March 2006 Archives

Today in the New York Times -- a business-section piece on TV commercials, yet another threatened institution in the rush of current changes in our culture. Companies now divert some of their TV advertising dollars to cell phones and the Internet; many people record shows with DVRs, and skip the commercials; many people go onnline during commercial breaks, and don't watch the commercials at all. (The Times business section, by the way, is a good place to find out what's changing in our culture. Anybody trying to sell anything has to know how things are changing, so they know how to find their customers.)

And buried inside this piece is this little passing remark: "…the trend of consumers being obsessed with user-generated content. A trend, obviously, that the business section and its readers take for granted. The context here was an ad campaign from Converse, which invited anyone at all to make videos with Converse sneakers in them. So popular culture makes people passive? Just the reverse, and advertisers now are so aware that people make cultural choices for themselves -- and in fact create their own culture -- that they now base ad campaigns on that.

Later in the section came a piece about mashups -- the practice of slicing and dicing music, video, whatever, combining existsing things to create something new. Well, really the piece was about investing in a company whose software facilitates mashups. Is there any money in it.? But again -- the trend is taken for granted. Everybody knows it exists.

And for some terrific musical mashups created by Jennifer Foster of WDAV, an all-classical public radio station in North Carolina, go here (it's a page from the station's website), scroll down to the bottom, and click on the five "montages" under "Main Street Sessions Remix." "Dulcissime" from Carmina Burana over something played by a local teenaged harpist (that's in Montage 1) -- I love it!

Has anyone else from a classical music institution done anything like this?

I'm happy to announce a performance of a recent piece of mine. This is a piece for cello and piano, called A te; it's an unpredictable and (if I say so myself) rather sly set of variations on "A te o cara," a tenor aria from Bellini's opera "I Puritani." These performances are happening on a series called Second Helpings, produced by the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble. Here's the data:

April 1, 2 PM: Chelsea Art Museum, 556 West 22nd Street, in New York

April 2, 2 PM: Dia:Beacon. This is a museum in Beacon, NY, where the Dia Foundation shows its art collection. For directions, go to their website.

This performance is one of several ways in which I'm slowly reemerging as a composer. I hope to announce a couple of more events soon. This piece — originally written for cellist Adiel Shmit, to whom I'm grateful — plays games. As a musician who heard it said after its premiere a few months ago, "You never know what's coming next." The Bellini tune comes at the end, and emerges like a light out of darkness, tying together everything that came before. Suddenly you realize where the things you've been hearing came from.

The variations run all over the stylistic map. The first one takes off from Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." Others are little tributes to bebop (with the cello and piano both taking solos). Still others are quietly drunken little rhapsodies. There's also a nod to minimalism, and, in many places, more dissonance than I usually write. I'm learning to bring all the non-classical music I love into classical pieces (odd that it didn't come naturally to me before, given how strongly I've publicly said that such things should happen). This piece maybe reflects the feeling I often have about music in our time, that the variety of it is just staggering, but also (with no disrespect meant to any musical style) a bit like litter — there's so much of it around that, apart from following your nose and just listening to whatever you love, it's hard to know what to do to it all.

Because the theme comes at the end, I had two problems in writing the piece. The first was how to start (since usually a set of variations starts stalwartly with the theme). I decided to use the orchestral introduction to the aria, just as you hear it in the opera. So the piece becomes a Bellini sandwich — Bellini at the beginning and end, me in the middle.

The other problem was how to get to the end — how to brake all the crazy momentum, how to make a transition from short, gnomic, wildly varied variations into the peaceful D major of the theme. My answer was to break the variations into fragments, as if the music slowly collapsed into rubble. And from that rubble the theme emerges.

That's a lot of writing about a fairly short piece! Also on the program is music, by a lovely quirk of fate, written by people I've known for a long time, and really like: Chet Biscardi, Martha Mooke, and Joan Tower (who's the artistic director of the series).

If any readers come to these performances, please come up and say hello!

Feel free to peruse the score of A te, and listen to a synthesizer version of the music.

The following comes from somebody in the business who wants to be anonymous. It was sent as a comment on my book, but it's worthwhile putting it out for everyone to see:

Permit me to offer a real-world perspective re your comment that "orchestras should try to find people who really like the modernist works." That's very true, but the cold, hard fact is that, at the present time, it's a small audience.

The research I’ve seen says somewhere between 5 – 10% of the current orchestra audience likes modern or contemporary. And the other 90%+ are becoming increasingly reluctant to buy an expensive ticket for a concert where half the program is music they dislike.

There’s a fundamental law of consumer behavior at work here -- people don't spend time or money on something they don't want. This fundamental reality applies to consumer behavior across the board, including orchestras.

I’ve also seen analyses of ticket sales that shows there is a strong, statistically valid inverse relationship between the word 'premiere' in a program – world, national or local -- and ticket sales. In other words, say “premiere” in a classical context and you can count on lower attendance.

These are just the realities of the orchestra business today. And here’s one more cold, hard reality: if new music sold more tickets, you can bet your bass clef orchestras would be doing a lot more of it.

I confess the data I see makes me kinda skeptical that the answer lies in whether or not we play new music, in and of itself. I sense that the answer is to connect. And to deploy all the elements of the experience -- the music, how it's performed, how it's presented, etc. etc. -- towards that purpose.

I think what you're REALLY arguing, Greg, is that we need to change the paradigm, challenge the assumption that today's audience is tomorrow's audience, that today's concerts are tomorrow's concerts, that today's organizations are tomorrow's organizations. The tricky part is getting from today to tomorrow; I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Once more I'll be going out on stage at Severance Hall in Cleveland, to lead short musical discussions during a Cleveland Orchestra concert. This coming Sunday, March 26; the concert starts at 3 PM.

Small audience, good discussion. I was very struck with the passion that began to come out. This subject -- the future of classical music -- gets people going. It doesn't only stir up peoples' love of music; it stirs up everything they care about in current culture.

So one woman got up and passionately said it was "naive" to think that a more informal presentation could attract newcomers to classical music .The music's too complex for that, she said. Someone else declaimed for some time on the theme that popular culture makes everybody passive. Someone else, who loves popular culture, thinks that it's badly degenerated since the old days.

Everyone who's read me here knows I disagree with all these thoughts. But I honor the people who voiced them. They deeply, deeply care.

The third episode of the new version of my book on the future of classical music is now online. Gradually I’m making my way through what will be the book’s first introductory chapter (or maybe simply the introduction), in which I set forth, in general terms, what the book’s going to say. When I’m through with that, I’ll launch the first main section, which will be about the measurable side of the classical music crisis—aging audience, declining ticket sales, and all the rest.

The next episode goes online two weeks from today, on April 3. If you’d like e-mail notification, please subscribe!

This coming Thursday, March 23, I’ll be speaking on a small panel about the future of classical music. 6:30 PM, at the Dahesh Museum, 580 Madison Avenue, in New York.

One reason this will be fun for me -- I get all of five minutes to state my position. There's nothing like brevity to focus my thoughts; this should be a big help in organizing my ideas for my book. Composer Stefania de Kenessey will moderate, and my co-panelists will be the very lively composer Paul Moravec, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music, and two people I don't knokw, composer/pianist David Ramsden Homan, executive director of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, and Kenneth Hamrick, conductor and artistic director of the American Virtuosi Baroque Chamber Orchestra. There’ll be a short reception after the event; tickets are $10 (students $6).

The Wisconsin Public Radio broadcast I thought I was doing — during my visit to Milwaukee, to talk about Brahms for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra— fell through. But I had a lively time on Milwaukee’s classical station, WFMR. I was talking to Steve Murphy, the station’s program director, and Samantha George, the associate concertmaster of the orchestra, on a weekly show they do called MSO Backstage Pass. I couldn’t imagine two better people to talk to. Samantha asked most of the questions, and I loved, really loved, talking about music as one musician to another. They keep these shows archived on their website for a couple of weeks. Soon you’ll be able to hear this one, either as streaming audio or a downloadable podcast.

Samantha, by the way, is clearly one of those classical musicians who can build a bridge from classical music to the rest of the world. She has a show, she tells me, Monday mornings at 10:30 on an alternative rock station, WMSC. She talks about classical music, and says she gets a terrific response. And why not? As she and I agreed, there’s nobody with more genuine interest in all kinds of music than people who like alternative rock. And to judge from my own conversation with her, I’d guess she’s irresistible. I’m going to listen to her show (and you might want to, too) on the station’s website.

As I studied various Brahms scores, I was forcefully hit by something I'd thought about before, but never noticed this clearly. You can gush about great composers all you like -- their magical inspiration, their matchless flights of musical creativitiy -- but it's hard to keep doing that when you study details of their orchestration, especially if you've ever orchestrated yourself. Yes, there are times when some orchestration idea strikes like a ray of light out of nowhere (that final chord in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, the famous flute and trombone chords in the Berlioz Requiem, the amazing passage in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth when the big tune gets flowingly played by low strings and contrapuntal bassoons). But often the details of orchestration take you into the composer's workshop. You see the great names of the pantheon solving practical problems. You see them making choices -- and you can see what the choices are, because the alternatives -- the choices they didn't make -- are often plainly obvious.

This even applies to Mozart, often worshipped as the most magical of magical composers. But try tihinking of magic when you look at the trumpets in the first movement of the Jupiter Symphony, hammering out very basic rhythms on mostly just two notes. Inspiration isn't striking here; instead, Mozart is making practical decisions about how to best use the trumpets to reinforce loud parts of the music. You can see him, in measures 9 through 14, choosing to use the trumpets in not quite the way he uses the horns. The horns play on all the beats; the trumpets only play on some of them. It's easy to imagine how the music would sound if the trumpets played on all the beats, and you can see why Mozart made the choice he did.

In Brahms, you find many passages where the oboes or clarinets (or sometimes both) double the flutes an octave lower. And then you find passages where the clarinets sometimes double the flutes, and sometimes diverge from them. Again, that's a choice Brahms is making. You can imagine the music with the clarinets literally doubling everything the flutes play. Maybe that would be too bland. THen you can imagine the music with the clarinets always playing independent parts. Maybe that would sound too thick. So you can understand Brahms's choice, more practical than magical.

There's a terrific example of this in the first statement of the big tune in the last movement of the first symphony. What follows, I'd better warn, is somewhat technical, so musicians (or at least people who read music) will have an easier time with it than others might. Here's the start of the passage I'm talking about:

If you look at the strings, you see the second violins move back and forth between doubling the first violins -- playing exactly what they play -- and playing independent notes of their own. Why does Brahms do this? Well., at times he doesn't have any choice. Look at the second measure i've quoted -- the first violins are playing low A, and the violas are playing F. There isn't any note in the chord (an F chord, the IV chord in C major) between the F and A for the second violins to play. And they can't go down to F, since their range stops at G. So they have to play the A with the first violins.

That pretty much dooms any chance that they could have a fully independent part during the statement of this theme. But Brahms sometimes has them doubling the first violins even when they don't have to. Look at the first measure. The first violins play C, and the violas are down on E. The chord is C major. The second violins could easily play the G between the C and the E, but instead they go up with the first violins, and double the C. Why? For two reasons, I think.

(1) If they're sometimes going to play independent notes and sometimes double the first ivolins, they'd better switch back and forth between these roles constantly. That's the most flowing, the most elegant way to handle them. Otherwise, their role would be rudimentary (if they doubled the first violins most of the time) or the music might sound too thick (if they played too many independent notes). (2) They start, in the previous measure, by playing low G with the first violins. And after they double the C, they go down to G to fill in a G chord while the violins play B and the violas play D. So if they played G at the point I'm talking about, their part would be rudimentary: G, G, G. By doubling the violins on the C, their part is much more flowing: G, C, G.

It's fascinating to see these details of Brahms's thinking. And I repeat: none of this is magical. It's just the practical stuff a composer thinks about every day, and works out in painstaking detail. (And, if you're Beethoven, with a lot of screaming and banging on the walls.)

One more practical Brahms decision I can't resist mentioning. In the opening movement of the Requiem, he rather famously leaves out the violins, so the strings -- now limited to violas, cellos, and basses -- have a darker, more subdued tone. (He does the same thing in the second orchestral serenade.) But it's less widely noted that he also leaves out the clarinets. Why? Because, I'd guess, he wanted a brighter woodwind sound to contrast with the darker string sound. Chords with flutes, oboes, and bassoons will have a subtle shine, even sometimes an edge, that gets muted if you add clarinets.

When I wrote out that passage from the first symphony in my notation software, I changed the C to a G in the first complete measure of the second violin part. Then I had my computer play the result. The music now sounds stiff. Brahms made the right choice.

I'll be in Milwaukee this coming weekend, speaking about Brahms for the Milwaukee Symphony, along with my old friend Tim Page. We'll be doing preconcert talks at 10:30 AM on Friday, and at 7 PM on Saturday. That's right, 10:30 AM; the concert's at 11:15.. Tim and I will also be on Wisconsin Public Radio at 9 AM on Friday.

And so now you know why I've been blogging recently about Brahms. Just doing my normal overpreparation, which in this case has been a joy, partly because Jan Swafford's Brahms biography is one of the most deeply satisfying books on music that I've ever read, and partly because I'm overdue to get to know Brahms -- really know him, the way I know Verdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Webern, Schoenberg, Stravinsky. I've never liked him all that much in the past (old-timers might remember something I wrote about why I didn't like him, for Keynote magazine back in the '80s). Lately I've mellowed, and now, with Swafford's help, I think I'm starting to understand the guy. Also with help from Furtwangler, whose Brahms symphony performances speak maybe not in Brahms's voice (there's too much Wagner in them), but in a voice that translates Brahms. Brahms's own voice, as Swafford points out, more or less retreats behind the music, behind all the motivic relationships, the counterpoint, the form. Which, then, is exactly where you have to look for it. One magic moment for me was when I began to hear Brahms singing in all the statements of one of the basic motifs in the first movement of the second symphony -- the little dance of D C sharp and D that starts the music off in the cellos and basses, and comes back in endless disguises later on. I used to think things like that got fussy; now I can all but see the eager true Brahms, hiding behind all kinds of crustiness, peeping out through them. Another magic moment was when I heard one of the second symphony themes (the closing theme of the exposition of the first movement) as an inversion of things heard earlier -- literally heard it as an inversion, not understood it as one, or analyzed it as one.

Along with this came -- especially with Furtwangler's help -- a new appreciation of things in Brahms that used to strike me as uneasy banging. (The third movement of the fourth symphony, for instance.) Furtwangler has a fabulous way of handling those moments. He takes them right over the top, filling them with the kind of wild excitement I can imagine Brahms, too, must have felt, behind his beard. Listen especially to what Furtwangler does with the last movement of the second symphony. I have no idea if Brahms would have approved his heightened rushing of the tempo whenever things get excited. Brahms, when he was young, played his piano music with great freedom, and late in life told Clara Schumann that one of his piano intermezzi had to be played with all kinds of tempo changes not written in the score. And, as a conductor, there was one part of the first symphony that Brahms used to rush. (All this is in Swafford.) But Brahms wasn't too crazy about other freedoms that Hans von Bulow used to take when he conducted, so the historical evidence, as least from what I know now, isn't very conclusive. (If anyone knows more about this, please tell me!)

Enough for now. I could gush about Brahms for a long time. My difficulties with him, I think, ultimately come from his odd historical position as the most classical of all classical composers. Before his time, roughly speaking, the very concept of classical music didn't exist, and people didn't play the music of the past. By the time he died (1897), the classical music world as we know it was pretty well established. I blogged earlier about how he saw his name enshrined above the proscenium of a new concert hall, along with Bach's and Beethoven's. The notion of the "three B's" (coined by von Bulow) existed, in other words, in Brahms's own lifetime. So he was the only composer who functioned during his lifetime as part of the classical canon! Wagner, his greatest contemporary, couldn't do that; he was too radical. But Brahms, the proud classicist, easily could. Or not so easily -- he was sometimes hurt by the growing concentration on music of the past, which made music of the present less welcome. He himself, when he conducted a major chorus in Vienna, didn't do much new music. His canonical position made him, I think, the most thorough embodiment of classical music who ever lived -- which brings with it, I think, a certain self-conscious stiffness.

But, as I said, enough. If any of my readers happens to be at these Milwuakee events, please come up and say hello. I'd be more than happy to meet you.

After I blogged on Peter Gelb's turnaround plan for the Met, Joe Kluger e-mailed. Joe used to run the Philadelphia Orchestra; now he works with AEA Consulting. I asked Joe if I could share his thoughts, and he agreed. Very interesting thoughts here, about what has to happen -- in very practical terms -- for the Met to truly turn around:

Greg: I read your ArtsJournal blog on the Met, which I thought was a great synthesis of all the positive things about Peter’s plans. The initial reaction that some of us at AEA had when we read the first NYT account was that this could be a catalyst for a departure from the arts programming SOP throughout the U.S., which is based on the standard ratio of 2/3 “safe and familiar” to 1/3 “new, but mostly unlikable.” But, this programming philosophy shift will occur beyond the Met ONLY if the Met is actually successful with this new plan. Unfortunately, “success,” will not be defined by critics and professionals like us, but ticket buyers and donors. And the measures of success will be:

• Whether they can sell on average 90 to 95% of the seats every year and

• Whether they can balance the budget each year (without $25M annual gifts from Mrs. Bass)

What I did not see in the Met’s announcement was an acknowledgment that this bold artistic plan is both expensive and risky, and a list of the strategies they will use to minimize both. While I would not expect Peter to disclose publicly controversial decisions that have yet to be made, I wonder whether he actually has any plans to:

• Test audience receptivity to the new artistic approach and, if warranted, market the season in a segmented way, which gives subscribers the option of choosing what mix of familiar and new they want

• Test audience receptivity to the pricing strategy (I think they are seeing some price resistance already at the high end and will find increased resistance to the “Robin Hood” concept of raising top ticket prices even more to subsidize the lowering of the bottom prices)

• Reduce (or at least restrain increases in) personnel expenses. The amount of money that the Met spends on musicians, stagehands, chorus, singers, etc. is a huge portion of its budget. And, one of the ironies of Joe Volpe’s tenure has been that, for all of his public persona as a “tough guy,” he has bought labor peace by allowing increases in union contracts that regularly exceed inflation. To pay for Peter’s exciting artistic ventures, he will need to allocate more resources to production costs, stage designers and directors, conductors, etc. Since he won’t be able to fund raise enough to cover the incremental costs of the new artistic plans AND cover the existing structural deficit, I wonder if he has the balls to shift resources away from “routine” aspects of running the opera company to the “innovative” areas.

Anyway, I thought I would share these thoughts, not in any way to dampen my enthusiasm for the positive statements in your Met blog, but to suggest that you might want to do a follow up at some point, outlining some of the risks that the Met will face in achieving “success” with Peter’s new artistic plans.

Joe himself provided the followup…

I love the ending of his Op. 1, the first piano sonata, in C major, which he wrote when he was in his teens. Listen to it…doesn’t it just radiate teenage exuberance? I can almost hear him shouting, “I finished it! I finished yet!” (And yes, I know that, despite the opus number, this was really the second piano sonata he wrote. But still I can’t believe he wasn’t thrilled to finish it.)

From Jan Swafford’s deep and compassionate biography of Brahms comes this little tidbit. At one point, at the height of his fame, Brahms attended the opening of a new concert hall. Above the proscenium were the names of three composers from the classical canon — Bach, Beethoven, and himself.

What an amazing experience for any living composer! But the historical meaning of this is very important. The idea of a classical canon — the idea, in fact, of classical music — didn’t exist before the 19th century. In general, music from the past wasn’t performed, and while a few people treasured older music (as Charles Rosen likes to point out, Bach’s keyboard music circulated in manuscript), the public at large wanted to hear music that was new.

Early in the 19th century, this started to change. As William Weber documents in his book Music and the Middle Class, connoisseurs (especially German connoisseurs) began to talk about the music of the great masters, at first meaning Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and then extending the canon (as music from the past got better known) to include Bach.

Brahms came along after this movement had gotten well established. So even as a teenager, studying with one of his first teachers, he could be hailed as a likely successor to Beethoven. The canon, in those days, was in a fascinating state, halfway between (or so it strikes me) the 18th century, when no canon existed, and the classical music world we know today. That is, the canon existed, but it still was alive; living people could join it.

Which is exactly what Brahms did. He was widely recognized as the next name in the canon, a position which, by the way, didn’t mean that he was the unchallenged leading composer of his time. Music was divided then, broadly speaking, into three types. (Swafford is wonderfully vivid about this.) There was “popular music” (as the connoisseurs actually called it), which meant opera and performances by flashy virtuosos. And then there was the avant-garde music of the “new German school,” written above all by Wagner, who said outright that he was writing the music of the future. And then there was music in the classical tradition, or in other words by composers who saw themselves as continuing the work of the classical masters. These included Mendelssohn, Schumann, and then Brahms.

So who was the leading composer of that time? If you were Italian, or liked opera, you might have said Rossini, and later Verdi. If you were an artist inclined toward the avant-garde, you’d say Wagner. And if you were a classicist, you’d say Brahms. So there was his name, in one of the top three slots of the pantheon, staring at him from the proscenium of a new concert hall. Being in that position (which of course he got to long before his name was inscribed above that concert stage) put a lot of pressure on him. That’s one reason he found it so hard to write a symphony. (Robert and Clara Schumann told him almost as soon as they met him, when he was all of 19, that the piano music he was writing was certainly good, but that he wouldn’t fulfill his destiny until he started writing for orchestra.)

But what a moment for classical music that was — when the canon was formed, but somebody still alive could be inscribed in it. By the end of Brahms’s life, that couldn’t happen. The composers that came along after him (Mahler, for instance) were too radical to fit in the canon. And thus things started to move to where we are now, when new music stands outside the normal classical-music order. Yes, you can be elected (so to speak) to the classical canon, as Mahler was, or Benjamin Britten, but only after you’re dead.

My friend Julia Kirchhausen — VP, Public Relations at the American Symphony Orchestra League — gave me another view on trends in orchestral ticket sales. I’d said they’ve been declining steadily since 1990, and she said the League’s figures give a different picture, showing a peak in 1996-97, as follows:

season                         attendance           # of concerts           

1990-91                       27,198,563                  25,210        

1993-94                       30,742,252                  27,484

1994-95                       29,862,089                  28,609

1995-96                       31,297,124                  29,661

1996-97                       32,661,817                  30,025

1997-98                       32,161,564                  31,766

1998-99                       30,795,560                  31,549

1999-00                       31,667,154                  33,154

2000-01                       31,532,607                  36,437

2001-02                       30,305,376                  37,118

2002-03                       27,802,240                  38,182

2003-04                       27,682,749                  37,263

But now comes the interesting part. Julia’s numbers are aggregate figures for 1200 American orchestras, gathered from many of them and then extrapolated to cover all the rest. My figures (which I’ve seen, but can’t at this point reproduce here) were gathered only from some of the largest orchestras. And there’s another difference, too. The League’s figures cover attendance for all kinds of concerts (family concerts, classical concerts, kids’ concerts, holiday concerts, parks concerts, you name it), while my figures covered only sales for core classical subscription events.

So here are two obvious explanations for the disparity. First, big orchestras might show a larger sales decline than small ones. Second — and I think this is very likely — sales for core classical events are declining faster than attendance at all events. That would be a sign of trouble, since the core classical concerts (at which orchestras play the music that’s most important to them) are the core of an orchestra’s artistic mission. That artistic mission (if these figures are correct) has been getting less support with each passing year, though more broadly populist events don’t do as badly. There might also be a distinction here between sales and attendance. School concerts and parks concerts (maybe with tens of thousands of people listening) count toward attendance; they don’t count toward sales.

But one thing these figures certainly show is that we need more data. I might have been too hasty, drawing conclusions for all orchestras from data that comes from just a few of them (though of course a sharp decline in large-orchestra ticket sales is very troubling). But the League’s figures, as Julia so helpfully reported them to me, are too general to show much of anything (though they do seem to confirm some kind of decline). There’s also the fascinating increase in the number of concerts orchestras give. What’s up with that?

We need more data. For a start, we need sales and attendance figures broken down by size of orchestra and type of concert. Once we have that, we can start to draw firmer conclusions, though I stick by my statement that a striking decline in large-orchestra ticket sales looks very bad for classical music (or at least for classical music as we’ve been used to seeing it operate).