Our Potemkin Music Scene

Isn't marketing wonderful? (No need to answer.)

The orchestras are dying. They hire marketeers to save their bottom line. Marketeer figures, rightly, we need young people in the audience. Too many grey hairs. So go find Gen X/Y/Z composers.

This could be good. Maybe there is someone out there worth discovering. But they have to look good. Nice teeth. Magazine cover material. Helps if they have a dog, too.

What about the music? It really doesn't matter. Sell more seats.

*sigh*

I'm glad to hear about an economist addressing some of these large-scale issues. The classical music community spends a lot of time blundering around addressing symptoms instead of problems because we don't have a broad enough perspective.

If the system is as you describe it, i.e. big-name composers select proteges from their grad student population and grease the skids for them, and then the orchestra machine takes the composers that have been offered up by the system, then I wonder if part of the problem might be that the admissions process for composition programs is flawed. If the big-name composers are trying to select their best students for The Treatment, and if their judgement of who is the best among their students is good, then maybe the problem is that they don't have the right people in the program to begin with.

So then the question is where in the pipeline from highschool to induction into the orchestra-composer elite does the system weed out the wrong people? I'm about to engage in some very risky generalizing, stereotyping, and speculating, so please read it with an appropriate level of skepticism. I can think of two plausible scenarios.

First, admission to undergraduate programs tends to be based on academics and interesting well-roundedness, but perhaps the profile of the future-great-composer is more likely somebody who didn't do particularly spectacularly in school because they didn't work hard on the things that didn't interest them, and isn't well rounded because they spent all of their time writing wierd music. The big-name composers are hired by the big-name universities, but the most promising young composers can't get into those schools. So they study with people who have less clout, and at a school with fewer resources for getting performances, and they don't have an impressive portfolio or big-name letter writers when grad-school application time comes along, and they don't make it into the grad programs with the hot-shot composers. Meanwhile, the capable and hardworking but less than brilliant composers did well in High School, got into first-rate undergrad programs where they got good performances and had famous teachers, and on the strength of their portfolio and recommendations they then go to a grad school with big-name faculty.

Second, if we think my generalizations about personality traits are off the mark, maybe the problem is in what the admissions committees at big-name grad schools are looking for. Suppose that the competent-but-less-than-brilliant composers tend to be more satisfied with doing excellent immitations of established styles, while the composers who will turn out to be really great spend their time trying to find new ways of doing things and often failing. The college seniors who are writing music that sounds the most like professional music might be the most likely to remain competent but not reach greatness, whereas the ones who will turn out to be great are generating lower quality work because they're not working from an established model. The admissions committee would likely admit the composers whose work sounds the most professional, thereby accidentally selecting for competence rather than future greatness. Maybe admissions committees would do better to prefer the young composers who are failing in the most interesting ways rather than the ones who already sound like pros.

In the meantime, if anybody reading this ends up reviewing my grad school application, please note that if you like my music it's because I'm already on the path to greatness, and if you don't like it it's because I'm failing in interesting ways. Either way, I'm ready to be devoured by the machine.

"Recently I was assigned a piece written by a composer in his 20s, the piece for which he is best known. I have rarely seen so inept a work."

So: Composer X is out there, apparently bamboozling major critics, and the public is being conned into believing that his inept work is worthwhile.

Under those circumstances, what's gained by (and what's the point of) your ever-so-coy refusal to name composer X, the work in question, or any of the critics who've been so thoroughly taken in?

KG replies: I'd love to, but I work for the orchestra in question, and it's not part of my job to denigrate their concert series offerings. I feel guilty enough just bringing it up, but there's social value in people knowing how these things operate. And besides, as I say, I don't really blame the composer. I think he's in a tough spot, probably scared shitless by each new commission and wondering why he meets, on all sides, an effusive praise he hasn't yet deserved. He's a victim, like the audience and the other composers who might be given such opportunities, of a stupid system that has nothing to do with merit, and you can't blame people for taking advantage of what the system offers. But you can start changing the system.

If anyone, I blame the critics - they're the free agents who could afford to tell the truth and don't. Two possible explanations: 1. they're too fond of access to the musical centers of power and refuse to make waves, or 2. they're morons.

Galen, I'm not sure it's necessarily correct to assume that the "future-great composers" all do poorly at anything other than music in high school and college. One can have a passion for music and still be well-rounded; I'd hate to think that all the composers I like were narrow and only focused on writing music and weren't part of the real world, even if only the academic part of the world. Xenakis studied architecture, for example. Richard Friedman is a very gifted programmer. There are other examples as well.

I think what you mean is that the "less-than-brilliant" composers protect the status quo. That I'd very much agree with. It's not so much that they excel in academics, because I suspect that if anything, they are more likely to concentrate in their particular area and not be well-versed in the humanities, the sciences, etc.

The ones who really are great are often iconoclastic, may be generally misunderstood, and have a voracious appetite for both creative efforts and knowledge in general. I also think that the truly great ones are not politically savvy and tend to speak their minds. That's often a very valued quality in academia, but not everywhere, and I think what the "not so gifted" composers have mastered is the art of schmoozing and politicking. That's why they advance in academic circles and why they flourish; they play it safe, don't rock the boat, and write like everyone else, usually the composition teachers at the institutions they attend.

Galen Brown wrote: "perhaps the profile of the future-great-composer is more likely somebody who didn't do particularly spectacularly in school because they didn't work hard on the things that didn't interest them, and isn't well rounded because they spent all of their time writing wierd music."

I agree with Galen that the students who don't do so well in school aren't part of the traditional university system. These young composers are the ones writing compelling electronic music and exploring the industry in a different way.

For example, this is a clip http://www.vitamine-source.at/files/listen/dorian_concept_-_tape_two.mp3 from an eighteen year old Austrian/American kid who isn't attending the Hochschule or the Mozarteum, but rather the Fachhochschule in Salzburg.
http://www.fh-salzburg.ac.at/mma

I'm not holding this composer up as a bright, shining example of what the future holds, but rather as a typical example of what happens when you give a kid piano lessons and a Nintendo.