November 2005 Archives

From a reader who prefers not to be named, a description of things that can keep people away from classical music:

I have read your blog for some time now because I love classical music and am the parent of a teenager who is an aspiring orchestral musician. As former southern Californians, we had many hours of pleasure attending concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Music Center and other So. Cal. venues in our time there.

Six years ago, we moved to Huntsville, AL. We bought season tickets to the Huntsville Symphony. Our experience started on a low note and has not changed a great deal until the present time. The concert hall is, to be frank, ugly and cold appearing. The foyers are dreary. The expensive seats that we had did not allow us to see all of the percussion section due to baffles that extend onto the stage. There were no cough drops at the entrance to quiet the continual hacking coughs that occur in an area where there's lots of smoking and chronic allergies. We were 30 years younger than almost anyone sitting near us and the music was punctuated by snoring and comments such as "wake me when it's over, etc." Many seats around us were unfilled. The performances were only slightly more inspired than the setting.

Huntsville is a rapidly growing city with a highly-educated population (most moving from larger metropolitan areas). There are two youth orchestras (split 20 years ago because of disagreements) and there is no reconciliation between them even though neither one has enough players. The leaders of each are entrenched in maintaining the control they have. Meanwhile the young players suffer from a less than ideal situation. The symphony does not directly participate with either one.

The symphony should be expanding based on the growth in this area. The symphony staff, some of whom are longtime symphony musicians, have put the bulk of their effort into developing relationships with a chosen few patrons who may or may not give enough to subsidize the symphony in perpetuity. Meanwhile, a large population with unknown, but potentially large assets, sits untapped and seats remain unfilled. It reminds me of a church we went to. It had approximately 20 members. Few members attended and the church staff seemed content with that. We were told that the church received enough funds from non-attending members or those who left money in their will, to not need to work to attract or maintain new members or to care whether seats were filled or not. While this may be effective in the short term, there is no way that it can be sustained over many years.

Huntsville has a dynamic new conductor. Unfortunately he is only here a few days out of the year. While he is away, the status quo continues. Though his programming and conducting are more appealing, it can not make up for the lack of relationship that the symphony has to the broader community.

This year we gave up our seats and have few plans to attend any of the concerts here. In the time that we have been here the symphony has has made little effort to establish a relationship with us. We were never approached directly to donate funds. The symphony seem to have chosen to focus their energy on a few select patrons and to neglect the larger potential audience. We have never been asked why we gave up our seats.

So, what do we do now? We travel to other cities, including back to CA, to attend concerts. We invest more in recorded music. We choose to use our resources more selectively.

As our child looks at colleges next year, we will be looking to ensure that along with a music degree, he/she will get an education in leadership, management, and community relations that seems to be missing from our local symphony. After all, a future musician's livelihood will depend on the whether attending classical concerts will matter to anyone in the future.
 

From Barney Sherman, of iowa Public Radio, bouncing off the e-mail I quoted from Paul DiMaggio:

I sometimes think of it as the “Your Father’s Oldsmobile” problem. (A blanket “forgive me” here if I got all of this wrong—I don’t know much about cars.) But… with that warning… in the 1950s, says Rob Walker http://www.slate.com/id/1006675/ , the Olds represented “middle-class achievement” - a car you wanted after you got affluent enough to move past the Chevy. The Olds represented membership in the country club, the house in the suburbs, promotion to middle management, maybe an elected position at the Rotary Club. Respectability – something a middle-class man aspired to in 1955, embodied in the Olds.

Then the 60s happened, By the mid-1970s, respectable was what a young man did NOT want to be. The Rotary Club began to shrink (I haven’t looked that up, but I’d bet it’s facing a membership problem not unlike the classical scene’s.) And the Olds started a long decline.

In 1988 Olds tried to counter the trend with its “This Is Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” ads – in other words, trying to reposition the Olds as having what post-60s people aspired to– youth, hipness, sexiness - in a word, Cool. Not ‘respectability.” But the Olds by now was too completely branded. Finally, in 2004 GM stopped making the Oldsmobile. Rebranding was hopeless. The image was too well set. The Olds’ very success in branding itself ultimately did it in.

You see where I’m taking this - the classical music scene was optimized for much of what the middle-class and upper class aspired to in the 19th century (as DiMaggio explains so well), and even what it aspired to be in America in the mid-20th century (which was the era of middlebrow culture and the Book-of-the-Month club - America’s middle-class was paying to have tweed-clad professors with pipes tell them what book to read that month. Americans still wanted to have Class. ) But after the Sixties/Seventies, people instead aspired to (all of this is debatable) being the rebel/ outsider/ individualist/ young/hip/ bohemian - Cool. No book-of-the-month panel for them. Formal symphony dress and etiquette was for effete twits or respectable Olds drivers, not for someone who wanted to be like James Dean or Dylan or Springsteen…. (I could refer to Andrew Heath and Joseph Potter . http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006074586X/002-3951223-2215204?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance - their chapter on “From class-hunting to cool hunting” ). Anyway, you see my point - the classical scene was optimized for earlier class-seekers, but now the culture was “cool-hunting”.

(To be sure, there’s lots more to the Oldsmobile saga than the story I just told. Just calling it “Olds” when everyone now aspired to be youthful was a hurdle. And there’s something much bigger happening economically: Japan was earning more and more of the market share that Detroit had taken for granted, so GM found itself with lots of excess capacity and huge legacy costs. GM was gonna start killing some of its lines regardless of branding etc. In fact, just this morning they announced the cut of 30,000 jobs and 12 plants. Still, the Olds went early. So back to my point.)

So the classical-music question is—can one re-brand the concert scene for this new set of cultural aspirations? And if so, how? – as a cool wannabe? (Or will that just look pathetic?) As a counter to the dominant cool culture? Or as something else? Or something in between? Or … er… whatever…. But note Walker http://www.slate.com/id/1006675/ saying that trying to redefine the Olds as “not your father’s” didn’t just fail, it actually backfired.

I've seen orchestra marketing campaigns, aimed at a younger audience, that squirm around trying to show that the orchestra isn't stuffy after all. That it's not your father's Oldsmobile -- an approach that, as Barney notes, in fact reinforces the perception it's trying to change.

I've been involved in a very lively, enormously stimulating e-mail discussion of some the problems facing orchestras. One subject that came up is the supposed hierarchy of art -- high art at the top, popular art far lower down. Along with this usually goes the idea that art, by its very nature, is something spiritual and sublime, far removed from everyday life. And then, of course, it's easy to say that high art, existing in its own lofty sphere, is the only real art.

I'd challenged that idea, suggesting among other things that it's a fairly recent invention, going back no later than the first few decades of the 19th century. And I got wonderful support from Paul DiMaggio, a professor of sociology at Princeton, and research director of Princeton's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. Paul can talk about these issues with an authority I don't have, and he also presents data that everybody in classical music ought to know about, if we're hoping to find a new audience. Who, after all, is the audience we're trying to attract? What kind of people are they? A lot is known about this, and Paul gives us some of the really crucial information. Note especially the third and fourth paragraphs. (And thanks, Paul, for letting me post this here.)

The hierarchical view of art established in the early 19th century was well suited to the way people lived back then, with a small, stable inter-marrying upper class capable of enforcing their definition of art.

It was also natural that the emerging commercial middle class, when it became large enough to sustain concerts, would draw from the ideas of the upper class -- and would actually elaborate on those ideas and in some ways make them even more restrictive -- to solve its own problems of identity and status (e.g., why it was not just richer but also more virtuous than the lower middle classes and simple trades people, how to tell the difference between art and fashion, etc., and so on). So the heyday of classical music was marked by an alliance between urban upper classes that were relatively stable and tightly connected and urban middle classes that served and relied upon those upper classes and their approval for their livelihoods and senses of selves. Classical music, and the stories they told themselves about it and what their ability to appreciate it said about them, was an important part of this.

The late-20th early 21st-century crisis, I think, reflects the dissolution of the way of living to which both the organization of classical music (in the U.S. at least) and the stories people told about it were tailored. Instead of fixed, well-defined upper classes, we have international overlapping networks of elites; and instead of urban commercial middle classes, we have even larger networks of highly educated and self-confident professionals, who have many other bases of identity (including viewing themselves as too "un-snobby" to like classical music). Research (both research at Princeton and research by folks elsewhere) has shown, first, that it's almost impossible to find a college-educated American who will espouse the hierarchical view of culture that dominated discourse about music c. 1900 and was common even in the 1950s; and, second, that the kinds of upper-middle-class people who use culture as a basis for identity and status (people with more of what sociologists call "cultural capital" than money) now tend to be "omnivores" who like and can talk intelligently about many kinds of music. Omniverousness fits the way we live now, with middle class people participating in far-flung, cross-national networks that put them into contact with many different kinds of people -- it makes sense to know enough cultures so that you can operate in all of these interlocking networks. The current form of organization and traditional narratives about classical music fit this new kind of social structure really poorly.

In other words, the problem isn't just getting the music and the internal organizational dynamics right, but it's aligning the music and the stories we tell about it with the way people live their lives and they way they use music and the other arts to understand themselves and
construct their identities.

Here’s e-mail from Larry Beckhardt, who plays in the wind octet I blogged about a while ago, the group that plays 18th century music in a beer garden in New York, with a large crowd of people if all ages sitting around eating, drinking, and listening, and sometimes even dancing:

 

Your recent discussion of access points on your artsjournnal.com blog reminded me of the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden wind octet and your blog about it back in August.

 

Is it possible that we found one access point to the 20-30 year old population, as well as children and older people through that venue? Of course we are just a group of amateurs sight reading music - can you imagine the response of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble or Met Opera Orchestra winds did the same thing?  I get a chill just thinking about it.

 

That would be fabulous, wouldn’t it? I’ve heard of musicians from smaller orchestras doing things like this. The day the musicians in the big ones do it will be a great day for classical music—and might even signal a turnaround in the classical music business. Imagine actually caring for the people in the city you play in! Not just doing “outreach,” but simply being there, where people hang out, doing your music. It could be worth its weight in gold (read: ticket sales, donations, and by the way, sheer pleasure for the musicians).

I've received wonderful e-mail from readers during the past few weeks, and I'm going to start posting some of it. Here's something very thoughtful, from Andrew Yen, posted with his permission. Thanks, Andrew!

I am a 20 year old who likes classical music and a lot of it, although being raised with it during my childhood I guess that might negate the appeal of people like me for institutions who are pining for new audiences.

I think there is a need for some explanation for classical music, as it is the most abstract of the arts (possibly competing with dance in that aspect). The least one can do to explain the music is in the context of when and how it was made. Everything else is up to the listener to interpret. This is why I find much of minimalism appealing because the process is simple enough to understand and that is it, you find out which sounds appeal the most to you and take it from there. Repeat listenings often reveal things that weren't heard before. Abstract music succeeds better at this than programmatic works which have entire stories woven into them represented in the sounds.

But I wonder though about the argument that classical music, especially the old kind, is less appealing because it isn't current or relevant to modern life. I agree that is true, I find much more resonance with Reich's "City Life" than I do with any Beethoven symphony. Sometimes I don't want my music to always be current or relevant or else I would pay too much attention on where and when it is from than on the music itself. That way I always have room for the older works and get a different appreciation for them as music instead of a statement. I treat pop music before 1985 (my birthyear) the same way. I treat old music like an escape, as people do when cracking open a fantasy novel.

Could this also be applied to the other fields such as literature and the visual arts? In my case I could never get into anything that is called "literature" because I find the whole thing horribly irrelevant especially concerning the customs of the time in which they were written. All the classics, Shakespeare, Greek tragedies, even the heralded works of the 20th century barely caught any of my interest. For the most part, the only books from literature that actually captured my attention was "The Scarlet Letter" and "Wuthering Heights", and it was for the pained love story, not the literary implications derived from it.

The same could be applied to the visual arts, such as painting and sculpture, the old masters and even a Picasso, it is interesting to look, and there is a certain amount of skill invested into it, but does it speak to me? Is it relevant to my experiences?

So I wonder if the same questions on the value of old classical music can also be applied to old literature and old art as well?

Ironic though isn't it? For me, I am pushed away from literature and art because of their intellectual asapects yet I am drawn to music for precisely that reason (as well as the emotional stimulus).

This paragraph:

"Some art, of course, is more popular than other art, but that doesn’t mean that the unpopular art needs access points. It’s not popular because it’s not for everyone. But the people it is for find it on their own. Nobody offered access points to bring anyone to difficult pop music, like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, or Sonic Youth. Those groups simply found their fans."

Drives the point home. Especially in the world today where tailored tastes oftentimes trump group trends, this could be applied with fervor for classical music. The biggest hinge to get off of for those wanting to publicize it is to realize that it isn't universal, at least not since the early 20th century. It is preferable, I believe to at least get a rounded understanding of classical music, as most aficionados of rock would often take in their acolytes with the pantheon of classic rock and so forth for other genres. However, as you obliquely point out, the individual gets to decide which music makes the most sense to them, which one belongs.

Sometimes, among my friends, being the classical music expert, I am asked which pieces I would recommend to them. I would always go through a survey with them
first:

What do you want to know about?
What sounds do you like to hear?
Any intrumental preferences?
Any time period preferences?
Genre?
and so on . . .

So I can narrow down which kinds of classical might appeal to them the most. I occaisionally get the request for the entire history of classical music, and I am often thinking how to go about it without putting my bias in (the dilemma of the so-called masterpieces and geniuses). So far I have yet to succeed in fulfilling that request, although I do suggest things here in there to get it started.

Anyway, to wind this down. I really enjoy your thought-provoking wonderments on the future of classical music and its role in society, especially for the under 50 crowd. Sometime, when I am a little less burdened I would like to join in the effort to find new avenues for classical music to be heard. I used to have aspirations for the music field, but the conservatory system was not for me, so I chose to study in the sciences which I am happy to be in as well, relegating my involvement to just being a good listener and prolific consumer or music.

One project I had in mind is to create a visual history of classical music in the form of a webcomic (a media that is very popular among people my age, at least the geekier ones). It will serve to explain and illustrate classical music like a book would, going from the basics such as defining types of music to the instruments and then to the periods and people who made music, except it won't as deeply serious as a book would go. Along the way I might solicit contributions from young amateur composers who would like to see their work exposed, or perhaps ask for e-mail interviews with prominent living composers, conductors, musicians, and scholars of music. I consider it to be the beginner's guide to classical music, made by and for amateurs.

I told Andrew in reply that I don't think classical music is all that abstract. It only seems so because so much of it -- the music from the past -- is so distant from us. Back in the 19th century, everybody in Europe knew the difference between German, French, and Italian music, and could identify each in about four seconds, just as now, as I sat last night watching a documentary about punk, I could immediately spot the various punk and punk-associated styles (punk, new wave, hardcore, retro punk like Rancid). Not because I've studied them, but because I was there when they came out. Old classical pieces have many other cultural cues that registered immediately to the original audiences, but no longer resonate, unless you've studied the past. That's one reason classical music can seem so abstract.

The second episode of my book-in-progress is now online, right here. Please take a look, and, as ever, fire off your comments. The comments on the first episode were both liively and very helpful, so we're making future comments much more visible. The second installment takes the book further than the first one did. (It would have to, wouldn't it?) I'll be eager to hear what you all think.

The book, by the way, is going to be read in a couple of college classes, might get on the radio, and excerpts might appear on other websites. If anyone is using the book in any other way, or has any other syndication ideas (for lack of any better term), please contact me. I'd love to hear about it.

Lately I had the privilege of being in some workshops led by an admirable and charismatic consultant, somebody widely employed by arts organizations, including orchestras, to help them reach out to a wider audience. I know him, and I’m fond of him, but I’d never seen his work before, and I ended up with some questions about it. These don’t reflect on him; they’re more about the assumptions behind his work, assumptions that are shared widely in the classical music business.

This consultant works with the idea of “access points”—things about a work of art that let us build bridges to it from the things people already know about. This, parenthetically, is one of the most admirable things about the way this man works: He starts from the art itself, and says very strongly that any outreach approach that doesn’t do that isn’t going to work.

And he’s terrific at finding the access points. Pick a bodily function, he’ll say, to variously intrigued or embarrassed giggles in the group he’s working with. Then write down what this function feels like. Then use these feelings, and the function itself, as a metaphor for something in American life. Now imagine that this something has become gigantic, transforming, apocalyptic. Now imagine someone caught up in all this, and invent a monologue for that person to speak. Having done all this, the consultant (who used to be a professional actor, and evidently a strong one) speaks a monologue from a Sam Shepherd play, in which somebody, with marvelous zany verve, decries America for being too clean. What we need is tourista, he says; we need to get sick from our own water. Then we’d know what life is all about.

And then the more limited “we,” the we in the workshop, see how we were lead point by point through much of what lies behind the Sam Shepherd monologue. Certainly we appreciate Shepherd a lot more. If we might have had trouble with the faint scatology of the monologue, now at least we understand where it came from. The consultant also asks us to examine how we made our own metaphors, what imaginative process we used. That way we learn ways to draw on our imaginations even if at first we’re stuck.

Of course, you might ask why anybody needs access points to a Sam Shepherd monologue. Shepherd is a successful playwright. He has his audience; anyone who doesn’t care for him or doesn’t understand him doesn’t have to be in that audience. And the humor in the monologue doesn’t need any explanation. It’s not much different from a lot we find in (just for instance) South Park.

But classical music, people think, does need explanation. Certainly it needs a new audience. So that’s where this consultant’s work might really be helpful, and that’s why he was doing his workshop at a music gathering I was at.

He had many ideas. He described, for instance, how he and others led a group of kids toward Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. He had them make thunderstorm noises with their mouths and their bodies. Then they set up textures based on these noises. Then they performed the textures, which changed a lot. Then they listened to the thunderstorm in the Pastoral. And lo! They could follow it! And appreciate Beethoven’s skill in making it work.

Now, granted, this was for kids. But a lot of the classical music examples worked in similar ways. The music is assumed to be valuable. It’s also assumed to be opaque, more or less, to those who haven’t come to it yet. And finally it’s assumed that if you find the right access point, the work will open its glories, and the people who went through this process will be glad that they did.

My problem with that goes something like this. The approach, I think, will work with kids. And it might work for adults in their 50s or 60s who want to like classical music, but find it baffling. It certainly might work for people in the classical music audience who can’t understand new music.

But will it work for smart people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s? Do I ever doubt that. Do they want to hear about the thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony? Probably not, because it’s so plainly obvious. Anyone can understand that music can depict a thunderstorm. Things like that happen every day of the week in film scores. And in fact the whole idea seems naïve, or at least it’s going to seem like that to people who listen to (let’s say) Radiohead, and therefore (a) are already used to music with complex textures (subtler textures, in fact, than they’ll find in Beethoven), and (b) are used to music that traces fine shades of often ironic emotion, something that (once again) is a lot subtler than a thunderstorm. How is this consultant going to attract them?

Well, again—the Pastoral Symphony exploration was aimed at kids. I assume the consultant would plan something else for smart people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. But nothing he said, no proposal that he made, addressed the worldview of this crucial but difficult audience. (Crucial, because they’re the people classical music is most notably not reaching, people who, in past generations, would have grown up to become the classical music audience; difficult, because they’re the people the classical music world least understands.) 

Besides, why should art need access points at all? This is the most important question, I think, and one that’s bound to be controversial. Many of us take for granted that classical music is complex and abstract, and that people need to be taught to understand it. These access points would therefore be an early stage in that education.

But maybe the problem is simply that this music is old, and for other reasons has gotten distant from contemporary life. It never needed access points when it was new. Worshippers in Bach’s church didn’t have to be taught to understand his cantatas. Verdi’s audience had no trouble understanding his operas. Wagner swept through Europe like a storm. Artists in Paris at the turn of the 20th century were immediately drawn to Debussy. The beats and other hipsters in the late 1940s and early 1950s heard bebop, and loved it. Thousands of people in and around the New York art world in the 1970s (including me) were thrilled to hear minimal music.

Some art, of course, is more popular than other art, but that doesn’t mean that the unpopular art needs access points. It’s not popular because it’s not for everyone. But the people it is for find it on their own. Nobody offered access points to bring anyone to difficult pop music, like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, or Sonic Youth. Those groups simply found their fans.

So what’s the problem with classical music today? Why does it need special treatment? I’ll go out on a limb here, and suggest that an art that needs access points is dying or dead. Why can’t it communicate more directly, not to everybody (no art does that), but to whoever might hear it, and like it? Don’t we have to work on the presentation of classical music, so that it seems interesting even before it’s played, and so performances happen in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and excitement?

And don’t we have to play the music more excitingly? At the workshop, I asked if the most important access point shouldn’t be the music itself. If it’s not functioning that way, couldn’t the problem be that we’re not playing it in the right way? I’ve mentioned here before that Brahms, among others in the 19th century, thought that music ought to be performed differently—with more pronounced tempo changes, for one thing—when musicians and audiences didn’t know it yet. That’s the situation all classical music is in, these days, when it looks for a new audience.

So here’s a question, for everyone involved with playing classical music who wants a new audience. (And isn’t that just about everyone?) How could we play the music, so its impact would be immediate and unforgettable?

 

I was at the College Music Society conference in Quebec City last weekend, to present my thoughts on the future of classical music. (And thanks, everyone there who reads this blog, for your warmth and enthusiasm.)

But what I presented at this conference wasn’t what most interested me there. The College Music Society is made up of people who teach music at colleges and universities, and the position they’re in is yet another symptom of the condition of classical music these days. They offer music courses to undergraduates, sometimes as part of a core humanities curriculum. Traditionally, these courses cover classical music, but the current generation of students might not be interested. How, then, can the courses work? Many teachers are finding they have to include pop music, or even start with it. As someone at the conference said to me, “We can’t just dump the whole classical canon on the heads of students who don’t care about it.”

One solution is to begin with music that the students like. (I should make clear that this wasn’t my idea, but rather something that a teacher at a southern university has tried. As others have, too, I’m sure.) You ask students to bring in the music they’re listening to, and discuss it in just the same ways that you’d discuss classical music. Then it’s natural to bring classical music up for discussion as well.

I was also struck by how many universities teach non-classical music, and how vigorously they include entrepreneurship in their curriculum. Students, in other words, are taught how to go out into the world, and make their own careers. That’s more readily taught for non-classical students than for students studying classical music, because entrepreneurship is much better established outside the classical world.

But it’s becoming more common in the classical world as well. (Just think of ensembles like eighth blackbird, which are looking for new ways to make classical music careers. Not to mention Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who struck out on their own, way outside the classical mainstream, a generation ago.) So I began to think about how music history is taught. Typically it’s taught as the history of music itself, and above all as the history of the development of musical style and compositional technique.

But what if music history classes stressed how all the great composers made their living? That would push entrepreneurship right into the heart of the curriculum. I recently reviewed a new biography of Beethoven for The New York Times Book Review (the review appeared last Sunday, November 6), and as I read the book, I was struck by how earnest and eager an entrepreneur Beethoven was, even if he wasn’t exactly good at it. Composers had no guaranteed way to make a living in past centuries, and while some of them (Haydn, Bach) took jobs, others (Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Verdi) for all practical purposes went into business, finding their own ways to make their careers. Some of those ways were clearly established; Verdi was paid to write operas for all the big Italian opera houses, and then, as his career developed, for opera houses all over Europe, and in Egypt. But a career like that doesn’t happen automatically, and Verdi had to manage it carefully, just as any successful artist would manage a career today.

Too bad music history courses don’t usually teach that. If they did, they’d help make classical music a lot more contemporary.

 

I've been to two straight conferences, and I've got a lot of things to say, but I'm also tired. So, one quick hit about something both refreshing and fun. This is the start of Allan Kozinn's review of a Turandot performance at the New York City Opera, which appeared in The New York Times on November 3:

Listeners of good will may differ, perhaps violently, about why Puccini's "Turandot" has tenaciously held its place in the standard repertory. It has an uncommonly dim libretto, even by operatic standards, and a paucity of great arias nestled amid two and a half hours of brass-heavy, faux-exotic scoring and purposeless pageantry.

Still, if your idea of a stimulating evening is watching a beefy and clearly none too intelligent prince devoting himself single-mindedly to winning the heart of a creepy harridan - and, O.K., singing "Nessun dorma" along the way - the New York City Opera's venerable production is back on the boards at the New York State Theater.

Delicious! Doesn't matter if you agree with Allan or not (and I like the opera, myself). It's just wonderfully refreshing to see a classical music critic speaking his mind, saying something offbeat and personal, and doing it in plain language.

The book has started. The first episode is here. Comments very welcome! Read “What’s Going On Here,” at the right of the book page, for more on how the book will work. Note that I might not post every comment that I get. But all are welcome.

This is quite a new adventure…

I was driving last night, and listening to Bach cantatas, from the latest installment of the John Eliot Gardner series, the recordings he produces himself, and which have the most striking classical CD covers I’ve ever seen. For example:

The performances, I’m finding, are marvelous, devotional, but also dramatic and dance-like. They’re true to the covers, or, if you like, the covers are true to the performances. This is devotional music, the covers say, and it could speak to anybody; that’s why we show you people from many cultures in attitudes of devotion.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. As I was listening, I had a sudden flash of how the cantatas might have seemed to people who heard them when they were new, in Bach’s church in Leipzig. To us, they’re classical music, with all that that implies (something special, elite, thoughtful, removed from everyday life, music to be listened to in silence). But in Bach’s time?

How would the cantatas have seemed if you, sitting in the church when they were performed, recognized the tune of every chorale? These would be the hymns you’d been singing in church your whole life. You wouldn’t only recognize them when they were sung, in a cantata, as a chorale. You’d spot them immediately when they came in over the chorus and instruments, in one of the many choruses that are chorale preludes.

You’d also recognize the dance rhythms in every cantata movement that isn’t a recitative. The music would sound like dances to you. You’d perfectly well understand that it was church music, and not to be danced to, but on the other hand you’d expect just about any music you heard to take off from some familiar dance. That’s how music in that time worked. So it could never be very distant from you.

And many other things would bring the music closer. You’d be hearing it in church. You went to church every Sunday. The church services were long, serious, and important to you. The cantata was part of that. The words would need no interpretation. They expressed your own religious views, not just because they were Christian, but because they sprung from the same Lutheran variant of Christianity that you professed.

Who wrote the music? Your own church composer, the man who played the organ at your mother’s funeral, and at your daughter’s wedding. You hadn’t exactly cheered when he was appointed; friends of yours had taken part in the process of choosing him, and from what they told you, you think you’d have preferred one of the other candidates. Bach’s music was a little too complicated for you. And when your son was in the church school, Bach yelled at him. In fact, Bach yelled at all the children, and sometimes at adults, too, which was another reason you weren’t always thrilled with him.

But then you were friends with one of the violinists who played Bach’s music at the church, and this man always told you that Bach was a wonder and a marvel. One thing you did understand, because you could hear it for yourself—he was a stunning organist. When he improvised at the beginning and the end of services, well, you’d never heard anything quite like it. And your musical ear couldn’t be all that bad, because one week you noticed that the opening chorus of the cantata Bach had written took off directly from some of the music he’d improvised the week before. So you’ll grant that the man has enormous skill. He can improvise, remember what he improvises, and use the music again next Sunday in his cantata. So even if Bach sometimes bores you, he does keep you listening. There’s no telling what he’s going to write next.

Enough…it’s wonderful, dreaming of music and life in the 18th century. I apologize for any liberties I’ve taken with musical history, or for anything in Bach’s Leipzig situation that I might have gotten wrong. But could music—and Bach’s cantatas in particular really have been received like that? I bet I’m not too far off. What listening experience today can compare? Maybe going to hear local bands at a club, if you go constantly. You’d know the bands, you’d recognize their old songs, be curious about the new ones, and have an instant reaction, pro or con.

But is anything in classical music even remotely like that now?