October 2004 Archives

Peter Gelb, as many people already know, is going to be the next head of the Metropolitan Opera, succeeding Joseph Volpe. (I'm writing this before the official announcement, but the news has leaked onto opera websites.)

I trust this means the Met wants to make some changes, since Peter isn't an old-fashioned classical music guy. I expect my colleagues in the press to get a little worried, since they've long assumed that Peter has no taste, blaming him for the decline of major-label classical recording, and especially for crossover releases like Michael Bolton's and Billy Joel's classical CDs. (Which, even if they they were Sony releases, and came out while Peter headed Sony Classical, weren't his responsbility. They were Sony pop releases, from artists with long-time Sony pop recording contracts. Peter, as head of Sony Classical, had to help with marketing.)

What people don't understand, I think, is that Peter didn't create the problems. Major classical labels were put in an impossible position, from any business point of view, with demands from their corporate owners that they make more money than any classical label reasonably could. Peter tried to make the best of it, facing pressure most of us can't imagine. That doesn't mean everything he released was wonderful, or that all the decisions he made were correct. How could they be? Nobody knows how a major classical label (meaning a commercial operation, owned by a multinational entertainment conglomerate) can function in this current climate.

But Peter -- whether or not you agree with everything he's done -- has a lot of imagination. Unlike many people, he's willing to say what the problems are, and to take steps to meet them. One reason he gets bad press, in fact, is that in 1997 he boldly said that classical music couldn't continue in the directions it was going, and particularly that contemporary composition couldn't continue to be so inaccessible. For this he got attacked, and has been a target of the classical music press ever since.

I wish him all the best. I also like him quite a lot. I haven't talked to him in a while, and won't pretend to know what he thinks the Met should do. But he's more serious about music than his detractors think. He's a fascinating choice, and (no matter what purists think) a hopeful sign for classical music's future.

I apologize for mistakes in my entry about the Pittsburgh audience, starting with -- and shame on me -- some blatant typos in the title.

One mistake that really mattered was about the dates of the next "talk back" events in Pittsburgh: November 6 and 7, not December. And the link to my Symphony magazine piece about the audience didn't work. If you'd like to read the article, go here.

I've corrected all these things in the original entry. Thanks to everyone, including one of my Pittsburgh colleagues, who noticed the mistakes, and told me about them.

At the dry cleaner this morning I noticed a poster for Rod Stewart's new album, Vol. III of The Great American Songbook, the series of CDs on which he sings old pop standards. And what struck me was the language used to describe what's going on: "The exciting third installment of the spectacular trilogy," or something very like that. And, below it, introducing the list of songs Stewart sings, "Including these classic songs."

Now, this is exactly the kind of meaningless boilerplate I complain about in classical music publicity -- empty, meaningless praise, words that don't tell you anything about how Stewart sings these songs. But there's a difference. Everyone who's going to care about this album knows Rod Stewart. Everybody knows what kind of singer -- and what kind of personality -- he is. Anybody could expect, from hearing his old rock stuff, or simply from seeing how he dresses, what kind of ragged elegance he might bring to pop standards. Then, once the first Great American Songbook CD came out, anyone could know what a success it was, and look forward to its sequels.

Besides, there's a photo on the poster, a really impish, charming, slightly naughty one (naughty, please, in its older, non-sexual sense), and that tells you all you need to know. A little like this one does (from the cover of volume I; I couldn't find the photo on the poster on the web):

Classical music publicity, by contrast, tries to tell us about musicians we might not already know, or -- worse -- musicians we've heard of, but don't really know anything about. And the publicists, by and large, don't have much that's informative or even plausible to say about them.

Some recent examples:

From a press release about a fairly minor oratorio performance in New York, describing one of the soloists:

American mezzo-soprano XXX [their boldface emphasis] is consistently praised for the burnished, bronze beauty of her voice enhanced by an innate musicality and a persuasive, sensuous manner of communication.

This is far too much praise for someone with no special reputation. If she's this good, why isn't she famous? And in fact these words would be too much praise for the most famous mezzos in the world, Olga Boradina, let's say, or Ewa Podles, or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (whose voice, whatever other transcendent qualities she might have, isn't "burnished").

And then this, from a major classical music institution:

I’ve started a project with the Pittsburgh Symphony that’s certainly unusual, and could be extraordinary. The Symphony calls it “talk back,” and the idea is simple enough -- to get the audience talking back to the orchestra about the performances they hear. But it’s extraordinary because orchestras don’t normally consult their audience about music, and don’t set up forums in which their audience can talk to them. I’ve written about this, in a piece that appeared two years ago in Symphony magazine, the publication of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Traditionally (as I said in that piece), the audience sits at the bottom of something like the medieval Great Chain of Being, waiting passively for art to descend upon them, as a gift from composers and performers.

This isn’t healthy, either for business, art, or simple human relations. And it’s especially baffling because the orchestra audience is -- demographically speaking -- so famously smart and educated. Not many of these people, maybe, are trained musicians, but so what? Why shouldn’t they have something important to say about the music they hear?

The Pittsburgh Symphony agrees with at least some of this (I should stress that all the ideas here are mine, not necessarily theirs), and hired me to help get their audience to talk. The project began on October 8 and 9, with discussions after two performances of an unusual program: Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Berio’s Stanze (his last work), Barber’s Violin Concerto, and Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on a Theme of Weber. Two of these pieces are atonal; none were written before 1940; in no way was this as standard concert program, even though no music could go down more easily than the Barber or the Hindemith. (Or at least that’s what I’d think. I’ve since met members of the Pittsburgh audience who had trouble with the Barber.) David Robertson conducted, and while the stage was reset after the Schoenberg piece, introduced the Berio, speaking to the audience in a forceful and friendly way.

But of course the program was hard for the audience. Many subscribers gave back their tickets, exchanging them for some other date. The house, I was told, was just 40% full. But after each program, to begin the “talk back” project, I led discussions with maybe 20 to 30 people who’d attended, and this is where things got interesting. I made sure everyone who came got a chance to speak (in fact, I just about insisted that everybody speak), moving among them with questions and comments. (The session was held in a bar in Heinz Hall, where the Symphony plays, with participants sitting at tables.)

Some people couldn’t accept the Schoenberg piece, or the Berio. But others readily explained the musical idiom of these works by addressing their subjects. Both are about the Holocaust, Schoenberg’s very directly (the piece, with a narrator and male chorus, is about the Warsaw Ghetto), Berio’s more subtly (he sets texts that address the Holocaust more indirectly, sometimes with private references that many people wouldn’t immediately understand). But the people at these sessions had read the program notes, and understood what was being addressed. If the music was difficult or even unpleasant, some people said, that made sense, because the Holocaust was (to say the least) unpleasant and difficult.

Other people raised objections, but not obvious ones. One woman said she knew a Holocaust survivor, and felt that the overt anguish in Schoenberg’s piece — as a Holocaust survivor recalls what happened in Warsaw — wasn’t right. Holocaust survivors, this woman said, were numb, not anguished. Someone else thought, quite honorably, that it’s possible to address unpleasant subjects in more consoling ways. (Certainly many artists of the past would agree with him. Art can deal with ugly things without itself being ugly. This discussion, by the way, touches on deep issues with atonal music. The rise of atonality, early in the last century, was linked to the rise of expressionist angst in other arts. Theodor Adorno famously said — in support of Schoenberg, explaining why he felt atonal music was the only responsible art music of the 20th century — that atonal dissonance was a covert expression of frozen pain. Schoenberg, though, seemed to think atonal harmony was neutral, just another way of combining notes, and that’s generally what people who’ve written atonal and serial music would say.)

Pittsburgh Symphony staff and musicians were at these discussions, and had useful things to say. One musician stressed that the Berio performances were, in a sense, just a beginning; the orchestra didn’t know the piece yet, and could get more out of it if it played the music more. And Bob Moir, the Symphony’s Vice-President of Artistic Planning, was willing to talk about a performance compromise. Someone from the audience had heard the Schoenberg piece before, and didn’t think the Pittsburgh Symphony performance was as strong as the earlier one. I commented that I’d found something missing; the sudden entrance of the male chorus (representing Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto defying the Nazis by singing a religious chant) wasn’t, I thought, as dramatic as it ought to be. Bob, in response, said that the size of the chorus, and the way it was divided into three parts onstage, were dictated by what the Berio piece requires (it’s longer and more complex than the Schoenberg). So while the chorus was effective for Berio, it might not have been as effective for Schoenberg.

This was something I’ve never seen before, though I’m not going to claim it’s never happened — people from an orchestra discussing the quality of a performance with members of the audience, and admitting that there were faults. But something even more extraordinary happened. David Robertson was at the first of the two sessions, and talked a lot. He just about mesmerized the audience, though from one point of view he might have talked too much, as I think he himself was aware. The point, after all, was to get the audience to talk, not the conductor.

But from the conversation that David’s comments provoked, we learned things about how to present composers like Schoenberg and Berio to an audience that isn’t comfortable with their work. I asked if it would help for someone simply to say to the audience, “Look, this music is difficult. You might not like it.” The people from the audience said they’d like that.

And so the next night, when David introduced Stanze to the audience, that’s just what he said. He began his remarks, in fact, by saying that he’d been at the discussion the night before, and had found it very helpful. He then talked about the piece in some detail, suggesting things in each movement that the audience might listen for. The response to the performance was quite a bit warmer. I’d say that the piece got a quiet ovation, with several curtain calls for David and for the baritone soloist, Sanford Sylvain. I think David’s remarks made a lot of difference. He didn’t just speak to the audience; he acknowledged it and empowered it, meeting it halfway by recognizing problems the listeners might have, and trying to address them.

At the second session, one woman asked whether the orchestra thought about the reaction the audience would have to programs like this. I said that of course the orchestra thought about it, and in fact that people inside the profession talked about this a lot. Sometimes, I said, the audience is treated as a problem, as a group of people who don’t want to hear music that the artistic leadership of an orchestra wants to play. What would happen, I asked, if the audience was brought into this discussion? I think that would be wonderful—and I doubt it’s happened very much before.

But how can these discussions continue? How can they become a regular part of the orchestra’s work? I’m holding more sessions with audience members after concerts on November 6 and 7, and the Symphony has started a message board on its website, as a forum for ongoing discussions. But these are just beginning steps (and the message board itself has only just begun). What we still have to figure out is how to draw the audience into conversations that are strong, unstoppable, and influential. Any ideas?

This is a busy time for me—a little too busy, but also wonderful. Here’s a taste of what’s going on, some of which will show up in this blog, at greater length:

•  This Thursday, October 21, comes the first of the Symphony with a Splash concerts I program and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony, this time with something very personal—a performance of a piece of my own, A Frankenstein Overture. This orchestral music based on my opera Frankenstein, with an extravagant trombone solo (representing the Creature, who’s meant to sound tortured, noble, and eloquent, as he’s depicted in the Mary Shelly novel). You can hear a synthesizer version on my website—or, of course, the real thing at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh on Thursday

• This weekend, the public radio show Studio 360 repeats the program on orchestras I did with them some months ago, updated with some new material about the current contract negotiations. This was one of the happiest projects I’ve undertaken, above all because of the terrific segments the producers came up with—discussions of orchestras and orchestral music which I had fun reacting to. The reaction both I and the producers got last time the show aired was very strong and very positive. Studio 360 goes on at 10 AM Saturday in New York, on WNYC; see the show’s website for the day and time in other cities.

• I’m working on a website for the American Symphony Orchestra League, designed to introduce new listeners to the pieces that will be played most often this season by the 100 largest American orchestras. We’ll cover the top 17 works, and it’s a surprising list, including (besides the usual Mozart, Brahms, and Mahler) Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral, Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, the John Adams Violin Concerto, and Joseph Schwantner’s Percussion Concerto. The introductions I and others will write (I’m in charge of finding all the writers) will be anything but orthodox—they’ll be personal and informal. On the site right now is an introduction to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, by Arved Ashby, a musicologist at Ohio State, who asks why Beethoven was, not to speak timidly, so crazy. And the previous entry was my own take on the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, centering on the introductory theme, and its hard-to-explain disappearance.  

And, very quickly, because these deserve more space:  

• There was a major music critics’ conference in New York this past weekend, which I was part of. The talk was very radical—all about changes in classical music, and how the old ways of doing things just don’t work any more.

• And with the Pittsburgh Symphony I’m doing a new project, helping them to get their audience talking back to them about music. The first sessions, two weeks ago, were tremendously encouraging—and helped David Robertson (as I think he’d be the first to say) to introduce a difficult Berio piece he conducted at a Pittsburgh concert.

I keep hearing about my blog posts on publicists – my posts about how bad classical music publicity can be. Sometimes I  hear from publicists, apologizing either after the fact or in advance for problems of the kind I pointed out. (Which were their failure, over and over, to give any real reason why anyone should care about the events they publicize.)

But now I’ve heard from a fellow critic, David Stabler of The Oregonian, in Portland, OR, who’s taken up my crusade. He wrote a fine piece for his paper, looking at publicity from Portland music groups, and finding all the problems I talked about. But he found some well-done publicity, too, and, best of all, he gave his own compelling versions of how the job should be done. Read his piece; I really liked it.

I said some harsh things about the state of new music in the mainstream classical world – especially the orchestra world – in my post about the Toronto Symphony.

So here’s a most encouraging response from Curt Long, executive director of the Dayton Philharmonic:

I would say that we include a "moderate" amount of new music in our classical season, balanced with more traditional repertoire (of course, most orchestra's don't even include a moderate amount).  We present a classical series of 9 programs annually, with usually 4 or 5 more-or-less contemporary works.  We have won ASCAP awards 4 out of the last 5 years.  Last year our series included the Corigliano Symphony No. 1, Oliver Knussen's Horn Concerto, a world premiere of a short new minimalist work by Thomas Svoboda, and Karel Husa's Music for Prague, 1968 (which is, obviously, far from "new").  The year before that, we presented 4 new 17-20 minute works that we had commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight (from Bill Bolcom, Robert Rodriguez, Mike Schelle, and Steven Winteregg).  The year before that, Rouse's Die gerettete Alberich, Torke's Bright Blue Music, Hanlon's The Lullaby of My Sorrows, Adams' El Dorado, and Svoboda's Oriental Echoes.  Any time we play a contemporary piece we inevitably hear from a few very disgruntled patrons.
 
At the end of this past season we asked our audience to repond to an e-mail survey that, among other things, gave them the chance to rate their satisfaction with our classical season programming in general, and for each specific program.  We got 388 responses (obviously, not a random sample, and almost certainly skewed towards "highly involved" audience members, but nevertheless a significant chunk of the overall audience).  This is some of what we found:
 
In response to the statement "Overall, I like the DPO classical programming"
 
strongly agreed = 138
agreed = 179
were neutral = 25
disagreed = 6
strongly disagreed = 2
 
When given the chance to rate specific programs,
 
Knussen program
 
Very Satisfied = 74
Satisfied = 62
Neutral = 11
Disatisfied = 2
Very Disatisfied = 1
 
Husa and Svoboda program
 
Very Satisfied = 116
Satisfied = 43
Neutral = 10
Disatisfied = 6
Very Disatisfied = 2
 
Corigliano
 
Very Satisfied = 82
Satisfied = 60
Neutral = 9
Disatisfied = 9
Very Disatisfied = 5

Curt doesn’t read grandiose implications into these results, but quite reasonably says, “I think they do refute any assertion that an overwhelming majority of our audience would like to see no contemporary music on our series.”

I’ll add a mea culpa. What I wrote was too narrowly focused on large orchestras. But when I’ve looked at smaller orchestras’ programming, I’ve been happy to see that some of them play a lot of new music. When I wrote my post, I simply (but not excusably) forgot that. Thanks, Curt, for setting me right.

Why can smaller orchestras do so much new music, with a better reaction from their audience than larger orchestras seem to get? Some theories: 

• Smaller orchestras play more accessible new music than many large orchestras do. You won’t find much Harrison Birtwistle on their programs.
• Smaller orchestras do fewer concerts, so their audience may get more interested in anything they play, and might have more time to prepare for it.
• Smaller orchestras have more contact with their audience than larger orchestras do. Or at least can have more contact, if they know how to get it. So they have more chance to get their audience interested.