June 2006 Archives

Here's something I found in the July issue of Food and Wine magazine, a quote from chef Graham Elliot Bowles:

I'm inspired by artists who use a limited palette, like painter Piet Mondrian and The White Stripes, two musicians who create an incredible sound.

And the moral of this story? Maybe it's not so obvious. Or at least it's not obvious in the classical music world. We tend to think that classical music is serious musical art, and that because of that, it has a very special status. Meanwhile, out in real life, people find musical art all over the place, in pop music as well as classical. (Not to mention jazz.) This is more than a casual observation--it's an official fact, certified by sociologists, who've shown that people in the arts audience are now omnivores, interested in popular culture, too. (That's even true of older people in the arts audience, or so research has shown.)

So here's a famous chef, making a casual remark about art he likes--Mondrian and The White Stripes. How are we classical music types going to talk to him, if we don't have some ideas about The White Stripes, too?

See Lisa's comment. Here's eighth blackbird on the cover of MUSO, looking pretty damn good::

In a comment on my last post, someone I respect says something that of course I should have expected--that MUSO, the magazine I praised, makes "classical music about the sex appeal of young performers."

Now, that's not all the magazine does. As I pointed out, it supports new music, putting a composer and a new music ensemble on the covers of the two issues I've seen. But the comment isn't completely wrong. MUSO likes good-looking young classical musicians, which, when I think about it, is part of what I meant when I called it a "real" magazine, meaning a magazine that looks and reads like all the magazines we see about more popular subjects. This kind of reality--looking like we belong in the mainstream world--is important to classical music, I've long thought.

But of course there's a downside. Make us part of the mainstream world, and we'll share the mainstream world's problems, including too much emphasis on good looks. Yet I think we need to do it, even in spite of this danger. For one thing, it's impossible to be completely pure. Theodor Adorno, somewhere in his book Minima Moralia, says that even people who object to the dominant and crippling trends in society are themselves crippled by those trends, and I think that's true. If you try to purge yourself completely of any concern for looks, you've made overreacted, and made yourself inhuman.

Second, classical musicians (maybe in part because of the situation I've just noted) don't care enough about how they look when they perform. They don't look pure, or artistic; they just look boring, and seem as if they don't care about their audience.

Third...well, here's an experiment. Pretend Britney Spears is a classical musician. She's still a bimbo, still shallow, still annoying, still hypnotized by silly surface values. But if she (with all her silly fame) were a classical musician instead of a pop star, what kind of world would we be living in? Clearly a world in which classical music was very popular. And would that be a bad thing? "Oh, yes, it would be horrible, all these silly people getting all that attention." OK, fine, maybe that's the human condition, silly people getting attention, but...classical music would be popular! Wouldn't we like that? Wouldn't that be a good thing for serious classical musicians? In a world where classical music was wildly popular would have much more scope than they do now. (One of the things I learned when I worked in pop music: In a huge market, even the fringes are huge.)

People who think we can get more attention for classical music and also save it from mass-market silliness are asking for something impossible--they want classical music to be somehow exempt from the human condition. It's not going to happen. And in past generations, and past centuries, when classical music was much more central to cultural life than it is now, it had both popular and serious aspects, and the popular side of it suffered from whatever silliness was going on at the time. In fact, I'd say that you can't have a thriving serious activity without rooting it in a popular version of the same thing. There wouldn't be serious pop music--there wouldn't be Neil Young or Elvis Costello--if there weren't mass market pop.

So anything that helps classical music get more popular might be a good thing. And from that point of view, MUSO does something important--and, given everything serious that's in the magazine, does it better than some people might expect.

Everyone should know about MUSO, "the music magazine that rewrites the score," to quote its own line about itself. Or, more simply, "the magazine for the younger, more open-minded generation of classical music fans." It's smart, lively, and most of all, it looks and reads like a real magazine, not like a dowdy classical music ingroup publication, tarted up to look contemporary. (Not convincingly, of course.)

Here's one recent issue:

The cover boy is Mason Bates, a composer and electronica DJ (and former student of mine at Juilliard). And say what you like about the pretty-boy look (I joked that you'd think Mason was a soccer player competing right now in the World Cup), Mason is a serious composer, the real thing, enjoying real and much-deserved success. So here's a classical music magazine that, among much else, doesn't slight new music. Even puts it on the cover. And not just this time: Another issue I have put eighth blackbird on the cover.

MUSO is British, and just recently trying to succeed in the US. I wish them all the best. Their audience seems (to judge from the content, and, even more, from the ads) to be young classical musicians, but I'm sure they could broaden that. They've done something impressive. As I said, this is a real, completely contemporary magazine, which on top of everything else is completely serious about music. Bravo to everyone involved.

For the most recent episode of my book, I'd promised something about how the finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni was partly improvised at the opera's premiere. And then I forgot to put that in the episode. I'm going to add it, but because it's such fabulous stuff, I thought I'd put it here in the blog, too. It comes from Thomas Forrest Kelly's book, First Nights at the Opera, and should be filed under the heading "How spontaneous classical music could be, before it became classical."

Here's what Kelly writes:

The famous finale of act 2, with its stage band playing dinner music from other operas for Don Giovanni, was evidently worked out in rehearsal, and perhaps indeed in the course of performances. First comes a melody from the first-act finale of Martìn y Soler's Una cosa rara, probably not yet known in Prague, though in Vienna it overshadowed Figaro. It may have been an inside joke by Mozart, perhaps appreciated by the members of the orchestra. Or it may refer back to its opera, in which two peasant couples have escaped the designs of another Don Giovanni. The other two selections seem to have been made in the course of rehearsals. One quotes the aria "Come un agnello" from Giuseppe Sarti's Fra i due litiganti, known from recent performances in Prague. Mozart had composed variations on the same tune in 1784. Perhaps Mozart intended it as a tribute to Count Thun, his friend and host in Prague, in whose palace theater the opera had been performed. Or maybe its text ("Like a lamb going to the slaughter, you will go bleating through the city") is a warning of Don Giovanni's fate. The third tune will have delighted the audience: the aria "Non più andrai" from Le nozze di Figaro, known everywhere in Prague (remember Mozart's letter cited above: "Nothing is played, sung or whistled but `Figaro"' ). And of course its original text tells a butterfly that his nectar-sipping days are over.

In the surrounding dialogue the characters on stage take full advantage of the joke. As each tune is heard, Leporello praises it and identifies it ("Bravo! 'Cosa rara!"' "Evvivano `I litiganti"'). When Don Giovanni asks him what he thinks of the first tune ("Che ti par del bel concerto?") Leporello manages to insult both Martin and his master: "It matches your merit" ("È conforme al vostro merto"). Other jokes are worked in also: Don Giovanni's "Ah che piatto saporito" may well be a reference to the attractive Teresa Saporiti; and when Leporello, caught in the act of eating his master's food, excuses him­self by noting the quality of the cook ("si eccellente è il vostro cuoco"), he may have winked at Herr Johann Baptist Kuchartz ("cook"), the well-known keyboardist, arranger,

and composer, in the orchestra pit. Kuchartz (Jan Krtitel Kuchar), among other things, sold keyboard versions of Mozart's operas, including this very song.

When the band plays "Non più andrai," Leporello says, "I know this one all too well!" Ponziani (Leporello) had himself sung that aria as Figaro in Prague, so his remark ("Questa poi la conosco pur troppo") has a double sense that must have delighted the au­dience-though the remark is not in the Prague libretto.

The stage band was intended from the first, but much of the finale must have been arranged in Prague; it may have arisen in part from improvisations during rehearsals, as much of the dialogue related to the band's tunes does not appear in the printed libretto. In his later years in Dresden, Luigi Bassi is reported as saying: "This is all nothing, it lacks

the liveliness, the freedom, that the great Master wanted in this scene. In Guardasoni's company we never sang the scene the same from one performance to the next, we did not keep the beat exactly, and instead used our wit, always new things and paying attention only to the orchestra; everything parlando and almost improvised--that is how Mozart wanted it."

[Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights at the Opera. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 107-9.]

I'm happy to announce the ninth episode of the new version of my book on the future of classical music, online right now. In it you'll find some delightful details of performance practice in the past. Or maybe a better term would be performance non-practiced, since what I'm talking about is improvisation, which should sound spontaneous, rather than practiced (no matter how much work went into it). Here I'm continuing my portrait of classical music before the concept of classical music existed, and one key difference between then and now is that performers improvised -- they changed the notes the composers wrote, sometimes drastically. And that's what the composers and audience expected. It's fascinating that musicologists know about this (what I'm reporting is hardly my discovery), but even so, we rarely hear performances that show anywhere near the amount of improvisation common before the 19th century (and, in Italian opera, well into it).

You'll see that I've used musical notation in this episode, once very briefly, and the other time. ...well, check it out. The notation is so vivid that you don't need to read music to know what's going on.

As I've said, this is the last episode until September. I need some time off, and I'm beginning a badly-needed vacation at the start of July. In August I'm likely to take some of the material I've written for this book, and work at improving it.

On another note, I again want to mention the debate that went on in my blog about Allan Kozinn's brave and controversial piece in The New York Times. After I ventured a disagreement, Allan wrote a comment, understandably defending himself. This developed into quite a wonderful discussion, very civilized, focusing on issues, not personalities, with comments from many, many people, including some notable figures in the classical music business. Some of these people had to post anonymously, since they're not authorized to speak for their institutions. But two were happy to post openly: Joe Kluger, who used to run the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Klaus Heymann, the founder and CEO of Naxos. This, I'm proud to believe, is one of the rare debates that actually illuminates its subject.

The following comes from Klaus Heymann, the founder and CEO of Naxos. Klaus posted it as a contribution to the ongoing debate about Allan Kozinn's New York Times piece, and I'm crossposting it here. It's important reading, since it's so full of details -- including financial particulars -- about how Naxos functions. I'm grateful that Klaus took so much time to write all this out.

Dear Greg,

I have been following your book episodes with great interest and I have also been reading your comments on Allan Kozinn's essay in the New York Times which was compulsory reading for all of us in classical music.

Much of what you have to say makes a lot of sense even though I'm not nearly as pessimistic about the future of our music as you -- more about that later.

What you have to say about the classical record industry, though, is not nearly as convincing.

The classical record business has not become a nonprofit operation --most of the independents make a profit although it may not be the kind of profit or return on investment financial investors might be interested in. For us independents being in the classical record business is a lifestyle, that allows us to live reasonably or very well depending upon how good we are at what we're doing. And there are different business models -- most of the independent full price labels actually make money through sales of CDs and, in some cases, DVDs. Naxos being a budget-priced label has to rely on other sources of income to make a profit -- licensing, downloads/streaming, subscriptions.

Quite a few of our recordings and those of our competitors are subsidized -- either by sponsors, by the taxpayer, by foundations or by the estates of composers.

All of us pay our artists "almost nothing" and those of us who can afford it also buy out all the rights from the musicians. And yes, it is practically impossible to make money from selling contemporary music if it is not Adams, Glass, Corigliano and a handful of other commercially viable composers. Whether or not orchestras bear some of the costs depends on the kind of contracts they have with their musicians. In most of the rest of the world, recording is part of the musicians' salaried jobs and orchestras actually make money from recordings because they can fill empty slots in their schedules. In the United States, too, some orchestras have deals with their musicians that include a limited number of recordings for which they have to pay the musicians whether they can sell them to a label or not. Others have to find sponsors to subsidize recordings.

I do object, though, to Allan Kozinn's "Dickensian pay to musicians" [although he does admit that musicians think our terms are in their interest because at least they get a fee and we pay all expenses such as travel, hotel accommodation and per diems]. "Dickensian" is defined in dictionaries as describing 'poor social and economic conditions [of the working classes]. But somehow, in the context of his contribution, he seems to imply that like the Dickensian capitalist of the past we are exploiting the poor working musicians and make a fortune from doing so. Nothing could be further from the truth -- like the musicians recording for us we don't make any money from new recordings, especially not when contemporary music is involved.

Here are the facts: when we sell a CD to one of our distributors we get $2.00 [yes, $2.00] because we sell our CDs at budget price. Manufacturing cost is about 65 cents per CD which gives us a gross margin of $1.35. 35 cents go towards overhead which leaves us $1.00 per CD to pay for the investment in the recording. In other words, for every dollar we spend we have to sell one CD. When it comes to contemporary music, another 50 cents come out of the $1.00 to pay for mechanical royalties [more in the United States and Canada because there the mechanical rates are based on playing time and not on the selling price, as in the rest of the world ].

An instrumental recording costs us around $6,000.00 [$2,000.00 for the artist including expenses and $4,000.00 for production --producer/engineer, hall rental and piano rental and piano tuner if a piano is involved ]. The first 4000 copies sold pay for the cost of actually releasing the CD [cover picture and cover design; booklet notes; mastering; marketing and promotion, etc.]. This means we have to sell at least 10,000 copies to break even -- most artists understand this calculation and are happy with our business model. Composers understand it too -- and at least they get some mechanicals back if they deliver a fully paid master to us.

Orchestral recordings cost us between $15,000.00 and $20,000.00 and, if copyrighted repertoire is involved, we have to pay another $3,000.00 to $5,000.00 to publishers for the right to record the repertoire [it's called "material rental" ]. You can do the numbers yourself -- with the first 4000 discs covering the release cost, we have to sell between 15,000 and 20,000 CDs to break even with public domain repertoire and double that if the works are in copyright. For example, each of the six volumes of the complete orchestral works of Barber cost us $25,000.00 to record but, on average, we've sold only about 25,000 CDs per volume -- which means we have yet to recoup our investment. On the other hand, we paid more than $100,000.00 to the publisher in material rental and mechanical copyright. The calculation is not much better for other big projects like our complete Lutoslawski and Penderecki orchestral works and many others.

Then how do we make money? We're selling lots and lots of compilations -- The Best of Mozart, The Very Best of Mozart, Chill with Mozart, and so on. And there are a few evergreens that keep selling year after year -- my wife's [Takako Nishizaki's] Four Seasons has sold more than a million copies to date since it was first released in 1987 and continues to sell between 15,000 and 20,000 copies per year -- and we have another 20 or 30 titles that do almost as well. Then we license many of our recordings as background music to movie and television production companies. At the 2004 Olympics all the national anthems performed at the medal ceremonies were our recordings, generating healthy public performance income. Then there is the Internet -- many people subscribe to our naxosmusiclibrary. We are regularly the most downloaded classical label on iTunes, E-Music and others and in Germany and Japan we even had the most downloaded album across all genres [classical, pop, and rock].

This is one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about classical music -- it is doing much better on the Internet than in the record shops and in the concert halls. On iTunes, classical music accounts for 12% of revenue as compared to only 3% in the record shops [although the percentage is slightly higher in other big markets ]. This means, there are many people out there who don't go to shops to buy their classical music or to concert halls to listen but who nevertheless enjoy classical music and are willing to pay for this enjoyment. Classical music is also alive and well in Asia -- we had a record year in Japan last year -- we sold 200,000 sets of a 10-CD box with Mozart's 100 most popular works.

2 million pianos are sold in China every year and more than 30 million young Chinese are taking piano lessons.

The market is there but people and performing arts organizations will have to learn how to adapt to changing market conditions. I think that, in the not too distant future, orchestras will have to change and become cooperatives providing all kinds of music to their communities with the cooperative providing a minimum but stable income to their musicians and with all members sharing in any profits. Orchestras will have their own chamber orchestras, modern music ensembles, chamber music groups, jazz ensembles and rock bands -- and they will enjoy a lot more support in their communities than at present. And management needs to improve in today's orchestras -- too many are run by music lovers who have no idea of how to run a business or by business people who have no idea of music.

How many chief executives of orchestras and other performing arts organizations could successfully run a normal business with 150 full-time employees and turnovers of between 20 million and 100 million per year?

Klaus Heymann

Here's a pithy and (I think) important comment from Joe Kluger, who ran the Philadelphia Orchestra for many years. He stepped down a year or so ago, and now works very happily as a consultant. He sent these thoughts to me as part of a private e-mail, and I'm posting them here with his permission. (I've also put it into the absorbing debate on Allan Kozinn's piece that's raging on one of my comments pages.)

I agree with those on your blog who say that his premise and yours (or Noteboom's in Symphony?) are not mutually exclusive. I think Allan is correct in saying that there has been a dramatic increase in the number and variety of classical music events in the last several decades. (The ASOL stats you put on your blog in March showed a 36% increase in the number of orchestra concerts in the last 10 years. Even if this data is flawed, no one can contest that the number of concerts has increased dramatically.) Where Allan's article fails is in the use of this isolated data to counteract the conclusion that some orchestras have major financial problems. They DO for all of the reasons you and others have articulated. What really frustrates me about this is the polarization of people as either Pollyanna-types, who think there is no classical music industry problem or that it is only temporary, or Chicken Little-types, who say that classical music is doomed to extinction.

I firmly believe that this music as an art form will stand the tests of time and societal changes and may even be more appreciated in the future than today. The institutions which create this music may not survive, however, if they don't acknowledge the necessity of adapting themselves to their changing industry environment. This means:

·         Reducing concerts to meet the expected demand. (If the number of customers increases, but their frequency of attendance decreases, overall sales can still decline.)

·         Reducing expenses to meet the expected revenue. (If contributed revenue and endowment income exceed 50% of the expense budget, I believe the expenses for conductors, soloists, musicians and administrator should be reduced accordingly.) and

·         Presenting performances of "value" to audience members. ("Value" is defined here as a high quality artistic endeavor, performed with passion, presented in a format to which the audience can relate, and at ticket prices which generate sales that average 90% of capacity.)

We talk a lot about the age of the classical music audience. Generally people now assume it's always been (or at least for generations has been) more or less what it is now, 50 and up. That's what Allan Kozinn said it's been in the essay we're debating on one of my comments pages, and I can't blame him. After all, this is what everyone says.

But is there any data to support this common view? I've never seen any. And in fact I've seen data that opposes it. Some years ago, I found a 1940 book that reports the results of a 1937 study of American orchestras. This study wasn't much concerned with the audience (its focus was finance), but it did survey the people at concerts in two cities, Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, MI.

And the result? It's a shock! The audience was young -- median age 27 in Grand Rapids, 33 in LA. In LA (but not in Grand Rapids), subscribers were older than single-ticket buyers, with a median age of 38, which of course is older 33, but nowhere near as old as the subscription audience now.

Can we believe this data? It's hard to say. It's pretty fragmentary (surveys in just two cities, at an unstated number of concerts, though with more than 1900 replies; no further data on the methodology used, though in the book where I found this, there's at least an appendix where we can read the questions that the surveys asked). But on the other hand, it's the only data I've ever seen from this far back, and the authors of the book, in writing about it, show no sign of surprise. Surely, if they'd been as amazed as we're likely to be, they would have said something.

And now I've found data that appears to corroborate that 1937 study. From 1963 to 1965, people at the 20th Century Fund did a study of the performing arts. They made a point of studying the audience, and passed out questionnaires, according to a book about their work, at 153 performances (orchestra, theater, opera, dance, chamber music, and "free open-air" events) in 20 cities. They got nearly 30,000 usable replies.

And how old was this audience? Median age 38! Again a shock. Of course, we have to wonder what the breakdown was among the various performing arts, and at this point I have to say that I haven't seen the full study report (which was published in a book in 1966), but only a single chapter from it, reprinted in a 1973 book about American orchestras. But that chapter does say that -- even though the orchestra audience has a greater percentage of people over 60 -- "the audiences from art form to art form are very similar [the book's emphasis]. They all show a median age in the middle 30's." The orchestra audience, then, really did seem to have a median age of 38.

And again this information is reported without any sign of surprise. What does surprise the authors is the percentage of women in the arts audience; it's smaller than they expected, only 48%. (In 1937, more than 70% of the orchestral audience surveyed in the two cities was female).

So what does this mean? First, it means we don't know our history. Nobody I've talked to in the orchestra world had ever heard of the 1937, and I'm betting they also don't know about the later one, since if they did, they wouldn't be saying that the audience was always as old as it is now. (And I should add that I came across these studies only by chance. I was browsing through the Juilliard library, looking for books on other subjects, and came across these two volumes, one a few years ago, the other just today.)

Second, these data fragments suggest that our history might not at all be what we think it is. The classical music world, as I'm beginning to think, is in the midst of a very long-range shift, which we won't fully understand until we learn a lot more about how things used to be.

Citations:

Margery Grant and Herman B. Hettinger, America's Symphony Orchestras And How They Are Supported. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1940, pp. 226ff, 301ff.

George Seltzer, The Professional Symphony Orchestra in the United States. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1975, pp. 240ff.