is only appreciated by a small segment of the society.

Commonly seen as elitist music, in Jamaica classical music is far from the mainstream of dancehall and reggae music. Due to lack of training, teachers, understanding and the attitude of the musicians, classical music has been pushed on the back burner.

As the director of the School of Music, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Roger N. Williams is well aware of the situation. "At times there is a lack of understanding as to what it is. Some people see it as an elitist thing; it's not. We have developed a culture where if it's not dancing music, people don't want to hear it," Williams said.

Williams attests that classical music isn't promoted properly, nor are there sufficient instruments, concert halls and persons trained to teach music. Yet, the School of Music is doing its best. "You have to do classical music, even if you do jazz and pop (which is the most popular programme). It helps one's technical facility, as well as musicianship, how to interpret music, how to bring music to life. It is very important," he said.

Doubts

However, despite the efforts Williams doubts that classical music will ever have a hold over the masses like dancehall or reggae.

For pianist Kathy Brown, classical music doesn't draw in sufficient income for a musician. "People play what they think will sell, what's fast. What you play on radio, that's what children listen to. If you don't play it then they won't want to hear it. We haven't made it a part of our staple diet in music," she said. In most schools classical music has long been abandoned.

However, music publisher and guitarist Seretse Small claims that Jamaica's instrumentalists are far too arrogant. "I think that our instrumental music in general is of too low a standard. I think that is why it is not appreciated, we're too lazy, we do the bare minimum in preparation for a show. All of us are very arrogant, we have a sense of superiority 'cause we know things. We have knowledge," he said.

"The dancehall person understands that people are people and they want to be hit with something. The classical music that I've heard in this country is so bad. It highly lacks passion, virtuosity. When you hear Beethoven as it should be done it takes your breath away, but we tend to do a really bad job of it," Small said.

Killed live music

Small says that this attitude has killed live music in Jamaica. He says that musicians look at themselves as providing background music, which is an entirely negative attitude.

He says "the whole colonial thing has messed us up, 'cause we have this idea of bad music and good music. It's not that dancehall is over here and jazz is over there. It all comes from the same place. I used to play with Sean Paul for three years. We did a show that was dancehall-jazz. Dancehall has always blended music anyway, so its fairly easy to do that. We took dancehall rhythms and did serious jazz improvisations over it and people loved it. That's some of the stuff we want to do. The average instrumentalist is not recording and not making an impact in terms of sales so that you can get really good gigs."

Mixing classical music and the mainstream is something the school of music has been trying to do, according to Williams, which seems to be the best option to make classical music listened to by the masses.