July 2005 Archives

A while ago, I heard someone give a keynote speech about classical music, and why it deserves a bigger audience. He was lively, smart, impassioned, witty, a master (among much else) of unstoppable one-liners.

And yet nearly everything he said was wrong. He talked about the superiority of classical music, and about how much our culture needs it. “Everything else is loud!” he said (or words to that effect). We’re mezzo-forte music in a fortissimo culture.” Only classical music, he said, gave people room for thought and reflection.

Which of course isn’t true. On my flight to the event this speech was part of, I’d been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, a famously quiet pop album from 1982, full of thoughtful reflections on the darkness in American culture. I’d been comparing the album versions of the songs with Springsteen's live performances, recorded on the Live 1975-1985 3-CD set; I loved how he pumped the songs up to make them work in huge arenas with his full band (instead of just the acoustic guitar and harmonica that he mostly uses on the album), but still found a way to let the quiet through.

And now this keynote dingbat tells me that there aren't any quiet pop songs. (Of course there are countless examples.) But then this is a mistake people in our field make all the time. No, wait, change that—it’s especially a mistake that older people in our field make. I don’t mean to disparage older people (I’m 62 myself), but there’s a cultural divide, at least in classical music, between people who think classical music inhabits a superior plane, and people who can accept that it's part of our modern world, and this divide is partly defined by age. I’ve noticed the age divide in reactions to what I say, when I speak in public. Older classical music fans tend to object that popular culture is terrible; younger classical music fans inhabit popular culture just like everybody else in our society; they know that lots of it is smart, honest, and intriguing.

So some of the older (or more conservative) classical music say some ridiculous things. Younger people have no attention span. They have no curiosity. Pop songs are famous for 15 minutes, and then are completely forgotten (as if oldies stations hadn’t been on the air for decades, as if pop hadn’t developed its own connoisseur and collector culture, as if people of all ages don’t listen to the Beatles).

And then at the same time they say we have to attract a younger audience. So how can we do that? Hey, I have an idea! Let’s attack the people we’re trying to attract! Let’s tell them that they have no culture, that their music sucks, that they can’t pay attention to anything for more than 15 minutes, that classical music is far superior to anything they currently understand, and that we'll have to educate them before they can enter our tranquil, lofty world.

Or put it this way: Let’s make tell our prospective audience that we’re arrogant and smug, that we don’t understand the people we’re trying to reach, and that in fact we don’t know much about the world we’re living in.

Now there's a recipe for success…

Some things I’ve run across recently, not necessarily in Aspen (see my last post). All of them show something that’s going on, something all of us should know about.

So first, something really nice from St. Louis. At some point this season, the St. Louis Symphony played a piece by Steve Reich. The orchestra had to be seated in an unusual way, so after the piece was over, stagehands had to rearrange the stage. That always takes a while, and leaves (or so it seems to me) a dead spot in the concert.

But not this time. David Robertson, who was conducting (and who of course will be the Symphony’s music director starting next season), asked the musicians to go out into the audience while the stage was reset, and talk to people about the Reich. What a fabulous idea! And it worked out beautifully, or so I was told, independently, by both David Robertson and David Halen, the orchestra’s very thoughtful concertmaster. People in the audience were thrilled to talk to the musicians, and very happy to give their opinion of the piece, pro or con. The musicians loved it, too.

This is something any orchestra could do. I’d love to see more of it.

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And now something not so good—another sign that classical music is losing ground in our cultural mainstream.

Foundations, I’ve heard, have given up on classical music. They think it’s a dying art. I heard this from quite a commanding figure in the field, someone who has a lot of direct contact with foundations, though I haven’t tried to verify what he said. Of course, some foundations (the Mellon Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust) still do fund classical music projects, but most won’t.

To illustrate how bad things are, this commanding person said he’d gone with a colleague to a gathering of foundations, where the number of foundation representatives who come to your presentation shows how interested (or not interested) foundation people are in your proposal. The idea here was to give them reasons to fund classical music. (Or, maybe, some area of classical performance; I’m not quite sure.) A proposal the foundations liked might get 50 people; a proposal they didn’t like would draw five. This one, presented twice, drew three the first time, four the second.

The foundation representatives, I’d guess, are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They aren’t bad people, or uncultured. They’re simply representatives of their generations—generations classical music has lost touch with (and it’s our own fault, but more on that another time).

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And finally something I should be discreet about. I’ve sometimes mentioned here that classical music professionals can be more pessimistic about the future of the field—assuming changes aren’t made—than they are in public. Once I asked, hypothetically, what classical music people should do if the private news inside the field was really seriously bad. Should they disclose it, or keep it secret? The advantage of secrecy is simple—you won’t scare your funders away. The advantage of disclosure is a little more speculative, since I don’t think anybody’s tried it yet. You’d keep your funders from concluding—once the bad news finally surfaces—that you’d lied to them. And you’d pretty much force yourself to say in public what you’re doing to overcome your problems.

So with all that turning over in my mind for quite a while, imagine how hard I listened when I heard two notable people in the field having precisely this dispute. Though the  person who favored at least modest disclosure didn’t have any fancy arguments. He simply said, “We really do have problems, and we can’t very well lie.”

I’ve been traveling, both for work and pleasure. The work part was two events in Aspen, both at the music festival, one a private conference on professional music education, the other a pair of public panels involving music critics. This last is the second installment of what I hope will be an ongoing series, and it’s an extraordinary project, not least because it was conceived and carried out by the festival’s director of marketing and public relations, Laura Smith. How often does a marketing and PR director plan and fund a project like this? The Aspen Music Festival and School should be grateful to her, and to her director of publications, Jeremy Simon, for giving them such a gift.

This year, there were four critics attending (or three and a tenth, if you count me as only very partially a critic), myself, my wife Anne Midgette, from The New York Times, Tim Page from The Washington Post, and Willa Conrad, from The Star-Ledger of Newark. Terrific people, smart, musical, a pleasure to talk with and listen to. ArtsJournal’s own Doug McLennan moderated, and as usual did a sharp, savvy job. Note that this panel had nothing to do with the blog that preceded it. We spent one session talking about big issues in classical music, and the second trying to identify bits of music Doug played for us. Anne and I also picked a couple, but Doug’s were the most interesting—really killer choices, that stretched our knowledge and instincts. We were joined by David Zinman, Aspen’s music director, and composer George Tsontakis, and each of us had our moments of clarity, and then our total blank spots. Someone from the audience gets the prize, though, for identifying a violin concerto—plainly American, with moments that sounded like country fiddling, but so varied and so quickly changeable that none of us had the slightest clue who could have written it—as something by Lukas Foss. (One of the only composers, George noted, after the truth had been revealed, who wrote in a large enough variety of styles to have covered every kind of music in this piece.)

A good weekend—and the larger but much more quiet conference the week before covered some important ground, especially when it talked about changes in the way orchestras are going to choose new musicians. Merely playing well won’t be good enough; future orchestra members might have to be good colleagues, good chamber music players, good spokespeople to the community, and capable participants in management. How will music schools have to change to prepare their students for all that?

Plus much more, of course. I learned, among much else, that the Thornton School of Music at USC has some pathbreaking programs. Among much else, they team chamber ensembles with students studying the business side of music, with results in one case that included a CD release and a tour of Japan. They also don’t have music theorists—or music theory teachers—on their staff. Instead, composers teach their theory courses, and every student has to compose. Their pieces are recorded, and in one story I heard, a freshman proudly sent the CD with her piece on track 18 to all her relatives as Christmas gifts. This was someone who’d never composed before. Sounds like Thornton is a very creative place.

(Full disclosure. Originally I wrote that George Tsontakis identified the Foss concerto. But I'd remembered wrongly, and had to be reminded that it was someone from the audience.)

This came from Molly Sheridan, managing editor of NewMusicBox, the American Music Center's new music webzine. It's her response to the fabulous pop music playlist I posted here a while back. Many readers of the blog won't know the music Molly picks, but check out how she presents it. Molly's in her late 20s, and knows more about reaching a young audience than most of us. Her approach reminds me a bit of The Ring and I, the lively and engrossing introduction to Wagner's Ring that WNYC (New York's public radio station) broadcast a year ago. (More on that elsewhere.)

Here's Molly:

My mix tape request: My favorite genre—since it doesn't really have a name—suffers from a serious identity crisis. I need a mix to show people that even if you can't program it properly into an iPod playlist, it still should get an invite into your six-disc CD changer.

Who says you can't dance to it? I've never had much coordination anyway.

     "Acrobatic Dancers" from The 23 Constellations Of Joan Miró: Bobby Previte

     858 Quartet-4: Bill Frisell

     No Crime: Elliott Sharp

Hey, I hear vocals. I thought this was all violins and shit.

     As We Know (Three Rumsfeld Songs): Phil Kline

     "Frozen Warning" from Kiss: John Cale

     Gotham Lullaby: Meredith Monk

Actually, can I get more violin in the monitor.

     Fog Tropes II for String Quartet and Tape: Ingram Marshall

     Lost Signals And Drifting Satellites: Annie Gosfield

     Lachen Verlernt for solo violin Esa-Pekka Salonen

Wait, I think I saw that guy with the composition degree play the Knitting Factory.

     Stereo Music for Serge Modular Synthesizer: Keith Fullerton Whitman

     The Ice (Feels Three Feet Thick Between Us): Aarktica

Bonus tracks: Damn, I think I'm addicted. You call this "challenging"? Bring it on.

     Superscriptio: Brian Ferneyhough

     Workers Union: Andriessen

Oprah, Oprah, Oprah…there’s a lot to say.  

From Anastasia Tsioulcas, classical music columnist for Billboard (and a triple threat, because she’s handy with world music and jazz, too) comes the following:

I was just catching up on your blog, and wanted to point out that Oprah's extremely popular magazine, "O," already does carry (albeit small) features on serious music--classical music, opera, and jazz--fairly regularly. (I should know, as I write many of them!) Over the past year, the pieces I've done for "O" include a short preview of the Margaret Garner opera and interviews with Renee Fleming and Angela Brown. Another wonderful, if surprising, example of serious music discussion in their pages is the interview I did for "O" with Mexican-American singer Lila Downs, in which she spoke of how both Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" and Strauss' songs have shaped her artistically.

Of course, that sort of thing doesn't have quite the same impact as her television show, and certainly doesn't carry the weight of her personal enthusiasm & imprimatur...but it's a start!

I guess we’d need to know how much Oprah’s magazine does the kind of thing any magazine might do—which could include, especially if you’re thinking of your African-American readers, something about Margaret Garner—and to what extent the magazine reflects Oprah’s own interests. Lila Downs, by the way is terrific (and thanks, Anastasia, for turning me on to her with your mention). Her life might as well be a playlist in itself—Mexican, Mixtec Indian, American, vocal study at the University of Minnesota, former Deadhead, and now a singer who’s powerfully ethnic, completely cosmopolitan, and politically committed. Think Caetano Veloso meets Mexican Indian meets Woody Guthrie (though comparisons like that make me itch).

Meanwhile, on Oprah’s own site there’s something a little bit discouraging. It comes from Robert W. Hamblin, a leading Faulkner scholar who’s Professor of English and Director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. He’s explaining how to read Faulkner—who of course is very difficult; many people will be grateful for any help Hamblin gives—and compares Faulkner to classical music:

…think of Faulkner's novels as symphonic in structure. And just as a symphony moves from section to section, presenting varying moods and impressions, altering speeds and rhythms, at times introducing leitmotifs [melodic phrases that are associated with an idea, person or situation] and themes that will be developed more fully later on, at other times looping backward to recapitulate earlier themes, but always advancing toward a final resolution, so too does the Faulkner novel employ shifting tones and impressions, hints and foreshadowings, repetitions and recapitulations, time shifts looping backward and forward, all consciously intended to shape the story not so much on the pages of the book but in the reader's mind and imagination.

Which is all very nice, but also garbled. Leitmotifs come from opera, not from symphonies. Hamblin, in other words, doesn’t seem to know much about classical music, no matter how eagerly he invokes it. And this, by the way, is nothing new. Milton Babbitt wrote a long, wry essay about mistakes scholars in other fields make when they talk about music, sometimes really basic mistakes from people who otherwise are paragons of authority. Classical music has really fallen off the radar even of cultured intellectuals—and that, I think, started to happen quite a long time ago.

I’ve been reading Faulkner, thanks to Oprah. She might as well be recommending Schoenberg. Faulkner, in his way, is just as difficult, though since he’s telling stories, and the characters and situations draw you in, he’s also accessible in ways that Schoenberg might not be. But still you have to work to read him; sometimes you have to read a passage over several times before you can even sort out the various threads that might be in it.

Faulkner also is about things we can understand. The Sound and the Fury resonates with echoes of the long-ago south, and especially the relations of black and white people. His portrait is unsparing, especially, I think, of the whites. The n-word is everywhere, which might shock us today. You’re forced to work out what he means by it, and what his characters, both white and black, might mean.

What in classical music deals with anything like that? Well, there’s an oratorio by William Grant Still about lynching, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in the ‘40s, though not at a regular concert; they played it in the summer season they used to have in Lewisohn Stadium in Harlem, NY. But that’s the exception—and a forgotten exception, too—that proves the rule. What classical music deals with our racial struggle in America? What classical music could Oprah recommend that would take us as deeply into our confrontations with the outside world as Faulkner does?

I talked for a long time yesterday with someone I’ve just met, Joe McKesson, a former opera singer (dramatic tenor), who’s now a music programmer at MTV, and used to work with classical music at iTunes. He thinks younger people—college age—are getting interested in classical music. This he bases on the kind of anecdotal data you’d develop if you were trying to sell music to college kids, and on buying patterns he observed at iTunes.

This makes sense to me. People these days have wider, more diverse musical taste than they’ve ever had before. Anybody who cares about music knows that music comes in many genres—pop, rock, country, alternative, Americana, blues, Latin music (of various kinds), dance music (in a bewildering variety of flavors), R&B, hiphop, world music, folk music, traditional jazz, contemporary jazz, new age, classical, and many more. When you look at it that way, classical music doesn’t seem so formidable. It’s just one of the many choices out there. (And when you think of the many subgenres inside classical—chamber music, opera, lieder, Baroque music, 20th century music, atonal music, Renaissance music, medieval music, so much else—and then realize that almost all the genres I listed above are also divided into subgenres, you start to see how wildly and wonderfully diverse music today really is.)

And how are college kids getting into classical music? According to Joe, many of them buy classical playlists on iTunes. (Or, to be precise, they buy the music on the playlists.) Joe made those playlists. And this, too, makes sense. We know that many people who like classical music, or think they might like it, have trouble buying classical CDs. They don’t know where to start. Which piece should they buy? And, worse, which recording of a piece?

iTunes starts to solve that problem simply by letting people browse. If they see a classical track that interests them, they can listen to a sample of it. Then they can buy it for 99 cents. That’s so much more friendly than spending $18.95 for a CD you don’t know if you’re going to like.

And playlists make the choice even easier. They’re organized in ways that anyone can understand. Slow music, loud music, piano music, contrasts between classical and jazz piano (that was one of Joe’s creations). There’s no limit to the imagination anyone can bring to this. If you want to explore classical music, you find a playlist that appeals to you, and try it out. Sadly, iTunes currently seems to have only a limited choice of very basic playlists, though if you want to learn about pop genres, the playlists look pretty fabulous. Still, the idea is fabulous, and the playlists can be very sophisticated. Certainly they’re one way to draw people into classical music, by giving them choices they can understand.

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For an idea of how ingenious—and how much fun—pop playlists can be, take a look at the Automatic Mix Tapes Generator on the Tiny Mix Tapes website. It’s anything but automatic; people post requests for the kind of song mix they’d like, and volunteers provide it. Here’s a sample:

Tunes for a single girl who is about to turn 30 and can't decide if she should move to Europe, get bigger boobs, or lower her standards.

Part 1: Why you should not move to Europe

01. Dropkick Murphys - "Eurotrash" (Singles Collection)

02. The Guess Who - "American Woman" (American Woman)

03. David Hasselhoff - "Night Rocker" (Magic Collection)

04. Fishbone - "Subliminal Fascism" (Truth and Soul)

05. Sly & Robbie - "Language Barrier" (Language Barrier)

Part 2: Why you should not get bigger boobs

06. Cuff - "Single Plastic Female" (Living With The Worryfish)

07. Lowell Fulson - "My Aching Back" (Tramp/Soul)

08. Alan Prince - "Look At My Face" (Between Today and Yesterday)

09. Larry Graham - "Don't Let 'Em Change You" (GCS 2000)

10. Willy Alexander - "Looking Like A Bimbo" (Willy Alexander & The Boom Boom Band)

Part 3: Why you should not lower your standards

11. Cracker - "Mr. Wrong" (Cracker)

12. Radiohead - "Creep" (Pablo Honey)

13. Social Distortion - "Ball and Chain" (Social Distortion)

14. The Rainmakers - "The One That Got Away" (Rainmakers)

15. Joe Jackson - "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" (Look Sharp!)

Bonus Track: The Payoff

16. Peggy Lee - "Love Is Just Around The Corner" (Platinum Collection)

I don’t know if we can be quite so clever with classical music, but we certainly could have some fun.

And yesterday, too. From yesterday’s ArtsJournal links came this, from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Travel industry fears tougher security

Already tight precautions discourage foreign visitors and are about to get tighter

There are fewer foreign visitors than there used to be, the story said, and in the future there may well be fewer still. This is bad news for many New York attractions (and maybe attractions elsewhere), but especially for the Metropolitan Opera, which has long gotten many sales from people who visit New York from abroad. A couple of years ago, Joseph Volpe, who runs the Met (until Peter Gelb takes over), said there had been a problem, blamed it on 9/11, and said that things were getting better. Now, apparently, they’re not.

This is especially a problem because the Met, by all informed accounts, is hemorrhaging ticket sales. Which leads to a fascinating question. Why do music critics sometimes think the Met is doing well? Possibly because they mostly go to first nights of major, hyped productions, for which tickets, in any sales climate, will go faster than they normally would. Quite a different story comes from visitors from out of town. When I’ve traveled, I’ve talked to people from other cities who go to the Met, and of course buy tickets for more random nights, when they happen to be in New York. These people tell me that the house seems half empty, and they wonder what’s going on.

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Also linked yesterday, a story from the Miami Herald about the Florida Grand Opera’s spiffy advertising. This, the story said, is raising ticket sales. The ads are bold and sassy, aimed, intelligently, at people who don’t go to the opera. This is a theme I’ve touched on before. If ticket sales are falling, you can’t just advertise to your usual audience. It’s disappearing! You have to reach new people.

In this story, though, was a silly quote from Danny Newman, the marketing guru whose book on how to sell subscriptions is a classic of the last generation. “We live in a Philistine society,” says Newman, explaining why new kinds of ads are necessary. It’s a society, he adds, “that does not hold the arts very high in their [sic] estimation.”

I really get annoyed when I read things like this. What makes us Philistines? Because we don’t support the arts enough? But—given the scope and intelligence of popular culture—why is it Philistine not to support the arts? This seems like a circular definition. Define the arts as culture; note that people don’t support them; then call the people Philistine.

If you look at wider cultural tastes, sure, a lot of mainstream culture can be stupid. But intelligent movies, TV shows, and music can be hits. Why are people who watch The Sopranos more Philistine than people who go to La bohème? The Sopranos is more challenging in just about every way, sometimes even musically.

The last thing any arts person should do is attack our potential audience. What we need to do is figure out why they’re not paying attention to us, and fix that. (But what if they’re right? Why should people who watch The Sopranos go to La bohème?)

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And today there was a story from the Dallas Business Journal, about the Dallas Symphony.

Good news, the story said:

Symphony ends year with balanced budget

Fund raising was up, the endowment was fatter, expenses were down. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But as usual, I read with eagle eyes, looking for the fine print. And soon I found it:

The symphony's total revenue for fiscal year 2005 included earned income (mostly ticket sales), contributions and "planned use of board-designated reserve funds," according to a release. Ticket sales were down 7.5% from fiscal year 2004.

“Planned use of board-designated reserve funds”? The story doesn’t elaborate, but that doesn’t sound very good to me. The board, quite properly, puts money in reserve, in case of rainy days. Now they’ve spent it (or some of it). So now they have less in reserve. What happens if the rain keeps falling? They can’t keep on balancing the budget that way.

And ticket sales were down! (A trend, from everything I’ve heard, among most big orchestras.) This is more important than a balanced budget. We’ve just seen how a budget can be balanced by using reserve funds. They can also be balanced by taking money from the endowment (the Cincinnati Symphony), by extraordinary one-time gifts (the San Francisco Opera), or by fiscal sleight of hand.

So what does a balanced budget prove? It might not be a sign of fiscal health. Rising ticket sales would be a better indication. If they rise, that’s money in the bank, both now and (if the trend continues) in the future. They'd also be a sign of rising popularity, which of course will help in many ways, both intangible and tangible.

Falling ticket sales, conversely, are a sign of trouble. That’s loss of revenue, and loss of popularity. If the sales keep falling, a lot of things eventually fall with them, including the amount of money you can raise. How can you raise money for an orchestra people are deciding that they don’t want to hear?