May 2006 Archives

Here's something wonderful. There's now a spirited and very civilized debate about Allan Kozinn's New York Times piece, in the comments to my last post -- with Allan himself taking part. Allan's piece, if you haven't seen it, was the cover story in the "Arts & Leisure" section this past Sunday, and says that classical music has never been healthier. Obviously, that's not the view I take.

I weigh in a few times (well, maybe more than a few times), in comments to the comments. But the best thing is Allan's own participation, which makes me very happy. I've said that I've known him for years, and that I like him a lot. Because he's taking part in the debate, his views can get the fullest possible consideration. This is good for all of us. No matter who's right, we need to hear every side in the discussion. Thanks, Allan, for being so generous and thorough your contributions. I'll eventually write some kind of comment of my own, as a regular blog post. But now, thanks to Allan, it won't simply be a response to his essay. It can be a summary of a really good conversation.

A new episode of my book is online today. Again it's about classical music history, the part they might not teach in music school. I'm trying to establish that classical music wasn't always classical. And in this episode, when I get to Baroque opera, things get a little crazy.

The next episode goes online on Monday, June 12. That one might be crazier still. Vivaldi went to extremes, improvising as he led performances of his operas! Mozart's singers improvised part of the Don Giovanni finale!

Isn't scholarship wonderful?

On June 26, I'll post another episode, and then I'm going on vacation. I'll be out of the country for all of July, and not writing anything. And for August, I trust I'll be out of action, workwise, except for composing. Probably I'll look over everything I've written for the book so far, and map out future episodes. But once June is over, I don't expect to post anything new until after Labor Day. That's for the book. I expect to be blogging in August, though not in July.

And there's one more thing that's important to say. Many of you may have seen a huge piece in The New York Times on Sunday -- it was linked in ArtsJournal -- by Allan Kozinn, called "Check the Numbers: Rumors of Classical Music's Demise Are Dead Wrong." Certainly many people have e-mailed me about it. Allan, whom I've known for years and like a lot, really believes that classical music has never been healthier. And he thinks he's got statistical support for that.

But what's weird is that there really aren't many statistics in his piece, and most of the numbers Allan does use aren't very relevant. He cites ticket sales, for instance, in a few small New York venues. But what about the Metropolitan Opera? What about the New York Philharmonic? What about the whole big world outside New York? What about long-term trends, easily documentable statistically, that show declining ticket sales and an aging audience?

I'm have a detailed comment on this here, later this week. The timing of the article is in one way very odd: In the upcoming issue of Symphony magazine, the publication of the American Symphony Orchestra League, there's a long position paper by the League's incoming board chairman, which for the first time says in public some of the things I've been hearing people in the orchestra world say privately. Namely, that orchestras face some serious problems, and these (with one small exception) go unacknowledged in Allan's essay.

I'm gratified by how many comments are coming in, and by how interesting they are. I have to say, with regret, that I'm not able to reply individually to each one, as I've tried to do with the comments on my book. I may not be able to respond to every book comment in the future, either. Precisely because I do much work on the future of classical music, my time is getting squeezed.

I'm responding to many of the comments, though, if not most of them. And I'm grateful for all of them. I always learn a lot from everything that people say to me, whether in comments to the blog or in private e-mail.

It’s too late to stop pop and classical music from interbreeding. There’s just too much of it going on, and it goes way beyond the obvious, well-publicized crossovers (Orfa Harnoy putting out a CD of Beatles songs, Michael Bolton singing opera arias, etc., etc., etc., etc.). The good stuff has a real artistic edge. I’m thinking of Capital M, a New York rock band, which commissioned seven pieces from seven classical composers, and premiered them in March. I’m thinking of the Steve Reich remixes, by dance music DJs, that came out on Nonesuch years ago. I’m thinking of Alarm Will Sound, the terrific New York new music group, which recorded arrangements of techno songs by Aphex Twin. Plus (picking things now almost at random) Christopher O’Reilly playing piano transcriptions of Radiohead, Conrad Cummings, writing piano pieces based on Beach Boys tunes, my own A te, for cello and piano, with an echo of Led Zeppelin. (Score is here, computer realization of the music here. I have a recording of a good performance, by musicians from the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, but I can’t put it on the web.)

Not to mention classical pieces written with a pop beat or a pop style or pop rhythms, by composers like Scott Johnson and Randall Wolff. Or Christopher Rouse, with his percussion piece that’s a tribute to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer, or his sequel to Wagner’s Ring, Der gerettete Alberich, for percussion solo and orchestra, which has rock & roll passages. And so much more. I’m only scratching the surface. And I haven’t talked about classical moves from pop musicians—industrial bands indebted to Stockhausen, for instance, and much more. Or the collaborations between the London Sinfonietta and the techno label Warp, and with members of Radiohead. Or the fuseleeds festival (no capital letters) in Britain I mentioned here 10 days or so ago. Or the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians, shown in the film Music from the Inside Out, who play in salsa and bluegrass bands.

And then there’s a student in my Juilliard course this past semester, Justin Brown, a bassoonist, whose graduation recital (presented on April 29th) for his master’s degree had this program:

RADIOHEAD Everything in its Right Place

BJORK Hunter

FRANK ZAPPA Dirty Love

RADIOHEAD I Might Be Wrong

CHARLES MINGUS Moanin'

SIGUR ROS Hoppipolla

BJORK Army of Me

WEEZER Only in Dreams

BONNIE TYLER Total Eclipse of the Heart

All of this, Justin says, was “performed by an amplified acoustic ensemble of Juilliard Students (Justin Brown, bassoon; Evan Kuhlmann, keyboards; Gareth Flowers, trumpet; Brendan Kane, double bass; Michael Caterisano and Brian Flescher, percussion; Mike Block, cello).”

And he adds: “There were about 150 in attendance (the largest I have seen at a student recital @ Juilliard in the last five years). The audience members appeared more excited than I could have possibly hoped for (cigarette lighters were used without request!).”

Why shouldn’t classical musicians play concerts like this? Why shouldn’t they treat themselves as jazz and pop musicians do? Instead of saying, “I’m a bassoonist, I’ll play the bassoon repertoire,” why not say, “I’m a musician, what music do I like? How can I make it work for my instrument?”

Another lovely sign of change, supplied as a comment to one of my recent posts, from someone who signs himself only as Luis, and is with the IberoAmerica ensemble (I think he’s probably Luis Díez, the violist in the Holland branch of the group; there’s also a branch in the US). Anyhow, Luis writes (along with some warm praise for me, for which I’m grateful), that “our cellist is reputed to have recently sung one of her favourite songs as an encore for her last concert!”

And there’s much, much more. How about pianist Gabriela Montero including a bonus CD of improvisations with her recent EMI classics release? Or soprano Melanie Mitrano recording a CD of new music, which includes some really good songs she herself wrote (words and music both, just like a pop singer/songwriter)?

Classical music is changing, maybe faster than we think. We’re least likely to see the changes at the big institutions, but elsewhere things are moving fast. The pop/classical bleedthrough is impossible to stop, because even before it ever showed up to any great extent in concerts, it was happening in peoples’ heads.

A lot of people want classical concerts — both on stage and in the audience — to be livelier. Here’s some recent e-mail I’ve gotten on this subject, all of it wonderfully written, passionate, and of course quoted here with the writers’ permission.

From Karen Pinzolo:

I'd be very interested to understand, from a historical viewpoint, why I sit as an unembodied soul at a concert where the only hint of life is my chest rising and falling with each unconscious breath. When I listen to any other kind of music I can't help but sway, bob, and gyrate. At what point in history did we as an audience become outwardly unresponsive?

From someone who’d rather not be named:

Your recent posting on making concerts vital and relevant came at a shocking time for me - I've attended two chamber recitals recently where, despite excellent technical playing, I was in severe danger of falling asleep and pitching off of my chair during the entirety of each! I still enjoy the music - yesterday I took Bach's cello suites along on a long nature walk, but performances played "straight" - reverent silence, tasteful black clothes, quiet public or church spaces full of reverent 60+ audience members, are killing me. The string quartet playing last Friday night in the wine bar was fun, and fab. But sitting like a nice girl, holding my program, listening to technically good but unimpassioned playing (sometimes by musicians who look like they are preparing their taxes) will be the end of me. Perhaps I've just caught too many performances that lacked deeper, emotional connection between the artists and repertoire, or excited artists in general, but if this is a widely-known issue (as it appears to be) it's not good. Modern Americans are running away from the churches and lectures that are "good for them" but put them to sleep - concerts like these are little better!

And from the irrepressible Jennifer Foster (almost every time she e-mails I want to quote her), a glimpse of something better:

I had the pleasure of performing at a music "event" (party? happening?) this past weekend in Virginia with pianist Greg McCallum. People attending had the option of sitting and listening with rapt attention or meandering around the rest of this house on the hill in the Blue Ridge, nibbling on food, emptying wine and beer bottles and chatting. Seven hours of performances ranged from soliloquy with harmonica to bluegrass to classical. When Greg played his "Hymn Quilt" (on his Southern Quilt CD) people felt free to hum along, stomp, exclaim, and "ah" with recognition. Their responsiveness fed him and he fed them right back with one of the most exciting performances of Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues I've ever witnessed. People stomped, hollered and jumped out of their seats when it was over. They gasped audibly as he played. How wonderful, to be free to express enjoyment during the performances!

For more on Greg McCallum (whom I’ve mentioned in this blog before), go here.

Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg play Mozart Violin and Piano Sonatas. The image says: Something’s going on here. These are people with something to say. Doesn’t matter whether the image evokes Mozart or not. The playing in fact is focused, inward, individual, sometimes sharp (with an edge), sometimes ferocious, not untroubled. So the image is accurate. It really does tell you — without words, without any thoughts it might be easy to name — why you want to hear this CD.

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Last Wednesday I taught the last class, for this year, in my spring semester Juilliard course, “Classical Music in an Age of Pop.” I had a marketing specialist as a guest, and he asked the students some useful questions. How did they decide which concerts to go to? Because they’re professionals, they actually look at listings, ads, and websites, to find out when there’s music that might interest them. They might be looking for a piece they like, or a piece they’ve never heard live, or something with an important part for their own instrument.

I then asked a followup. Which classical concerts in New York, during the past year, generated a lot of word-of-mouth buzz at Juilliard? Almost as soon as I got the words out, three or four students all answered at once: “The Berlin Philharmonic.” Then, after a pause, another student named the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (the Bayerischer Rundfunk), playing Brahms. He didn’t remember the conductor, but I think it was Mariss Jansons. The student said that when word got out about the first concert in the series, 40 or 50 Juilliard people got tickets for the second one.

And that was it—two events (counting a series of concerts by a single orchestra as one event), out of the hundreds available. And note that these were musicians who play orchestral instruments, picking orchestra concerts. Student singers would probably have picked a vocal concert or an opera; student composers would probably have picked a new music performance. Pianists would have picked a piano concert. I began to wonder if there’s anything that everyone agrees on. Or, more to the point, that everybody even hears about.

I thought back to things I’ve heard or read about that happened in the past. The list of musical celebrities who went to the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 was staggering. Rachmaninoff was there, for instance. During that same decade, a singer I once knew (I studied singing with her in the 1960s) made her New York recital debut. She was very well received. When she came back the next season, she looked out at the audience and saw, she said, Toscanini and Rachmaninoff. (To try to check that, I looked up her New York Times reviews. They were very strong.)

So what was different then? Were there fewer concerts? Or were there certain things that serious musicians paid attention to? In the ‘40s and the ‘50s, Virgil Thomson used to talk about an “intellectual audience,” which, he said, went to certain musical events. (Schnabel, for example, but never Horowitz.) Is there anything like that now? Any audience that goes to chamber music, operas, orchestras, recitals, new music concerts, everything that’s out there, if the individual event is interesting enough? I’m not sure there is. And even within each area, I wonder if there’s any unified audience. Well, pianists always go to Martha Argerich. But I’ve gone, over many years, to innumerable new music performances, and no matter what they are, I don’t see any large number of composers at them.

Maybe I’m asking the impossible. Maybe things were always like this. But I wonder.

***

One event I went to very happily was David Robertson’s concert of Berio, Ligeti, and George Benjamin, at Zankel Hall this past Thursday. David was given one of Carnegie Hall’s “Perspective” series, which (within limits) means that he can do anything he likes. So he brought a violist and percussionist from the Ensemble Intercontemporain at IRCAM, of which he used to be music director, to play Berio’s Naturale, and had them join a group of young and fabulous American musicians in Carnegie’s Zankel Band to play the Ligeti Piano Concerto, and Benjamin’s Antara.

All of this was crazy music, in a way—well, maybe not the Berio, which hauntingly layered viola and percussion comments on recordings of a folk singer from Sicily. (It reminded me of some of Antonioni’s films, Il Grido and Red Desert, for instance, where scars of heavy industry weigh on human hearts.) But the Ligeti and Benjamin pieces were crazy, full of crazy rhythms, crazy sounds (screeches, tootles, growls), and crazy references (to pygmy music, Peruvian music, the sound of hammers hitting steel).

I loved this concert. If David and the band had wanted to play it again, I would have listened again. And what matters most is that this is music David likes. Carnegie Hall in effect asked him, “David, what would you like to do?” And he answered: “This!”

So how often does that happen in the classical music world? Sadly, almost never. Most concerts feature music from the standard repertory. I’m not going to say musicians don’t want to play those pieces; they do. But we’re all conditioned to expect to hear (and play) the same music over and over and over and over and over and over. Why?

And what does this say about classical music as an art? Again we’ve been conditioned to think that classical music is artistic. But most artists don’t repeat the same things every year, or even every few years. They’re always moving onward, always growing. That’s hard in classical music, because you always have to think of the repertory that you audience demands to hear. Which—sadly—sounds more like commerce than like art. David’s concert was an art event. He did the music that he loves, and it’s not the music that someone else might love. He had the chance to be himself.

How often—honestly, now—does that happen, in classical music?

Episode seven of my in-progress book on the future of classical music is now online. After some introductory stuff, it goes in a new direction (well, not so new to those of you who read the first, now discarded version of the book). Everything up to now has been the introduction to the book. Now I've embarked on the first main section, which will give chapter and verse, in considerable detail, of how classical music is in trouble. But I start with a look at the distant past — at the days when Bach and Mozart were composing, but classical music (as we know it today) didn't even remotely exist.

I've also put a summary of the introduction online (a summary, in other words, of episodes one through six). It’s especially meant for newcomers, but might also be helpful for anyone who’s followed the book, but has read all the old episodes, or might quickly want to review what I've written up to now.

The next episode should be online May 29. It'll offer some fun and maybe even startling data from history.

And by the way…why not subscribe to the book? Subscribers get more information than I’m posting here. This time, for instance, I mentioned something I’d left out of the new episode, but which surely should have been there. And I also linked to the latest post on this blog. There’ll be more extras like that — so click the subscription link, and when the blank e-mail form appears, just put “subscribe” in the subject line and mail it off to me. And to make me even happier, add a note to your e-mail, and tell me something about yourself.. I’m always curious about who’s subscribing, and why everyone is interested. That often leads to an e-mail exchange, and often enough to some sharing of ideas (from which I learn a lot). I’m going to dedicate the book to everyone in classical music who’s working for change, everyone in the audience who wants change, and especially to the many, many people who’ve helped me in endless ways (which include telling me when I’m wrong). So subscribe, and write to me—and the book will be dedicated to you, too!

From Jon Farley in Britain (and posted here with his permission) comes something worth thinking about. Jon says, “I studied music at school and though I loved the music I found the stuffiness overbearing.” And then this:

I went to a [classical] concert last week and the thing that struck me was that nobody talked to the audience and that's really weird! I listen to a wide variety of music and it's only the classical world that does this. Even a hello, how are you? would do. I went to a contemporary music concert the next night - completely different with the organiser/performer/composer introducing the concert, performers or composers introducing pieces and you could chat to them in the interval. It made a huge amount of difference. Having performed myself - mostly as a singer - I find connecting with the audience vital and I know that’s done mostly through the music but a little talking never hurt. The concerts were all part of a festival trying to bring a wide range of music from classical to contemporary to you name it to a wider and younger audience with some success. Have a look at http://www.fuseleeds.org.uk/ for more info.

People don’t always believe me when I say that a younger audience wants things the existing (older) audience doesn’t ask for. So here’s one more piece of evidence that they do.

And now please follow that link. You’ll find the website for a festival in Leeds (in the UK) that looks just wonderful—and which brings together pop music and new classical music, mostly of the outside-the-concert-hall variety. I’ve noted the natural link between those two worlds before, and this is an exceptionally stunning example. Too bad the festival (according to Jon) is held only every other year.

Does everybody realize what credibility classical music institutions would have with that younger audience everybody talks about, if they organized something like this? Doesn’t matter whether they normally put on events like this or not. And in fact if they don’t normally go in this direction, they’d help themselves even more with a younger audience if they’d try it.

Here’s a really good classical music press release. Faithful readers will remember how exasperated I’ve been at bad ones (and, sadly, the vast majority of classical music press releases I see are really bad).

SONY CLASSICAL PRESENTS THE ACCLAIMED
COMPOSER/INSTRUMENTALIST EDGAR MEYER
IN COLLABORATION WITH PERHAPS
HIS MOST PROVOCATIVE PARTNER YET - HIMSELF

CDS IN STORES TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2006

Three-time Grammy Award winner Edgar Meyer has won remarkable acclaim both for the music he has written and for an inexhaustible variety of recordings and live performances with everyone from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to Garth Brooks, James Taylor, The Chieftains and Yo-Yo Ma, but his latest Sony Classical recording features what is perhaps his most demanding collaboration yet - with himself. Aptly titled Edgar Meyer, the recording presents the double bass virtuoso and composer performing 14 all-new instrumental pieces he has created for himself to perform, on an array of instruments, through the magic of multi-track recording. Recorded in the music room he built in his Nashville home, Edgar Meyer will be released on Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

Hailed by The New Yorker as "the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument [the double bass]," Meyer plays every one of the instruments on the new recording - bass, mandolin, guitar, piano, dobro, banjo and gamba. He says that the album he produced makes him happiest in the way he was able to realize the voice of the bass.

"It was immensely pleasurable spending time at home making music," Meyer says. "When you are dealing with an unusual voice such as the double bass, you usually have to clear the decks for it to work. You can't just put down some drums and some keyboards, and then put a bass on top of it. You really have to move stuff out of the way. I hate to ask that of people I work with, because they're so accomplished. So it's nice actually not being worried about asking anybody for anything, to be able to build a whole record around the voice of the bass without feeling self-conscious about it…I feel it's the happiest I've been with the voice of the instrument overall."

Each of the 14 tracks on Edgar Meyer evolved in a process in which composing, playing, recording and editing were fused and did not have to happen in a particular order, at a particular time. Meyer calls it a type of music-making "I couldn't have composed or planned." Some pieces are heavily composed, others developed as they were built, voice by voice. He notes that the first thing he recorded - a nine-minute piano improvisation - wound up, unchanged, as the foundation for one of the tracks, with other instrumental voices added. Just as the recording process was unpredictable, so was the music itself, which Edgar uniquely wove with classical, jazz and bluegrass threads.\

In addition to his virtuosity on the double bass, Meyer is a fine pianist, but working with the other instruments - banjo, mandolin, dobro, guitar - was a bit of an adventure. "I have stood next to a lot of my favorite players on these instruments for 20 years, so even though I couldn't do what they do, I had an idea of what those instruments could do, and what a good sound on those instruments is," he says. "So I knew what I was going for, and the trick was to find what suited my ability level for each instrument. That meant that each part is equally difficult. Whether it's a super-simple mandolin part or a very complicated bass part, I had about the same degree of difficulty playing each."

Edgar Meyer is an exclusive Sony Classical artist, and his most recent recording for the label is Music for Two, his acclaimed collaboration with his longtime friend and musical colleague Bela Fleck. The two also collaborated on the Grammy-winning Perpetual Motion, also released on Sony Classical. Meyer's catalogue of recordings includes a solo recording of unaccompanied Bach, a recording of the first Concerto for Double Bass and of his own Concerto for Double Bass and Cello with Yo-Yo Ma, and original collaborations with such musicians as Joshua Bell, Mark O'Connor, Mike Marshall and Sam Bush, as well as his work in the traditional classical rule as composer, including Hilary Hahn's recording of his Violin Concerto.

The album’s pretty nice, too.

And now someone’s going to say that this was too easy, that it’s easy to write an engaging press release for a project like this. As opposed, let’s say, to a new recording of the last three Beethoven piano sonatas.

To which I reply: Isn’t there something vivid and personal going on in those Beethoven performances? Something, that is, that could be turned into a vivid press release. And if something personal isn’t going on, why record the performances?

There’s been a lot of talk in the past couple of years about the intrinsic value of art, as opposed to its economic value. Here’s a really lovely statement about that, from Mary Pat Mombourquette, the Managing Director of Symphony Nova Scotia, from testimony before the Canadian parliament:

Also, we give people something to aspire to. There is more than what's down in the trenches. There is something to crawl out of the trenches for, and when you get out, you can see something. It sort of inspires people, it broadens them, and it allows them to dream. So much of it is intangible. It's very hard to comment in economic terms that this is our value, because it's all about inspiration and dreams.

From Dan Walter, who’s 30, says he grew up with heavy metal, rock, pop, and rap. Lately he’s been buying and downloading classical recordings, and says he’s “a little bit upset with myself for not discovering and continuing to follow this great form of music much earlier in my life. I have been reading biographies of composers and doing research on the web about all the music I am interested in and continue to discover something new on a daily basis. I have a pretty big CD collection of popular music and have decided to start a collection of classical music.”

But that’s not all. Here, with his permission, is what he told me he’d like to see in classical music today:

1.      New music!

2.      New music!!

3.      New music that is relevant to today, and is marketed with as much effort as any popular music.

4.      Orchestras taking advantage of PBS again.

5.      Orchestras without so many stifling rules.

6.      Audiences without so many stifling rules.

7.      Concert halls embracing new technologies. (recording audio, and visual tech.)

8.      Music that has some controversy. (Political, social, religious, etc.) By this I don't mean controversy for controversy's sake. But a composer who is not afraid to take some risks and a orchestra not afraid to take those risks also.

9.      Low cost or free children's concerts that when it's over the kids are allowed to go up on stage and talk to the musicians and see and possibly try out the instruments. Get the kids excited about instruments they probably have never heard of before.

10.  Everyone to lighten up when it comes to art. Far more often than not art is to be enjoyed. Not studied to death.

Many, many thanks to Dan for this. Point four might be reversed, so that PBS (which is the culprit here) would telecast more orchestras. And point nine, very happily, describes something that many orchestras have done.

But no one should underestimate how important this list is. Here’s what someone who comes from classical music from the pop world would love to see — or, to put it more strongly, what many people who look at classical music from a pop perspective would like. Dan’s not alone. We’d attract a lot more people his age — and have a much more lively time ourselves — if we did what he suggests.

Not long ago I wrote two posts here about why classical music organizations should embrace pop music. I gave many reasons — that we need to embrace the world outside us, that we’ll never attract a new audience unless they know we live in the same world they do, and of course that many people in the classical world like pop music, and many classical musicians play it. Later I added one more thought, that a concert of pop and classical music together might be fun, and stimulating.

But talk about missing the obvious! This weekend, I joined many people from the orchestra world in a tour of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s a wonderfully happy place, and full of information, too; I highly recommend it..

And how did the orchestra people feel after the tour? I won’t claim to speak for them, and certainly didn’t survey their opinions. But in the days that followed, as I spent time with them in various activities, the tour came up a lot. And not just in conversation with me; people kept bringing it up in general discussions. And what everyone who talked about it said (I didn’t hear a single dissenting voice) was that they wished orchestral concerts felt more like rock & roll. Specifically, they talked about how happy the rock & roll audience seems, in videos on display at the Rock Hall (as they call it in Cleveland). And how freely the audience reacts to the music, moving and smiling, not sitting blankly in their seats.

This led to discussions about why the orchestral audience sits so blankly. Often orchestral music is very rhythmic. Why doesn’t the audience move (even a little) to the rhythm? Do orchestras preclude that, by sitting blankly onstage themselves?

I found this wonderfully hopeful. It also gave one more reason, quite a decisive one, I think, for putting classical and pop music together on a program, or at least opening classical music organizations to pop music in all the ways I’ve discussed: This will be good for the classical musicians, and for classical concerts.

Footnote: I hope it’s clear that nobody in these discussions expected classical concerts to become entirely like rock & roll, with audiences on their feet dancing, and clapping along to the music. (Though in the past, especially before the 19th century, the music we now call classical was performed much more informally than we’re now used to, with a lot of participation from the audience, as well as a lot of relaxed audience members talking to each other instead of listening.) Obviously classical music is different, and some classical works — Bruckner symphonies, for instance — should be listened to more quietly.

But that doesn’t mean that both audience and orchestra can’t show more feeling than they now do…

…which leads to a less happy followup.

I found myself late one night in a discussion with a dozen or so orchestra people, mostly musicians, from a variety of orchestras, both large and medium-sized. When I joined the discussion, they were talking about why orchestras don’t move more on stage, why they don’t smile, why they don’t acknowledge the audience, and even (when appropriate) perform to it. Everyone in the room, without exception, wanted these things to happen.

But everyone, again without exception, didn’t think it would be easy to change the way orchestras behave. Who would lead the change? It couldn’t be orchestra managements, everyone heartily agreed. Their endorsement would be the kiss of death. Musicians wouldn’t want managements to tell them how to look onstage. No, that’s an understatement; musicians would fight back with everything they had.

Naively, I asked what would happen if an orchestra’s board of directors asked the musicians to show more life on stage. (Not that I thought that was likely. As a thoughtful board member — a real leader in the field — put it recently, boards still see their role as fiduciary, not strategic. They watch to make sure the organization is soundly run, in other words, and don’t yet think their job involves planning for the future.) The answer I got was wonderfully specific. The standard musicians’ contracts, I was told, have a clause requiring musicians to carry out “reasonable” requests from the board. This request, to show more life on stage, would be considered unreasonable, and musicians might actually file a grievance with the union!

Music directors, everyone agreed, could take some leadership here. But mostly they don’t, and when they start to, the musicians agreed, they rarely follow through.

So how could change ever happen? It would have to come from the musicians themselves, everyone agreed, though how that would happen seemed a little vague. Some of the musicians in this conversation thought they might go back to their orchestras and start talking about this, but the odds (at least for the moment) seem not to be in their favor. Which doesn’t mean change won’t happen. It just means that it’ll take a while, and that the early steps aren’t very clear at all. But there really are some orchestras where musician/management relations are more or less relaxed, where musicians already have made some changes, where musicians already talk about these things, where musicians are starting to take some leadership inside the institution. Maybe in these places we could see some movement toward a someday tipping point.

But there’s one thing very sad and discouraging that I took from this discussion. Orchestras don’t have leadership. Most of them don’t have any governing body, or even any CEO, with the power to set policy for the institution. This is amazing, but true. And, quite honestly, it’s ridiculous. I started thinking of other management situations that seemed just about insane. Like the New York City public schools, in the past. School custodians didn’t report to the principals of the schools they worked in. They reported to the custodians’ hierarchy, headquartered in the Board of Education office. So if a principal wanted to get a broken window fixed, he or she would have to ask the Board of Education, which would pass the request on to the custodians’ hierarchy, which would relay it downward to the custodian of the broken-window school. Crazy! Broken windows often weren’t fixed.

The orchestra situation seems just as bad. I have great sympathy for orchestras, and the musicians in this discussion were a great group of people, full of spirit, hope, and ideas. But that evening I couldn't help but wonder. If orchestras don't change -- if they can’t pull together any real internal leadership -- will it be anybody’s fault but their own if they all go out of business?

From Jennifer Foster, at WDAV at Davidson College, in North Carolina:

I was at a Sunday afternoon concert at a small Episcopal church in town. (A local baroque cellist has a treasure trove of early music friends from Berkeley who come to town to perform from time to time.) The concert opened with Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. The harpsichord player, a mischievous looking fellow named Henry Lebedinsky, was in the heat of playing the daylights out of his extensive solo. Rather than wallow in the kind of attention a well-heeled classical music audience owed him for his great talent and efforts, he turned his face to us in the middle of one of the most difficult passages, hoisted an eyebrow and gave a crooked grin as if to say, "Impressive, isn't it?" It was like Bugs Bunny delivering a casual aside or giving himself a manicure while everything around him is exploding.

Suddenly, we were all off the hook. He gave us permission to perceive our concert-going experience differently. A small gesture with grand implications.

Of course this is the kind of gesture — the kind of communication between musicians and audience — that’s so often missing in classical music. Many thanks to Jennifer for passing it on. She herself embodies many things that classical music needs, and she’s figured in this blog before, as loyal readers will remember: here and here.

I worked with Leighton Kerner for six years at the Village Voice in New York, back in the early ‘80s. And I want to add my voice to those who mourn his passing. As everyone so rightly said, he loved music—loved it with everything he had. He never seemed to get jaded, or overloaded. He was always out there, always going to performances, always excited.

And his reviews showed his enthusiasm. I can’t remember him ever being harsh, even if he hadn’t liked something he heard. And when he liked it, he was generous and grateful. I remember one review of a concert by the American Composers Orchestra. Leighton loved it so much that he printed the name of every musician who had played that night. Which of us, among critics, has ever shown such gratitude and love? May he rest in peace. He had a full, rich life.

Not long ago I visited the New York Philharmonic’s archives. My main job was to research Stravinsky performances. Had Stravinsky’s neo-classic works ever been played during the 1920s, ’30s, and 40s when he himself wasn’t conducting? The answer, confirming my instinct, was that they hardly ever had been. But I was also interested in what the archives might show about the age of the audience in the past, and while there wasn’t much information, Barbara Haws, the Philharmonic’s fabulous archivist, did give me this. How times have changed! (And by the way, on a more serious note: This is one more piece of evidence that classical music wasn't always treated as serious, elite art.)

The Philharmonic As Singles Hangout
By Vera Brodsky Lawrence

In 1855 the Philharmonic concerts and public rehearsals became the favorite hangout of the city's teenagers. To more sedate music-lovers the rehearsals were a frustration: "There is hardly a place in which one is not disturbed by the shameless talking and flirting by which most of the audiences amuse themselves," wrote an unhappy subscriber. But all efforts to enforce silence were vain.

Assigned to review a Philharmonic concert the following year, a critic disgustedly wrote: "It was crammed, jammed, steaming hot, noisy, and uncomfortable. The entire youthful population of the city was present. All the ladies were under eighteen years of age, and all their male accompaniments twenty or twenty-one. Those are the recognized Philharmonic ages. Not only were all the regular seats occupied, but the lobbies were filled by the youthful musical enthusiasts seated on chairs and arranged in groups of from four to ten, enjoying t he Beethoven accompaniment to their chit-chat and tittle-tattle. It had been suggested that another Society should be started, to be called the 'Old Philharmonic,' to which mamas and papas should be eligible."

The craze persisted. In 1857, George Templeton Strong, dedicated concertgoer, brilliant diarist, and future President of the Philharmonic Society, just back from a Philharmonic concert, wrote in his diary: "Crowd. Clack. At last an excited individual--Teutonic--rose up in the midst of a dreary Adagio on the violoncello ... and exclaimed, with much emphasis: 'Well, I can talk, too. So the every bodies can hear me! Is it not possible for us to have some place where we can hear?' And then subsided with like abruptness. People were still as mice in that neighborhood for some time."

Episode six of my in-progress book about the future of classical music is now online. It completes the introduction to the book—or, as I've started to call it, the improvisation of the introduction to the book. In it, you'll find some pretty trenchant criticism of one last piece of classical music orthodoxy, along with—in a very different key—my own declaration of love for classical music.

Plus more, including the dedication of the book. It's dedicated, in effect, to everybody reading this, to everyone who wants to see change in classical music, and most especially to everyone (like so many of my readers) who've helped me.

So thanks! Please feel free to post comments. I may take a brief hiatus after this episode, or I might not. I'll post my decision here as soon as I’ve made it. If I don't take a hiatus, the next episode will appear on May 15.