“Main Street Sessions” footnote

When I wrote my post on classical and pop performed

together, I should have noted a few places where this really happens, or almost

happens. Key among them ought to be the London Sinfonietta,

which has done concerts with Warp Records, a pop label, in which Warp artists

play on programs where the rest of the music is by serious postwar composers

like Xenakis. These concerts have been wildly

successful, attracting a large, young audience, who from what I’ve heard like

the Xenakis pieces just as much as the pop stuff.

And then there’s Zankel Hall, the

newest and hippest of Carnegie Hall’s three performance spaces. The programming

there mixes classical and pop (not to mention world music and jazz). Rarely do

these musics show up on the same concert, but one

idea afloat in all this is to brand Zankel as a place

where art music in many styles can be heard, and thus to develop an audience

for all of it.

Likewise Nonesuch Records, which long ago (as I’ve said

before) stopped being a classical music label, and instead became an art music

label, with “art music” defined as anything from Emmylou Harris to John Adams,

Steve Reich, and Richard Goode. Although again I don’t think the various styles

are likely to appear on the same CD (except maybe when dance DJs remixed Steve

Reich pieces). And I’m not sure Nonesuch needs to brand itself, with the idea

that the same people might buy all their releases. I think they simply want

their releases to sell. (With the exception, quite honorably, of some of the

classical CDs—music by Louis Andriessen, for

instance, which Nonesuch is determined to record whether anyone buys it or

not).

And then there are arts centers, which long ago stopped

offering (or at least most of them stopped) all-classical performing arts series.

Now there’s likely to be world music and jazz, simply because classical music

won’t sell enough tickets to keep these concerts in business.

Finally, here’s an important thing I forgot, a really personal

reason why concerts might include music from many different styles—because I’d

like to go to those concerts. Not that I always mind sitting through an entire

evening of classical music—this is my first and probably my greatest musical love,

after all, and it’s also the business I’m in. But who’s going to deny that some

classical concerts go on too long? Or, which often amounts to the same thing,

that they’re not programmed skillfully enough to justify their length.

Sometimes an entire evening of an orchestra is just too much. There might be

one piece on a program that—as performed by the orchestra on stage that night—really

demands to be heard. And while it’s surely unfair (most of the time) to call

the other pieces “filler,” I often can’t help feeling that there wasn’t any

compelling need to hear them.

In such cases, why not have Radiohead playing part of the

concert instead? (Well, there are many practical obstacles, but still…they

could be worked out.) I’d certainly be interested.