June 2007 Archives

For some of the last two weeks, I was blogging on a special ArtsJournal blog leading up to the American Symphony Orchestra League's just-concluded conference. The subject was, more or less, the state of the arts, and the need for arts organizations to engage audiences in a much more vivid way. If I'd been the least bit organized, I would have noted this here, while it was happening, and maybe even crossposted some of my many entries.

But to tell the truth, even while I almost obsessed with that blog, I was discouraged. My view, simply put, is that the arts -- as an enterprise separate from our wider culture, and somehow standing above it -- are over. And that therefore any attempt to revive them (this includes classical music, of course) will have to mean that they engage popular culture, and everything else going on in the outside world. Which I started calling "the real world," partly because I was frustrated that many people just don't get all this.

I have many reasons for my point of view, starting from my own arts consumption, which these days makes no distinction -- in presumed cultural level -- between TV, movies, gospel music (my current craze, along with a yet again renewed passion for past-generation opera singers) and classical music. And then there's the wider world, where the arts clearly don't have the force or constituency or unquestioned prestige that they used to have. The clearest example of this is the sense that emerged over the last decades that cities don't need the arts to attract a smart, creative young workforce (and therefore the corporations that employ it). Instead -- as reported by Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, and in reporting in the New York Times, cities need a vital local band scene, and a good network of bike paths. That's a huge cultural change, of course reflecting the change in younger peoples' culture.

But never mind that. You can read my posts in that blog for more. And in fact I'd recommend at least skimming the whole thing. It was quite a vital discussion. What bothers me is the way I seem to be received. I was praised, offstage, by more than one person, for being "the provocateur the field needs." I've gotten that "provocateur" label many times before, and, honestly, I don't like it. I feel a little bit like Varese, who hated being called an "experimental" composer. "My experiments I leave in my studio," he groused. "This is my music!" (Or words to that effect.)

So, likewise, me. These posts, here in this blog and in the other one (along with all my declarations on these subjects) aren't meant to provoke anyone. They're simply my ideas. They're what I think is true. They're what I think should be acted on. But they don't quite register that way. I don't often get people saying, "Great! Let's do it!" Or, which I'd like just as much, "His solution doesn't seem right, but he's certainly raised some crucial issues. Let's find a way to deal with them.'

Of course, maybe I'm just too extreme. Maybe I'm out beyond left field, raving about global warming, when all we're seeing is a hot day. Or maybe, on the other hand, the field is too conservative. Take your pick. But I'd offer the following as one perspective that ought to be more than a provocation:

1, The arts are in crisis. There's not enough audience, not enough support. Why else are we having all these debates?

2. From outside the arts, the world looks very different from how it looks inside the arts. And, above all, the arts look very different.

3. There's even a literature partly about the arts, written by people in the outside world, including such widely read items as the Richard Florida book I mentioned above, and John Seabrook's Nobrow. People in the arts don't seem to know these books. Certainly they're not cited very often, even in the middle of debates where what they say is directly to the point.

4. People in the arts don't pay enough attention to what people outside the arts think.

5. People in the arts need to pay close attention to what people outside the arts think. Because if you don't have enough audience, or enough funding, or enough advocacy...well, we can all connect the dots ourselves.

But people in the arts are, in my experience, far too focused on inside-the-arts thinking. They (including me) talk, talk, talk about how to engage a new audience, without spending enough time considering what that new audience is really like.

Quotation of the day:

"Most orchestras have got to do something to lower the age of their audience, or they're going to be in big trouble in a few years."

-- Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the trade publication for pop music tours, quoted in a New York Times piece about how some orchestras are starting to include alternative rock on their pops concerts.

Granted, Bongiovanni is talking about pops concerts, and where pops concerts are concerned, orchestras really do seem to be addressing the problem Bongiovanni raises. But look at the forthright way he states the problem. Do orchestras ever talk like that? This is yet another example of how things in classical music that we walk on eggs to talk about, get addressed in plain English when they come up elsewhere in the world.

The problem, by the way, with talking so frankly about orchestras' classical concerts and their audience would be something like this. It's fine to fiddle with pops concerts; they're not part of the orchestra's core mission. The classical concerts, on the other hand, are at the center of that mission, and therefore can't be changed. Which then means it's fairly hard to address some huge problem like the aging of the audience, because the most direct solution -- start doing things younger people might like -- seems to conflict with the untouchable core mission, and therefore can't be contemplated, unless you're only talking about very small changes around the edges of the standard concert format. To change that format in fundamental ways, or to change the programming in fundamental ways -- these things aren't yet allowed. Therefore it's best to state the basic problem very cautiously. If it was hurled at the world in the kind of plain, bold English Gary Bongiovanni used, someone might just jump up and say, "So do something!"

From Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies":

We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art. The movies we respond to, even in childhood, don't have the same values as the official culture supported at school and in the middle-class home. At the movies we get low life and high life, while David Susskind and the moralistic reviewers chastise us for not patronizing what they think we should, "realistic" movies that would be good for us--like A Raisin in the Sun, where we could learn the lesson that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family. Movie audiences will take a lot of garbage, but it's pretty hard to make us queue up for pedagogy. At the movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful. We get little things even in mediocre and terrible movies--Jose Ferrer sipping his booze through a straw in Enter Laughing. Scott Wilson's hard scary all-American-boy-you-can't-reach face cutting through the pretensions of In Cold Blood with all its fancy bleak cinematography. We got, and still have embedded in memory Tony Randall's surprising depth of feeling in The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, Keenan Wynn and Moyna Macgill in the lunch-counter sequence of The Clock, John W. Bubbles on the dance floor in Cabin in the Sky, the inflection Gene Kelly gave to the line, "I'm a rising young man" in DuBarry was a Lady, Tony Curtis saying "avidly" in Sweet Smell of Success. Though the director may have been responsible for releasing it, it's the human material we react to most and remember longest. The art of the performers stays fresh for us, their beauty as beautiful as ever. There are so many kinds of things we get--the hangover sequence wittily designed for the CinemaScope screen in The Tender Trap, the atmosphere of the newspaper offices in The Luck of Ginger Coffey, the automat gone mad in Easy Living. Do we need to lie and shift things to false terms--like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her acting had made her a star? Wouldn't we rather watch her than better actresses because she's so incredibly charming and because she's probably the greatest model the world has ever known? There are great moments--Angela Lansbury singing "Little Yellow Bird" in Dorian Gray. (I don't think I've ever had a friend who didn't also treasure that girl and that song.) And there are absurdly right little moments--in Saratoga Trunk when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, "You're very beautiful," and she says, "Yes, isn't it lucky?" And those things have closer relationships to art than what the schoolteachers told us was true and beautiful. Not that the works we studied in school weren't often great (as we discovered later) but that what the teachers told us to admire them for (and if current texts are any indication, are still telling students to admire them for) was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what might have been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing in them, and subversive, too, had been coated over.

[There couldn't be a better example of "official culture" than classical music, at least as it's been presented and talked about during my lifetime. Why do we think we're going to get anywhere by having schoolteachers -- whether literally in school, or doing outreach programs for classical music institutions -- "educating" people about classical music? With all the piety that this usually implies. Doesn't Pauline Kael blow up that kind of education, by showing how people in our era really do learn to like things? Especially now, when suspicion of official culture can be taken for granted among the smart younger people the classical music business wants to attract.]

I'd like to invite everyone to listen to my recent symphony, in one of the world premiere performances the Dakota Chamber Orchestra gave in April. Well, in a composite of two of their performances, which I edited from recordings I made.

I'm grateful to the musicians for giving me permission to put this recording online. To hear the piece, follow the link, and scroll down the page till you find the symphony. You can listen to the live performance, hear my old computer demo, and download the score.

I'm not going to be shy about this piece. I really love it. The musicians had a good time with it, too, and I'm grateful for their dedication. And of course for the terrific work the conductor did. He's Delta David Gier, music director of the South Dakota Symphony (parent organization of the Dakota Chamber Orchestra), and also conductor of all of next year's New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts. He did some smart and wonderful -- and sensitive -- things to the score.

Listen, for instance, to the lilt he gets in the strings at the start of the second movement (where the strings function as the rhythm section of a 1950s rock song). He'd asked me how I wanted the rhythm played, and what he wanted, since he was asking as an orchestra professional, was details of articulations -- which notes should be long, which short, which ones stressed, which notes unstressed. I'd never thought about that, and could only tell him I wanted it to sound like some laid-back kind of rock & roll. So he was on his own. Just hear what he worked out! (And listen to the gorgeous oboe playing, too.)

I'm also grateful for what he did with the third movement. You can, if you're really into this, compare the tempo I set for the third movement (in my computer demo), with the tempo David took. His is much faster. And he was right. I can't imagine why I thought it should go more slowly.

Many thanks to David for commissioning and premiering the piece, and to the orchestra, for working so loyally on it. I'd be curious to know what my readers think. It's a piece designed as pure entertainment, based on 18th century models, but with a lot of American music added. I'm getting terrific reactions from people in the business who've heard the recording. It would be immodest to quote what they've said (and also improper, since they said it to me privately), but I'd like to think I have a hit on my hands.

From time to time, I've talked about new ways of giving concerts that seem guaranteed to work -- new ways of giving concerts that reliably attract large, new audiences. So here's another one. Put on a new music marathon in an attractive public place. Don't sell tickets. Make it free, let people come and go. Then stand back and watch your success.

New Yorkers will recognize this non-formula -- it's the Bang on a Can marathon, which has been going on for 20 years, but this year and last was presented in the Winter Garden, a relaxed and spacious atrium (it's tall enough to fit more than a few full-sized palm trees) in downtown Manhattan. I'm calling it a non-formula, because obviously you can't just plan the concert, and then sit back and expect success. Bang on a Can is a brand name in New York new music, has a following, sets up expectations, builds loyalty (I'd call myself a fan, way beyond any professional allegiance I might have). They can attract terrific musicians, along with funding enough to bring off a giant event.

Still, they succeeded maybe beyond anybody's expectations. This marathon was 26 hours long. It ran from 8 PM June 2 straight through to 10 PM June 3, or in other words from Saturday evening to late Sunday night. (It may have ended long after 10 PM, because long before that it was running late.) In a brilliant stroke of programming, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians -- an hour-long piece, and a true musical high, if ever there was one -- was scheduled for 4:30 AM, and felt "like an epiphany," according to someone I know who was there. 400 people heard it, I was told, by someone who says he counted them.

I heard maybe two hours Saturday, and maybe three hours Sunday, from around 11 AM till 2. I would have stayed later Saturday -- in fact, I was longing to -- but my leg was hurting. I can walk, these days, but it's not easy, and if I do it too much, I get tired, and the leg starts to hurt. By late Saturday night, I was feeling all of that, and while my heart longed to stay, my body demanded to go home.

This was more than a concert. It was an event, with a capital E. One of the three composers who run Bang on a Can came with his wife and kids. The kids -- who'd been passing out programs when the show began -- bunked down on sleeping bags when they got sleepy. Sunday morning, I saw a very well known composer arrive with his own family, his two small kids on bicycles. Kids were everywhere, in fact. Saturday night -- in the midst of what must have been 1000 people -- I saw one little girl, maybe three years old, dancing. My wife and I watched her. She danced between performances, when no music was playing. But she danced differently when the music was on, so she was clearly listening.

Sunday morning, a little boy, maybe four or five years old, very solemnly went up toward the performing area with his parents' camera, to take a picture. People were taking pictures everywhere -- from the crowd, from an upper level where you could look down on the proceedings. And I can't stress enough that this wasn't a professional crowd. I was surprised, in fact, that I didn't see more people I know from the music business. On Saturday night, I asked one of the organizers who the people all around us might be. "I don't know!" he said, with complete delight.

And I also can't stress enough that people applauded all kinds of music. Sunday morning there was a lovely calm guitar piece by Dominic Frasca, which (in video form) has gotten more than three million hits on YouTube. It's hardly a surprise that the live audience liked it, too. But the audience also cheered some slashing music from the World Saxophone Quartet, full of dissonance. This year, Bang on a Can extended their reach by including two rock bands, the Books and Yo La Tengo. I heard the Books. It was quickly clear to anyone with ears that new music of the Bang on a Can variety overlaps really strongly with alternative rock. Same kind of sounds, same kind of textures, often the same rhythms, same non-mainstream approach (Bang on a Can's music isn't like to show up in classical concert halls; the Books aren't going anywhere on the pop charts).

But there also are differences, which I might express like this. The language of new music, as Bang on a Can speaks it, has many dialects. The Books (and other rock bands with a new music tilt) tend towards the dialects with comparatively regular rhythms, comparatively clear harmony, and something at least approaching pop-song melody. (Or at least fragments of it.) The rock bands also head toward the dialects that are less immediately accessible, but maybe they spend more time than the other music on the marathon in the clear-chord territory. Which is no criticism of them, just an observation. The music I write is full of bright, clear chords. (Well, often not so bright, even if they're triads.)

This was one of the happiest musical events I've attended for quite a while. I felt like a fan. I bought a t-shirt. And one thing I liked was the presentation. The space was huge (and also surrounded by upscale shops and restaurants). But the presentation was always low-key. Nobody tried to whip the crowd up between pieces. There was never any hype. The hosts -- the people who announced each act from the stage -- were the three Bang on a Can composers, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon. (Well, to be absolutely accurate, I heard Julia and Michael making these announcements, but since David of course was there, I assume he made some, too.) They made no effort to fill the huge space with their personalities. They were just themselves, as they always are. Which helped the music speak for itself.

For a really nice live blog of the event, go here.