August 2005 Archives

I'm on vacation; have been for a week, in fact. So most likely no posts here till after Labor Day. We've moved into a new country house, which we've been building for more than a year. Now it's finished. Exhilarating!

When the blog resumes, I'm eager to make many posts. More about pop music and pop culture -- I've gotten some very thoughtful objections to what I've been saying, which help me refine my thoughts. And then there's the aging audience; I have some striking data.

And finally I'm going to write a book on the future of classical music. A lot of the writing will be done in public, maybe here in the blog, maybe elsewhere. So you'll have a chance to read the book as it takes shape. Best of all, you'll have a chance to comment, which is sure to teach me a lot, and make the book a lot better.

All this when work resumes in the fall…best wishes to all my readers (and my faithful correspondents) for what remains of the summer. It's all too short!

Linked on ArtsJournal today is a fabulous “critic’s notebook” by New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn, about the way orchestras program new music. Or, rather, about one way that they don’t program it.

 Allan had heard a piece at Tanglewood that knocked him out—Stephen Stucky’s Second Concerto for Orchestra, which was premiered a year or so ago by the LA Philharmonic, and won the Pulitzer Prize this year. And so Allan asked why he had to wait this long to hear it:

While intending no disrespect to the Tanglewood Music Center or its superb young musicians, who produced a fantastic performance, I wondered why I had had to drive 150 miles to hear a student orchestra play it, some 17 months after a premiere that, by all accounts, was a success and four months after its Pulitzer?

Where, to put it differently, were the New York Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the American Symphony Orchestra and all the other orchestras that while away the musical season in a city that regards itself as the center of the musical universe? And what about orchestras elsewhere that might have picked up on the work , then brought it to New York on tour?

He concedes, of course, that orchestra programming is done long in advance, and — or so orchestras insist — can’t easily be changed. But why not?

He’s right to ask. In fact, I’ve asked the same question myself. Back when Gorecki’s Third Symphony was such a smash popular success, I wondered why American orchestras didn’t rush to program it. One answer, back then, might of course have been, “Because we don’t like the piece” (since many people seemed to disapprove of its apparent simplicity, not to mention its popularity).

But think of what orchestras would gain — and what the cause of new music would gain — if successful new pieces were widely performed. First, orchestras would look like they really cared. “Look! Here’s a new piece that’s a raving success, and we thought [speaking now to their audience] that you just had to hear it! So we tore up our schedule to bring it to you.” Wouldn’t the audience sit up and take notice?

And, taking this further, wouldn’t the entire city where the orchestra plays? This is the second advantage. One problem orchestras have (especially large ones) is that most of their concerts don’t really register as events. “What’s the New York Philharmonic doing this week?” “Playing classical music, as usual.” Of course, the Philharmonic would annoyedly point out that they’re doing Mahler’s Sixth, or whatever, and that there are good reasons for people to care about the piece. But that doesn’t register with any large number of people. It speaks only to those who already know the repertoire. For others, it’s just about meaningless.

But how about this? What’s the Philharmonic doing this week? Sweeping everything aside to play a new piece that really matters. That’s news. That would get attention. People who don’t usually go to orchestra concerts might show up out of sheer curiosity. And who knows? Do this often enough, and you might build a new audience, full of people who like the new music you program, and really care that you’re playing it.

Plus there’s something else. New music, in the classical music world, lives in an insane kind of limbo. We all know that, but I don’t think we pinch ourselves often enough, and realize quite how insane it is. We think we’re art, we think we’re thoughtful, we think we’re serious, we think we represent some kind of pinnacle of thought and reflection. But go to the most serious, committed subscribers at any major orchestra — or, for that matter, go to most members of the orchestra’s staff or board, or even to the musicians, or even to leading music critics — and ask them to name the five best new pieces premiered by any orchestra in the last few years.

They won’t be able to do it. They won’t, in almost all cases, even be able to name five candidates. And why? For exactly the reasons Allan says. The works aren’t recorded, and aren’t widely performed. A successful, even tumultuously successful premiere isn’t followed by other performances. Eventually a piece might get around (that’s happening to two Jennifer Higdon works right now, Blue Cathedral and her Concerto for Orchestra), but it’s a slow process, which misses far more cities than it hits.

So what’s the problem? Let me quickly note one way for critics, at least, to fill in these gaps. If I wanted to hear Stephen Stucky’s piece, quite possibly I could go to its publisher, and ask for a private recording. I’ve heard a good many new pieces this way. Performances are sometimes (though not always) recorded, and CDs are available, if you’re in the business and ask the right people.

And also it’s probably not necessary for orchestras to send, as Allan suggests, representatives to important premieres. The artistic administrators of every major orchestra know far more about these premieres than anybody else in the business. If a new piece is a success, they all hear about it. They can easily get recordings, if they exist, and in fact may even have recordings showing up in their mail, unrequested.

So the information is there, inside every major orchestra. Why can’t the orchestras change their programs? Well, first, they all probably think that as it is, they’re doing all the new music their audiences can stand. They can’t very well cancel some new piece they’d programmed, to substitute something that was a smash hit elsewhere. That would be an insult, to say the least, to whoever composed the piece they originally planned to play.

So what else can they do? Take some beloved warhorse off the program, as Allan suggests? Probably not, for two reasons. First, the audience would screech. Subscribers and donors, even some major funders, might be outraged. Second, the two pieces, the warhorse and the new piece, wouldn’t require the same amount of rehearsal time. The new piece, presumably, would need more. So this means rejiggering not just the program, but the rehearsal schedule.

And then there are issues of instrumentation. Does the new smash hit require eight trumpets, or nine percussionists? Start smashing the piggy bank — now you have to hire extra players, and they might break your budget. So you’d find you had to adjust something else. Maybe you’d have to cancel the Janacek Sinfonietta, which you’d scheduled the same season, because it needs lots of extra trumpets, too.

But the odds are that any smash hit new piece won’t need extra musicians, because whoever commissioned it didn’t want to break the piggy bank, either. So this, in most cases, won’t be an issue. There is, of course, an extra cost for renting performance material. If you’re doing the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, and you’re a major orchestra, you already have the orchestra parts in your library. If you replace it with Stephen Stucky’s Second Concerto, you have to rent parts from the publisher, and pay a royalty, too. So there probably will be extra costs involved.

Beyond that, are there any issues. Unfortunately, yes. It’s not easy to arrange a full season of orchestra concerts. You have to balance more things than most people realize, including tricky questions of which musicians play on which days. I once programmed a season for an imaginary orchestra, for a panel discussion at the annual conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League. I thought I’d done a reasonably decent job, but then someone got up from the audience and told me I hadn’t given the tuba anything to play until half the season was over. I’d never thought of that.

And then there are problems with guest conductors and soloists. You can’t very well displace an expensive soloist you’ve hired, to accommodate your new burning need to play Stephen Stucky. And you can’t foist Stucky’s piece onto some guest conductor who might not want to conduct it. In most cases, you’ll have to ask your music director to conduct it, and what happens if he/she doesn’t want to, doesn’t like the piece, has no affinity for it, or (pardonably) really worked hard on the existing programs, and isn’t happy to see any of them changed?

And what if the new piece needed a soloist? Where would you find one — someone willing to learn the piece — in a hurry, if the soloist at the premiere was (as would hardly be surprising) not available?

But enough of this. The obstacles are real, but at the same time, they’re imaginary. If any orchestra really wanted to change a season in midstream, that could happen. The music director, of course, would have to support the idea 100%. If the music director (and this really happens) is too busy with other commitments to learn a new score in a hurry, then an assistant or associate or resident conductor can learn it. (Well, these people are probably even more overworked than the music director, but I think they’d jump at the chance for this kind of exposure.)

I’ve seen orchestras find imaginative solutions to problems, once they decided to look for them. When the LA Philharmonic did the three acts of Tristan on three successive days one weekend this year, they initially couldn’t see how they’d find enough rehearsal time. The musicians, since they’re not an opera orchestra, by and large didn’t know the score, which also is more than double the length of an average concert program.

But the LA Phil did find a solution. They made sure, in the weeks just before Tristan, to program some repertory pieces that the musicians had already played with their music director. These needed less rehearsal than other works might, and the time this saved was given to Tristan.

One marketing director I know wants his orchestra to consider playing special concerts for the 6% of its audience who say, in surveys, that they like new music. These concerts of course would have more new music than usual, but might be done only once in the course of a week, instead of the usual three or four times. If this plan were adopted, the programs might be left somewhat open, to accommodate new pieces that had just been successful somewhere else.

And there surely are other solutions, which I won’t try to anticipate, because orchestral programming is a specialized craft, one I don’t pretend to have mastered. But I think the artistic administrators I know could figure out a way to do what Allan Kozinn urges — if they really wanted to, if their music directors bought into the idea, and if the orchestra was willing to spring some change from the piggy bank. It would be worth the money, I think, for all the reasons I’ve said.  

When I went to the Glimmerglass Opera a few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend—Carleton Clay, principal trumpet in the Glimmerglass Orchestra, and also a composer and music professor at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. He’s been principal trumpet at Glimmerglass ever since the company was founded, 30 years go.

I’ve known him since a couple of years after that, when I was working for the New York State Council on the Arts. My job was to evaluate grant applications  in music (I was one of four people doing that). One year we got one from the Catskill Conservatory. That was Carleton. Turned out he’d gotten a graduate degree from the Yale School of Music, gotten the Oneonta job, and, after he moved to the area (in central New York State), attracted other musicians there as well. His wife, Julia Hasbrouck Clay, plays the horn. Soon there was a professional brass quintet based in Oneonta, and a wind quintet, too. These ensembles eventually made New York debuts. The people in them played in local orchestras, and taught. The Catskill Conservatory was one of the schools they taught at; Carleton started it to help build local careers to the musicians who were moving in.

Soon a conductor was attracted to the scene, Charles Schneider. He’d become music director of the Catskill, Utica, and Schenectedy Symphonies (which he remains to this day), as well as the founding music director of Glimmerglass. Carleton also brought composers to the Catskills — John Cage, Lou Harrison, many, many others. He created a thriving music scene, which he’s still a big part of, whether he’s playing at Glimmerglass (he says he hasn’t missed a rehearsal or performance in 30 years), playing a concerto in Schenectady, premiering an oratorio in Oneonta.

So let’s hear it for Carleton. And how many other musicians like him are there, all over America, keeping classical music alive, without (as a rule) a word of mention from anybody big in the business? There must be hundreds of stories like this that we ought to know about. I’ve encountered the Da Ponte String Quartet, which operates out of mid-Coast Maine, performing in places like Portland, Brunswick, Newcastle, and South Bristol, with a strong enough local base to fund and cheer a Weill Recital Hall debut in New York, as well as a commission to David Del Tredici. But of course there are many other groups like that. This has got to be an important part of classical music’s future. Major institutions may be reeling, but Carleton and the Da Ponte Quartet are doing just fine.

And surely this is the place to mention Made in America, the project (from the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer, funded by Ford) that brings a new Joan Tower piece to 65 orchestras all over the country. The premiere is in Glens Falls, New York in October, and Joan says she wanted to do this commission because of all the varied orchestras involved, especially the community orchestras.

So here’s to all of this. We talk too much about the major institutions (I plead guilty), and not enough about what may well be sustaining classical music in places the major institutions don’t reach.

In my last post, I talked about walking in New York, and some classical music trivia I ran into.

But there’s more to say about walking. It was heavily hot, almost unbelievably so. If I came out from an air conditioned store, the heat was a shock, no matter how many times I encountered it. The air seemed to weigh three times what it normally does.

The streets were full of people, though, at least in the places I walked. And walking was disruptive. Every time I’d pass a store, and someone was coming out of it or going in, a blast of cold air would hit me. And, sure, this was welcome, but it was also jarring.

The smells were disruptive. Not just exhaust, but, striking without warning, smells of garbage, soot, and chemicals I might rather nobody identified.

And inside every store was music. I’m talking about major stores, like Macy’s and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, not to mention supermarkets and specialized boutiques. There was also music on the street, and sometimes in the subway. I couldn’t escape it. It was most offensive in the stores. I’m sure there are studies showing that people buy more when they’re entertained, but the effect, in the end, is as if someone had forbidden silence. We’re never to be left to ourselves for a moment.

But wait. Now have I contradicted what I’ve been writing in my posts about younger people and pop culture? Not at all. I don’t think that everything in the culture around us is wonderful. But the important point is that people who don’t spend time with high culture—people outside the arts (if such a phrase means anything)—aren’t therefore plunged into blasting music every moment of their lives, with no escape. Plenty of people in pop culture hate the constant noise as much as people who identify with classical music do. And they can escape it just as well with acoustic pop, ambient dance music, folk music, world music, and many kinds of jazz as classical music people can escape with string quartets and Chopin nocturnes.

Again we have to guard against the silly (and self-promoting) claim that only we have an alternative. Instead, if we want to fight the blasts of noise, we should ally ourselves with everyone who makes quiet and reflective music, in every genre. Besides, a lot of classical music is loud (and its loudness has been marketed to heavy metal fans). But that’s another story.

Walking in New York; hot weather, the temperature up as high as 99. Walking is good for me, says the current fad, echoed by my body, which feels toned and alive after walking miles on shopping trips. But then I’ve breathed enough exhaust to give me cancer faster than a lifetime of second-hand smoke. The air is foul.

As I’m walking downtown on Broadway, I stop at Lincoln Center to buy some bottled water. I want to sit and drink it by the fountain. They’re charging $3 a bottle, for Aquafina—Pepsi-Cola water, a product of the Pepsi-Cola company—so cold that some of it is frozen.

$3 a bottle. That’s high, even ridiculous. Any deli (and I’ve passed dozens of them on these walks) would sell Aquafina for half that. So this is an art tax. The extra money pays Lincoln Center’s bills.

And that seems wrong to me. Sure, I go to the ballgame, and pay too much for beer that might be watered down. If I go to a Broadway show, the concessions are exhorbitant. Movie theaters make their money on the popcorn I might buy.

I know all that. And I know that if I buy anything to eat or drink at intermission at Carnegie Hall or the Met, I’ll be paying far too much as well. But outdoors at Lincoln Center? This seems like a mistake. It establishes to anyone who passes by and wants to drink some water that they’ve entered an elite space. Lincoln Center—don’t even think of coming here unless you can afford to pay $3 for a small bottle, not even of Evian, but of Aquafina. (Which, by the way, isn’t even mineral water. It’s distilled, and on the bottle Pepsi has the nerve to claim that this unneeded purity makes it taste better, as if Evian and Perrier and, for God’s sake, New York City tap water were dangerously loaded with impurities.)

Is this the message Lincoln Center wants to send? (Note that their outdoor space is home to their most populist activity, the wonderfully lively Midsummer Night Swing dances, attended by people who mostly never go to Lincoln Center’s arts events. Sometimes Lincoln Center wonders how to get this new potential audience into the Met, or the New York Philharmonic, or Lincoln Center’s own productions. Well, first let’s charge them $3 for some water, just to weed out the undesireables! I’d call this incoherent messaging.)

On another note, and maybe biting the hand that feeds me, I saw that Juilliard has some posters that try to give the school some sizzle. “Refining virtuosity!” says the one about chamber music (and if the exclamation point isn’t really present—I don’t quite remember—certainly it’s there in spirit). “Exhilirating originality!” flares the one about jazz at Juilliard.

And those phrases fascinate me. Let’s forget the meaning—if there is one—of doing ads like this at all. Some people might say that anyone who advertises this way forfeits the right to also claim the arts are special, but I won’t go there. I also won’t ask if the phrases really mean anything, or, rather, have any tangible connection to the music Juilliard students actually make. Are the students playing chamber music all virtuosos? Are the jazz performances always so original?

What interests me is the implied contrast between jazz and chamber music. Jazz gets called original, perhaps because the players improvise. Chamber music does get to be both exciting (all those virtuosos) and refined (or in other words artistic), but even advertising copywriters know that it’s not likely to be innovative in any way.

But why not? The grain of truth in this upsets me. Both in reality and perception, jazz appears more likely to do something new than chamber music. Too bad. What would chamber music be like, if we all expected “exhilirating originality”?

I raise a lot of perilous questions here on my blog, but sometimes my life in classical music seems completely old-fashioned. I talk to people in the music business about music. I might e-mail with a conductor friend, commisserating about the orchestra he’s conducting at a leading European opera house, which turns out to be full of musicians who don’t like Bellini. Or I go to the Glimmerglass Opera, and see Massenet’s little one-act trifle, The Portrait of Manon, and even though the piece is so slight it’s hardly worth performing, I find myself loving the way Massenet writes music. He’s always wonderfully agreeable, and as I grow older, agreeable music seems more important than it used to be. (Maybe I’ve spent too much time in the trenches, gritting my teeth at new pieces, which, truth be told, aren’t always as good as I’d like them to be.)

Or I write music, and never think about what any of it means for the future of classical music. I just write it, concentrating on form and flow, melody and harmony, sound and texture. I play games with myself. Suppose I wrote an opera scene as a palindrome, with an orchestra part that sounds the same played backwards or forwards…(upcoming, in the third act of my opera based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where already a complete scene from the first act shows up as the accompaniment to a very different scene in the second act — or, rather, two very different scenes, because two sets of characters are carrying on two conversations simultaneously).

And last Sunday I had a wonderful time with live music. My wife and I went to a beer garden in Astoria, Queens to hear an amateur musician friend play with his wind band (eight winds and double bass). The beer garden was worth the trip by itself — it’s an outdoor establishment run by Czechs, with Pilsner Urquell on tap (not too shabby), and a menu of good Czech food. When we got there at 1 PM, there weren’t too many people there, and most of them were Czechs. By 4 PM, the place was happily overrun — hipster New York younger people, families, kids, Czechs, you name it, everybody having a good time, playing cards or Scrabble, eating, drinking, hanging out, listening to the music (or not, if they didn’t feel like it).

The musicians were quite good, and the 18th century music they played seemed perfect for the place. They played at one end of the large outdoor space, on a bandstand. In front of the bandstand was a dance floor. At first kids ventured out on it, mainly to get closer to the music. Some of them danced. But then two adults started dancing, slow-dancing to a graceful slow movement in the music. That was heavenly. I thought of standup comedy. If you’re a comic, you have to make your audience laugh. And nobody can fake that — either people laugh or they don’t. What’s the equivalent reaction to music? Well, maybe dancing. If people dance to your music, you know they’re loving it.

Later one of the musicians’ wives showed up, with his two kids. After a while, one of the kids went up on stage and just sat with the musicians, evidently loving the music (and loving to sit nearby while his father played).

All of this was lovely. I can’t remember many outings (and I’m certainly including bigtime concerts in New York and elsewhere) when I’ve loved music more. By the end of the afternoon, some of the musicians — who’d been sharing pitchers of beer — started saying that we ought to tear down the concert halls. It was easy to sympathize. This was one afternoon when music — gorgeous music — simply took care of itself.

One of the dumbest, most ignorant, and most insulting things I’ve heard in the present culture debates is that younger people have a short attention span.

Where did that come from? I won’t try to unearth the history of that insane assertion, other than to suggest that it might in part derive from conventional wisdom about MTV—the videos, supposedly, have a lot of quick cuts, which then infected movies, commercials, and just about everything else in our culture, creating undemanding fodder for people who can’t keep a thought in their head for more than a few seconds at a time.

But I do know this. The idea is smug and self-serving. If we define our ways as superior—“we” being, in this case, people in the arts and especially in classical music—and everybody else’s ways as lacking, then we win. And even if we lose, in the sense that everybody else gives up on everything we love, we still can feel superior. We were overwhelmed by barbarians, who just can’t pay close enough attention to appreciate the things we say are good for them.

Such bullshit. Why don’t we look for a moment at some of the things that younger people are famously inclined to do? Designing websites, for instance. Takes about five minutes, doesn’t it, to create a sophisticated site. That’s why Photoshop costs $29.99, retail, right? And has just a dozen menu items in its interface. Anybody can create graphics for the web. You don’t even have to think. The people who come to your sites certainly won’t!

Video games. Hand-eye coordination; that’s what they’re about. You don’t have to think. You just react. Never mind that Stephen Johnson, in his indispensable book Everything Bad is Good for You, has extensively documented just the opposite, showing something that the high-culture snobs of course would know, if they’d ever played a videogame, or even looked at one. Video games take many hours to complete, and require complex strategy.

Which also means creating them is difficult. Months, years of labor are involved. Complex graphics, complex computer programming, complex planning of the storyline and interface. Oh, but they take breaks every 15 minutes! Yeah, right. Work all night would be more like it.

How about software design in general? Endless work. Fashion design? Nothing to it. Everybody knows that young designers knock off their fall collections in a single evening. Pop music? As one classical music critic who used to write for The New York Times once said to me, “In pop music, they take no care with what they do.” Those were his exact words. I could only stammer, “Don’t you read the pop music coverage in your own newspaper?” “Yes,” he said, a little bit abashed. “That’s what the pop critics always say to me.”

In fact, pop music takes an enormous amount of work, much of it in the production of recordings. Any teen can do this now at home, using music software which famously puts the power of a giant recording studio right inside your laptop, for just a few hundred dollars. Has anyone who thinks younger people have a short attention span ever used this software? Do they have any notion of how complex it can be? Have they ever tried to sculpt the precise sound of a delay (a sort of echo effect, but much more subtle), working for an hour just to set the timing of the delay (the speed at which the sound repeats, with special care to plot this against the speed of the music’s beats); the volume (or, to be more precise, the volume envelope, the speed with which the repeated sounds get louder or softer); and the EQ of each repetition (so the timbre of the sounds can change as they repeat and fade away)? And all this just for four seconds of one of 14 songs on somebody’s next album. (See more or less any issue of two magazines, Electronic Musician and Keyboard, for many more details. And these are just the publications that especially appeal to nonprofessionals!)

It’s just a bad joke to say that younger people have a short attention span. And I’ve just cited what it takes to work in areas stereotypically associated with younger people. How about young scientists, young scholars, young novelists, young choreographers? Does anybody seriously think that young physicists give up on string theory after 20 minutes, and then watch Leave It to Beaver reruns? If this all weren’t such a serious mistake, I’d just hoot with laughter.

From long experience with these debates, I’d expect one of two answers to what I’m saying here. One would be that everything I’ve cited is an exception to the general rule. But of course that line of argument is metaphysical, in the sense that the logical positivists used the word. You’re making an assertion that can’t be verified. Or, to put it differently, if you’re going to tell me that any piece of evidence that seems to prove you wrong is atypical, then the proposition you assert—that younger people have a short attention span—is unfalsifiable. Nothing could ever prove you wrong. Of course, a notion that can’t be proved false also can’t be proved true, but that won’t bother you. You know what you know.

The other thing I might expect to hear is truly wonderful. “Oh, all right. Younger people do think about some things. But they’re the wrong things!” Which of course shifts the ground of the discussion entirely. And makes it pointless to have started off by saying that younger people have a short attention span, since this really wasn’t what you meant. You meant, really, that you hate everything about contemporary culture. Which would be worth talking about, but why didn’t you say what you meant in the first place?

What’s really going on with those MTV jump cuts, and everything allied to them, isn’t short attention spans. It’s a demand for complexity, that arises from increasing speed in processing verbal and visual and sonic information. Our culture, in other words, is getting smarter instead of stupider. See Stephen Johnson for more details. If we in classical music don’t realize the truth of what he says, we’re dead.

Ever since I’ve started working inside the classical music business (as a consultant, for instance, or doing projects for orchestras), I’ve noticed that people writing about big classical music institutions don’t seem to know what’s really going on.

There are many reasons for this. Many writers are expected to work as both critics and reporters. But these are different skills. How many people have both of them? Second, many writers—even if they’re good reporters—just don’t know the business side of classical music. And why should they? Where would they learn it? But if you don’t know how the business really runs, you won’t even know what questions to ask when an institution looks like it’s in trouble.

Third, the institutions themselves play their cards pretty close to their chests. (Do institutions have chests? Metaphor out of control in Sandow’s blog…) They’re not used to serious media scrutiny, may bristle when they’re pushed for facts, figures, or explanations, and may prefer to hide what’s really going on. So they’re not exactly going to be any reporter’s friend when things get tough.

But then all reporters face that problem. Does the Bush administration open its secrets to The New York Times? Forget it! Reporters who cover politics, sports, or business have to fight even harder than people who cover the arts do. They have one resource, though, that arts reporters—or at least a lot of classical music writers—don’t seem to have, and that’s off the record sources, people you talk to confidentially, who’ll tell you what’s really going on. You might never quote them in a story; probably you’ll never print nine-tenths of what they tell you. But when you need to ferret out the truth behind some striking new development, they at least get you started. They’ll tell you where to look for further information, and give you an idea of what questions you ought to ask. Sometimes they give you everything you need, and if you have enough of them—and if they all confirm each others’ stories—you can go to press without much more than what they’ve told you.

Case in point: a story in business section of The New York Times on August 1, about the break between Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan. Lachlan resigned his high-powered job in his father’s company. What was going on? Richard Siklos told us:

Neither Lachlan nor his father would comment on the specifics of their relationship or Lachlan's resignation. But four personal acquaintances of both men and two high-ranking executives within the company say that the strong bond between father and son has frayed recently. These people, who declined to be identified because they wish to maintain their personal or professional relationships with the family, said that Rupert and Lachlan had trouble maintaining a productive working relationship and as a result, their personal relationship suffered as well.

See? Off the record sources, in this case six of them, without which you really can’t find out anything. Imagine what we might have learned if someone with equivalent sources in classical music had dug down to find out what went wrong in the Carnegie Hall/New York Philharmonic merger.

(One certain reporter, who used to cover the classical music business for the Times, pretty clearly had her sources. But these, again pretty clearly, were loose-cannon board members, out to push their own agendas. What they told her badly needed to be checked—and to check their reports, she needed off the record sources she'd developed on your own, whose comments she could trust.)

(One further note. If one confidential source tells you something really striking—and especially if it's something that might damage someone's reputation—you absolutely have to check it before you print it. You need a second, independent source, who tells you exactly the same thing.)