August 2003 Archives

Sandow the blog -- and Sandow the individual -- are going on vacation. We'll both be gone almost a month, happily retreating to the countryside in the north of England, to relax and compose. Look for us again the second week of September. And thanks so much to everyone for making the first month of this so wonderfully stimulating! I'll still be getting e-mail, so if anybody wants to get in touch, I won't be completely gone. Just, perhaps, a little slow, relaxed, and wonderfully lazy…

Have a good month, everyone. I'll look forward to resuming when I'm back.

People reading me continue to write, sending thoughtful, interesting, provocative stuff. I want to post a lot of it, but for the moment only have time for a little. I'll post more (I promise!) when I get back from vacation. My apologies to people whom I'd asked for permission to quote, who haven't yet seen their comments here. I'd hoped to get more in now, but the last few days were pretty hectic.

From Donald Clarke, author of a forceful book, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (which you can find here):

I wrote earlier about Gregory McCallum, and his project in North Carolina -- bringing his piano to every county in the state, to play concerts, give master classes, and work with schools. Unfortunately, he had to curtail his plans, as he explained in an e-mail to me:

This project was to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the invention of the piano by a series of residencies in every county in North Carolina over a four-year period. To ensure that audiences would experience piano music at its best, I insured my Yamaha C7 grand with Lloyds of London and loaded it into a Ryder truck to take to each county. The residency's goal was to bring people of diverse backgrounds together around the instrument we all play and love: the piano. My hope was that the experience would foster a greater appreciation for classical piano music.

"Bach to Boogie" launched the project in my current county of residence, Orange County. My piano was moved to East Chapel Hill High School by a group of volunteers, including some Harley-Davidson bikers. The concert featured diverse performers of all ages and backgrounds, and I acted as the host and musical "glue" that held the program together. I performed works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and Gershwin. In between my performances, guest pianists performed, including two young Asian students, a self-taught Hispanic boy who performed his own compositions, a high school student of mine, an African American gospel pianist, a jazz pianist, and fpur piano teachers in their golden years who perform two-piano eight-hand arrangements (and call themselves the "Fourmost"). Even more remarkable was the full-capacity audience that included people of all ages and backgrounds. Everyone came away with a greater appreciation for a style of music and playing that was different from their own. And how appropriate it was to see the Harley-Davidson couple snuggling during the Chopin nocturne!

But then came 9/11, and over the next few months, one by one Arts Councils and school presenters canceled their participation in this project due to the economic slump and budget cuts. Piano Connections [McCallum's organization] was unable to raise sufficient funds to keep the project alive. And the stress of the year contibuted to my own health decline, and I had to have surgery for a severe sinus infection at the end of the concert season. Piano Connections was forced to go dormant in 2002 until better financial support could be found for the project.

Currently, I am fully recovered and will continue the project in some capacity in the fall when I pack up my piano again to join forces with pianist Barbara McKenzie of Wilmington for some two-piano performances in New Hanover, Robeson and Currituck counties. I must say the most gratifying experience has been playing for elementary school students and feeling the electricty in the room. I know that experience will stay with them for a lifetime and encourage them to be creative and open to deeper and richer life experiences. I will never forget their enthusiasm and appreciation.

I had to drive a lot over the past two days, and started out with CDs to listen to. All for a project I'm doing with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Pictures at an Exhibition, both the piano version and the orchestral one. Piano version: Evgeny Kissin (who plays the "Promenade" as something fiercer than someone strolling through a gallery; a triumphant army, maybe). Orchestral version: Gergiev (oddly restrained, though maybe I'm wrong, because for my work purposes I didn't have to hear much of his recording; or myabe he just seemed restrained compared to Kissin).

And then three newer pieces: Todd Levin's Blur (a brilliant, almost savage orchestral evocation of techno, with an ironic echo of a Schoenberg tone row flying over it); Philip Glass's Heroes Symphony (which takes off from a David Bowie album); and Michael Daugherty's Le tombeau de Liberace, for piano and orchestra, based on guess who, and worthy of him. A while ago I was e-mailing with someone who reads this, and wondered if she listened to new classical music. She said that she had to chew on Schoenberg, whose music was like eating brussels sprouts. Poor Schoenberg, dead more than 50 years, and somehow still a hassle for us! He's history. My listening today brought home something I know very well, but hadn't touched so tangibly in quite a while. Composers today go in directions that don't sound at all like (ugh) "contemporary music." (The mere fact that we have to label it shows that there's a problem. When was the last time you went to see "contemporary film"?) The Levin, Glass, and Daugherty CDs show that one strain of new American classical music grows directly from pop culture. It's vivid, vital, often smart and tough. Perfect for the new audience we want to find.

And then the radio. Got sick of WFAN, New York's dominant sports station, which usually I love. Too much stupid talk about Jeremy Shockey, the football player who caused a scandal by calling Bill Parcells a "homo." Too many callers wondered what was wrong with that. And the jocks at the station, explaining that the word was "offensive to some people," mostly didn't say just who those people were. It was more than I could take. Couldn't somebody have had the decency to lay it out plainly? "Gay people get a lot of abuse, professional, verbal, and sometimes physical. It's very bad to use an epithet for 'gay man' as a term of abuse. And if you, Mr. Caller, say, 'Well, that's just how they talk in the locker room,' did you ever think that there are gay men there, too? I didn't think so." There! How hard was that?

Switched to FM, tuned to WNYC, the New York public radio outlet. They play classical music, but often it's offbeat. But no! They're playing blues! Delight and gratitude! Strange, though, that the blues they're playing is so wry and just a touch urban...oh, I see. This is Prairie Home Companion. Down and dirty Delta or Chicago blues just wouldn't be their style. But blues is rare on radio. More rare than classical music. At least in the northeast, I can usually find a classical station when I drive. But blues? Or '50s R&B, which would keep me happy for a hundred miles? Forget it. When we wail about classical stations disappearing, let's remember that there's lots of good, important music that we can't hear on the radio at all. (In fact, it's weird. We can hear music from Vienna in 1805, but not Mississippi in 1935.)

I also listened to the CD that comes with Nick Hornby's Songbook, some of the clearest writing about music I've seen for a long time. (I quoted passages from it here some time ago.) The CD has many of the pop songs he writes about; the indie ones, which the publishers could license. "You Had Time" by Ani DiFranco really knocked me out. I should just quote Hornby to tell you why, since he says it better than I could, but the quote would be too long, and besides I want to save it for some future blogging about music criticism. But "You Had Time" begins amazingly -- it takes shape from DiFranco trying things at random on the piano, then slowly focusing on what becomes the song.

Finally I switched to WKTU, the big New York dance-music station. Madonna came on, doing a promo for them. Then they played "Holiday" (which among much else is an exquisitely crafted song; even the sound of the first two keyboard chords is unmistakable). I smelled a deal: "You flack us, we'll play you." Who cares? I was glad to hear the song, which almost sounds, well, classical, next to current hits.

The shrinking of classical radio is a danger sign for classical music. Or at least I always say that. But when I find a classical station, I usually can't bear to listen. Too tame, too smooth, too much old music. But if I found a station that played Todd Levin, Ani diFranco, blues, and Madonna (plus some Ibrahim Ferrer)…

They could even slip in some Beethoven (maybe one of the symphonies, in a bracing Roger Norrington performance on old instruments, with whipcrack timpani). And wouldn't that be better for classical music in the long run? I wish it wouldn't be presented on the radio like some cult of meaningless refinement (or, in more modern style, as bright and perky). I wish instead that it showed up as intelligent fare, right next to all the other things intelligent people, out there in the real world, really listen to.

Not everyone agrees with what I said about classical music on TV. My faithful correspondent Marla Carew writes:

From Drew McManus (who's also shown up in Andrew Taylor's blog, and from whom we'll be hearing more), comes this, about classical music on TV:

When I take a group of adult students to a rehearsal or talk to them about what to look for at the symphony, I mention many of the same things you mentioned in the footnote to "Opera troubles":

I'd love to see an orchestra televised a different way. Instead of showing us the horns when they play, show us the horn players emptying spit out of their instruments, as they'll do several times during a concert. Show us the strings frantically turning pages in their music, when there aren't any pauses that can give them time to do it. Show us the second trumpet sitting motionless on camera -- for quite a while -- then play two notes, and then sit motionless again. Show us, in other words, what really goes on, including the musicians taking their lead from the concertmaster, if the conductor isn't any good. None of this might do much for the music, but it might make absorbing (and informative) TV.

I also like to point out the eye rolls among violinists.  For operas I tell them to look for the brass players reading a book or playing with a Palm Pilot. I've actually seen some laugh out loud when they see it happen for the first time. They almost get giddy waiting for it to happen again.

Reading ArtsJournal is indeed an education. (And let me say that I'd been reading this site daily, long before I was ever asked to blog this blog.) Today I hope you noticed the item about niche cable channels. Yesterday I carried on about the limits of niches -- how some niches were surely just too small to support themselves.

And then today I read about the Puppy Channel. Only a proposal, so far, but who knows? Maybe it'll fly. And if it does, I give up. Bring on the Asparagus Channel, and the Godard Network. Yesterday I said they couldn't float, but now…

And while we're at it, how about the Opera Channel? If we're going to have a Puppy Channel, I'd love to know how many viewers all those puppies would draw. Would opera do better or worse? (A serious question, actually. And suddenly I fear I know the answer. I look into my heart, and realize that I myself would watch the Puppy Channel. Already I watch Animal Planet. "The World's Funniest Animal Videos," or whatever they call it, is a guilty pleasure for plenty of people I know, despite the silly host. So puppies, I'll bet, would do better than opera. Forget you ever read this blog-entry.)

From Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (1924):

We have all had those days of halcyon perfection, when the precise degree of warmth was a miracle, when the aroma of a wine seemed to have the whole fragrance of the earth, when one could do anything or nothing and be equally content. In the presence of great works of art we experience something similar. We are suspended between the sense of release from life, the desire to die before the image of the supremely beautiful, and a new-found capacity for living. Our daily existence gives us no such opportunity; we cannot live languorously because we have no leisure, and we are compelled to be intense at rare intervals if life isn't to be entirely a hoax and a bore.

My last item, about classical music on TV, has prompted some disagreement, which I'll soon reflect here.

Meanwhile there's an alarming piece in The Independent about a dip in British classical CD sales. It wasn't just that fewer people bought classical CDs -- classical sales fell dramatically as a percentage of all CDs sold, from 10% in 1990 to 5% now. I'd love to know if the decline was steady, or just spiked recently, which might (thin ray of hope) mean only that the current crop of classical releases isn't very gripping. I'd also like to know if percentage sales of each musical genre normally stay about the same, or routinely churn.

But this can't be good news. I also notice, in the story, another example of an escalation I've noticed this year in scary rhetoric. "Welcome to the death of music, or that genre of it we define as classical," said an opinion piece in The Scotsman, back in May. (Are things worse in Britain?) And in the Independent piece, we have an artists' manager asking whether classical music "has reached its sell-by date." Granted, he manages the shabby crossover string quartet Bond, but still it's new -- and bracing -- to see statements like that in print.

A contrarian would be hopeful -- the rise in pessimism, he or she would say, is a sure sign things are going to turn around. At least the classical music world might take it as a wakeup call.

I want to thank my blog-brother Terry Teachout for finding something I squirreled away in my "Resources" section on the right, and recommending it so fervently. It's an Opera News piece about why PBS won't broadcast opera.

But I don't read the piece quite the way he does. What registers for him is PBS rejecting art, refusing to show challenging operas because they won't attract a massive audience. For me what might be going on is different. I wonder if the problem isn't that PBS demands a massive audience (though perhaps it might), but that opera draws a very tiny one -- so tiny, for works that aren't widely known, that no responsible large-scale broadcaster could afford to show them.

To put it differently, think of the Food Network, or IFC, the Independent Film Channel. These can find a niche on cable. But the Asparagus Network wouldn't fly, and neither would a channel that only showed Jean-Luc Godard. Some niches are too small to support themselves, and opera may have reached that point. Terry quoted quite a long statement from John Goberman, executive producer of Live from Lincoln Center, but for me the killer quote from him was this: "There have been some broadcasts over the years where we'd have been better served to have made videocassettes and just sent them to the people who actually wound up watching."

Three factors might be operating here:

1. Many educated, smart, and cultured people just don't care about classical music. That's a new phenomenon, but it's unmistakable. Younger classical musicians find they can't talk to their friends about their work. I've been at dinner parties where nobody knows what to say to me about what I do -- and the "nobodies" have included a rather famous writer on art and culture, and a MacArthur prize-winning historian. So if PBS deemphasizes classical music, that might not mean it's dumbing down its programming. The programs might be as thoughtful as they ever were, but the smart people they're aimed at don't care about classical music. (True fact: WNYC, New York's public radio station, used to start its day with Morning Edition, and follow that with classical music. When the classical music started, fully 80% of listeners turned the dial to something else.)

2. Opera isn't all that popular. The opera audience might be getting larger, as everybody says, and marginally younger, too. But still it isn't very large. The PARC study of the performing arts audience that I link to in my "Resources" section has the numbers. In five surveyed areas (Alaska, Denver, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Seattle), from 7% to 11% of people interviewed had gone to an opera performance, as compared to 16% to 20% for orchestra concerts, 43% to 51% for theater, and 23% to 36% for dance. It's true that opera companies don't perform as much as orchestras, but maybe that's because the audience is smaller. And opera has a lot of what I might call negative appeal -- a lot of people really hate it, including a lot of people who listen to other kinds of classical music. An old classical radio maxim says that opera should be broadcast on Saturday night, when nobody's around; the few people who like it will stay home to listen. Opera, in other words, was always a minority taste. And now that fewer people take an active interest in classical music, it's even more a minority taste than it used to be.

3. Classical music doesn't work well on TV. Or at least it's deadly for noninitiates who run across it flipping channels. Orchestra concerts can be stultifying. When the horns play, you watch the horns. Duh. If the music doesn't grab you, the visuals surely won't. Opera looks silly, because the production values mostly aren't adequate, by the standards that apply to everything else on TV. The singers don't really act, don't look their parts, aren't graceful on stage, don't relate to one another (or at least don't relate as actors would) -- these are all the standard failings opera always had, now magnified in closeups. Opera lovers can forgive that, but most people can be forgiven if they ask, "What is this silliness?" And change the channel.

Footnote: I'd love to see an orchestra televised a different way. Instead of showing us the horns when they play, show us the horn players emptying spit out of their instruments, as they'll do several times during a concert. Show us the strings frantically turning pages in their music, when there aren't any pauses that can give them time to do it. Show us the second trumpet sitting motionless on camera -- for quite a while -- then play two notes, and then sit motionless again. Show us, in other words, what really goes on, including the musicians taking their lead from the concertmaster, if the conductor isn't any good. None of this might do much for the music, but it might make absorbing (and informative) TV.

Slowly I'm adding to the fine print on the right. In the "Resources" section -- where I mean to build a list of references for anyone who cares about the state of classical music -- I've added a heading called "Useful Articles." It'll cite newspaper and magazine pieces, and starts with two entries, both of which can help explain unfortunate things we might not like, but need to understand.

Soon I'll have a section on CDs I've been playing, currently a bewildering list, ranging from the new Annie Lennox album to a few dozen classical pieces I've had to sample for a project I'm doing with some orchestras. The best of all of them? Leopold Stokowski conducting Wagner, on a recent release from Andante.

And in the "Elsewhere" section under "Sandow," I snuck in a note about my latest column in the wonderful webzine NewMusicBox. It's about Bob Dylan, and some arousing dissonances that he gets by more or less ignoring his guitar chords when he plays his harmonica. But I think he likes the sound, and so do I. (There's a classical connection, just maybe, but why bother about that?) If you want to read other installments of that column -- and I hope you will; I have a lot of fun, and explore some of my favorite ideas -- you can find many of them here.)

Just to show that pop singers have no monopoly on classy photos (see below), here's Anne Sofie von Otter, looking smart, glamorous, and interesting. How could you look at her, and not want to hear her sing?

More here.

 This is Renée Fleming, as she appears in a Rolex watch ad, and on the cover of an upcoming CD. I think she looks awful. Ghastly makeup, overdone eyes…what was she thinking of?

Let me quickly say that I don't mind classical stars doing endorsements. It's very likely good for classical music, since it brings these artists into the world most Americans live in. And if classical stars are tempted by the money, well, who can blame them? They're only human, and it might well be galling, seeing teen athletes getting all the cash, when you, the evocative soprano, have disciplined yourself for years to reach a higher place.

But there are endorsements and endorsements. Rolex doesn't seem like such a great idea, right now. Classical music needs a wider audience. Why link it to a product whose very name breathes money? Why brand it as elite and out of reach?

And then there's the photo. It's not a great example of its kind. It seems to say that classical musicians really don't fit in, that they can't be glamorous, like actresses and pop stars.

But beyond that is something even worse. What kind of artist does Renée Fleming seem like here? If she were a pop star, I'd take one look, and say I didn't want to hear her music. She comes off like a Top 40 act, someone singing mostly mindless stuff. Real artists in the pop world never look like that. They look honest, smart, and fascinating, even in their glamour shots, as you can verify (just for instance) on the stylish Annie Lennox website, or in this Joni Mitchell photograph:

Enough said. This demonstrates an unhappy tropism in classical music -- it bends (maybe because of all the money that it has to raise) towards the upscale mainstream, rather than towards art.

We've talked here about the passive audience, but the ACO has a page on its website where the audience talks back.

"Truly Dreadful," said one back-talker, about a controversial piece (Swirl, by Todd Levin, which combines classical music and techno; I myself like it): "An exercise in the composer's imagined self-importance."

But these calmer (though still outspoken) comments on a Roger Sessions symphony are more typical:

"I loved the Symphony No. 1"

"The Largo movement was lush, calm, regular in structure, and fulfilling"

"The Roger Sessions First Symphony was enjoyable and accessible (unlike most of his other works that ACO has performed)."

"I was surprised to hear yet another Sessions Symphony,well constructed but a composer that really doesn't age well. It is dutiful but increasingly irrelevant."

More, please -- from every orchestra.

Greg McCallum:

He's a North Carolina pianist, who -- in a four-year project that began in 2001 -- is taking his piano (quite literally packing it in a van and moving it) to every county in the state. In each county he gives concerts, plays in schools, holds master classes, and organizes "community jams," where local pianists play.

Apart from what's on his website, I don't know anything about him, (though I like the single sample of his playing he provides; why not more?). But his county tour has to be a wonderful thing for classical music, guaranteeing both publicity and contact with the audience we wish we had. Too bad our largest classical music institutions -- including the most famous orchestras -- don't get out on the county roads and do what McCallum does. It's not enough to give concerts; classical music has to reach everyone at once, by getting in the news, and also has to touch people directly, outside the concert hall.