February 2004 Archives

Here are some excerpts from Philip Kennicott's Washington Post piece, linked from ArtsJournal today, which so wonderfully -- and justly  -- praises Sam Bergman's blog. And no, they're not about Sam, except indirectly. They're about the woeful state of orchestras, part of which is how woefully they communicate with…well, whom? Quite honestly, I don't know who most orchestra PR might be aimed at. The present audience? A new audience? The classical music press? The general press? The only thing most orchestras communicate that could interest any large part of these groups, is the simple listing of concerts, conductors, and soloists. Those of us who know classical music can read all that, and know whether we'll be interested. But for everyone else, I defy anyone to find, in the pious boilerplate of most classical music publicity, anything that sounds like art, or human interest, or even simply human life.

Here's some of what Philip wrote:

Bergman's blog has emerged as accidental but excellent under-the-radar publicity for a sector of the music industry -- the orchestra world -- that takes a notoriously top-down, control-freak approach to its public image. Orchestras are often locked in a dated and low-energy relationship with their public: using old media, and only to promote their concerts, their conductor and sometimes their soloists. Innovative use of Web technology, even something so simple as a good blog, is a rarity. And efforts to see inside orchestra life are shut down or hampered by old-guard PR executives nervous about stories they can't control, or aren't clearly focused on filling seats.

When it comes to educating the public about the inner workings of musicians' lives -- beyond the predictable human-interest stories, pablum about the glories of music, and reassurances that the local orchestra is the best of all possible orchestras -- orchestra leaders have essentially failed.…

Bergman found a voice that spoke articulately from inside a world that has become all too reticent, nervous and polished in its nonmusical communication with the public. That his blog, which made the facts of a musician's life fascinating, should be so successful suggests that the professional orchestral world has become so self-absorbed that it no longer knows what is interesting about its own microcosm.

Amen to all of this. If we in classical music can't tell other people why we're interesting, why should anybody pay attention to us?

Sam's blog, I should add, is just wonderful. If there's anyone reading this who hasn't yet looked at it -- which, I'm thrilled to say, is hard to believe, since Sam has gotten so much well-deserved attention -- you're missing a great treat.

I haven't been blogging, and haven't said how thrilled I am with Alex Ross's piece on the nature of classical music, which ran in The New Yorker in the issue dated February 22, and was linked here last week. This is surely the most important essay ever written on classical music's future, or maybe, more precisely, on what its future ought to be.

As I wrote to him after I read his essay (it's called "Listen to This"), he leapfrogs all the usual debate, all the breast-beating, all the criticisms people like me make, all the cries of "whither us" we hear throughout the field, and instead offers a vision of what classical music would be like if it were saved. Or what I hope it will be like. He touches on many of the familiar debates, but always in new ways, with phrases striking both for how vivid they are, and how true.

And his piece is intensely personal. This isn't an academic argument. This isn't a theory. Alex can talk about what classical music should be like with special authority, because he's writing about what classical music already is for him. Two people -- one of my current Juilliard students, and one from last year -- have already told me they're xeroxing the piece, and sending it to many people they know. I can't believe they're alone. Read the piece yourself. To say I found it thrilling isn't even a small exaggeration. It clears an important new path.

Just to whet your appetite, here's how Alex begins:

Barenboim's announcement -- that he'll leave the Chicago Symphony when his current contract expires two years from now -- demonstrates two things. First, that music directors really are expected, in this new era for classical music, to do more than conduct. "After much soul-searching and reflection," Barenboim said (in the orchestra's official press release), "I have come to realize that the position and responsibilities of a music director in America are changing in that they require many non-artistic activities and I feel I have neither the energy nor the time to fulfill them." These "non-artistic activities" include fundraising, and going out into the community. Orchestras really do want their music directors to do these things. Eschenbach was an attractive choice for Philadelphia precisely because he likes to go out into the community. That, in fact, is why (or so I was told at the time) he was put on the orchestra's shortlist. His musical strength was taken for granted; it was his community interests that made him stand out.

(Of course, he's now forged a blazing musical bond with the Philadelphia musicians, something I hope will be confirmed when I hear him conduct them in the Mahler Third tomorrow night. From what I've heard from them so far, this may very well be the )orchestra we'll soon all be raving about.)

But the second thing the Chicago announcement demonstrates is Barenboim's honesty. Or at least that's how I see it, without knowing what might have gone on behind the scenes. "This is what music directors will have to do," he says, in effect, "and it isn't me." So bravo for him. He knows what he wants. Each spring, when I teach my Juilliard course on the future of classical music, I tell my students that selling classical music -- much as that's needed in the current era -- wasn't what they might have signed on for when they decided to become musicians. It's a different set of skills. Anybody good at marketing will have a better chance in today's classical music world, but plenty of wonderful musicians aren't good at it, and might not even be interested. We have to honor and respect that.

Here, though, is another wrinkle. One of America's most famous composers sent around an e-mail, saying that the date of Barenboim's announcement should become a national holiday. That's because Barenboim's taste in new music is strongly modernist, something reflected in his Chicago progamming, though it never got nearly as intense as what Levine will do in Boston. This composer objects to Barenboim's modernist emphasis, and because he's so successful -- so widely performed -- I wouldn't for a minute say he's angry just because he himself might be excluded. (Besides, I know him; he doesn't operate that way.)

So the battle over modernism continues, even as modernism ebbs. It will ebb more, I imagine, after Barenboim leaves.

A reader writes to tell me that I'm wrong about the Grammys. There's no contradiction between the Boulez Mahler Third being named the best orchestral performance, while the Tilson Thomas CD of the same piece is named best classical album. There seems to be a problem here, of course, because if the best album is orchestral, as this one is, than you'd think it would be best orchestral performance as well.

But not so, says my correspondent. The orchestral award is specifically for the music -- "best orchestral performance" is exactly what it means. And the best album award is for everything about the CD release -- not just the performance but other things as well, like recording quality. Thus the awards are really for two different things, and can't really be examined side by side.

I stand corrected. But still I wasn't wrong to note a contradiction, because my correspondent only explained half the mystery. Note that the Boulez CD was nominated for best album, and didn't win. This, under the rules I needed to have clarified, could in fact be logical. The performance, one could say, just marginally beat out the Tilson Thomas one, but the recording quality and everything else about the Tilson Thomas album was so far superior that -- taking everything into account -- it topped Boulez for the main award.

But here's what's weird: Tilson Thomas wasn't even nominated for best orchestral performance! Maybe the music isn't all that the best album award recognizes, but surely it ought to count a lot. Surely the best classical album should stand out musically; surely, on musical grounds alone, it ought to be one of the top CDs of the year.

So then how could the Tilson Thomas Mahler Third not qualify as one of the top orchestral albums of the year? How can something be the best classical album released in 2003, if -- in the evident opinion of the Grammy organizers -- it's musically not strong enough to even rate a nomination in its proper category?

It's pointless to argue with award shows, but still there's something about the classical Grammy winners that makes no sense. The best classical album was Mahler's Third Symphony, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony. And the best orchestral album was Mahler's Third, but this time with the Vienna Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez conducting.

Which, as I said, makes no sense! The Tilson Thomas Mahler Third is of course an orchestral album. So if it's the best classical album of the year, then it also has to be the best orchestral album. The Boulez CD, by pure logic, had no business winning.

When you see something weird like that in the Grammys, you have to look at the nominations. They're supposed to protect against lapses in common sense (and, for that matter, musical understanding). If something went badly wrong with an award, a mistake in the nominations may have made the problem possible.

And that's exactly what happened here. Both the Tilson Thomas and Boulez CDs were nominated for best classical album, but only the Boulez was nominated for best orchestral release. That allowed the two awards, which are so delectably silly when you look at them side by side.

Yesterday there was an ArtsJournal link to Anthony Tomassini's optimistic piece in the New York Times about the classical record business. In that piece, and in the ArtsJournal summary, was something that needs some qualification. Major record labels, Tony says, aren't doing so well, but

Smaller labels like Nonesuch and Naxos, which once just filled in the gaps with records of specialty repertory and adventurous artists ignored by the majors, are proving that it is possible to release important recordings at midrange prices and still pay the bills.

The biggest difference between the classical record business in past decades and what it does now is pretty simple. Formerly -- up to the mid-90s, maybe -- major classical labels recorded major stars doing their core repertory. If you were a leading conductor (or even a conductor on the way up, with enough promise to make a record company want to grab you before someone else did), you could record your Brahms, your Beethoven, and your Richard Strauss with whatever orchestra you led. Major orchestras had record contracts, and major opera stars sang their most important roles in complete recordings of the operas involved.

That's no longer true. To see why, first look at some numbers (ballpark figures; I don't have exact budgets). A major recording -- with a major orchestra, major conductor, and major soloist -- might cost (or so I've been told by people in the business) a quarter of a million dollars to record. If it sold 10,000 copies the first year it was out, that would be a miracle. Two thousand might be more likely, and some major recordings have sold a lot less than that.

Now figure that the record company gets $10 back for each CD it sells. That's $20,000 that the record company earns for the first year this $250,000 project sits in its catalogue. Do the math. The recording will take more than 10 years to recoup its recording cost -- and even then the record company won't start making a profit, because we haven't counted marketing costs and a share of normal overhead, which the record company naturally will allocate to each CD it sells (since it has to pay for office space, staff salaries, and everything else any business puts on the expense side of its balance sheet).

(These figures are highly approximate. I'm aware of some complex wrinkles in the way the money flows, but I'd welcome corrections if I've gotten anything seriously wrong. Record companies don't like to give out budget or income data. Though I did once see a pretty detailed budget for a debut major-label recording by a chamber group, and the recording costs for that were $50,000, a figure that didn't even include whatever the record company paid the musicians.)

Now, in past years, record companies might have accepted this financial picture. Classical music was a high-prestige operation then. Record companies figured their profitability on sales of their entire catalogues. They'd balance income and expenses for the operation as a whole, not worrying -- if, at the end of each fiscal year, they earned more money than they spent -- if some of their releases hadn't yet been profitable. And, of course, record sales in the '50s and the '60s were fueled by the advent of the LP, and, with it, the vast expansion of the recorded repertoire; in the '80s, sales were goosed when CDs were introduced.

Things are different now. Until the rock explosion of the late '60s, when for the first time pop album sales took off, the record business as a whole wasn't wildly profitable. It can be now, and the conglomerates that now own classical labels expect them to make more money. There's a change in overall business climate, too; businesses now seem to expect everything to make more profit. Surely the dizzying dance of record labels from one owner to another must play a part as well. Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Philips, three leading classical labels, once were independent. After various mergers and aquisitions, they were combined into Polygram Classics. They then were sold to Universal (as a byproduct of a giant acquisition), and then sold to Vivendi, which now is ready to sell them once again. Each sale is financed by borrowing; with each sale debt accumulates; as the debt grows, the corporate owners of these classical labels need to squeeze more cash out of every corner of their operation.

And then there's one more factor -- the disasters of the early '90s. Spurred by high CD sales, major classical labels signed artists to extravagant contracts. Giuseppe Sinopoli, for instance, signed with Deutsche Grammophon to make more than 80 CDs. Most of these CDs didn't sell, leading to financial crisis. As a result of this, and everything I said above, major classical labels aren't, on the whole, allowed to make recordings that won't be profitable for years. At some labels, each CD has to make a profit in the first year of its existence. Under these conditions, a major classical record label -- as we've known them in the past -- simply can't function. That's why they're all recording crossover.

Cut now to the smaller labels. Of course it's right to say they're doing better. But that's because they don't -- and never did -- try to go the major label route. They don't make grand recordings of major stars in standard repertoire. They make modest records, which don't cost so much, and thus can make a profit. Take one of Tommasini's examples, Nonesuch Records. They've never made a major-star orchestral record, and I doubt they ever will. In fact, I wouldn't even call them a classical label any more. They're an art music label, whose concept of art music includes people like Emmylou Harris, who aren't classical -- and who ought to sell more records than classical artists do, which then makes it easier for the label to stay profitable.

(And that's emphatically not a criticism of Nonesuch. I think they're one of the finest labels around, a truly artistic operation.)

Tony's other example, Naxos, is a special case. It really does function the way classical labels used to -- it makes its profit from sales of its entire catalogue, and can afford to do some projects (complete operas, now and then; ten volumes of Brahms's four-hand piano music) that might not make much profit quickly.

But Naxos also operates under special rules, rules it established by itself. It pays its artists relatively little. That means it almost never can record established stars. But then it compensates by selling its CDs for very little, so people buy them even if they don't know the performers. It also does something else that can be very profitable, and which it couldn't do with name artists -- it keeps all the rights to everything it records. If you're Yo-Yo Ma, you have a contract with Sony Classical. You make CDs. Now Sony wants to put tracks from your CDs on a compilation, or license them for use in a film. They have to pay you; they may even have to ask your permission, if you wanted that in your contract.

Naxos doesn't have these problems. Once they've recorded something, they can use it any way they like -- license it to Hollywood, put it on a dozen compilations, stream it on the Internet. And they keep all the money.

Other smaller record companies have their own ways of operating. Harmonia Mundi and ECM (two of the best independent labels that record classical music) don't do wildly expensive projects. Some labels (Bridge, for instance) are nonprofit operations, supported by donations. Others, like Albany Records (who released the Houston Grand Opera recording of Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men, which I wrote about here earlier), in effect make the artists pay for their recordings. Even on major classical labels, some CDs are subsidized.

The bottom line? Tony Tommasini is right. The classical record industry doesn't seem to be dying out. Independent labels still release all kinds of interesting music. Even the major labels sometimes do. But the conditions under which this happens have drastically changed, and no classical musician now can count recordings

I was tickled to see my Wall Street Journal piece on problems with classical music digital downloads linked both here on ArtsJournal, and on Musical America. I also got a tide of e-mail, maybe more than I've ever gotten about anything I've written, including my Boston Symphony/modernism post here. Clearly I tackled problems many people have been having, among them an executive from one of the major classical record labels, who's been terribly frustrated by all the things I wrote about.

Of course I've written about these things here, too; in fact, it was writing about them here that gave me the idea to do the piece for the Journal. But the problems go on and on. If I'd had more space for the Journal piece, here are more things I would have said:

Every hard-drive based digital player I've ever had -- plus the iPod -- puts a brief pause between tracks. There's nothing any owner of these players can do about this, though maybe the manufacturers could: At least to some some extent, the pauses seem to be a software problem. I have a Creative Nomad Jukebox, the first digital player ever made with a hard drive; when I bought it, the pause was really long, but a firmware upgrade made it shorter. Needless to say, these pauses are horrible for classical music. Try listening to a complete Strauss or Wagner opera, consisting, of course, of continuous music, divided into many CD tracks. Every few minutes, as one track succeeds another, the music hiccups. Even some pop albums have continuous music. This is a problem the digital player makers really ought to fix.

And here's another opera problem. When you rip music from a complete opera CD set, or download the opera from iTunes or some other online service, the tracks are automatically numbered. Usually that's helpful, because your player reads the track numbers, and plays the tracks in the right order. But operas normally come on more than one CD, and the track-ripping software and the online music services number the tracks on each CD separately. That is, they'll start from track one when they number tracks on the first CD in an opera set, and then, for subsequent CDs, they'll start with track one all over again. Rip music from a three-CD opera set, and you'll end up with three track ones, three track twos, and so on. Put them on your player, and what happens? You hear track one from the first CD, then track one from the second CD, then track one from the third CD, then track two from the first CD -- and so on. The opera becomes nonsense.

To avoid this, you have to renumber the tracks yourself, which I've spent long minutes doing. When you're downloading from an online music service, it's pointless to have track numbers that correspond to the physical CDs. Tracks should be numbered consecutively through the opera, starting with track one and ending with track 64, or whatever the final count might be. And software that rips music from CDs ought to deal with this problem. It should give us the option to continue incrementing track numbers on successive CDs, until we say an "album" is finished.

(I won't go into the fresh problems caused when -- instead of giving you more than one track with the same number -- a player decides that each CD in an opera set is an independent album. You can go crazy listing all the bewildering tiny things that can go wrong when you download classical music, or rip it from CDs. You can, of course, deal with eveyr problem, but only by spending a lot of time deleting all or most of the information online services and CD ripping software supply, and typing new information in yourself.)

The MyDoom virus must have hit Germany. This morning I've had well over 20 e-mails (I stopped counting) from German addresses, with the virus attached.

But that's not what I want to write about. I haven't kept up this blog in the past week or so, for a blog-related reason -- I've been spending too much time living the blog in real life. And not just for the past week. This has been happening for the past month, and I've had to catch up on other work.

What I mean is that people have been asking me to speak or consult on blog-related issues -- issues related to the future of classical music. I've also been teaching my Juilliard graduate course "Breaking Barriers: Classical Music in an Age of Pop," which is about classical music's future, and required a lot of preparation this year, because events have caught up with me. There's more going on (more changes in the business, more signs that classical music is in trouble), and, maybe most crucially, I know more than I used to, in part thanks to this blog.

Among my speaking engagements have been a panel on the future of classical music at the huge annual presenters' conference in New York, and a stint as keynote speaker and general participant at the Richmond (VA) Symphony's retreat, a two-day affair involving staff, board, music director, and musicians. Plus preparations for next year's installments of the concert season I host for the Pittsburgh Symphony, and also conceive and program (in very happy collaboration with the orchestra's artistic administrator and assistant conductor). Plus private meetings with people from three major New York classical music institutions, who've wanted to consult with me. Plus many more informal talks with people in the business, and a surge of e-mail.

I don't mean to pretend that suddenly I'm Mr. Change-in-Classical-Music. Everything I've listed here is, in fact, very sobering. All these encounters tend to show me, first, how little I know. Whatever I may have given the Richmond Symphony, I thought I learned far more from them, about how orchestras of their size operate. At the end of lunch yesterday with one of the people who wanted to pick my brains, I simply said, "I think I've floundered with you. You wanted ideas, and then you showed me why many of them won't work." This man, I want to say, struck me as wildly smart and capable. He's a former businessman who, out of love for music, now runs a classical music group, and he brings a good business eye to classical music doings. I don't mean to say I wasn't any use to him. I think we learned a lot from each other, but here are two principles that I'd urge on people who find themselves playing the role of a pundit (or, worse, seek out that role):

• With punditry comes responsibility. If you want to tell people what you think they ought to do, you'd better learn how their world really functions. Otherwise your ideas might well be useless.
• If you're going to urge your ideas on the world, you'd better listen to ideas that other people have.

And here are two things the past couple of weeks have borne home to me:

• Classical music organizations can be timid. They're not used to taking risks, worry that risks will fail (costing money, credibility, and precious staff time), and may not even expect to have opportunities to do anything new.
• A business approach to classical music doesn't only mean a careful eye on the bottom line. It also means taking risks, and being alert to opportunities. Profit-making companies do those things; if they don't, they fail. It's oddly surprising -- and clearly the surprise is part of the problem! -- to realize that the same rules apply to non-profits, even the most established.

I'll get the blog going again shortly (well, I'm doing it right now). And I'll resume the overview of classical music's problems that I started a few weeks ago.

It's a shock that Robert Harth died -- a shock and a great sadness. He was, first of all, a wonderful person, really strong and optimistic. And tough. There's a wonderful bit in Anthony Tommasini's piece about him in The New York Times, linked from ArtsJournal today. Tony would run into Robert, after writing something critical; Robert would greet him cheerfully, but with a glint of steel underneath. The same thing happened to me.

Tony's piece is exactly right, in all of its praise. I'd add that, under Robert, Carnegie Hall was the best-run major music institution in New York, and certainly the one with the most vision. Some of that wasn't Robert's doing; he inherited some of the terrific Zankel Hall programming, and he would have been the first to credit Ara Guzelemian, Carnegie Hall's Artistic Advisor, for putting that together. But Robert's own musical outlook was completely in tune with what Ara did, and I'm sure Robert would have continued Ara's work, even if Ara left. I saw them together; they looked like very easy partners.

In many ways, Robert may have been the first top classical music executive who completely embodied the new era we're entering, an era where classical music needs to coexist with artistic music in other genres (which is exactly what it does at Zankel). Robert embodied that understanding in his own love of many kinds of music, as well as in his administrative leadership. I didn't know him well enough to have much idea in detail of where he was going, but I trusted him. Wherever he went would be a good place to be.

He'll be very badly missed.