June 2005 Archives

In today's New York Times, I've reviewed Joseph Horowitz's big recent book, Classical Music in America. You can find the review here. The book is important, but none too successful. I'll add some further thoughts in the next day or two.

This was a happy day in our household, because my wife Anne Midgette and I both had pieces in the Times. She's there all the time, of course, but we were tickled to show up in the paper together. Her piece is quite important. "Decline in Listeners Worries Orchestras," says the headline, and Anne did a terrific job exploring how that's true, and especially how the decline hits summer festivals.

One of Anne's best points:

An article in The Times of London last summer bemoaned this very fact: that festivals with all-star concerts play to full houses while local orchestras in England struggle to attract audiences. "Audiences are looking to the arts as sensation rather than sustenance," Magnus Linklater wrote.

But this is hardly surprising, given the way the arts tend to be marketed. Classical music is positioned as something transcendent, sublime, with great artists and stars. That's pretty heady stuff. And it's understandable that someone who expects this kind of intensity from a classical concert may be perfectly content going only once or twice a year, rather than making a steady diet of such rich fare.

No, we don't coordinate our views of these things. We often agree (not always), but we tend to put things very differently, and I learn a lot from Anne.

 

A few days ago, I was talking to someone at a large classical music organization, yet another person who wants to widen the audience for classical music, and in general bring classical music (or at least the way his organization works with it) into contemporary life.

 

He was outlining his ideas to me, and said something wonderful: “I want to develop some programming that people will love.” And suddenly it struck me: I don’t hear anything like that very often. I myself don’t talk like that. We’re all concerned with widening the audience, and our conversations about that often seem abstract, or suffused with worry. We want to develop programming that won’t turn a younger audience off. Or, a little more positively, programming that will attract a younger audience—but “attract” is really such a bland and empty word. Or programming that will attract a new audience, but not turn off the existing one. Or programming that will attract new people, but won’t dumb down the music.

 

Worry, worry everywhere. The fear of failure lurks behind every sentence. And here comes this wonderful, lively, sunny, smiling man, who says he wants programming that people will love! Maybe this sounds sentimental, but as he said that, my thoughts filled with an image of a sunrise. We don’t realize what great opportunities the problems of classical music can give us.

From someone in Detroit comes the following:

There was great hope among Michigan Opera Theatre folks that Oprah would come to Detroit for "Margaret Garner," and perhap even do a show from the opera house. She is, as you probably know, a big Toni Morrison fan and has featured four of her novels as part of her book club. Danielpour, by the way, would play very well on TV; he's articulate, passionate, tells detailed stories with a point to them and is one of those guys that remembers dialogue from conversations 20 years ago. Anyway, the grapevine had it that Oprah was interested in coming but logistics didn't work with a bunch of other stuff that was happening on her show, etc. Hard to know how reliable this information was, but my sense is that it was a real possibility.

I'm very glad to hear this. Might have been more effective if they'd tried to involve Oprah from the moment the opera was conceived, with its plans for productions by three companies. But that's a thought for the future. For the moment, it's good (if this information is reliable) that they tried to get Oprah involved at all.

 

In today’s New York Times (“Arts” section, page E12), there’s an ad for a Live from Lincoln Center telecast. It’s a New York Philharmonic performance, and the text of the ad (or at least the parts of it that matter) reads like this:

Shaham’s Sibelius

New York Philharmonic   Lorin Maazel, music director

Gil Shaham, violin

Violin virtuoso Gil Shaham joins maestro Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic for a spectacular performance of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Also on the program—Thomas Stacy, english horn.

So now let me ask a question. Is there one word in this ad that would make anybody want to watch?

Well, sure. The names. Gil certainly has fans (as he should). Maazel might have a few, and the Philharmonic has some. So for people already into classical music, maybe the ad has some point. At the very least, it says “Classical music on TV tonight!” For some people, that’s good news; for them, the ad works.

But even then there’s a question. Thomas Stacy? Who’s he? English horn? What’s that? Don’t laugh—a year ago, when I was working with the Concert Companion project, I watched focus groups of New York Philharmonic listeners who’d used the device, and even long-time subscribers, it turned out, might not know the orchestral instruments.

And even if you do know what an english horn is, the ad doesn’t tell you anything. What’s Stacy going to play? Does the instrument itself have any fans? I doubt it, apart from double-reed players. So the ad ought to say a little more, or drop poor Stacy from the text entirely.

But back to my original question. Orchestral ticket sales are falling. Classical music is rare on public TV, because not many people watch it. (Opera has its own audience, distinct from people who like orchestral music, but I love the remark John Goberman once made about opera on public TV, he being a noted producer of classical music TV events: So few people watched, he said, that it would have been more cost-effective to simply mail a videotape to anyone who cared.) Why would this ad reverse these trends? Is there anything in it that would make any newcomer want to watch?

Of course not. For attracting a new audience, the ad fails so completely that I don’t know whether to laugh, or start throwing things. All those names! Gil, Sibelius, Maazel, Stacy? Who are these people? What could they mean to anyone who doesn’t follow classical music?

Nothing, of course. There’s just one word in the text that says anything about why anyone should watch the show—the Sibelius performance, we read, is going to be “spectacular.” And, in a stunning display of inauthenticity, that one word is incorrect. The great thing about Gil is that he’s not a spectacular virtuoso. Instead, he’s warm, humane, limpid, and intimate. So that’s the appeal of hearing him play. The ad, even in its one attempt to say something real about the performance, can’t connect us with the actual music.

(But maybe the whole thing is hopeless, without even bigger changes. What’s the telecast going to look like? How would that connect even to the most loving and accurate evocation of the music? What kind of total experience can this telecast offer, that anyone new to classical music might want in their lives?)

 

I’ve gotten a lot of warm comments on my “Authenticity” post, and they’re inspiring me to say something further, something I should have thought through more carefully.

 

I was hasty, I think, in saying that the New York Philharmonic could have made its “Visions of the Beyond” more honest (more authentic) by arranging panel discussions, involving theologians, and so forth. Accessories are helpful, but still might not be convincing. The orchestra would have to do this for several years, most likely, before any large number of people believed they were serious.

 

And—far beyond that, but now getting to the heart of what authenticity means—who at the Philharmonic cares about these programs? The faux festival, as publicized, was clearly the invention of just a few people on the Philharmonic’s staff. But even if the project should continue for years, with convincing accessories, how many people would have been involved in planning it? I’d like to see the entire staff involved, plus the board, the musicians, and even the audience. I’d like to see all these people involved in the choice of intellectual or moral or spiritual or social problems to focus on. What issues would the musicians choose, for instance, if they were given a voice in the process? What issues would the audience choose?

 

Until everyone involved with an orchestra starts getting involved with projects like these, the projects will never be truly authentic. They’ll be top-down exercises, however well they’re carried out.

 

***

 

That said, here’s a case of real authenticity—a press release from the Philadelphia Orchestra that arrived some weeks ago, announcing their “Raising the Invisible Curtain” initiative.

 

This project tries to remove barriers between the orchestra and the community, and also between the orchestra and its audience. Very tellingly, the press release didn’t focus (as so many do) on boilerplate comments from dignitaries (the music director, the board chairman, the executive director). Instead, it featured people directly involved with the work—the orchestra’s education director, Sarah Johnson; a spirited cellist, Gloria de Pasquale; and an inspiring consultant who worked very closely with the project, Eric Booth.

 

I know all these people; they’re all terrific. They all mean everything they say. And so for me, the press release was completely authentic. In itself, it raised an invisible curtain, in this case the curtain of PR verbiage that prevents us from seeing what the reality really is. It cut through all this, and introduced us to some of the people who make the project what it is. Bravo to all, and go here for a very similar introduction to the project on the orchestra’s website.

Thanks to my wife, Anne Midgette, for that title. She ought to trademark it!

And maybe Oprah ought to start promoting opera. Anne thinks so, and so does Jason Hibbard (his own blog is here), who e-mailed as follows, and is happy to have me post his thoughts:

On your point about what Oprah might champion in the music world, opera seems a logical choice. It has a long, glamorous tradition, fabulous people who would make good interview guests (Renee Fleming, Deborah Voigt, Rolando Villazon, etc.), and a text to provide an extra measure of accessibility. In addition to the core repertory, there have been a number of recent operas taken from (North) American literature ("Little Women," "The Handmaid's Tale," "The Great Gatsby" - and especially the recent premiere of the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison collaboration "Margaret Garner"). Seems likes there's plenty there for Oprah to work with - maybe she could start with the October premiere of John Adams' "Doctor Atomic"! (A guy can dream ... )

I'd only add that discussing new operas, Oprah Book Club-style, could be tricky, because they're not performed nationally. I doubt she'd want to launch a project with an opera that's heard in only one place.

But she could use DVDs, should any be available. And if we're going to dream, why not a collaboration, in which Oprah would initiate discussion of an opera, which opera companies throughout North America would stage? Opera companies, of course, would have to plan that years in advance, and Oprah might not work that far ahead, but still…it's worth dreaming about. I'm tempted to get in touch with Oprah, and see what she might like to do.

 

[I've revised this a bit.]

 

Oprah’s book club is reading William Faulkner this summer.

 

Yes, Faulkner. Deep, serious, difficult stuff. You can go to Oprah's website to see this talked about lightly, but there’s nothing light about Oprah’s commitment. She’s urging three Faulkner books on her fans, As I Lay Dying (June’s selection), followed by The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. And on the website, she has Faulkner scholars answering readers’ questions.

 

Bravo for Oprah. And this ought to have serious implications for classical music. If Oprah can get people to absorb themselves in profoundly serious, difficult books, why not profoundly serious, difficult music?

 

I’m sure that’s an unfair question. Oprah might not be into music, in the way she's into reading. And books, in many ways, are easier than music. They have stories. They’re about something. They have characters, and plots. You can put them down if they get too difficult.

 

(Though Oprah's readers seem willing to accept Faulkner's knotty, sometimes almost impenetrable writing. On the site right now, one reader asks about a passage on pp. 80-81 of As I Lay Dying: "And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be." The explanation comes from Professor Robert W. Hamblin, Director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. It's substantial and thorough, around 450 words long.)

 

Besides, if Oprah were to promote profoundly serious, difficult music, that music might not be classical. Why shouldn’t she get her viewers listening to Charlie Parker, or Thelonious Monk, or Robert Johnson? God, wouldn’t that be wonderful!

 

But let’s think of how she might approach classical music. Or, maybe better, how we’d approach her, if we wanted her to give it a try. What pieces should she ask people to listen to? And how should she describe them?

 

Faulkner, difficult or not, has many connections to the current world. He writes about something many people—especially African-Americans, like Oprah—know about, the segregated south. And quite apart from racial issues, there’s his evocation of the kind of rural life that’s just about vanished now, which he sees tragically, without any nostalgia.

 

What can we offer in classical music that could be so vivid, so directly powerful for us, so American, so profound, so intuitively understandable?

 

That’s not an easy question, and until we can answer it, we shouldn’t be surprised that Oprah isn’t doing anything for classical music. Even though she’s urging three novels on her community that offer a sustained level of difficulty no orchestra would dare -- for an entire summer's programming -- to touch.

 

***

 

I don't know Faulkner well, so I'm going to read these three books myself. Thanks, Oprah!

 

Immediate reward, right on the first page of As I Lay Dying:

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.

This took my breath away. (Precision, economy, rhythm and sound, evocation of heat and summer, compassion.) I closed the book. No need to read anything else for a while.

Note that I've refurbished the items on the right-hand panel -- all the stuff about me, and about things you can read on the subjects I cover here. This last -- the "Resources" section -- I'll expand a lot, I hope, now that I have some free time.

About me: Read the list of things I've been involved with this spring. I've been busy!

One "Resources" link I've added is important: It points you to a study that will tell you how the Melbourne (Australia) Symphony attracted a younger audience. This comes from a chapter in Innovative Arts Marketing, a book by Ruth Rentschler, and it's the best information I've ever seen on the topic. Some of the study's vital conclusions:

• If you want to reach a younger audience, you'd better let people from younger audience tell you how to do it
• You'll have to play more new music
• You'll have to lower ticket prices
• You won't make any money doing all of this, so you'll have to treat the program as a long-term investment

And here's a footnote to the book I've cited under "Things I Like," The Peregrine, by J. A. Baker. (It's a difficult book, by the way, so loaded with imagery that the writing might seem excessive. But that's only if you read too quickly. Read it slowly, and the way Baker's inner world meets nature all at once turns precise, entirely unexpected, and often quite explosive.) Peregrines, I learned from Baker, prey on other birds. They lay their kill on its back, and eat everything except the wings and head, leaving only bones everywhere else.

On a roof next to my building in New York, there's a dead pigeon, lying on its back, with everything gone except the wings, head, and bones. I'd been looking at it for weeks -- and now I know a peregrine killed it.

On the Cleveland Orchestra's website you can read the program note I wrote about Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Or, rather, about what Franz Welser-Möst, the orchestra’s music director, thinks about the piece and tried to bring alive in his performance. (The link takes you to a PDF file, which you can’t read unless you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. It’s a free program, which comes with most computers these days. If you don’t have it, go here. Note that the first two pages of the PDF are something Franz wrote. My own program note begins on page three.)

This program note is in many ways like the press releases I made up in a previous post. It addresses the same questions. What’s the meaning of the music we’re going to hear? What will it feel like when we hear it? What do the performers think of it, and what are they trying to bring across? All of which implicitly addresses further questions, which are even more crucial. Why should we go to this performance? Why should we care?

An approach like this is really revolutionary. Program notes, as we all know, usually discuss music historically or analytically. They talk about the composer’s life, about how a piece fits into the composer’s oeuvre, or about the structure of the piece. They don’t talk about how it feels to listen to the piece, or about what it’s like to perform. I should add here that these are my own thoughts, not necessarily the Cleveland Orchestra’s. They just asked me to write the note (as, for all I know, a one-time experiment), and to talk to Franz about the music. I also had the chance to watch him rehearse parts of the work, and incorporated some of what he said into what I wrote.

I have to thank Franz, and compliment him. He took a risk here. He exposed himself. Normally, you hear a performance, and if you don’t like it, you say, “I don’t think the piece should go like that.” But now you can go further. You can say, “Welser-Möst himself didn’t want this! He said he’d do X, and it didn’t happen!” Bravo for Franz, who (or so it seemed to me) cared more about communicating with his audience than about protecting himself.

And, no small thing: His thoughts about the Missa Solemnis are well worth reading.

 

Authenticity—as a component of marketing, as I discussed it in a recent post—is a powerful concept. If you want to make a new initiative seem plausible, the spirit of it has to permeate everything you do, or else people won’t believe you.

 

Case in point: the New York Philharmonic’s February announcement of a series of concerts it called “Visions of the Beyond,” and whose purpose, the Philharmonic said, was “to explore symphonic portraits of existence beyond our own mortality.” And right away there’s a problem. The Philharmonic isn’t an institution that discusses problems in spiritual or intellectual life. It plays music. So why is it now concerned with huge questions of life and death? Who’s going to believe this is serious? Who’s going to care? The whole thing, in the terms I’m using here, registers as inauthentic.

 

Of course, the Philharmonic could have fixed that. It could have gotten theologians and philosophers involved; held panel discussions; planned auxiliary events, like the all-night performance of a spiritual John Tavener piece that Lincoln Center actually did produce; commissioned a new piece from a spiritual composer; connected with religious music in other idioms; played concerts in churches, mosques, and synagogues.

 

But it didn’t do any of these things, and if the mere announcement of the festival seemed inauthentic, the details of the programming made things worse. The series started, for instance, with Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a complete performance, using Shakespeare’s text, with actors. But of course Shakespeare’s play isn’t about eternal life. It’s about the follies of love. Yes, there are fairies in it, and the fairies are immortal, but their immortality doesn’t figure in the play. They’re as silly as the mortals are. So nothing in the text and music even remotely fits the Philharmonic’s theme, and now we know they aren’t serious.

 

The second concert features Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’au-delà… (“Illuminations of the Beyond…”), which legitimately does belong on a festival like this (and whose title might have inspired the Philharmonic’s title for the festival.

 

But what else is on the program? Bach’s concerto for oboe and violin, and excerpts from his Art of the Fugue. The press announcement bravely tries to make this work: “Although separated by two centuries and two branches of Christianity, Bach and Messiaen were united artistically in their devotion to God and a deep Christian faith.”

 

And now we have two problems. First, the Bach selections aren’t religious works. Second, Bach and Messiaen might both have been religious, but it’s not clear that they’re in any other way alike. There’s an abyss between Bach’s dour Lutheran beliefs (the world is an abode of sin and sorrow), and Messiaen’s ecstatic Christmas-light Catholicsm. “United artistically”? That’s a mighty leap. I don’t believe it. Again the project doesn’t seem authentic. Nobody seems to have thought very seriously how the thoughts behind it would be manifested.

 

The other programs, which had the same problems, were Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust starting March 31, and Ligeti’s Atmosphère, along with the Beethoven fourth piano concerto, Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, and the Janacek Sinfonietta starting April 7 (though the last one had to be changed when the scheduled conductor cancelled his appearance.) And here I might as well say that, if I’d wanted to be cruel, I’d have put “festival” in quotation marks each time the Philharmonic used the word. It’s pretty clear that these events really weren’t any kind of festival, in the sense of something planned in advance with a coherent purpose. Instead, they feel like ordinary subscription concerts, with a title unconvincingly slapped onto them.

 

I’m sorry to say all this, because the Philharmonic did try to make connections between classical music and a wider world, which is good. And, as I’ve said, they so easily could have made it work. (Well, maybe not easily, but the rewards—being taken seriously, making an impression both on its core audience, and, more crucially, on the wider world—would have been worth it.)

 

Best of all, the Philharmonic might have found a way to make the philosophical discussion come alive in the musical performances. By pure chance, I was just involved in some concerts where that happened. These were performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnism, by the Cleveland Orchestra, on May 26, 27, and 28; as I’ve mentioned before, I wrote the program notes.

 

The piece immediately presents some philosophical conundrums. It’s a setting of the Catholic mass, but Beethoven wasn’t a practicing Catholic. You have to ask, then, what parts of the mass he really believed, and, even more important, in what sense he believed them. It’s clear, for instance, that he didn’t care much for the lines in the Credo about the supremacy of the Catholic church. He included them (Schubert never did), maybe because he dedicated the piece to a friend and patron who’d been made an archbishop, and could have had the piece performed in church. But he buries the words, so we can hardly hear them.

 

And Franz Welser-Möst, Cleveland’s music director, who conducted the performances, is convinced of something else. (I talked with him a lot about the piece, and watched him rehearse it; my note, as I’ve said before, was designed to set out what he thought the music means, and how it ought to be performed.) The Credo—the formal statement of belief in the mass—ends with a declaration of faith in eternal life. Beethoven makes this a giant fugue, which begins very quietly. Franz thinks that Beethoven “puts a tiny little question mark” behind that beginning, as if he hadn’t yet convinced himself that life would really be eternal. Thus Franz asked the orchestra and chorus to perform the passage that way.

 

And there we have exactly what the Philharmonic talked about, an exploration of belief in life “beyond our own mortality”—but tangibly present in an actual performance.

 

(I should make it clear that, no matter how much or how happily Franz and I talked, we never mentioned the Philharmonic.)

From David Ezer, Conference and Events Manager at Chamber Music America, comes the following:

Greg,

Since you're blogging of late about copy, here's some brochure copy I just found, which I found remarkable for its being conversational, direct, and reflective of a history between presenter and audience. It has asides, quotes the artists, doesn't treat the art like its rarefied -- it may not be sober, but at least it's different and much more engaging than the basic stuff.

http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/CulturalPrograms/fall.asp
http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/CulturalPrograms/spring.asp

David's right, and these links are well worth following. My own take: the copy might run a little long, and maybe needs a bit more flavor. But "conversational, direct, and reflective of a [quite tangible] history between presenter and audience" -- that's exactly on the money, and very refreshing to see. Thanks, David! And thanks to the arts presenters at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, who wrote the copy David's pointing us to.

 

I’ve been reading a lot of business books lately, and one of them—Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World (the "liars" part of this title is partly ironic, by the way)—makes a striking point. Grodin says that marketing must be authentic. It has to tell a story that the product being marketed really does fulfill. If you run an airline, and you want people to believe that your flights are truly special, then they have to be. And not just the flights. Also the way you advertise, the way your printed matter looks, the way your flight attendants dress, the way you give customer service. All these things have to work together, to tell a single, consistent story—the story that you want your customers to believe.

 

This has profound implications for classical music. We don’t do anything like this. We’re incoherent. Our marketing is often empty glitz (“immortal,” “joyful,” “masterpiece,” “acclaimed”). Our program notes are scholarly. Our appearance on the concert stage is…what? A sacred ritual? What does all this add up to? Glitz, scholarship, and ritual. That’s contradictory, to say the least. Mixed messages. No wonder people aren’t coming.

 

And the Caramoor press release I’ve been discussing here is wildly inauthentic. It talks about a joyful celebration. But do the people who wrote the press release really believe the concert will be joyful? Did they feel joyful writing what they wrote? Do the people who run Caramoor, the people in the orchestra, the conductor, the stagehands—do they all really think the audience will joyfully celebrate? Is this their actual, stated goal? Are they moving mountains to attain it, to make sure the audience will feel that way?

 

I doubt it. I especially doubt that the people who wrote the press release feel anything even remotely like what they described. I’m not saying they’re lying, like people writing copy for a junky catalogue, pretending that trashy products are better than they are. But I do think that classical music has gotten disconnected from any actual experience, so that we don’t often ask whether the words we use to describe it in publicity and marketing are really true.

 

How to write a press release, I mean. Or some ideas in that direction, since I’ve been complaining about classical music press releases that are dumb and empty.

 

A few principles:

 

1. Classical music is full of depth and intelligence. Press releases should reflect that. Not just state it, but reflect it with intelligence of their own.

 

2. The classical music audience is smart. So are the people we’d like to attract to classical music, along with people in the media we wish would pay attention. Another reason why press releases have to be intelligent.

 

3. Classical music has competition. A press release should—at least implicitly—give its readers reasons why they should pick this concert over other forms of art or entertainment. Or, for that matter, over other classical music events.

 

And now some disclaimers:

 

1. The samples I’m about to offer aren’t actual press releases. The writing might be a little rough, and I mostly haven’t bothered with the who, what, where, and when. I’ve concentrated, instead, on what’s usually left out: why.

 

2. I’ll often only deal with single pieces, not with entire concert programs. Those are harder. How do all the pieces fit together? (Though I’ve addressed that, repeatedly, in concert blurbs I’ve written for orchestra brochures. I’ll give some samples here.)

 

3. I can’t promise that the approaches I’m about to take will work. I’ve hardly ever seen them tried. (Maybe only on the Boston Philharmonic’s website, and in the St. Louis Symphony brochures I’ve been privileged to work on. If anybody knows of other examples, please tell me!)

 

4. There are larger issues in marketing that I don't address here, above all this: Why should anybody go to classical concerts at all? Making them seem interesting is part of the battle, but won't work unless we first find ways to make our potential audience pay any attention at all. That's a larger question, which I hope to address later on.

 

And finally: The way to get the kind of information I’ll offer here is, at least in theory, very simple. You ask the musicians who’ll perform the concert what they had in mind. You should also ask the artistic staff of the performing group, if the group is large enough to have one.

 

So, to demonstrate my method, almost everything that I’m about to write is based on something a musician told me, about a performance he or she gave or was about to give. I’ve named some of those musicians at the end. But the way that I express what follows comes from me, not from these musicians, so if something doesn’t make sense, please blame me, not them.

 

And now the press release ideas.

 

I

 

The Caramoor situation (see my earlier post on a Caramoor press release): the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at a long-established music festival.

 

A Different Ninth

 

“We’ve never played Beethoven’s Ninth

at the Dunwich Festival. Why are we playing it now?”

 

Music Director Wilbur Whateley says: “I have my own view of Beethoven’s Ninth. To me, the interesting part isn’t the famous ‘Ode to Joy’ at the end, with the big tune that everybody knows. I care more about the struggle that leads up to that. Beethoven didn’t think that joy comes easily.”

 

Adds Dunwich Festival executive director Henry Armitage: “We’ve never done this piece before because we’ve always thought of ourselves as an intimate festival. Beethoven’s Ninth, by contrast, is supposed to be huge and overpowering. But Beethoven himself didn’t conduct it with many musicians, and Wilbur Whateley thinks the inner turmoil in the music comes through more clearly with a smaller orchestra. We’re going to take a chance on that, and do something that we’ve never done before.”

 

[I hope it’s clear that I made all of this up. I don’t know what Caramoor or its music director, Peter Oundjian, were thinking.]

 

II

 

Arkham Symphony Plays

Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique

 

Music Director: “It’s a piece that always gives me trouble.”

 

I won’t try to write this one, but the music director could say (as one conductor really did once say to me) something like this: “I will conduct this piece four times on this concert series, and I probably will make it go the way I want it only once.” She then could explain what makes the piece so difficult, and which moments in it are especially hard. I can imagine that many music directors wouldn’t want to reveal such things, especially since the public then could judge whether the performance had been successful. But some conductors might actually enjoy that. I just recently wrote a program note for the Cleveland Orchestra, for which I talked extensively with their music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Franz very much wanted the note to convey his thoughts about the piece, and was delighted when I quoted things he’d asked the orchestra to do in rehearsals. (I’m sorry that this program note isn’t yet available on the Cleveland Orchestra’s website.)

 

III

 

“It Ought to Sound Raw!”

 

Miskatonic Orchestra Plays The Rite of Spring

 

Cthulu Hall, February 25, 26, 27 at 8 PM

 

[Instead of starting with the normal—and often stultifying—who, what, when, and where, this press release starts like a magazine piece, with a narrative that’s meant to draw the reader in. But that leaves the place, dates, and times of the performances unstated. So I put them in a headline.]

 

Why isn’t the orchestra’s principal bassoonist [I’m not going to make up any names] happy when she plays The Rite of Spring? You’d think she ought to be—the piece begins with the most famous bassoon solo ever written, and everybody in our concert hall will be listening to her.

 

But our bassoonist isn’t happy. “It’s a wonderful moment,” she says, “but it’s a little too easy. All we bassoonists learn to play this solo when we’re in school, and by the time we get to an orchestra like this, we can play it very smoothly.

 

“Should it sound smooth, though?” she asks. “The piece depicts a violent pagan sacrifice. And so the opening bassoon solo should sound weird and scary. Stravinsky wrote it very high. I think it’s higher than anything ever written for the bassoon before that. So I think he wanted it to sound strange, and really edgy.

 

“I’ve always wanted to play it like that, and with our new conductor, I finally can. He thinks the whole piece should sound weird and edgy. He says it ought to sound raw.”

 

IV

 

A Fearless Look at Life

 

Dunwich Philharmonic Plays Mahler’s 7th Symphony

 

{This press release would quote the Dunwich music director.]

 

“Of all Mahler's works, it may well be the astonishingly ‘modern’ Seventh Symphony that most fully expresses the mayhem of living in the contemporary world. It lays out the conflicts and contrasts, then offers a kind of alternative refuge—dream-like, entrancing ‘night music.’ In the end, though, it is in this world, not some remote afterlife, that this symphony finds its true victory. It seems to say: ‘This is life. It's rough—but I am going to look it square in the face, and win.’”

 

[I stole this from Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic, who described the symphony in these words on their website. The headline is my own. Apologies for taking their powerful description and bending it to my own purposes, which aren’t necessarily theirs.]

 

V

 

A Difficult Piece that Hardly Anybody Likes

 

[This would be a press release for a violin recital.]

 

“Maybe I’m crazy to play the Schoenberg Phantasy on my recital,” confesses violinist Erich Zann. “It’s just insanely difficult, and Schoenberg isn’t exactly a composer that everybody likes.”

 

“But this was the first piece I decided on, when I put this program together. There’s something so wistful about it. I know it’s almost impossible just to get the notes in tune, but I love this piece, and I hope that when the audience hears it, I can make them love it, too.”

 

VI

 

Radiance

 

St. Louis Symphony

Brings Deeply Touching Program

to Carnegie Hall

 

Mozart                    Overture to The Magic Flute

Morton Feldman        Coptic Light

Mahler                     Das Lied von der Erde

 

Each of these pieces seems to glow with a radiant inner light. Mozart’s overture takes that radiance from the opera it introduces, which tells a fairytale of good triumphing over evil. Mahler’s music glows with the deepest possible acceptance of everything profound in life. And Morton Feldman transmutes into sound the intricate design of radiant Coptic tapestries—which will be shown in all their glowing color on a screen while the music plays.

 

[The St. Louis Symphony really will play this program in Carnegie Hall next season, under their new music director, David Robertson. David and I talked a lot about all the programs he’ll conduct with them next year, and I know that what I wrote here reflects his thoughts as well as mine. I wrote it, in fact, for the Symphony’s season brochure, which has been much talked about in the orchestra world. It’s one of the handsomest brochures of its kind that I’ve ever seen, and one thing about it is revolutionary—it’s completely about the music, and what David thinks about that music. There’s no hype, no boilerplate photos of random glitzy stars, “no violinists posing with their violins,” as the jealous marketing director of another major orchestra said to me.

 

[This, though—to be fair—is a revolution the St. Louis Symphony first unveiled three years ago, with a brochure about Beethoven’s nine symphonies (with each symphony described on a page of its own). And they’ve continued this revolution each year since. I think the new brochure is their best yet, but the others were pretty wonderful, too. I have to confess that I played a part—I’ve written descriptions of all the concerts. But that’s only one small part of what goes into these brochures. The credit really goes to Stephen Duncan, the former marketing director who thought of doing these brochures this way, and to Carol Stanton, the Symphony’s in-house designer, whose contribution goes way beyond design.

 

[I changed the wording of my blurb a bit, since here I have more space than I had in the brochure. I hope Carol won’t mind!]

 

VII

 

Stravinsky Would Have Hated It

 

His Apollo Shares a Program

With Strauss’s Alpine Symphony

 

[This was a program Roberto Abbado was really going to do with the Philadelphia Orchestra—two works that don’t just not belong together, but probably shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence. I was writing blurbs for the orchestra’s brochure, and for this concert wrote one that said something like, “Stravinsky would have hated this program. He hated Strauss and everything Strauss stood for, and it’s easy to understand why. His music is…” — but here I’ve lost the thread, because Abbado cancelled, the program was changed, and I deleted my blurb for it. Wish I hadn’t. I described, as well as I could in just a few words, what Stravinsky’s music is like, and why Strauss’s work is so opposed to it. I then suggested that anyone who went to the concert could choose sides. The orchestra, to my complete delight, had no problem with this blurb, and would have printed it in their season brochure if the program hadn’t changed.]

 

VIII

 

Casting a Spell of Peace:

 

Kingsport Quartet Plays Beethoven

 

The Kingsport Quartet will start its annual three-concert series at the Dunwich Festival on July 13 at 7:30 PM in Sarnath Auditorium. The program features Beethoven’s String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 74, a work that moves these musicians very deeply.

 

“When we first got together,” says violist Asenath Derby, “we had trouble getting along. The details don’t matter now, but we’d get angry at rehearsals, and there was one of us the others decided that they didn’t like.

 

“But when we started working on Beethoven’s Op. 74, things began to change. The slow movement seemed so beautiful that it somehow spoke to us. I know this might sound silly, but it taught us how to get along. We solved all our differences, and we’ve been very close ever since.”

 

VIII

 

Dancing

 

“A friend of mine was teasing me,” says the music director of the Miskatonic Orchestra. “She said that Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra isn’t really an orchestral showpiece, as everybody thinks it is. ‘Where’s the solo for the contrabassoon?’ she asked me. ‘That would sound sensational! The instrument just growls. And why isn’t there a lot of splashy music for percussion?’

 

“I told her that Bartok didn’t want to be splashy. I think he wanted the music to be very Hungarian, and above all to be connected to Hungarian folk dance. I hear dance music in every bar of this score, and I’ve tried to get the orchestra to play the piece that way.”

 

IX

 

The Viola: Triumphant at Last

 

“Everybody laughs at my instrument,” says violist Thomas Obey. “Any musician can tell you viola jokes. You know, like how can you tell when a violist is playing out of tune? The bow moves!

 

“OK, I can live with that. We spend all our time playing unobtrusively in the middle of the orchestra. We rarely get a solo. But it really irks me when we do get a solo, and someone wants to take it away from us!

 

“That’s how I feel about the Brahms sonatas that can be played either on the viola or the clarinet. Everybody thinks the clarinet version is the real one, and the viola is only an afterthought. Well, I don’t agree with that! And I don’t think Brahms did, either. And when I get finished playing these sonatas on my ‘Extreme Viola’ concert series, you’re going to forget that the clarinet even exists.”

 

***

Someone’s sure to say, “Well, fine, Sandow picked unusual musicians, with something unusual to say. And he picked brave ones, who are willing to expose themselves before the public.”

 

There’s some truth to that. But behind every performance, there’s a story buried. Not all of them might be gripping, but they all mean something. The musicians themselves might not think to tell them, but if you talk to them long enough, the stories will emerge. This, I grant you, means that publicists need two skills that haven’t been in their job description up to now. They really have to know the music they’re writing publicity about, and they have to know how to interview their clients, to unearth the stories, feelings, ideas, and points of view that might interest a wider public.

 

Maybe publicists don’t have these skills. But maybe they need them! Doesn’t publicity, as I’ve (clumsily, I fear) tried to reinvent it here, make classical music seem much more engaging than it usually comes off in the average press release? And rather than dumb things down,  haven’t I simply reported what musicians actually say?

 

One last issue. Am I highlighting frivolous things in all this? There's a purist streak in classical music, reflected in most program notes, that favors historical and structural commentary: “In this work, Mahler's innovations in the use of sonata form are in some ways very striking.” If you think talk like that will draw an audience, feel free to try it. My own view is that these things are the advanced course, and that very few people, now or in the past, have ever gone to concerts to contemplate them. Musicians, in my experience, are far more likely to talk about human issues in the music that they make. And it's through these, I'd think, that we can give classical music a human face, and connect to the audience we badly need to reach.

 

***

 

Many thanks to Mariss Jansons, Franz Welser-Möst, the principal bassoonist of a major orchestra I won’t name (not one I currently work with), David Robertson, the Boston Philharmonic, and to two of my Juilliard students this year, Glenda Goodman and Fernando Vela. And apologies once more for taking all these things I've found or have been to ld, and using them for my own purposes. I hope I haven’t rephrased anything in any way that would bother the person who originally said or wrote it.