January 2006 Archives

The Association of British Orchestras conference I went to was held in Newcastle, a lively, thriving city. Or pair of cities—it promotes itself as NewcastleGateshead, Gateshead being a sister city right across the River Tyne. I happened to spend time with two people from the UK the day before I left, and both of them raved about how fine a place it is.

And I could see that for myself. I had a hairraising connection between two of the three flights I had to take, to get to Newcastle, and while I managed to get to the plane on time, my luggage didn’t. So I had the pleasure of walking through Newcastle, looking for a chemist’s (as they say over there), to buy some toiletries. It’s clearly a lively town; you can tell just from looking at the people and the shops, not to mention the life sciences center and the fabulous performing arts facility, the Sage Gateshead.

Which brings me to the Northern Sinfonia, the local orchestra. They play in the Sage Gateshead’s main concert hall, which seats 1700, and is airy, modern, comfortable, but also has an easy elegance, and sounds terrific. And the musicians, almost all (if not absolutely all of them) fairly young, dress in a way that fits both the hall and the lively cities. They wear black—without tails or fancy dresses, without even jackets or ties for the men, if I remember correctly. I asked Anthony Sargent, who runs the facility, if the orchestra always dresses this way, and he said they did, even when the Queen came to a concert a month or so ago.

And that did it. As far as I’m concerned, I never want to see an orchestra wear tails again. The Northern Sinfonia looked so crisp, so alert, so contemporary, and at the same time so friendly…who wouldn’t want to see musicians dressed like that? Of course, their youth fit their outfits, or their clothes fit their youth. An older orchestra, or one less visibly enjoying itself, might have looked out of place wearing what the Northern Sinfonia wore.

Something else to think about: the orchestra has a late-evening new music series, which apparently attracts a sizeable young audience. Obviously it wouldn’t make any sense to wear tails for that. But by wearing (as I’ll guess they do) the same clothes for the new music concerts and for their regular gigs, they help build their brand, and help make people who come to the new music shows feel comfortable if they come to the main events.

The concert seemed well attended. The audience wasn’t notably old, and really seems to love the orchestra. I know it’s not quite so simple here in America; I’m sure that older subscribers might well hate it if orchestras started dressing more informally. But it’s got to happen sometime. Do orchestras want to look like they come from some high-church dreamland, or do they want to be part of the world their future audience lives in?

I've been at the annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras, where I spoke on two panels, and gave one of the wrapup speeches. Very, very interesting in many ways, which I'll blog about in the next few days. Among the things to talk about:

the informal dress of the Northern Sinfonia, which I heard play

the lack (as I was told) of older musicians in British orchestras

the tone of a conference -- and of an orchestral scene -- where government subsidies are still the mainstay of orchestra funding, and therefore trustrees (people from boards of directors) don't play a major role

some striking initiatives to support new music, taken by the London Symphony and the London Sinfonietta, and unlike anything I know of in the US

some even more striking research on the new music audience, far beyond anything I've seen in the US, and successfully put into practice to draw people to new music performances at two major venues, the Barbican in London and The Sage Gateshead in Newcastle (well, really Gateshead, Newcastle's twin city -- hope I'm not treading on any sensitive toes by how I'm stating this…) This research completely supports everything I've been saying about younger audiences, though I'm thrilled to see how much further they've taken their studies.

More to come.

Episode Five of my book on the future of classical music is now online. It talks about form in classical music -- and why form has become such a fetish. Comments always welcome!

My iTunes shuffle just brought up the "Pas d'action" ("Apollo and the Muses") from Stravinsky's Apollo, one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know. Given what I've just been writing, how does its beauty strike me? As deliberately clsasical beauty, an assumed serenity, serenity that implicitly honors all the 20th century reasons not to be serene. (Too bad for Theodor Adorno, who absolutely did not get that, and thought Stravinsky dishonestly tried to make the world go away.) Which makes the music all the more beautiful, and helps me understand why I respond to eagerly to Stravinsky, with no sense of puzzlement or uneasy nostalgia.

There’s a beautiful passage in Bjork’s song “Jóga,” the refrain, with intricate string music weaving around her voice. But look at the words:

Emotional landscapes,
They puzzle me,
Then the riddle gets solved,
And you push me up to this

State of emergency,
How beautiful to be,
State of emergency,
Is where I want to be.

So again we’re in a modern realm of beauty, where beauty has an edge.

And now let me clarify what I’ve been saying, in case it hasn’t been clear. I’m hardly arguing that beauty no longer exists. Instead I’m saying that it isn’t simple. And unfortunately it’s presented—in classical music, these days—as if it was simple. You see this in marketing copy (“come hear the most beautiful music ever written”), in criticism, in program notes, even in academic writing by musicologists. The connotation is that beauty is pure, that it needs no explanation, that it’s calming, ennobling, transfiguring, radiant. This tracks with surveys of the orchestra audience, where you can find people saying they love orchestra concerts because there’s something spiritual or transfiguring about the music. And this also tracks with something you hear a lot in conversation, that people like classical music because it’s “calm.”

Classical music beauty, then, is completely good, with no alloy of trouble. And here’s Bjork, saying—with more aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional depth, if you ask me—that beauty can be a state of emergency. Love…beauty…heightened perception…emergency. This is where the world is now. Classical music, where beauty is calm or transfiguring, is a refuge from the world.

You can read something parallel in Michael Shurkin’s valuable essay, “Why We Still Need Beethoven: Why Modern Art Survives in a Postmodern World,” which appeared in Zeek, a Jewish journal of art and culture in 2002. He says, but from the opposite side, exactly what I’m saying, that classical music speaks to a purer, more untroubled, more hopeful vision of the world than current culture does, and that this is why we need it. The counterargument might be that this older vision can be unrealistic, and sets us up to fail, because it doesn’t show us what the obstacles might be. In that way, though it’s painful to write this, classical music becomes like Top 40 pop, too simple to be realistic.

Curiously, as I was writing this past paragraph, my iTunes shuffle brough up the second of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, 20th century classical music shaking with angst.

Which should remind us that this beauty-filled view of classical music—Shurkin’s, the marketers’, to some degree the audience’s—doesn’t track with classical music’s history. Beethoven didn’t seem so noble or untroubled to people in his time. There was wildness, despair, and mania mixed in. And the romantic era was underlined with sadness, as the certainties of the 18th century disappeared in the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the growth of industry. Nothing was certain any more, and artists started to depict themselves as isolated, expressing only themselves, in opposition to society.

How “beautiful” was that? Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, one of the most influential books ever written, provides one answer. Werther is so dislocated that he kills himself. The influence of the book was that young men started dressing like Werther, and killing themselves. This leads us to Schubert’s Winterreise, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and other works of romantic emotional extremes, which don’t affect us as they affected their contemporaries. We hear Schubert, and we think he’s beautiful. His contemporaries heard him, and burst into tears. How do we bring the classical repertoire back from a realm uncomfortably close to new age music, and put it back in touch with both itself and us?

I wondered if I was completely right to say that “beautiful” isn’t much of an aesthetic category for younger people. Of course it is for some; there are majorities and minorities in anything you look at, and also exceptions to every rule.

But is “beautiful” at the very least not a good description for the alternative rock a lot of smarter younger people listen to? I dialed up all my alt-rock tracks on my iPod, turned on Shuffle, and listened to them in the random order the iPod generated. The artists were Arcade Fire, Bjork (her six-CD Family Tree retrospective) Broken Social Scene, Death Cab for Cutie, Mi and L’au, Sigur Ros (their () album), and The White Stripes (Get Thee Behind Me Satan).

Very little of this music was beautiful. Or at least that’s not the first (or second or third) word that came to my mind as I heard it. Words that jumped into place were wry, poignant, homemade, hopeful (The White Stripes’ “Forever For Her”), weird, sad, desolate (Mi and L’au, “How”), complicated, brainy, odd, forlorn. I won’t swear that the preponderance of sadness here isn’t an accident of selection, though joy is pretty clearly not a common emotion in alternative rock.

The song on right now, as I jump into this shuffle for the third time, is Sigur Ros’s Track 6 (track numbers are the only way the songs on () are identified). It sounds homemade, because of the rather raw, rather casual drumbeats that run through it. Plus brainy, in its long compositional unfolding (completely unlike any pop song). Also brainy and edgy in its occasional dissonant electronics. Plus deeply sad in its emotional landscape. And odd, if you like, because all these things come together, but then that’s a standard feature in this collection of styles. It’s only in pop standards, show tunes, top 40 hits, simple country music, and old classical masterworks that emotions are largely unambiguous. The oddness I often hear in this shuffle goes deeper than that. It’s a deep kind of awkwardness, that maybe comes from trembling on the edge of the inexpressible with musical tools not clearly defined. Note that this doesn’t mean the groups are musically undeveloped. It means that the style is very much evolving. Nobody’s saying what anyone “should” do. Too much technique, or too smooth a technique, is a worse problem. If that’s what you’re offering, then more than likely everything you say will be predictable.

Now Track 2 comes on. Powerfully sad. Heartbreaking, really. A soft scratch of a needle on an old record (or that’s what it sounds like). Wavering voices, barely heard in the distance. Reassuring drums, very full, soft, strong. Hesitant guitar, pitch slightly wavering, outlining lonely chords, uncertain gaps between the notes. This music is really very beautiful, but only after typing everything you’ve just read (and going back more than once to listen) did that word occur to me. It’s beautiful because of everything else I could describe it as. The beauty comes as a footnote. I wouldn’t listen to this because it’s beautiful. And despite the many times I listened to the beginning, to fix my words, I’m not sure I can stand to hear it soon again. So sad. (Seven and a half minutes.)

Arcade Fire, of all these groups, comes closest to what I think we mean by “beautiful” in classical music. It also strikes me as the most nearly classical in its way of writing music. Meaning here traditionally classical, since Bjork (as I’m hardly the first to say) can sound a lot like new classical music (which shows why she isn’t “beautiful” in any traditional sense). One “beautiful” Arcade Fire song would be “Crown of Love,” possibly because of its harmony, quite classical (or simply old-fashioned) in its push to dominant chords, and then back to the tonic.

Though in the meld of styles that’s the norm in current pop there are background triplets, straight from ‘50s rock, and other not-classical details. And in rock’s rhythmic language, the clump of the bass drum on every downbeat is a rhythmic dissonance. In rock, the clump implicitly (and usually explicitly) falls on the backbeat, so in a complex way the downbeat emphasis jabs at the rhythm, subtly throwing it off.

And then in classical terms, the V of VI chord in first inversion shouldn’t — right in the first stanza of the song, yet —move directly back to I! Illegal! Not allowed! Sounds fine, though, and creates an expectation, later fulfilled, for a “proper” resolution to VI. (This is the kind of harmony that’s natural on the guitar, where you can think of chords as independent units, and don’t have to care about voiceleading, unless you want to.)

Besides, beauty has to be ambiguous in a song with lyrics like these:

They say it fades if you let it,
love was made to forget it.
I carved your name across my eyelids,
you pray for rain I pray for blindness.

If you still want me, please forgive me,
the crown of love has fallen from me.
If you still want me, please forgive me,
because the spark is not within me.

That tears at you. There’s no rest in beauty like this. (And then we can argue about the old-style drama in the music, big chord progressions, surging vocals, how ironically or absurdly or maybe just appropriately excessive this is.)

Another “beautiful” song, the most purely beautiful I’ve heard in these shuffles, would be “Passenger Seat,” by Death Cab for Cutie. But that might be because for once I’m hearing a straightforward love song:

roll the window down
And then begin to breathe in
The darkest country road
And the strong scent of evergreen
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

Then looking upwards
I strain my eyes and try
To tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

"do they collide?"
I ask and you smile.
With my feet on the dash
The world doesn't matter.

When you feel embarrassed then i'll be your pride
When you need directions then i'll be the guide
For all time.
For all time

Collisions are distant. Now just the scent of evergreen, and the simple beauty of the music.

I'm often asked how classical music can attract a younger audience. There aren't any easy answers, but it's pretty obvious -- or ought to be -- that the younger audience, if it ever showed up, wouldn't be much like the older one. Or, to put this another way, the younger people the classical music world would like to attract aren't much like the older audience classical music already has. Oh, of course you'll find a few younger people happy to attend on the same terms the older audience does -- or in effect to become part of that older audience -- but they're going to be in a minority. Younger people these days rather famously have a new kind of culture, and it's very different from the culture of classical music.

(As an aside, I have to laugh over what I mean by "younger people." From a classical music point of view, these would be people in their thirties and forties. People in their forties, though, would surely be amazed -- though maybe flattered or delighted -- to find anybody saying that they're young. They'd surely think that "young" people would be in their twenties or their early thirties. Only in classical music would young people be older.)

So what’s this new kind of culture, the one younger people share? It’s almost silly to ask, since embodiments of it (not to mention descriptions of it) are all over the media, for instance in the business section of The New York Times, nearly every day. Or in The Onion, the fabulous satirical weekly that also has one of the best culture sections around; certainly it has the best film reviews I read. Or you could watch people in their 20s and 30s, or 40s. Or you could ask them how they do things. Or you might even be one of these people yourself! (Or you could read Alex Ross, who writes about loving classical music very much from the point of view of this generation the classical music world doesn’t know what to do with.)

And now I have to laugh again, because the classical music world is only beginning to learn about all this. Or, for that matter, to understand that in a large classical music organization, many people on the staff are members of that prospective younger audience. Not that they commonly go to the organization’s concerts. Which means that “know thyself” would be important advice for orchestras, among other institutions. If you want to know why younger people don’t come to your concerts, ask the younger people on your staff! They’re a built-in focus group.

I made a presentation not long ago to part of the board of one of the largest orchestras in this country, and talked a lot about this problem. I’ll post here some of the things I said. But for now I’ll just start with one of them, which is a problem with the word “beautiful.” Often classical music marketing copy stresses this word, as if beauty was one of classical music’s great attractions. And so it is, for members of the traditional older audience. But not with younger people, I think. Or at least not with many of the smart ones. “Beautiful,” at best, means not much more than “pretty,” these days, and music that only can be called beautiful would seem pretty empty. How about thoughtful music, challenging music, ambiguous music, wry music? Or even troubled music, conflicted music, since all these words might show up in some description of smart alternative bands.

If classical music is mainly “beautiful,” then it’s not even playing in a very intelligent ballpark. It’s just about advertising its emptiness, or rather what people are going to believe is its emptiness. “Beautiful” music is many things, but in modern terms it certainly doesn’t sound very interesting. “What’s your friend Melissa like?” “Oh, she’s a beautiful woman!” “Yes, and…?” Is she a supermodel type, a bimbo, or a gorgeous woman with brains and attitude? You’d want to know more. And the same is true about music.

And I treasure this little gem, sent to me in an e-mail exchange about this very subject:

“Beautiful” [has] gone to this magic point beyond overused adjective. It's become one of those words you just don't even notice, just there to connect other words and fill up space. At this point I just classify it with “the” “an,” “it” and “or” and such…

Coming: more about the culture of today, and how it relates (or doesn’t) to classical music.

I was driving back from the country to New York, flipping around on the radio dial, looking for whatever might catch my ear. The heavy metal station from Poughkeepsie? The AM station from Pittsburgh that unpredictably wafted across three states the last time I drove late at night, broadcasting a show for older folks, who called in requesting songs they'd danced to in the Big Band days?

I listened for a while to soul music from the city. The DJ's voice could have made a nun melt. A woman named Keisha called him. She'd had a hard day. "You have to do something for me," the DJ purred. He told her she should take a bubble bath, and lie in it until he played her song. And what song was that? What was her request? "Secret Lover." "Oh no, Keisha!" "It is what it is." "But Keisha, keep your eyes open…keep them open for what you really want…"

Flip the dial. Public radio. Beethoven, the late A major piano sonata, Op. 101. First movement. Now I began to melt. Such perfect music, "perfect" meaning to me that it doesn't strain, doesn't strive, has no transitions. Every phrase within it simply is, using nothing more than weight and tone to take its place within the flow. And each phrase seems very simple, simple and direct. There's nothing "classical" here, nothing that seems removed from everyday expression, nothing that ought to need analysis or explanation. If I composed anything like this, I'd think I could be happy forever.

(Not the second, third, and fourth movements, though. They're OK, but the first movement is perfect.)

The new episode of my book on the future of classical music went online today, Monday, January 9. It's about structure in classical music, and starts to talk about my take on how structure works. I'll be continuing on the same subject in Episode Five, which will go onlin on January 23. I aim to have these episodes available at 12:00 AM on these days (midnight of the night before). But note that this is Eastern Standard Time (New York time), in the United States. Readers outside this time zone -- and especially International readers -- will find the episode earlier, or later.

I'm happy to be back to work on this. Comments welcome, as always! And if you'd like to be notified by e-mail when new episodes are posted, write me with "subscribe" in the subject line at gsandow@artsjournal.com.

Some months ago, I went to a large and impressive function at Juilliard, a public forum on the arts in America, featuring some all-star guests: Renee Fleming, Stephen Sondheim, David McCullough (the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. This turned out to be a no-bullshit symposium. All of the stars talked sense, and talked from their personal experience. You could agree or disagree with what they said, but they weren’t speaking empty words. The same was true of Juilliard’s president, Joseph Polisi, who led the discussion.

Twice Polisi asked what the difference was between art and entertainment. This, for many people, is a crucial question, because the value of the arts—and especially the value of classical music—seems to hang on it. Art, many people think, is lofty and profound. Entertainment, by contrast, is shallow and predictable. The very word “entertainment” seems to carry and inherent qualifier: mere entertainment, diverting, maybe, but worthless compared to art. Naturally popular culture, and especially pop music, is dismissed this way. It’s all entertainment, and nothing more.

But none of the panelists took that view! They wouldn’t go there. They wouldn’t make any rules, especially rules linked to musical genres. Fleming was especially determined here. “Right now,” she said, “I’m singing Manon at the Met. But that’s not art. It’s entertainment. It’s romantic fluff.” But she’d just been to see Verdi’s Falstaff at the Met, and that, she said, really was art. She went on to talk about pop music—how much she liked it, how important it had always been to her artistically, and how she planned to sing much more of it in the future.

Polisi asked both Fleming and Sondheim if they’d ever had to compromise their art for commercial reasons. Sondheim, who’s worked all his life in the commercial world of Broadway, said he never had. Fleming, who works in the lofty non-profit sphere of art, said she had to compromise constantly. Opera houses wanted her to sing popular repertoire; her record company wanted her to make recordings that would sell.

So if we can’t formalize the difference between art and entertainment, Polisi asked, how can we justify funding for the arts? A good question, and also a fine example of how well Polisi led the conversation, always sharpening, focusing, refining. Sondheim immediately granted the importance of the question, which nobody quite knew how to answer. I’d say that the arts (as traditionally defined) should be funded not because they’re better than popular culture, but because they’re different, and because the different things they do are valuable. Though where we draw the line is problematic. Why aren’t independent films art, and therefore fundable? And what about noncommercial pop? (Which is already funded, in a way, in Britain, where each year a noncommercial band can win a special prize.) And can’t art sometimes be commercial? (A point insisted on by all the panelists, who rather strongly noted—McCullough with special poignancy—that artists don’t mind at all when people like their work, and when their work can make a living for them.)

But leave those questions for another time. Right now I want to say that I think the whole art and entertainment thing is bogus. Art and entertainment, in my view, are separate qualities, and any piece of music, film, or play (or poem, painting, pop song, jazz performance, sculpture, dance, or graphic novel) could be either, both, or maybe even neither. Art might be a quality of freshness and unpredictability that tells us something new about our world and ourselves; entertainment, as a quality we potentially might find in any human endeavor (or in nature), would be the mere fact of being entertaining. (And if we define art as an experience, as a special way of paying attention, rather than as a quality somehow inherent in things that people deliberately create as art, then we could find art in anything. That’s part of what John Cage was about.)

With this in mind, we can rate things separately for their art and entertainment value. The Schoenberg Violin Concerto is pretty artistic, but not very entertaining. Webern’s little pieces for soprano, E flat clarinet, and guitar, on the other hand, are wildly artistic and also wildly entertaining. And maybe other people won’t find Webern as entertaining as I do, but that, as the old line goes, is why there’s chocolate and vanilla. All of us like different things, and, on top of that, we like them in different ways. I could go on with the rating game, and say that Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska is tremendously artistic, and not entertaining at all, and that, in Götterdämmerung, the scene for Hagen and Alberich is a comparative low ebb, given Wagner’s standard, for both art and entertainment, but that Hagen’s call to the vassals rates high on both counts.

I guess I should name something that’s entertaining without being artistic, but I have to admit that’s harder for me, because I’m not all that likely to be entertained by something that isn’t, at the very least, artful. One of my Juilliard students, faced with this question in a class, said she named eating contests (like the one each year at Nathan’s, in Coney Island in New York, to see who can eat the most hot dogs). That’s a good answer. But the important thing here, for me, is to clarify what entertainment and art really are — that (at least in my view) they’re entirely separate concepts, which in practice can often be united in a single endeavor, but which ought to be thought about separately, and should never be opposed to each other.