I loved Josh Kosman’s piece on whiny modernist composers, linked from Artsjournal yesterday. Certainly there’s a problem here, and in fact a serious historical conundrum. Why hasn’t atonal modernist music by composers like Schoenberg and Charles Wuorinen caught on, even after a century (in Schoenberg’s case)? Why does the mainstream classical music audience hate it so much? 

Josh’s piece was brought on by a New York Times interview with Wuorinen, John Harbison, and James Levine (who conducts a lot of atonal modernist music). Harbison, I thought, dissented from a lot that the others said, but Levine and Wuorinen were notably hardcore, blaming the audience for not working hard enough to understand this repertoire.

This is silly. There’s a huge historical fact here. You can’t blame people as individuals for not liking the music you think they should like. Or at least you can’t blame them without understanding why they feel the way they do. This becomes quite a conundrum, I think, because abstract expressionist painters (whose style might be more or less analogous to atonal modernist music) have a much easier time with the public. People like their work. As I’ve mentioned many times in many contexts, there were lines around the block when MOMA had a Jackson Pollock show. So why doesn’t music work that way?

I don’t think we study this problem nearly seriously enough. I haven’t seen much attempt to explain it, even tentatively. All we do, as a rule, is blame each other. Some people blame the composers, for writing this horrible music. The composers and their advocates then blame presenters and performers, for not programming this work, and the audience, for not liking it. All this seems useless.

I can think of two tentative points to make. First is that music takes more commitment than visual arts. You can stroll through a gallery or a museum, look at what you like, and ignore the rest. If you don’t like Jackson Pollock, you won’t go to MOMA’s show. Whereas concert audiences have to take what’s thrown at them. If you hate Schoenberg, and your local orchestra programs his violin concerto, you’re sitting there for 20 minutes gritting your teeth.

Second, music depends on performance. If you go to see abstract painting, the painting sits there on the wall, looking exactly the way the painter wanted it to look. Not so with music. Your local orchestra may have butchered the Schoenberg violin concerto, which isn’t at all an easy piece. (And in fact I’ve heard really bad, ugly performances of atonal music that gave completely wrong ideas of what the pieces ought to sound like.) Orchestras have a particularly hard time, because it takes them a long time to get to know a score. When I did an audience feedback session with the Pittsburgh Symphony after a concert with Berio and Schoenberg pieces, members of the orchestra freely said that they were still feeling their way in those scores. And these were, by and large, good performances. But the audience may pick up on something tentative, that they’re not going to sense in Beethoven or Shostakovich.

Third, music may be more encompassing — and more emotional — than visual art. It surrounds us more; it gets into us. So it may be harder for us to open ourselves to music that seems horrible. It takes more out of us. It hurts us more to listen, than it would to look at an unfamiliar and, at first, unpleasant painting.

Fourth, the classical music audience may be notably conservative. I don’t quite know why that should be, but it seems to be true. People devoted to classical music may be, in some way, pre-selected. They tend to be people who aren’t very interested in new directions in art.

These ideas, even if they hold up to closer analysis than I’ve yet given them, would only scratch the surface. Why, for instance, should classical music attract a conservative audience? I don’t think we know that.

There’s one simple thing, though, that we might all keep in mind. Some art naturally finds a large audience; some art finds a small audience. You’re not going to get many book groups reading Finnegans Wake, for instance, or Samuel Beckett’s novels. That seems natural to most of us. I love Beckett’s novels, but I’d hardly urge them on most people I know.

So the same is surely true of classical music. Some pieces — some styles of music — don’t appeal very widely, no matter how fabulous they may be to those who understand them.

But then we run into two problems. First, the feeling (strongly helped along by Schoenberg) that modernist music is inevitable and important — that in fact it’s the only style appropriate for our age. That means we have to like it. Second, and much more simply, modernist composers continued to write for orchestras, which mean that some of their pieces demand large concert halls, and also large audiences (or else the orchestras can’t pay their bills).

But what if their work simply isn’t the kind of thing a large audience will ever like? That’s a dilemma we’re not going to get around by trying to pin blame on anybody.

This came to me last night, from Delta David Gier, music director of the South Dakota Symphony:

I am now coming to the close of a season of concerts centered around Pulitzer prize-winning composers. This is my first season as Music Director, and I have worked for the past ten years as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic. During the interview process in Sioux Falls last year I stressed the importance of the orchestra’s commitment to contemporary music. When I was offered the position I then had to figure out how to make good on that commitment, but in such a way that would be engaging for an audience that did not have much experience with contemporary composers.

In a serendipitous moment, as I was going to get on the plane to sign the contract, I ran into a neighbor in Montclair, NJ who runs a music publishing house (Steve Culbertson, Subito Music). He told me that one of his composers, Paul Moravec, had just won the Pulitzer. That supplied the impetus for the idea of building my first season around these composers. The concept provided a convenient format to present some of the front-runners in American composition in a unified way, the idea being that those who attended all of our concerts would come out with a rather broad view of what kind of music was being composed now. The Pulitzer prize itself serves as a sort of stamp of approval, and a source of intrigue for the public. The success has been amazing.

The composers and pieces are:

John Corigliano – Gazebo Dances

Joseph Schwantner – Distant Runes and Incantations

Paul Moravec – Monserrat (Concerto for Cello and Orchestra)

Christopher Rouse – Kuku-Ilimoku, Rapture

Aaron Jay Kernis – Musica Celestis

John Adams – Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Tromba Lontana

These pieces are mixed, interestingly I believe, with standard and not-so-standard repertoire. But these are not mere concert openers. The intention is to give a real taste of the composer’s work, hence two contrasting pieces in some cases. I talk about the pieces both before and during the concert, and give an e mail address in the program for people to respond. I also go to the foyer of the hall to talk with people after the performances.

I have spoken with hundreds of people about this, either personally or by e mail. Literally everyone has been thoughtfully and energetically engaged.

Not everyone “liked” everything, but everyone has been excited that we are presenting this music in such a committed way. They seem to be changing the way they listen (which is one of my primary goals), from a passive entertainment mindset to a more engaged, discerning way of listening.

Perhaps the most interesting development is that our board wants to continue this type of programming, even to the point of making it part of the ensemble’s identity. They see it (as do I) as an effective way to distinguish our orchestra.

My hope is that I can continue building trust with my board and audience, starting with the programming of established contemporary composers and their works. I think that soon we will be able to program larger pieces and lesser-known composers and be able to bring our audience into the process even more. There is already talk of a composer-in-residence and other commissioning projects.

I would also hope that our success could serve as a model, one that other orchestras could use to expand their programming to include living composers on a regular basis. I think all orchestras in general, and smaller ones in particular, can truly benefit from engaging existing audiences and building new ones in this way.

I agree, and I also think it’s important (as I said in my last post) to share information. If David hadn’t e-mailed, I wouldn’t have known this was going on.

What follows comes from conversations with several organizations, and a consulting job with one of them.

Suppose you’re a classical music group, musically terrific, reasonably well known, and with a reasonably long history of success. But now your audience seems to be shrinking. You’re not alone in this, since the same thing seems be happening everywhere. But still you need to do something about it.

What do you do? Immediately, as far as I can see, you have a dilemma. On one hand, you’ve got all the stuff you’ve always done to sell tickets. And it works! You might, for instance, send out a letter from your executive director to your subscribers. They’re so loyal that they quickly respond, and renew their subscriptions. You also send out flyers, brochures, and postcards, listing the pieces you’re going to play, because you’ve learned your audience picks concerts above all for their programs.

You have to keep doing these things, because they do work. And if ticket sales are shrinking, you need every sale you can get. You can’t neglect your established audience.

But at the same time, sales are shrinking, so you have to find a new audience. And for that, you need to do things differently. Very likely you can’t just send out listings of your programs. (Or print them in your advertising.) Now you’re reaching toward people who haven’t been inclined to go to your concerts, or may not know your group, or may not even know classical music very well. For this last segment of your possible new audience, a program listing will be meaningless. And for the people who know classical music but don’t know your group, or for whatever reason don’t usually go to your concerts, the program listing won’t be enough. They have to know why your group is worth hearing.

All that points to a different kind of communication. A postcard with detailed concert listings is full of fine print. Maybe now you need something warmer, something that — in words, design, and images — tells people why you’re distinctive. Maybe your performances are intimate, maybe they’re passionate and joyful, maybe the musicians feel deeply and happily involved. These are all things you should communicate, and you’ll have to figure out how to do it.

But now you’re doing two kinds of marketing. You’re reaching your established audience one way, and your hoped-for new audience another way. That will cost more money. It might require new and different kinds of expertise. It will take more time, and demand more work from your staff. Are you ready for all of this?

And what happens if the new forms of marketing don’t work? If you were a large organization (and especially if you were a large, profit-making business), you could experiment with different approaches. Magazines do this; they’ll send out mailings, offering subscriptions at several prices, to see what works. Food companies can test-market new products in just one region of the country.

Classical music groups (even big ones) don’t have that kind of flexibility. They’re more or less forced to decide on one approach, and see how it works. Worse still, they need to stick to that approach for at least a couple of years, to give it a chance. The newer the approach is, the more time it may need to make an effect.

But can a music group wait two or three years for results? And what happens if the new approach turns out not to work? Now the group has lost two precious years? Ticket sales may now have fallen further. Now what does the group do?

You can’t try new approaches without taking risks. But you also can’t afford to fail, so how can you take any risks? Classical music groups usually don’t even have the money — or the determination, or, sometimes, even the knowledge that this would be a good idea — to try out their new marketing plans ahead of time, with doing surveys and focus groups with the people they’re trying to reach.

This is a serious dilemma, one which explains some, at least, of the reasons why the classical music world is so slow to change. I’d suggest that groups just jump in, and take the risks anyway. But then that’s easy for me to say. I don’t have to find the money for the new approaches, or take responsibility if they fail. It would also help gigantically if groups could learn from each other, if new approaches that someone tries were quickly and widely shared. That way, if I’m in New York and somebody in Chicago sold a chamber music series to a new audience with some new kind of marketing, I at least can know that if I decide to try it, at least it worked for somebody.

My conversations lead me to believe we’re not moving fast enough. I’d love to hear some new ideas.

[This is an old post -- from January 25. But I'm not sure it ever got on my blog, due to some technical glitch, so I'm reposting it now.]

Well, responses have been pouring in to things I’ve been writing lately — the dimensions of the crisis, Baroque and medieval performance, CD covers. I’m glad I’m touching various nerves. And finding so much agreement! We’ve got a fine conspiracy going here. All through the classical music world are people who agree with the kinds of things I say, some of them in major institutions. The institutions are slow to change, but the hunger for change — and the need for it — is growing quickly. Won’t be long, I’d guess, before we see some action. (Which of course depends on what “long” means…)

But about CD covers. Besides the John Eliot Gardner self-produced Bach cantatas, which I mentioned in my last post on this subject, take a look at the Vivaldi operas on the Naive label. Like this one:

Maybe some people think this isn’t suitable for opera, classical music, Vivaldi, or the 18th century. I think it’s gorgeous and provocative – and precisely right for the wildness of opera seria as it was performed in its time, complete with highly sexed castrati. And also precisely right for what I imagine is the blazingly hot performance on the recording, if it’s anything like the one on the same label’s new release of Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso, full of hairraising vocal ornaments (planned, according to the liner notes, on the principle — historically correct, we’re assured, for Italian music — that the melody of a da capo repeat shouldn’t be recognizable). The conductor is Jean-Christophe Spinosi, leading the Ensemble Matheus. They’re fabulous.

And, I’d assume, this CD cover is also right for the piece, which, if it’s anything like Orlando Furioso, is sexy and seductive ear candy. I had imagined, silly me, that Vivaldi wasn’t much of an opera composer. I still can’t say that his operas make any dramatic sense, but purely as music, they’re irresistible. Vivaldi must be (not that I’m breaking new ground in saying this) one of the most underrated composers around. And in part that’s true because we’ve forgotten (a) that Baroque music is extravagant and wild, and (b) that Vivaldi was an entertainer. Put his music in those two perspectives, and suddenly it doesn’t have to be profound. It was meant to be fun.

But back to CD covers. (Harmonia Mundi has terrific ones, too. And, by the way, if you think classical music is by definition high art, you’ll think I’m betraying everything that’s sacred for liking the Vivaldi CD art I reproduced here.) Note that the Vivaldi opera has the basic CD information — the title of the opera, and the names of the performers. The Gardiner CDs don’t have that, and I may have been wrong to assume that wouldn’t be a problem. Because I got this heartfelt (and very fetching) e-mail from Joseph Zitt, who’s in a much better position to judge these things:

As a record store worker, let me just say “Oy” [to my idea that the Gardiner CDs don't need any information on their covers]. I’m the classical music guy at a store in a major city where we have a relatively large classical section (steadily shrinking, but larger than most of our competitors, though I fondly remember the downtown Tower in NYC in the 80s).

 

Imagine that you work in a record store, and a customer has just asked you if you have the Gardiner recording of Bach Cantata #82, or asked for the cantata “Ich habe genug” (assuming, of course, that you’re one of the very few people in the store who would recognize that string of phonemes as a title in German and have a clue how to spell it). You now go to the bin, pick one up, flip it over, read the back, put it back in the bin, pick up another, flip it over, read the back, put it in the bin, pick up a third… all while an irritated customer is asking “Well, do you or do you not have it?” (And yes, we have computerized search tools, though their indexing and their relation to the reality of what we have in the bins are often tenuous.)

 

Pretty, eye-catching design (such as the recent Vivaldi series that also uses striking portraits) is wonderful. But I can tell you from my experience that customers have little patience for being given the pretty instead of the informative, and I strongly suspect that only the most dedicated classical music fan (which, as you indicate elsewhere, is a rapidly dwindling breed) is going to bother picking up any of these to see what’s on them and proceed to buy them. We may get a few people who will be looking for “the Bach CD my friend had with the picture of the guy with the beard on the cover”, but finding that will be tricky. And we all know how little stock we can take in people telling us what CDs they want by describing the cover — if memory serves, today I shelved CDs of a particular recording of a Brahms piece (I think it was the Cello Concerto played by du Pre on EMI) with *five* different covers.

 

And we get lots of annoyed people returning CDs that have the same titles and artists as other CDs that they actually wanted, since when they played them the discs “had the wrong music on them”. We’re not supposed to accept returns of opened CDs, unless we’re replacing damaged CDs with copies of the same disc. In these situations, though, we can often get a manager to approve the return… if the increasingly annoyed customer is willing to wait the several minutes that it often takes for a manager to get to the registers and hear the customer tell his story yet again.

I’m glad to be corrected, and above all to understand more about how record stores really function. There’s more to Joseph Zitt’s e-mail (which, of course, I’m reprinting only with his permission), and it’s all worth reading:

On the other hand, a whole lot of our sales are of compilations, of the type “(More of) The Most Relaxing/Romantic/Soothing Opera/Piano/Classical/Lullaby Music in the World/Universe”. There’s also a very successful collection of thematic mixtapes, as it were, in the “For the…” series, such as “For a Dinner Party”, or “For When You’re Alone” (which, to our disappointment, didn’t have orchestral variations on the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself”). Other than that, the sales are either those of the handful of huge stars or from aficionados looking for very specific things.

 And for those looking for CDs from stars, it’s often quite difficult to explain to them that we have CDs organized both by performer and by composer, so that a lot of Yo Yo Ma is filed under, say, Bach rather than in Yo Yo Ma’s section. And finding the performers’ sections is far more difficult than it has to be since, by a corporate mandate handed down by some idiot who apparently is proud of getting a “C” in elementary school music appreciation class, we have had to take apart our fairly clear sections where we had things alphabetically by instrument and group things together by families of instruments, so that we now have a Strings section that groups together cellists, violinists, guitarists, harpists, etc. (Well, half of the harpists are under “Keyboards”, Celtic harp is under “Celtic”, a lot of the things that come up when looking for “harp” are really harpsichord or harmonica, and the Ocarina Quartet is in “Strings”, but those are different kinds of problems.) And percussion and electronics are in “Other”. (We’ve decided, though, that we’re to going to go against the corporate mandate and once again group all the cellists together, etc, though still within the categories.)

 We have a team of workers who are supposed to shelve all CDs, but they leave most of the Classical CDs for me to shelve (during the time that I should be doing other things in my section and during my information desk shifts — though the information desks will soon be dismantled, leaving workers and customers to wander through the Habitrail of our new aisle design in faint hopes of spotting each other) since they’ve given up on understanding our system and the odds of their placing things in the right place are slim. It’s also the only way that I can tell what new discs have come in or been restocked, given our cranky and delusional computer system.

 Another thing that’s given a boost to some recordings was the well-designed page of “Best of the Year” selections in the NYTimes, where they created a grid of album covers and descriptions — many customers tore out that page, circled what they wanted, and brought it in. Fortunately, when I saw it in the paper, I immediately cut out each item and made a bin card of it. And the corporate office has even seen fit to send us a further copy each of some of the items that we had actually had and of which we sold our single existing copy.

 And the one thing that can pretty consistently trigger a day-or-two-long burst of sales is having them mentioned on NPR. Fortunately, we have access to npr.org (though almost nothing else from the Web) from our systems at work, so we can guess what people are looking for from their blurry descriptions.

 And the surprise hit from last year was the Trio Mediaeval’s “Soir, dit elle”. That’s one of those discs that people will buy almost every time that we play it on our overhead system.

 Just a few rants from a guy who has been dealing with crazy people and trying to sort our Brahms CDs all day…

As I told Joseph, he can rant to me any time. And I’m not surprised that the Trio Mediaeval sold so well. Their two recordings are treasures, immediately appealing, completely individual, sung with the simplicity of folk music, and all of classical music’s detailed concentration. Full disclosure: I’ve written a piece for them. But I fell in love with their CDs before I did that — and wrote the piece because I loved them so much. They’re terrific people, too.

I’ve seen them twice live, and the second time (maybe I’ve mentioned this here; don’t remember if I have) the response of the audience was something else. The Trio sang on an established early music series in New York, one that draws a loyal audience. So people came because they love the series, without knowing the Trio at all. As the concert went on, the applause got warmer and warmer, until finally I thought the three women could have sung “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (or the Norwegian or Swedish equivalent), and had the crowd cheering for hours. And actually they do sing Norwegian folk songs as encores…they’re very special.

But why am I raving like this? Joseph said it all. He plays their CD in the store. People hear it. Then they buy it. It’s as simple as that.

Funny to read (in a Norman Lebrecht column, linked from ArtsJournal) that anyone might object to the English National Opera performing Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town. It’s a musical, see, and opera companies ought to be above that. (Which isn’t Lebrecht’s position, by the way.)

My wife and I just listened to the On the Town original cast album, during one of our drives from our New York apartment to our country place. It’s very sophisticated music, heads and shoulders, if you ask me, over most American operas. The beginning is especially brilliant, with a through-composed opening scene built around “New York, New York” (“…it’s a hell of a town/The Bronx is up/And the Battery’s down”). This is a very sophisticated bit of composition, especially since the song is by no means all we hear, and — even though it’s the hit tune in the show — it’s introduced quite gradually.

After it’s been around for bit, Bernstein (all of 25 when he wrote this show) makes the song work as a canon against itself. This could be nothing more than a stunt (people are too impressed with contrapuntal tricks, maybe because not everyone knows that counterpoint is the one aspect of composition that can easily be taught). But instead it works as a fabulous piece of urbane savoir faire, the musical equivalent of someone bouncing down a New York street with irresistible style and verve.

Later, there’s a ballet sequence based on the song, and it’s a little miracle. The song, fine as it is, is from a structural point of view pretty thin. All it has is two musical phrases, the second almost a repeat of the first. No beginning, in other words, no middle, and no end; just two tossed-off little phrases. So how do you build this into a ballet? You can’t just keep repeating it. Not, that is, unless you’re as clever as Bernstein, who does repeat it many times, dressing it each time in new colors. Also a brilliant piece of composition, much harder to pull off, actually, than extending, or, God help us, developing the tune (like symphonic composer) would have been.

On the Town, perhaps tellingly, struck some people as too sophisticated when it premiered in 1944. (Even though the show was a gigantic hit.) One critic thought it had too much ballet (as opposed to old-fashioned Broadway “hoofing,” to use the critic’s word). And even George Abbott, the director, told Bernstein he wrote too much “Prokofiev stuff.”

I’ll say again that most of it, and especially the beginning, is better composition than anything in any American opera. In fact, I think I’ll take it to my Juilliard class (a graduate course on the future of classical music) and ask the students why we don’t call it classical music. The only reason, I suspect, is its style. It’s too catchy. Most classical composers, even tonal ones, can’t relax enough to write a real tune. Too bad for them! (And, of course, too bad for classical composers of the past, when this prissy restriction didn’t apply.)