April 2007 Archives

I'm writing this from O'Hare Airport in Chicago, where I'm waiting for a flight to Sioux Falls, SD. There I'm going to hear the premiere of my new symphony, played by the Dakota Chamber Orchestra, the chamber wing of the South Dakota Symphony. Which, in turn, is an orchestra that's getting some deserved buzz among professionals. Delta David Gier, the music director, does a terrific job, doing big, unusual repertoire, and getting the orchestra to play exceptionally well. He also programs a lot of new music, and commissioned this piece from me.

But when I call this piece a symphony -- and in fact that's its name, Symphony -- I'm smiling more than a little. A symphony has come to mean a major, deeply serious piece, and this one isn't all that serious. It's a symphony in the 18^th century meaning of the word, which means that it's meant as entertainment. In the 18^th century, after all, music wasn't considered a very high art, and instrumental music, because it didn't have any words, wasn't thought to be serious at all. (This is beyond any dispute. See, for instance, Mark Evan Bonds' book, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven.) So all of Haydn's symphonies were meant as entertainment, and so were most of Mozart's, or maybe all of them. It's a bit of a gray area, for the last few, because the understanding of instrumental music was starting to change, and some people were starting to say it was serious. Still, the full conviction of that didn't hit till after 1800.

So I wrote my version of an 18^th century symphony -- four movements, in the usual forms: sonata form, lyrical slow movement, scherzo, and finale, again in sonata form. (And yes, I know the scherzo is mostly a 19^th century innovation; so sue me.) In these forms, I used musical styles that would be familiar to my audience -- echoes of 18^th century music, but also blues, pop, and bluegrass. Not that the piece is a pastiche, but all these elements are in it. The ensemble is the same one Haydn used for his early symphonies: two oboes, two horns, bassoon, and strings.

Though I also indulged myself in a solo string quartet, because one way this piece departs from the 18^th century -- and God knows, it'd have to; we're in the 21^st century now -- is that its texture is quite a bit more detailed than most of what you'd find in Haydn. You'll understand that I'm hardly saying I'm better than Haydn, but only that I've absorbed so much music in which many things go on at once -- Prince, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Steve Reich, so much else -- that now I think that way, too, and it's reflected in everything I write. That might be why this piece is only 13 minutes long. There's a lot going on at any one time, so there's less need for the music to spread out lengthwise.

You can see the score and listen to computer demos of the music here. Just scroll down till you see "Symphony" and click on the proper links. And here are some tidbits about the four movements:

First movement:

The main part of this is fast and bright, but I started with a slow introduction, just as Haydn often did. And here I snuck in a bit of pop culture -- tiny, soft fanfares, that emerge in the solo string quartet. I was thinking of the 20^th Century Fox movie fanfare, which (especially in past generations) kicks movies off with a fine sense of cheesy theatrical grandeur. My fanfares aren't theatrical or grand, but they're meant as a wistful echo of those old, simpler days. (It's not for me to say if they're cheesy -- or whether, if they are, that this would be all that bad.)

Second movement:

Unabashed pop. A doo wop ballad, straight out of the 1950s, complete with a blatantly cheesy jump, toward the end, up a half-step into a new key. I loved every moment of writing this, and I'm completely unashamed of it. But I do have to say that this isn't straight doowop. (It's no more 1957 now than it is 1757.) I keep introducing new tunes, and piling them on top of each other, which is the kind of thing classical composers do. An old friend of mine once said my music was sentimental and cerebral.

Third movement:

The scherzo section is broadly rhythmic. The trio is pure ear candy, a shameless indulgence, maybe even more shameless than the doowop ballad. (18^th century composers wrote ear candy in their trios; I've heard some especially shameless examples from Antonio Rosetti.)

And then midway through the trio, the music starts to play in reverse. If nobody hears this, that's just fine. I worked really hard to make the reversal sound seamless. When the scherzo returns, it's the literal retrograde of the beginning -- the same music played backwards. This you might be able to hear, if you listen; scales that went upward now go down. But, again, you don't have to hear it. The game I'm playing here is that the music flows perfectly well in both directions, and even sounds pretty much the same.

Fourth movement:

A romp --the fastest, most rhythmic music in the piece, and also the quietest . The entire development section is meant to be greatly hushed. Though finally there's a big climax, with some virtuoso celebration from the first horn. The South Dakota horn player says that he accepts the challenge, and I'm eager to hear how he'll do with it.

The premiere is Thursday night. They're going to play the piece three more times, in three other South Dakota cities. I'll get recordings, and I trust that I'll be able to put them on line. And of course if any other orchestra would like to play this piece, I can e-mail the parts.

Of course I've been following the debate (if that's what it is) between Alex Ross (also here) and Norman Lebrecht (see also the comments to his blog post) about the classical record industry. Nobody who's read me a lot will be surprised to know I side with Lebrecht, and I think there's a very simple way of stating the issue. Classical recording used to be a profit-making venture, both for major labels and small ones, without anybody needing to release any crossover albums. Well, OK, major conductors might record an LP of Strauss waltzes, to boost sales, but that's as far as it went. And a week later the same conductor would record a serious classical piece, fully paid for by the record company, with the expectation that the recording might -- eventually -- make a profit.

One key example is the Solti Ring, the first complete recording of the Ring ever made. As you can read in John Culshaw's famous book about the project, Ring Resounding (Culshaw produced the recording), this was a commercial project. Decca, the record company, paid for Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the best (and therefore most expensive) cast that could be found, all in the expectation that the records would someday earn money, which eventually they did.

Does that happen today? Barely. Classical recordings now are largely subsidized. I'm not saying that the big labels, DG, for instance, might not record a few favored artists at their own expense. But these are largely soloists -- stars, or stars in the making. And meanwhile the labels couldn't make a profit without crossover sales. Really large-scale recordings -- operas, orchestral performances -- are largely recorded live, and may be subsidized. As I've noted before, even back in the 1980s the Metropolitan Opera's Ring recording on DG was subsidized with private funds. Most American orchestras that record today produce and pay for the recordings themselves. They don't expect to make a profit. They make the recordings for promotion and publicity.

And the small classical labels? Many of them aren't commercial operations, in any meaningful sense. The artists often pay for the recordings that show up in critics' mailboxes, and that get reviewed so lavishly in Gramophone and other magazines. (And which used to be so bravely displayed at Tower Records, before the chain went bankrupt.)

Yes, there still are a few truly commercial classical label -- Naxos, as everybody knows, and Harmonia Mundi, and few others. (Does anybody know how Naïve operates? I'd be curious to know.) Harmonia Mundi operates by, for the most part, recording smallish projects without major stars. And of course I know that they record Mozart operas conducted by René Jacobs -- he's one of my great favorites, and I love those recordings. But Jacobs doesn't rank as a classical star the way Colin Davis does, let's say, or Essa-Pekka Salonen. Harmonia Mundi also told me, some years ago, that they'd diversified into world music, as a hedge against falling classical profits. They also make money distributing other labels, something Naxos does as well. I'm sure that helps them pay for their own releases.

Naxos has its own way of operating, which includes paying artists very small fees, and keeping all rights to the recordings, so that the artists (just for instance) don't get a cent if something they've recorded gets licensed to be used in a Hollywood film. I'm not going to say this is right or wrong; the artists, obviously, accept it, and maybe it's the only way to do business now. But things were very different in the classical recording industry decades ago. I noticed that people commenting on Norman Lebrecht's post cited the Naxos American Classics series as a bright spot in the current classical recording world. But American Classics couldn't be a better example of what I'm talking about here. As far as I know, Naxos doesn't pay for these recordings. I know one famous composer, who paid a six-figure sum to have recordings made, which then were given to Naxos in final form for release in the American Classics series. Naxos then paid for manufacturing, distribution, package design, and other things (the composer, in this case, paid for the program notes).

And I'm not minimizing that; the composer of course was grateful for it. But this is miles away from how the classical recording business used to function. In the 1950s and the 1960s, and maybe onward into the '70s, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra (to cite just three examples) had recording contracts with major labels. They got paid to make recordings. They also, I believe, earned royalties on sales of those recordings. In any case, substantial income from recordings showed up in their budgets. This doesn't happen now. Orchestras that make recordings now tend to pay the cost themselves. So they lose money on recording. As I've said, it becomes a promotional expense.

People will give many reasons for this change. They'll say that record labels in the 1950s thought they should record classical music as a public service. Small labels in the '50s (Vanguard, for instance) could go to Europe, where many people were still living in the rubble from World War II, and record performances very cheaply. They then could make a profit by selling the recordings in America, especially if they recorded music that hadn't ever been recorded. This, of course, leads to the other factor that made classical recording profitable, the emergence of the LP, and with it a larger market for classical records, and a sudden demand for recordings of music that hadn't been on records before.

You'll also find people saying that all this couldn't be sustained. I've heard that RCA recorded operas in the '70s that lost vast amounts of money. Some people think that only the advent of the CD in the '80s kept the classical record business going -- and that therefore it's really only the emergence of new formats that keeps the market lively. And then DG and its associated labels (Philips and Decca) then went crazy in the '90s, signing artists whose CDs they couldn't sell. That, people say, will show that the classical recording industry was in bad shape even then.

But despite all this, the bottom line is clear. For whatever reasons, classical recording used to be commercial; now it largely isn't. And if major labels in the 1950s released classical recordings because it was prestigious -- presumably accepting less profit than they would have made from pop -- doesn't that itself tell a story of classical music's decline? Clearly it must have been more prestigious in the '50s, in society at large, than it is now. Besides, pop music didn't start making giant profits till the 1970s, when multimillion album sales kicked in. So the profits from classical music in earlier decades, small as they perhaps were by current standards, would have loomed larger than they do now.

Footnotes:

The Solti Ring actually wasn't the first Ring on LP. There was an earlier release, on the Royale label, credited to Dresden forces. But it was really a pirated recording from Bayreuth, and of course had to be withdrawn.

Why are there so many classical recordings currently? One reason, I'm sure, is that recording is now cheap and easy. Anyone can do it at home. If you like, you can even design and burn the CDs yourself. Having them burned commercially isn't terribly expensive. Now factor in the number of classical musicians there currently are, a number swelled by the impressive levels of younger people studying classical music professionally. Why there should be so many young classical musicians is something I haven't figured out, but the musicians are definitely there, unfortunately not mirrored by anything like a proportionately large younger audience. Given these two things -- the ease of making recordings; the number of classical musicians around -- it's no wonder that there are so many small classical labels (plus, of course, some that rerelease older recordings). Especially if the musicians are making recordings without being paid!

But here we come to something serious. Almost all the money in classical music comes from the mainstream classical music business, from big orchestras, big opera companies, and big stars. This includes the money that funds music schools, which of course doesn't come from big institutions, but (at least to some reasonably large extent) is given by donors inflamed by the big institutions' prestige.

So if the mainstream classical business declines, what happens to all the hopeful young efforts we're seeing now? How are the musicians making all these bright and happy new recordings going to make a living?

There was a British newspaper piece linked on Musical America this week, something about Handel operas being boring. And then we had the opening of Handel's Giulio Cesare at the Met, with a worshipful review in the New York Times. ("[T]he richness and endless variety of the music... the piercing psychological insights of this staggering masterpiece.")

There's one thing I know for sure -- performances of Handel's operas today are nothing like the performances in Handel's own time. Back then, these operas (and in fact all operas, by all composers, all over Europe) were sheer entertainment. Spectacle -- lavish sets and costumes, and special effects like storms at sea and flying, fire-breathing dragons -- were a big part of the attraction.

And there was musical spectacle, too. The singers sang lavish, extravagant, often improvised ornamentation. The operas, as any music history book will tell you, consist mainly of arias, almost all of them in the same musical form, with an opening section, a shorter, contrasting span of music, and then a repeat of the opening. To musicologists, this has long seemed like a very severe and static way to construct an opera, and stage directors in our time labor mightily to construct some kind of action on stage, so that something happens while the arias are being sung.

Nothing like that happened in Handel's time! Nobody needed to be distracted by stage action. For one thing, very few people in the audience were paying full attention. People talked to each other, ate, walked around, and sometimes shouted at the stage. And for those who were listening, the repeat of the opening section was something to wait for, maybe with great excitement. What was the singer going to do? Singers would stride down to the front of the stage, wearing wildly overdone costumes, sometimes even striding into the middle of the audience on specially constructed ramps. Then they'd vary the repeated section so that the original melody completely disappeared. They did this (to judge from some surviving examples) with a virtuosity few singers have today.

Besides, our current classical music aesthetic goes against this practice. We're supposed to respect the composer's text, and one result is that vocal ornaments, in current Handel productions, are careful and discreet, the exact opposite of what they were in Handel's time. I don't claim to be a Handel expert, but for whatever it's worth, I've only once heard ornaments in a Handel performance that approached what Handel's singers would have done. This is in Ewa Podles's recording of "Or la tromba," an aria from Handel's opera Rinaldo, found on a recital disk on the Forlane label, called Famous Arias. Podles attacks the music like someone out to beat the world record for wild ornaments, and (if you ask me) gets a gold medal.

And this was only the beginning. The orchestra improvised, too. Recitative accompaniments were surprising and inventive. Forget the blank chords on a harpsichord, and the discreet bass notes played on a cello, which you see in the written scores, and hear played in most performances. The players went half crazy, with the cellist improvising scales, arpeggios, and complex chords. Other members of the orchestra would improvise. The written score was only a guide to what might be done, subject to delightful, unexpected changes in performance. When Handel produced his operas in London, his own harpsichord playing was a great attraction. He wasn't at all content simply to reinforce the orchestra, and calmly accompany the singers. He improvised virtuoso counterpoints to everything that was going on, and deliberately drew attention to himself. (Just as Vivaldi, when he produced his own operas, improvised crazy stuff on the violin, playing as high and fast as possible, and always providing one of the highlights of the show.) (You can hear one reconstruction of what the instrumental playing in Handel's operas might have been like, on René Jacobs' recording of Rinaldo. The vocal ornaments, unfortunately, are far too discreet, though I do love it when some of the singers mockingly add their voices to an orchestral passage, something not even remotely indicated in the written score, but which Jacobs thinks might well have happened.)

And then there were the costumes. In London, everyone wanted to know what the female singers wore. Often their dresses became fashionable. Sometimes they were shocking. In effect, the singers would go from directly from the opera stage into the 18^th century equivalent of gossip columns, and the cover of Vanity Fair. The singers - largely Italian -- were exotic creatures in London, much whispered about. Sometimes they'd get into fights on stage. Sometimes the press would derisively comment on their supposed sexual habits, in explicit language that would never be seen in a newspaper today.

And the castrati! Castrated men sang many of the leading roles. Obviously they were exotic creatures, far removed from the ordinary run of human life. They were gigantic international celebrities, and also walking sexual scandals. For one thing, castration of boys for musical purposes was illegal in Italy. But it was widely practiced, and here were the castrati to prove it, each one representing a flagrant violation of the law. They were almost like liquor during prohibition -- legally forbidden, but (with a wink and a grin) widely known to be available.

And on top of that, they were sexually potent. Their castration robbed them of any chance to have children, but they could (and did) have erections from morning till night. Some were gay, some were straight. The straight ones were much in demand as sexual indulgences, for women in the nobility. They were celebrities, after all -- and they couldn't get you pregnant.

All of this jumped from the stage in any Baroque opera performance. Sometimes the gossip came front and center, as it did whenever Vivaldi premiered an opera. Vivaldi, as everybody knew, was a priest who hadn't said mass for decades. How sinful was that? And he went around Europe, flagrantly living with two younger women, one of whom was his prima donna. People drew the obvious conclusions, just as we'd do now. Starved of all this gossip and spectacle, Baroque opera as it's performed today is - to speak bluntly -- a 21^st century fabrication, in which we contort these pieces into something there's no sign that they were ever meant to be.

I'm sorry I've been inactive so long, but I'm happy to say that I'm home from a rather long hospital stay, and then a session in a rehab facility -- and now I'm recovering. There's a lot I could say about how medical institutions work, based on my own experience these past weeks, and on things my friends and family have gone through.

Maybe I could put it this way -- try to imagine Gray's Anatomy combined with Catch-22. Or imagine a version of Gray's Anatomy (a more truthful one) in which half the communications between people on the medical staff -- and between medical staff and patients -- are halfway incoherent, or even completely so. You haven't lived until you've been rolled on a stretcher to the OR for surgery, and then hear the OR staff talking about how something new has come up, and you're not going to have surgery that day. Nobody tells you this -- you just hear them talking about it. And then one of the doctors throws a little hissy fit, because he hasn't been told how things stand. Based on my experience, the confusion this demonstrates might be more typical than not, and I'm not saying that to disparage the skill or caring of the people involved. It's their administrative processes that need work.

One evening a nurse came on duty, and told me not to eat or drink anything after midnight, because I might be having surgery -- again! -- the next day. I hadn't heard anything about even a remote possibility of a second procedure, and was naturally amazed. The nurse assured me that a doctor would come to tell me all about it. But hours later, when no doctor appeared, and I asked the nurse what was going on, she told me it had all been a mistake. Another nurse had told her this news about me -- news that wasn't true at all. There was no formal, written medical order about any surgery coming up. The whole thing had been hearsay. And my nurse, once she realized that she'd just been passing on rumors, never bothered to tell me, until I asked. All this, at a major New York City hospital.

I've heard far worse. A few years ago, a friend of mine became a father. The baby was hooked up to various monitors, and at one point -- while my friend and the baby's mother were standing nearby -- the monitors began sounding alarms. Two medical people came in, and without a word to the parents, began having an argument about whether this was really a medical crisis, or whether the machinery might be malfunctioning. They actually walked away continuing their dispute, without a word to the parents. Luckily, the machinery was the problem, not the baby, but the way this was handled just sounds sick.

The moral of all this? As a couple of doctors emphasized to me-- doctors who see very clearly what's going on -- you, the patient, have to take charge of your medical care. You have to ask sharp questions, complain when something doesn't seem right, and insist on changes when obvious mistakes are being made. If I and my wife hadn't done that, I'd have been in rehab for four weeks instead of one, and would have paid hundreds of dollars for a completely unnecessary ambulance ride that my insurance didn't cover, and (as I correctly insisted) could just as well have been done in a much cheaper ambulette, or even in a taxi. Again I'm not saying that the medical people I dealt with, on all levels, were incompetent. Far from it. But their administrative procedures need lots of work.