Taruskin

Greg,

I don't think it's accurate to write that I think that Taruskin has "wasted 12,000 words." [This refers to an earlier version of my post, which I was happy to change at Marc's request.] What he wrote about the power of classical music to draw people to classical music needs to be said, loudly and often. I do think that he could choose his targets with more care, and dial down, to use an appropriately wartime term, the rhetoric a few degrees.

"Why can't we all just get along?" is also a vast simplification of my point. There's no other genre or force out there that's trying to do classical music in, or that's trying to destroy it. There's no one to make peace with. Presenters and administrators are doing their jobs, musicians are seeking out ever more opportunities, and this appears to be, to me, a net gain and a gross gain. There aren't two opposing camps that need to come together here; what we need to do is move the argument beyond the Death or Non-Death of Classical Music.

I'm also not convinced that there is, or am aware of, a "classical music mainstream" in this day and age, which is moving faster and faster towards a world of niches. I only wish that musicians and presenters would realize the numbers they are dealing with, such as those I cited, and derive strength from them. I always believe in dealing from a position of strength, rather than throwing up a wall against the outside world, and taking high-minded solace in your supposedly threatened state.#

Marc, I'm sorry if you think I've represented you. From my point of view, there definitely are battles going on, but maybe they're being fought in private.

Some of those battles involve the mainstream's struggle to survive. By "mainstream," I mean the big classical music institutions, whose long-term future isn't as secure (if you project their numbers for the past decade forward) as you might think. These big institutions, plus their smaller cousins -- all the groups doing standard classical repertoire in familiar classical venues -- are, at present, the only established source of income for classical musicians. By "income," I don't mean any pay at all, but enough pay to live a reasonable middle-class lifestyle. You can look from above, and see a long tail at work, and happily foresee classical music becoming a productive niche. But if you look from below, you might see something else -- a threat to classical musicians' livelihood. Can the Chicago Symphony survive, with its $58 million budget, as a niche? If it's just a niche, should it get public funding, and can it claim the universal importance that's the basis of much of classical music's fundraising?

Like you, I can go to sold-out concerts most nights of the week. I can see cheering crowds. But I can also look behind the scenes, and see what a thin foundation some of it rests on.

Quiz question: Which major classical music institution quietly reveals, in its most recent publicly available tax return, that it borrowed $35 million, almost certainly to pay off accumulated debts it's never talked about in public?

Greg, thanks for pointing out this article.

The impression I increasingly take away from these discussions is the utility of backing up and look at the music business from the 30,000 ft. (10,000 meter) level. For an example, you can see a model that Drew McManus and I did that explored the potential connection between low average income for musicians and a increase in the number of new musicians coming out of schools in The Dynamic Lifecycle of a Musician at http://www.pegasuscom.com/aar/model7.html. Download and explore the associated model, if you want to see what I'm writing about. I still think that analysis has validity, although it wasn't focused directly on the problem you're discussing now.

When I look at what you and Taruskin described, it sounds very much like a classic boom and bust pattern. Something gets out of whack between perceived and actual demand (typically involving delays and, potentially, distortions), and the system responds according to the perceived demand and overshoots the actual. Eventually reality makes it through to perception, leading to a return to normalcy. If in the process the overshoot has eaten up the "carrying capacity" of the system, though, the eventual end state may be at a far lower level than had the overshoot not occurred.

If that's what's going on, don't feel alone. There is a whole litany of such booms and busts, some of which have been cataloged at http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/default.asp.

While it's easy to make conjectures about the causes of a particular boom and bust cycle, it's more reliable to create a simulation model, as Drew and I did, to see if one can create a structure that mimics how one thinks the problem arose and that adequately replicates the behavior that's been observed. With such a model or series of models, one can begin to weed out unlikely explanations and strengthen one's belief in likely explanations. One can also test conjectures about ways out of the problem, for it's usually far faster and cheaper to experiment on a model than on society.

The good news of such modeling is, in the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Typically you can create a model that replicates the structure and behavior of the problem and that contains no exogenous pieces. In this case, you might expect that the problem isn't due to an external public which doesn't recognize good art when it hears it but to something about the system that produces music, musicians, and performances.

That's good news, because if you cause your own problems, you likely have the potential to fix your own problems, too. (That's not to say that fixing this problem will allow the US to field 50 million professional musicians all making in the seventy-fifth percentile or higher in annual income.)

"There aren't two opposing camps that need to come together here; what we need to do is move the argument beyond the Death or Non-Death of Classical Music."

With all due respect to Marc, there _are_ at least two distinct camps working at cross purposes with eachother. They aren't the Death and Non-Death camps -- that terminology is simulataneously loaded and meaningless, and Marc is right to want to move beyond it. The camps in question are the classical music chauvinists and then anti-chauvinists. These viewpoints are diametrically opposed, and are fighting it out. When the chauvinists succeed in reenforcing the "classical music is superior" narrative, we anti-chauvinists see it as exacerbating the marketing problem that the public doesn't like elitists. When the anti-chauvinists argue that classical music isn't inherently any better than popular music, the chauvinists see it as undermining their ability to leverage the "superiority" of classical music into increased funding and cultural relevance. If there's a compromise to be had between these viewpoints, I don't see it -- it's not a question of the camps coming together, it's who's going to win the war.

Galen, this is brilliant. Much better than I've been able to put it. I agree with you completely. Thanks!

I agree with the main arguments of Taruskin's essay, apart from one. The three reviewed books defend - however clumsily - the reality of the 'classical canon' as containing some of the greatest music the human mind has dreamed-up, and for that reason it deserves a place of symbolizing cultural identity and aspiration in public space. It should never be a monolitic repertoire of course, there is so much around it which is good and interesting, but 'the classics' are NOT just what academia have made of it, but works full of life and worth more respect than they get in the shopping mall of contemporary culture where everything is on offer without any hierarchy of value or meaning.

I'd think this is why we're all here -- because we think classical music is pretty wonderful.

But I don't know about that contemporary shopping mall. Do you really think there are no distinctions of value or meaning? I have to admit I haven't seen that. Hierarchies might be a different story. I'd agree that things don't get put in categories any more, with some categories more or less universally assumed to be worth more than others. But certainly there are understandings about what's tremendously good -- the current Bruce Springsteen album, for instance, which has been acclaimed as more than simply a terrific rock record, but as a serious political and cultural statement. Which is exactly what it is. The problem for classical music, or one problem, is that our field can make huge claims for its general value, but comes up surprisingly short when anyone asks why any particular performance or composition (especially new compositions) demands attention. The usual answer amounts pretty much to saying, "Go hear X conduct Mahler, because Mahler is important, and X conducts him very well." Rather than what people are saying about the Springsteen record, "You've got to hear this, because he has something to say."

There are exceptions. For me, Simone Dinnerstein's Goldberg Variations CD would be one. But they're rare -- and the classical music world isn't good at identifying them or talking about them.