May 2005 Archives

A reader -- Tom Lowderbaugh -- e-mailed to support what I'd said about the Caramoor press release. His marvelous e-mail put it all better than I knew how to.

Here, with his permission, is what he wrote:

Your comments on the Caramoor release are entirely on target. Why - in God's name - would any reporter or editor reading that release want to learn more? Or feel a need to read more? This release contains exactly the kind of useless language that George Orwell condemned more than half a century ago. (Granted, Orwell was examining political discourse, but his comments are equally valid for discourse about arts.)

 

Nothing bolded in the Caramoor release will mean anything to a reporter or editor. Nothing in the release - bolded or unbolded - means anything to me either. This kind of empty language confirms the idea that the music to be performed is irrelevant to anyone's real life. Why, then, should a reporter or editor want to devote time or space to an irrelevant subject? The release asks us to join in a Caramoor celebration without ever telling us what we should all celebrate together.

 

As you well know, to say something real appears even more dangerous to the folks publishing the release than saying nothing. Do the festival executives want us to know really why the Rosens created Caramoor? Or why Mr. Oundjian decided to program the Ninth and the Fidelio Overture together? (Could the Rosens have created Caramoor because they couldn't have children? Or because after many years of marriage music was the only topic left that they agreed on? Or that they had made a religious vow to give up Caramoor if their son returned safe from the Second World War? Or that Mr. Oundjian had promised himself that if he ever became a conductor that he wanted to conduct the Ninth because a performance of that work twenty years ago gave him the courage to propose marriage to his wife? I have no idea, but telling me why music mattered so much to the Rosens or why these works matter so much to Mr. Oundjian might make me think that the concert might connect to my life.)

 

In my work teaching a technical writing course at the University of Maryland, I stress for students the basic principle of exigence: the writer must create for readers a need to read the writers' texts. The problem with too much arts talk and writing is that the writer (whether it be a PR flak, a reporter or an editor) just assumes that the reader, of course, wants to read the text. This kind of writing seems to imagine the ideal reader as someone who has too much free time and is eager for any text to read. Worst of all, the writer has failed to imagine the reader, has failed to care about the potential reader and as a results ends up insulting anyone who actually takes the time to read the text the way that you and I have read the Caramoor release.

Drew McManus has, all this month, been running things from a delightful assortment of people about taking a friend to an orchestra. This is in his blog, of course. I should have mentioned it, but May has been a crazy month for me, and I've barely done my own blog at all.

But I'm back now, and I want to give Drew a plug. Besides, my own contribution is now up, so I'm remembering to plug it, as well. (I'm amazed at how often I forget to mention things I've written, or things I'm doing.) I'm afraid my thoughts for Drew were about why people probably don't want to go to orchestra concerts, but then…they don't! That's why orchestras are in trouble.

So I just made all this fuss (below) about a press release for Caramoor. Someone may very well say, “Well, sure, the press release might not be very good, but does that really matter? How many people read it? The public doesn’t see it!”

And of course that’s right. The public doesn’t see the empty press material that so many classical music institutions send out. But the same kind of language also shows up in season brochures and advertising, which the public does see. So it’s good to root it out wherever it is.

Besides, one very crucial group of people does see press releases: writers and editors at the media outlets the releases go to (and producers, for radio and TV). I’m talking here about people other than the classical music critic, at those few media outlets that have one. Classical critics, in my experience, just ignore the writing in a press release — except, of course, on the rare occasions when it actually says something — and go right to the details. “Caramoor…Ninth…Oundjian. Do I care?” (The press release, of course, is losing any chance to make them care.)

The other writers, and the editors and producers, may also ignore the language of the press release—consciously, that is. But don’t think it doesn’t get to them. It makes them think, “Yeah, classical music. Nothing going on there.” Or, worse, “Wow, this is as bad as Britney Spears.” And this is a serious problem for us. The media, as time goes on, covers classical music less and less. A lot of people in our field complain about that. Sometimes they blame the media, as if all these editors and writers and producers — many in their thirties and forties, precisely the people we know we’re not reaching — had some obligation to cover us, which they shamefully neglect.

But in fact, as some smart classical music publicists explained to me many years ago, the problem is the opposite of this: People in the media are getting smarter, in part because there's more art for them to think about, more theater companies, dance companies, museums (not to mention everything in popular culture). So they won’t automatically cover everything the local music festival might do. They want to know what the story is. And we’re not giving them anything!

So if we’re not getting covered, it’s partly our own fault, and press releases like the one from Caramoor are a big part of our problem.

I've commented here from time to time on bad press releases, but here's one that makes me lose my patience. It arrived as an e-mail today:

Hello,

Caramoor International Music Festival’s 60^th anniversary season begins on June 25^th at 7 p.m. with Ode to Joy,  a joyous musical celebration featuring Beethoven’s immortal Ninth Symphony in the Venetian Theater. Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor Peter Oundjian leads the all-Beethoven program featuring the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and The Collegiate Chorale, with Janice Chandler-Eteme, soprano; Mary Phillips, mezzo-soprano; Simon O’Neill, tenor; and Philip Cutlip, bass-baritone. The program opens with the Overture to Fidelio and is followed by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in its first Caramoor performance.

"Joyous musical celebration"…"Beethoven's immortal Ninth Symphony" -- these phrases don't mean anything. They're empty hype. They're also an affront to Beethoven, who had deeper things in mind when he wrote the piece. The Ninth isn't simply about joy; it's also about the struggle to find it, a struggle made explicit in the famous passage in the last movement, with the recitative in the cellos and basses, where Beethoven rejects the music of the first three movements. Caramoor trivializes the piece -- and, implicitly, all classical music -- with all this tinkling talk of celebration and immortality.

As I read this crap (sorry), I started to wonder whether there just might be a reverse Mozart effect. Maybe classical music makes us dumber. Meanwhile, if we believe Stephen Johnson's new book, pop culture gets smarter and smarter. Certainly the world is full of smart people who don't go to classical concerts. We need to attract them. But since they're savvy citizens of our current culture, they're good at seeing through bullshit. What will they think when they read about this fake, candy-colored joy and immortality? They'll expect the performance to be as empty as the press release, and who could blame them?

"I am hoping you will consider this program for a Listing, Review or Advance," the e-mail concludes. (An "advance," for those who don't know the term, is an advance feature about the event. And by the way, what's up with all that boldface? Do they think we can't read?) But what have they told us that's worth writing anything about? What's missing from the release -- and from too many classical music press releases -- is anything with any substance, anything that might tell us why we ought to be interested. For instance:

Why hasn't Caramoor done the Ninth before?

Why are they doing it now?

What will Peter Oundjian try to do with the piece? What's his approach to it?

Of course, the e-mail isn't the full press release. So to be fair, I looked at what the full release said, and it's worse. It begins with what I've quoted, and then goes on with this eye-glazing tidbit:

Michael Barrett [more pointless boldface], Chief Executive and General Director of Caramoor said, “Caramoor's 60th anniversary is a good time for us to pay tribute to our founders, Walter and Lucie Rosen, and their incredibly generous and forward-thinking act of creating the Caramoor Festival. Occurring near the end of World War II, the gift of Caramoor to the public reflects the Rosen’s unshakable belief in the power and future of music, and their confidence in the ennobling aspects of the human spirit. I think they would be very happy to see Caramoor continuing to flourish. As the Rosens were visionary in creating Caramoor, they were also advanced in their broad artistic and musical tastes. We will honor this legacy during the 2005 season, and in the years to come."

I'm sure the Rosens were fine people, but can't we be told something real about them?

(And, you know…quite apart from deeper questions about how art should be described and how we can find a new audience for classical music, this press release also fails in a much more basic way. Caramoor, take note. Your press release doesn't distinguish you from any other venue, from any other summer festival, or this concert from any other concert. So why should anybody pay attention?)

Life has been rich, full, and exhausting. I've neglected the blog, for which I apologize (and also for not being able, yet, to answer some of the terrific e-mail I've been getting).

But a lot of good things have been happening. My students at Juilliard have done some astounding stuff, which I want to share here -- presentations about works in their repertoire, aimed at people who don't go to classical concerts, and plans for concerts to appeal to this new audience. My students just blew me away with their ideas, and their feelings. If the classical music world could talk to its actual and potential audience the way my students do, we'd be well on our way out of trouble.

I also gave a commencement address at the Longy School of Music, in Cambridge, MA, where I studied singing back in the '60s. Turns out that Longy is a hotbed of classical music change -- the whole school seems to be run (or heading toward being run) on the sort of thinking I do in this blog. I couldn't have found a more receptive audience, but actually that's the wrong way to put it. What was really remarkable was that I fit right in. They were already there.

I'm going to write more about all this. But meanwhile, here's something else striking. On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jâma Jandrokoviã will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally -- to state the obvious -- it's people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here's someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, "chronicle Ms. Jandrokoviã’s romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself." I haven't read the poems, and can't say if they're good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert -- very good move here -- has a stage director. This is not your grandmother's vocal recital.

Unfortunately, I can't attend; I'll be in Cleveland, doing some work with the Cleveland Orchestra. Brave to Ms. Jandrokoviã, though, and boo to her publicists, who don't seem to have grasped the importance of the occasion, because they don't stress, in their press material, how new and unexpected this concert is. Don't they want people to pay attention?