May 2007 Archives

1. I'm driving from New York out to my country place, late last night. I'm listening to sports radio. A commercial comes up; I don't want it yapping at me. I flip over to NPR, aka WNYC, New York's public radio station, and often a good place to hear surprising music. I just miss the announcement of the music coming up, but when the music starts, I'm drawn right in. A woman with a strong, high voice -- nice edge on it -- is singing something repetitive, with a good sharp beat. But really not repetitive; that's an illusion created, I think, because the tune keeps boxing itself in before it gets very far, and then keeps starting over again. Interesting.

For a while I think this must be one of those new-music composers (the kind who don't work in the classical concert hall) who writes what in any non-classical context would be called pop songs, though they're rough and individual. I'm judgmental enough to think the boxy tune is evidence of this; maybe a real pop person would write a tune that flew a little further. But then something starts skittering around in the instrumental mix, and I get lost listening to it. And before I understand exactly what's been happening to me, I find I'm drawn into the entire thing, that it goes on longer and does far more than I'd expected it to, and that I'd follow it anywhere.

Turns out it was Bjork, singing one of the last songs in her recent NYC concert. Shame on me -- if I listened to her more, of course I'd have recognized her voice. Shame on me double -- if I'd listened carefully to her unstable new album, Volta, (unstable in all the best ways) instead of leaving it on in the background, I'd have recognized what I just heard as one of its tracks.

But I loved that music. It was gripping, original. I would have followed it anywhere.

*

2. I'm flipping channels after dinner this evening, watching twilight fall outside, listening to a storm slowly brew, wondering if the three wild kittens I've been spotting on our property will show their little faces. I flip to PBS, and the overture to The Barber of Seville is just starting. This, I realize, is a telecast (or retelecast) of the Met's new production, as originally streamed to movie theaters. I'd vaguely wanted to see it, to find out how theatrical the new staging might be.

But quickly I hit a snag. I know The Barber of Seville all too well, from recordings and live performances, and I didn't want to hear it this evening. It's lots of fun, and in fact I just adore bel canto opera, but as I said, I know it pretty thoroughly, and it holds no mysteries for me. So -- really, truly, and with no prejudice against its quality -- I didn't want to hear it. This is a danger, obviously (or in a sane world it would be), that's going to strike when the core operatic repertory has so few pieces in it.

Nor was I encouraged by what I heard. The orchestra sounded neat and mildly crisp. Closeups showed that the players are notably young. That got me thinking about the paradox in classical music today, the aging audience vs. the youthening (so shoot me; I made up a word) of major orchestras. Then came the second theme of the overture, the oboe solo, and the tempo slipped a fraction. Bad. Careless. The conductor's fault. The camera wandered over to him, and I thought I saw what the problem was. He makes all sorts of graceful motions to encourage little string flourishes, but he doesn't keep an absolutely steady beat.

So why do I want to watch this? The Mets had just gone ahead of the San Francisco Giants. I'd rather go back to the game. So I do. But then there's a commercial. I switch back to PBS, thinking that by now the curtain must have risen, and I can watch the staging, and hear Juan Diego Florez sing his first-scene aria.

But again I'm discouraged. The staging isn't bad, exactly. But it's all too predictable, the count's servant Fiorello asking everybody to be quiet, and everybody not quite doing that. "Quiet!" Something falls. Ba-ding. Been there, done that. And in the middle of all these mild contrivances, the baritone who sings Fiorello isn't singing quietly, and as far as I can tell, isn't even trying to. Been there, done that, too. Opera! The art where sometimes they don't even try.

Then Florez comes in. Through the audience, which did wake me up a little. He gets up on stage via a ramp built over the orchestra pit. It's a nice touch, which I'd read about. But it really works.

And of course he's a real singer, in the sense of "singer" that includes Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra, though not many other opera figures. Or at least he could be. I really think he's got it all -- voice, feeling, attitude, expression. Except he's so damn careful! It's the classical music curse. The first thing you're taught to do is obey the rules. Don't go too far. Respect what the composer wrote. Yadda yadda yadda, until you've got about three square feet in your 2500 square foot musical home for your own personality.

In this aria ("Ecco ridente"), he might begin by doing the kind of ornamentation Rossini would have expected to hear. I teach this each year to my Juilliard class on the future of classical music. I show them the Barber score Rossini wrote, and then two sets of ornaments for this aria, as published by Manuel Garcia, Jr., a famous 19th century voice teacher who also just happened to be the son of the man who created the role Florez is singing tonight.

I also play three performances of the aria for my class. First a modern one, strictly by the book. Then one by Tito Schipa, from 1916 (if I remember right; I don't have it with me), nicely ornamented. And then one by Fernando de Lucia, recorded I think in 1904, just full of ornaments and all kinds of other personal touches, though the Manuel Garcia ornaments go even further. It's a kind of musical archeology, unearthing history, one layer at a time, always going deeper. Too bad Florez (and probably the conductor, and the coaches at the Met) don't know all this, or else think it's somehow not respectable. Florez needs to be unleashed. He might start, at least in this role, by doing what the composer would have wanted - -and what the style of the composer's time demanded. He should go to town with the music, in a really personal way. (Just like Dorothy Love Coates, a classic gospel singer I'm listening to as I write this, goes to town with every note she sings.)

I went back to the ballgame. There was nothing here to interest me. How could I recommend this emptiness to any Bjork fan? (Including me.)

You can see the Manuel Garcia ornaments by downloading a PDF file here.

"Those who maintain, or, more commonly, just assume, as adherents of western classical music tend to do, that their own [musicmaking] is in its very nature superior to any other, can only mean, finally, that they believe themselves, by virtue of the culture to which they belong, to be inherently superior to all others."

Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue

[And if this seems too strong, just restrict it to classical music vs. pop.]

The mainstream classical music world, I sometimes think, lives in denial. Tell it that its audience is aging, and some people simply don’t believe it. Others say it doesn’t matter, because the audience always has been old. (Not true.) Or else it doesn’t matter because younger people, as they age, will turn to classical music.

Whereas when model railroaders age — their median age was 30 in 1970, and it’s over 50 now — everybody in the model railroad world starts saying, “Yes, goodbye, it’s over.” Which is only common sense. If you don’t see younger people taking part, why think you have a future? (The link takes you to a blog post of mine with complex stuff about the age of the classical audience. Scroll toward the end for the model railroad part.)

And now comes more common sense, this time from the beverage industry. The business section of today’s New York Times has a lengthy piece on the Coca-Cola Company. In it, we read that younger people aren’t drinking carbonated drinks the way they used to:

Taken as a whole [the story says], soda sales still handily outweigh all other beverage categories combined, but the trend lines are ominous for a “sparkling beverage”-dependent company like Coke. William Pecoriello, a Morgan Stanley analyst, found in a survey last year that teenagers, who used to be among the biggest consumers of soda, increasingly prefer other beverages.

“If you lost that generation, as they age they aren’t suddenly going to start drinking carbonated soft drinks,” says Mr. Pecoriello. “That’s the importance of Coke closing the non-carb gap.”

“As they age they aren’t suddenly going to start drinking carbonated soft drinks.” Common sense! So let’s get back to classical music. The National Endowment for the Arts, in one of its periodic reports on the age of the classical music audience, found that the number of younger people going to classical concerts basically collapsed in the 1980s, and hasn’t recovered since. (These links go to NEA publications, which you can download from the NEA’s website. Then you’ll have the same data I have.) If younger people aren’t going to classical concerts nearly as much as they did in past generations, why assume that as they age they’ll suddenly start going? Follow William Pecoriello’s lead; read the writing on the wall.

There is one ray of hope. The number of younger people playing classical music — as opposed to sitting in the mainstream classical audience — has stayed the same. In this way, classical music is very much unlike model railroading. It has an active core of younger people. So, in principle at least, it ought to also have a younger audience — except that mainstream classical events turn off the great majority of younger people, including (as I hear all the time from my Juilliard and Eastman students) even friends of all the young classical music professionals.

So, like the beverage industry, classical music must diversify. A company like Pepsi (Coke lags behind) has fruit juice, energy drinks (Pepsi owns Gatorade), iced tea, and the largest-selling bottled water in America. Young classical musicians, all on their own, are giving concerts (in clubs, for instance) that attract younger people. But this is still a tiny slice of the classical music world. Will the mainstream classical music biz read the history of Coke and Pepsi, and start giving new kinds of concerts, too? (In large quantities, I mean. The tiny toe-in -the-water experiments they’ve tried so far just aren’t going to cut it.)

From Gillian Gallagher, a violist who was one of my Juilliard students this spring. Reprinted from her final paper, with her permission:

We think of the general public as being ignorant and unable to pay attention -- we don't give them enough credit. The average American consumes a vast amount of entertainment (complex TV shows, hours of music on their iPods, movies) a day -- I feel fairly confident that they will want to listen to and watch concerts if we present them in the ways that they are already accustomed to consuming their entertainment.

This past weekend, I found myself at a party with three opera stars. I'm not going to name them; no reason they should go to a party, and then get talked about in public. But they're singers anyone who goes to the Met would recognize. And this is worth blogging about, in part because of a comment someone posted to my "Nuns with Manicures" post.

The person commenting asked what I'd thought of an intermission feature in the Met's live movie-theater presentation of Puccini's Il Trittico. This was a short film about the Met's National Council auditions, showing one of the first rounds of that competition, complete with a skeptical judge who didn't think there would be many singers good enough to go on to the next round. A friend of the commenter thought this was a terrible thing to say, especially if the Met wants to bring new people to opera.

I disagreed, which will hardly surprise regular readers. For one thing, we're not going to be credible -- not even remotely -- if we pretend that everything about classical music is wonderful. But, beyond that, singers do vary. Some are good, some are bad. And hearing a major opera star sing in someone's living room is a striking reminder of what the standards for "good" really are.

So here's what happened. A lot of musical people were at this party -- opera stars, opera singers who do smaller roles at the Met, other people in the classical music business, and one coach/accompanist, who seemed happy to spend much of the evening at the piano. Often when he'd start some opera aria, one of the singers would start singing. Though not, for the most part, the major stars. They're unlikely to sing at parties. They need to save their voices.

But one of them did sing, a soprano who sings roles like Tosca. Which is to say that she's not a lyric soprano. Her voice is bigger, more potent.

And here's the lesson she taught. (Not that she meant to teach anything. She was just having fun.) She might not be your favorite soprano. Or she might be. I'm not sitting in judgment. But if you heard her do Tosca or one of her other big roles, maybe you'd think that she'd gone past some of her limits, whatever those might be. This is normal. Anyone might go past their limits, singing major opera roles. Those roles are difficult.

But heard in a living room, this soprano was just about mesmerizing. Somehow the pianist and singers got started on The Sound of Music. A lyric soprano sang the title song. And then the Tosca soprano sang "Edelweiss." All at once, anyone could hear what it means to have a major voice, and an equally major ability to use it. The size of the sound, the richness, the control, the focus, the commitment -- these were stunning (and all the more so because it all sounded so easy). You knew you were hearing someone who knows how to sing, someone with a voice you won't forget, someone who delivers on a very high level.

And that's what the judges at any competition are looking for. Or, rather, the potential to get that far, since young singers aren't likely to be there yet. You can get into arguments about who's going to make it, who's going to take the further steps that professionals, hearing them sing when they're young, know they have to take. But not many people would disagree about what the goal is -- or miss it, when it's plainly displayed just 15 feet away.

Twice before I've quoted one of my Eastman students. Here's yet another one, who prefers to be anonymous. She's writing here about why even she -- not normally a big pop music fan -- was drawn in by a pop event:

I am not the type of girl to go to a Warped Tour concert willingly, (my high school girlfriends basically had to drag me there) but it really was mildly entertaining. Here is the big reason why someone like me (sort of nerd) wanted to go out a buy a Good Charlotte CD after I attended an afternoon at the Warped Tour: stuff happened! There was a skateboard half pike competition as well as a BMX trick bike competition. There were also vendors lining the street selling promotional t-shirts, CDs, hats, water guns, and condoms, really anything that would entice the consumer. When the bands were up on stage, I remember how I felt and what the music sounded like based on how the performing ensembles interacted with the people in the audience. They sprayed us with hoses, jumped into the audience, asked an audience member to go get them a beer in the middle of the song, burped, screamed, and even TALKED! There was no heavy, red velvet curtain creating this unspoken wall between the stage and the audience. Also, we (yes, even me) thought that these guys up on stage were cool and wanted to be like them, and liked by them. It really did seem as though these alternative/punk bands were writing for the audience. They were writing for the tour, because that is how they make a lot of their money: it seems as though if the music is not enticing live, these bands have no future. In Mozart's letter to his father about the Paris Symphony, he explains how the "audience was quite carried away" and how they verbally and physically reacted to his work of music. (I am sure that if these people had a chase, they would have bought a "Mozart Rules!" T-shirt and a CD of this work recorded by the ensemble that they just heard play).

From Joe Queenan's essay, "Why Not the Worst?" in the New York Times Book Review, May 6, 2007:

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they're not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn't. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through "The Da Vinci Code" is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame. In these people's view, any time spent reading a bad book can never be recovered. They also act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.

And the antidote to that? Here's a story that the 19^th century British music critic Henry Chorley told, in his book Thirty Years' Musical Recollections. He's writing about Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment, a work that, as he says,

has gained universal acceptance [and] has established itself as among the brightest and the last of comic Italian operas. There is a careless gaiety amount­ing to merriment -- there is a frankness, always military, never vulgar -- in this music. One might fancy it to have been thrown off during some sunny period of high spirits, when the well-spring of melody was in a sparkling humour. It is slight, it is familiar, it is catching -- it is everything that pedants find easy to condemn.

I happened once in London to hear it laid hold of by a party of such connoisseurs, including more than one composer, who would have found it hard to write eight bars having the faintest echo of hila­rity in them. Some were decrying it, too, for the poor reason of anticipating the presumed censure of the one Genius of the company. This was Mendelssohn. He let them rail their fill for a while, saving nothing. Then he began to move restlessly on his chair.

"Well, I don't know," said he, at last; "I am afraid I like it. I think it very pretty -- it is so merry." Then, bursting into one of those fits of hearty gaiety which lit up his beautiful counte­nance in a manner never to be forgotten, "Do you know," said he, "I should like to have written it myself."

The dismay and wonderment of the classicists, who had made sure of his support, were truly droll.

Well, finally I went to see one of those Metropolitan Opera live moviecasts -- the live performances streamed to movie theaters. And yes, it was marvelous. The work was ll Trittico, which, as ever, I find slow going in Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, and divine in Gianni Schicchi. (Well, except for that climactic chord at the end of Suor Angelica -- the soprano on high C, G in the bass, and D, F, and A in between. I've never looked at a score, but each time I hear it, I just love that chord. It's a modern pop sound, decades before its time -- and the pop notation, Dm7/G, makes a lot more sense than any classical chord symbols anyone might use for it.)

But you might not be reading this to see me gush about Puccini's harmony. (Though really I ought to talk more about music here. And I love Puccini.) So here's my future of classical music point. Yes, it's terrific to see the Met in a movie theater. There's the communal sense of a live performance. People applauded, just as they'd do in the opera house. And the opera looks larger than life, which is also what you'd want if you saw it live.

And yet I'll cite two problems. First, some of the nuns in Suor Angelica -- seen, unavoidably, in close-ups -- had fancy manicures. Now, if you're an opera fan, you might say, "So what?" You're thrilled to see the opera on a movie screen. You don't care about anybody's nails. (And who's going to tell the singers that, just for this one performance, they have to unmanicure themselves, and then run out to the nail salon to get the manicures done again? Will the Met pay for that?)

But when I told someone not yet an opera initiate about the manicures, he just howled with laughter. And that's just the point. To the extent that these moviecasts reach outside the standard opera audience, the nuns' nails really do matter. Movie fans collect gaffes like that in movies. Sometimes they do it affectionately. But if they sense that the people making the movie aren't wholly serious, they'll get angry, or at least derisive. If the Met wants a mainstream audience for its theater showings (and maybe later for DVD releases), it has to take responsibility for every detail on the screen.

Which then brings me to the intermission conversation between Jack O'Brien, who directed the production, and James Levine, who conducted it. This, to put it plainly, was self-congratulatory crap. O'Brien says Levine is wonderful, Levine says O'Brien is wonderful, both say the operas and the singers are wonderful. This, from two smart guys, who could talk much more seriously if they wanted to. (Actually, they seemed like they could dish the production from top to bottom, which would have been priceless, not that we'll ever see it happen.)

If this had been a bonus track on a movie DVD, my friend would once again be snorting, If, that is -- since he's a smart guy himself -- he wasn't offended at this insult to his intelligence.
How can people get away with blather like this in classical music, with nobody saying a word against them, w hen anywhere in popular culture they'd get blasted? (Just for instance: The Onion -- the satirical newspaper that, on its more serious pages, has some of the smartest pop-culture coverage anywhere -- makes a cottage industry of finding dumb DVD commentary tracks.)

Why couldn't Levine and O'Brien name the parts of the operas that don't quite work? (I'd nominate the end of Il Tabarro, when the baritone draws his wife, the soprano, under his cloak, just he did when they were young lovers -- except that this time the cloak hides the body of the tenor, the soprano's lover, whom the baritone has just strangled. Especially in closeup -- with poor Licitra doing his best to look like a google-eyed corpse -- this could have been one of those EC horror comics from back in the '50s, where gore was uncorked partly for laughs.)

Or they could have talked about the parts that were hard to stage. Or the parts that were easy. Or the parts that at first they interpreted differently. Then they could have told us how they resolved their differences. Or -- since in another intermission feature we were told that this production had the most massive set ever seen at the Met -- they could have told us how they got such a huge (and surely expensive) set approved, at a time when the Met has been running deficits.

Some people worry that classical music is going to be dumbed down. I worry that -- at least as it's normally presented -- it doesn't seem smart enough.

I urge everyone to read a report from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation about the participation -- or lack of it -- of younger people in the arts. Its formal title: Involving Youth in Nonprofit Arts Organizations: A Call to Action. I was alerted to this by a reader who saw it mentioned in Andrew Taylor's terrific blog, and when I read Andrew's post, I thought he nailed one problem the report has. More on that later. But the report tells some unpleasant truths, and cuts through some of the fog we still find in discussions of youth issues in classical music. Read it and see!

It outlines a crisis. Here in the fumbly confines of the classical music world, we're still not sure (well, some of us aren't sure) that our audience is aging. Well, it's more than the audience. How about the staffs of arts organizations, their volunteers, their boards, their funders? Or even simply people who think the arts matter, and support arts funding? These people are aging, too, the report warns, and may not be there in the future.

And it gets worse:

There are fewer people in the generations immediately behind the 78-million-strong group of boomers, signaling greater competition for workers in every field in the near future.... According to the Employment Policy Foundation (EPF), between 2003 and 2013 over 30 million new job openings (in all fields, for-profit and nonprofit) will be created for candidates with at least a two-year college degree. However, only 23 million new graduates will be available to fill these positions, leaving a shortfall of qualified candidates for 7 million positions.

And given that younger people don't seem to care about the arts...

Which, by the way, isn't some vague fear, or unsubstantiated theory:

According to a study released by the National Endowment for the Arts in November 2006, "The Arts & Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life," based on a 2002 survey of 17,135 adults (ages 18 and older), young adult (18 - 34) participation in the arts has declined over the past twenty-year period. Attendance at performing arts events showed a marked decline, 18-34 years old went from having the highest rate of literary reading across all adult categories to the lowest rate, and the rate of volunteerism by the 18 to 34 age cohort declined as well. If young people are less engaged in the arts than they were just twenty years ago, that may make it that much more difficult for the arts sector to recruit and retain the participation of this age group.

Another quote:

As changing global economics impact national and local jurisdictions, fierce demands on scarce resources may further reduce public funding for nonprofit arts organizations, making it even harder to maintain current, or hire new, staff. Scores of worthy causes and dramatic natural and human emergencies continue to lay claim to public generosity, resulting in donor fatigue. Future projections suggest that the nonprofit arts sector must make a concerted effort to connect with the next generation of donors in order to attract a market share of philanthropic giving. There is no guarantee that the patron system of wealthy individuals supporting certain cornerstone cultural institutions in our larger cities will continue; the new generation of civic philanthropists may indeed abandon them and shift their support to other priorities.

This new generation of civic philanthropists may have already emerged in New York, where there's been a shift in money and power from the Upper East Side (the traditional old-money 'hood in New York) to more recently trendy downtown areas like Tribeca. And where does the classical music audience -- and hence classical music donors -- come from? Still the Upper East Side. Worse yet, people from the new power neighborhoods don't buy many tickets to classical music events. Where will the donors of the future come from?

And then there's this:

[There is] an obvious and drastic effect on recruitment of the next generation of leaders and staff. Declining public funding of the arts and increased competition for funding from other sources make it almost impossible for all but the wealthiest arts organizations to offer competitive pay packages....This means nonprofit arts organizations invariably find themselves disadvantaged when searching and competing for the best candidates in the small pool of qualified young leaders.

Read further in the report, and you find that arts organizations aren't doing much about any of this.

The Hewlett Foundation is located in California, and the writers of the report surveyed many California arts organizations. Only 19% had programs to recruit younger audience members. Only 4% targeted young people as potential donors. Just 3% tried to involve younger people in arts advocacy. The Los Angeles Opera has one of the more promising programs aimed at younger people. Its annual budget? $2500. The total LA Opera budget is more than $10 million.

Other than nurturing the next generation of artists, the nonprofit arts sector has done little to capitalize on its present bridges to youth. To date, there is no systemic approach to the challenge of generational succession in the areas of governance, membership, advocacy, or financial support.

The one problem with the report? It keeps saying that younger people have to be taught the value of the arts and culture. Not so -- they have arts and culture of their own. It's just not the kind of art and culture that people in "the arts" keep talking about. If people in the arts want to sell their kind of art to a younger audience, fine, let them do it. But they'll never succeed if they don't respect the art that younger people already have. And maybe "the arts" need to expand to include the art that smart younger people identify with, even if, by traditional standards, much of gets labeled as popular culture.

Or as Andrew put it, much more sharply than I have:

The best and only way to ''convince'' younger citizens that the arts are valuable to them is to actually be valuable to them. That requires not just a change of face, but a change of nature.

I'm walking again, almost. "Almost" means that I'm cleared, medically, to put weight on my broken leg, and can gimp around without crutches -- but only for a little while. Then my not-yet-fully-healed leg begins to ache. And it'll swell up. Neither the ache nor the swelling are medical problems. They're not a sign that my leg isn't healing. But they're uncomfortable. On Sunday I gimped around quite a bit outdoors, crutchless, trying to jump start our second car, which we neglected while we were preoccupied with the leg break. The battery died. This was too much; I ached the next day, and had to cut back.

But this is progress! One thing I've learned is to be grateful that my situation is, in the end, routine. You break your leg, the doctors do their job, you go around on crutches for a while. You're weak, but you get stronger. And in not too long, you're back to normal. Other people have it much worse, starting with a loyal reader of this blog who broke his leg much more badly than I broke mine, and on top of that lay for quite a while in horrible pain, with no one around to help him. And then I think of the rookie Yankee pitcher Phil Hughes, who needed to prove himself, and took a no-hitter into the 7^th inning, only to pop a hamstring, and go on the disabled list for four to six week. That's a worse story than mine.

The South Dakota premiere was a heartwarming success, both with the audience (in three South Dakota cities, and in a town in Minnesota), and with the orchestra. Parts of the piece were harder than I'd expected (I get a big "duh" award for that), and the orchestra worked hard to get everything right. Any composer will know how I felt when, from time to time, one of the musicians would come over to tell me how much he or she liked the piece, and how hard they were working to nail [fill in the blank: the viola triplets in the first movement (which cut against the rhythms in all the other parts); the devilish place for the first violins in the finale; the high horn craziness in the scherzo...]. The playing got better and better, and the musicians absolutely got the spirit of the piece, playing the second movement (just for instance) with a lilt I'd be thrilled to hear from any orchestra. I was proud of these people, and grateful for their devotion. Nor could I say enough good things about the conductor, Delta David Gier.

If the musicians allow me, I'll post the performance on my website, so anyone interested can hear it.