December 2007 Archives

First and most important -- best holiday wishes, warmest holiday greetings, to everyone who reads this blog. I'm grateful for your interest, your support, your disagreement, your e-mail, and your comments, whether on my side or not. As many of you have been kind enough to say, we've had some good discussions here, and I'm sure they'll continue through 2008.

Next year should be interesting for me. (Understatement!) As many of you know, my wife, Anne Midgette, is going to be interim chief classical music critic for the Washington Post, replacing Tim Page, who'll be on leave to teach at USC. She's been a star for seven years as a freelancer for the New York Times, and this new job is a wonderful honor for her, recognition for her terrific writing, her terrific thinking, and her terrific ear. I couldn't be more proud.

She starts early in January. And what will this mean for our lives? For the last few years, we've been living in two places, our Manhattan apartment and our house in Warwick, NY, a town just over an hour from the city that's still refreshingly rural. So now we'll be living in three places instead of two. We have friends, colleagues, and contacts in Washington, and also in Baltimore and Philadelphia, cities between Washington and New York that'll be easy to visit. Just step off the train! I've been scouting for work along this corridor, and of course I'd appreciate any leads. The main thing, though, is that both Anne and I are opening our lives to new possibilities, personal and professional. This new year is going to be newer than most.

I have many projects going. It's a time of transition in many ways. Some of the work I've done with orchestras over the past few years has stopped. But new possibilities are dawning, which might involve teaching, consulting, writing, and -- especially delightful for me -- composing. I have two sets of piano pieces under way, and while I shouldn't say much about them just yet (and one is tied up for the moment as a snag has developed about the rights to some photos the pieces are based on), but these are pieces not quite like anything else I've written, with paths already opened to performances by exactly the pianists I hoped would be interested.

Many people have asked about my book (about the future of classical music, of course, and drafted in online installments during the past few years). I'm revising everything I've done, and hope in January to resume online posting, at least of the first chapter, the book's introduction. I can't plan to go beyond that just yet, because I'll also need a strategy for print publication, and making the book available online might (at least for some publishers) interfere with that. Or not! We'll just have to see.

And now one more thing to be happy about, this holiday season, the amazing success of Alex Ross's book, The Rest is Noise. This -- as I'm sure many of you know -- is a serious and passionate account of classical music in the 20th century, aimed at non-initiates. And look at the acclaim it's gotten! Not just rave reviews, but placement on top 10 lists in the New York Times Book Review and Time. Plus impressive sales. The book, in short, seems to be reaching its intended audience, and in fact my wife and I can see for ourselves that it has, because of the reaction of some of our non-classical music friends.

So what does this mean? Will the success of the book translate into new interest in classical music, coming from smart, maybe younger people who'll take the 20th -- and of course the 21st -- century as their starting point? Or, better still, does this success show that new interest has already dawned? I'm crossing my fingers, and hoping that the answer to both questions is yes, and that this will be a tangible step toward the reshaping of the classical music world into something livelier and more contemporary. Congratulations to Alex, of course. The book helps redefine classical music's past as well as its future, and he deserves its success.

Myth: The classical music audience has always been the age it is now.

A lot of people still believe this. But -- as regular readers here know -- I've discovered that the myth isn't true.

Reality: The audience used to be much younger.

Source for this? Studies done in 1937, 1955, and the early 1960s, combined with statistics the National Endowment has been compiling since 1982. I've never seen any data -- any at all -- that supports the myth.

Of course I've posted on this subject before, here and here. But now I've gotten something new. In the second of those posts, I quoted a book on marketing, which talked about the 1955 study I mentioned above. That study was done by the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra), and found that their 1955 audience had a median age of 33, which was about the median age of the general population back then. Now, of course, the orchestra audience is much older, with a median age around 50% higher than the population at large.

And now -- thanks to generous help from the Minnesota Orchestra's director of public relations and their archivist -- I have that study. It's amazing to read, providing (as a friend of mine said) a window into another era, a time very different from ours.

The median age number doesn't appear anywhere. Instead, the study simply says that 54% of the orchestra's audience in 1955 was younger than 35. Which of course is consistent with the number quoted for the median age.)

So who were these people? Students, professionals, housewives, and businessmen. (I think "businessmen" is the right expression, since people in business back then were predominantly men.) Students, believe it or not, made up 23% of the audience, though they were older than you might think: more than half lay in an age range between 21 and 35. But just in case anyone thought it was only the students that made the audience so young, the study points out that the largest occupational group in the audience were the professionals --doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, and the like -- and that they, too, were young. 52% of them were under 35.

So it really was a young audience. It was so young, in fact, that the study -- conducted by a professional polling firm in Minneapolis -- offers one simple suggestion, in case the orchestra wants to sell more tickets. It should advertise in college newspapers!

(Similarly, the authors of the early '60s study I've read - in which the median age of the entire performing arts audience was found to be 38 -- speculate about what they think is an important question: Why people stop going to performing arts events as they grow older. Of course that's exactly the opposite of what we see today.)

The housewives and businessmen in the Minnesota audience were older than the students and professionals. A third of them, approximately, were over 50. But of course that means that two-thirds were under 50, which of course makes them younger than comparable groups in today's audience. (And around a third of the housewives and businessmen were under35.)

One other finding seems important. Where did people of different ages sit? The answer is exactly what you'd expect. The older people (who presumably had more money) by and large sat in the orchestra seats, while the younger people (or most of them, anyway) sat in the balcony. Why is this important? Because sometimes you'll see a photo showing the orchestra audience in bygone years, sitting in its seats for a concert, and the people in it look old. So now we know why that is. These photos are taken from the stage, and the people they most clearly show -- the ones sitting in the front of the downstairs seats -- are, on the average, the oldest people in the audience. The younger ones are invisible upstairs.

Source: "In-Concert Survey of the Audience Attending the November 11th Symphony Concert at Northrup Auditorium, University of Minnesota." Conducted for the Orchestral Association of Minneapolis by Mid-Continent Surveys, of Minneapolis, and dated December 12, 1955. The Friday concerts at Northrup Auditorium were the orchestra's regular subscription events. 1900 members of the audience filled out the surveys, which were supplemented by a random poll of Minneapolis residents (conducted by the local newspaper) and in-person interviews.

I can't resist quoting one thing more. How, the study asks, could the orchestra expand its reach (beyond advertising in college newspapers)? The study makes two recommendations:

Modify the audience Image toward reality -- portray the audience for what it really is: Young, a cross-section of middle-income, middle-education groups, informally dressed, the kind of people who might live next door to almost Anybody! The unhappy stuffed-shirt stereotype of the audience is a negative motivation for many. Attending the Symphony just once, a shift in press treatment of the Symphony audience, or a portrayal of the true audience through advertising can transform the Image to proper dimensions.

Capitalize on the conductors' favorable image as a conductor, and create a more vivid Image of him as a personality, not merely by getting so many lines of newspaper space, but striking home a dramatic IKDEA that focusses audience perspective on the conductor as a captivating personality. Probably a few lines in St. Louis newspapers on Mr. Golschmann as a poker player have successfully engendered a colorful personality for him.

[Vladimir Golschmann was the music director of the St. Louis Symphony. All emphasis, spelling, and capitalization, however quaint, is in the original.]

Here we might be talking about orchestras today!

(Antal Dorati was the conductor, back then, of the Minneapolis orchestra, and one problem they had was that he wasn't as popular as his predecessor Dmitri Mitropoulos had been.)

Now the New York Times has joined the New York City Opera party, adding "new details" (it says) to the story that just surfaced (in an AP story, on the Parterre Box blog, and in one of my own posts) about incoming director Gerard Mortier allegedly cancelling the 2008-9 season.

The Times story has one curiosity. Mortier, reportedly, doesn't like City Opera's past productions. Asked about that, he says he might keep some of them, including Jonathan Miller's famous Little Italy Rigoletto, "which [says the Times] he called 'a famous production,' adding, 'I don't see why I should throw it away.'" But this wasn't a New York City Opera production. The English National Opera staged it. Did Mortier not know this, or was his statement just a slip? (Maybe he meant the Miller production of L'elisir d'amore, which the New York City Opera did stage.)

And neither the Times nor the AP talks about some serious questions the story raises. Is it true, as Parterre Box reported, that singers' managers, trying to negotiate next season, are being stonewalled, without being told why? And if that really is true, how will the company repair relations with those managers, who'd have every right to be annoyed?

How much would it cost to cancel all or part of the season? Would the company -- as could easily happen -- lose more money than it would if it staged the season normally? What about the unions? Would City Opera have to pay (just for instance) its orchestra and stagehands, whether or not they worked? Has the company been talking the unions that it has to deal with, consulting with them in advance about what might be happening?

These are major questions. The answers to them might tell us something -- maybe quite a bit -- about how the Mortier regime will function. Or about how City Opera's board functions now. So why hasn't anyone in the mainstream press (at least so far) asked about these things?

ArtsJournal had a link today to an AP story, which ran in USA Today. So my item on the company's startling plan was right on target -- the company really might cancel is 2008-09 season. City Opera's board chairman Susan Baker spins the thing very smoothly, making it sound like the most natural thing in the world, as if singers' managers (if we believe what Parterre Box reported) weren't being stonewalled when they ask about their artists' contracts for next year.

Not that USA Today seems to have asked about that, though Parterre Box (which they mention) was apparently the impetus for their story.

Baker says that City Opera might look at performances outside Lincoln Center, if the season there is canceled:

"At the moment, our thinking is that if we have to be dark in the State Theater for part of the '08-09 performance season, what we would do is have some non-traditional season in other venues," she said.

Baker said the company could perform in churches and various auditoriums around New York. She said the focus could be a lookahead to Mortier's first season, which will stress 20th century works.

Stockhausen just died. I've always gotten a big kick out of his music. And I think -- maybe controversially -- that he's been underappreciated in the classical world, and found his most important fans outside it.

How could he not be appreciated in the classical world, when any history of music after 1945 will tell you that Stockhausen and Boulez were the two kingpins of the European serial and post-serial avant-garde? In the '60s and beyond, everything Stockhausen wrote was recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon. There were many books about him.

But look what happened after that. Boulez, thanks to his conducting, became a revered uncle in the mainstream. His entirely unobjectionable music gets widely played. Ligeti and Berio, the other two top composers in that European world, are connoisseur favorites. The New York Philharmonic is doing a Berio series this year. And, sure, that's especially possible because Berio wrote agreeable adaptations of older classical works, and because his biggest hit, Sinfonia, was famously commissioned by the Philharmonic. But I'd guess it'll be a long time before the Philharmonic features Stockhausen.

Some of this, of course, is Stockhausen's own fault:

·         He got bitten by the '60s, and took himself way out of the classical box, in pieces like Stimmung, in which six singers chant a B flat ninth chord for more than an hour. (Even if this hurt him in the classical world, I'd call it a virtue. Did Boulez feel the '60s, even for a moment?)

·         He wrote pieces that touched on real weirdness. One asks for a telepathic conductor; another claimed to be dictated by beings from another star.

·         His best-known new piece in the last three decades was a seven-opera cycle, Licht, which (even though five of the operas were produced) was too much for the classical world to swallow. (The whole thing, 29 hours long, is supposed to be staged next year in Dresden and in Essen in 2010. Though I can't find any current reference to the Dresden event. Does anyone know if it's still on?)

·         Stockhausen took his recordings away from DG, and sold them only through his own website, at exalted prices. Nor did he seem to grasp the Web. You can't buy the CDs online. You have to send a check to Germany. (Though, to be fair, a British Stockhausen site sweetly announced its discovery of PayPal, and accepts online orders, which it sends on to Stockhausen HQ.) Thus Stockhausen effectively removed his music from circulation.

He had his charlatan moments. I remember hearing him speak in the '70s. He talked about Aus dem sieben Tagen, a collection of pieces whose scores are verbal instructions. In one of them, everyone sits without playing, until their minds stop thinking. Then they play. Deutsche Grammophon recorded these works, and in the recording session for this one, hardly anyone played at all. No surprise! So Stockhausen changed things, so the recording wouldn't -- unacceptable! -- be silent. Another piece asked the musicians to play something in the rhythm of the universe. (Or something like that. I don't remember the precise directions.) A pianist, Stockhausen said, didn't know what that meant. "Think of Webern!" Stockhausen said he told the man. "Play something like Webern!" Which of course violates the premise of pieces like these. They're supposed to be about the process of playing them, and shouldn't be reinterpreted as a shortcut to recordable results.

But his music can be wonderful. Stimmung has been recorded three times; the latest version, by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, just captivated me when it came in the mail, and I raved about it in the Wall Street Journal. (It's better than the last recording, by Singcircle, because it's far more meditative. But the most rapt and also most playful recording is the original, from 1970. Of course it's only available from Stockhausen's site. Luckily I still had my old LP.) I've also refallen in love with Mantra, a dense and wildly inventive '70s piece for two pianos, with electronic alteration of some of their sounds, sometimes creating the effect of two prepared pianos.

But Stockhausen's fame outside classical music is something else. I'll make a flat statement: Nobody in his serial and post-serial world had anything like the influence he had. He's on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, because the Beatles listened to him. Miles Davis listened to him; he's cited, along with James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, as the bedrock of On the Corner, the stupendous funk/space/fusion album that sank like a disreputable stone when it was released in 1972, but has now triumphed with a six-CD release of its complete recording sessions. (I've been listening to this. It really is stupendous, and, for those without a lot of money to indulge, costs a lot less on iTunes than it does if you buy the CDs.)

Current dance and electronica people listen to Stockhausen, I'm told, which has created a market for his LPs on eBay. Certainly they're there (though the prices maybe don't suggest any wild bidding war). And just a few weeks ago I met a jazz musician in his 20s who loves Stockhausen, and talked about Stimmung with real affection.

As for the Philharmonic -- why not a Stockhausen festival? Gruppen and Carré are two big orchestral pieces, and Gruppen, I heard, made a sensation when it was done somewhere in the past few years. They could find singers to do Stimmung at midnight, and start the festival with Aus dem sieben Tagen, with Philharmonic musicians improvising according to Stockhausen's directions. Come on, Zarin -- why not?

Yesterday a friend told me some surprising news -- that Gerard Mortier, the incoming director of the New York City Opera wants to cancel the company's 2008-9 season. That's right. No City Opera performances at all. And my friend seems to have impeccable sources.

And today the same news surfaced on the ineffable (and drop-dead accurate) Parterre Box opera blog. Check it out! La Cieca, the onlie begetter of Parterre Box, has pretty much the same story I do. Mortier wants to shut down the New York City Opera for a year. One reason, the public one, would be that the New York State Theater, where the company performs (and notoriously a terrible house for opera), needs to be renovated. But the deeper reason, which probably won't be public, is that Mortier hates the City Opera performances he's seen, and doesn't want anything like them happening while he's in charge.

This all might be an act of artistic courage, or a piece of arrogant idiocy. If Mortier doesn't like what City Opera does, he's not alone, and it's well known that he wants to do far more contemporary works, and to spread them around the city in venues outside Lincoln Center.

But then there are risks. Risk number one: Cancelling a season might lose more money than letting it go on. Any opera company has fixed costs -- staff salaries, for instance. And, in City Opera's case, very likely contracts with its orchestra, with stagehands, with its chorus, with singers who've already been signed for the season due to go dark, and likewise conductors, directors, and designers. I don't know how these contracts read. Maybe they specify that the company's free of them if it performs no operas. I do know that the Metropolitan Opera considered shutting down for a year in the 1970s, when its finances were bad, and rejected the idea after finding that it would lose more money than it would have by staying open.

Risk number two: ill will. La Cieca reports grumbling from singers' managers, who -- trying to firm up arrangements for 2008-9 -- have gotten nothing but "stone cold silence from the [NYCO] administration." This, if it's really happening, can't do the company any good. And if it's possible to cancel contracts with the orchestra, et al, then the ill will is vastly multiplied.

Risk number three: Mortier could fall on his butt. His first season in charge will start with a big fat bang. Nothing but new productions of important modern works. Spread out through the city, even. If the productions triumph, so does Mortier. But if they fail -- if they don't please critics, bloggers, the smart opera crowd that posts on Opera-L and comments on Parterre Box, and if they don't sell tickets -- then Mortier stands completely exposed.

Compare Peter Gelb, who's been setting off fireworks at the Met, but who also has a buffer between him and critical opinion: No one outside the company knows in full detail what, on the stage right now, is his idea, and what's left over from the previous administration. That gives Peter some privacy. Nobody can sum up the quality of work, and with any certainty blame him if it's thought not good enough. Which leaves him relatively free to learn to run the company, something nobody in a job like that can possibly grasp, or not fully grasp, without doing it for a while.

Whereas Mortier will be learning the ropes at the same time his new productions get dropped on us. Very brave of him -- or very foolish. (Yes, he'll have been there for a year by then, but he won't have produced any opera.)

But this plan, I hear, isn't final yet. If my friend's information is correct, the board will vote on it on December 11. I wonder what they'll decide.

Erich Stem put something very well in his presentation at the DePauw symposium I spoke at. (See my last post.) He asked whether classical music faced death -- or a paradigm shift?

I'm sure it's the latter. And part of the new paradigm would be all sorts of non-conventional performances, string quartets in clubs, new music groups (there seem to be more of them every day), exploding numbers of releases on indie classical record labels, and much, much more.

But there's one big question about the new paradigm (or, if you like post-classical performances, or alternative classical performances). How will classical musicians make a living? The old paradigm gives you ways to do that (playing in an orchestra, for instance), even though there aren't enough jobs for everyone who graduates from music school. But the new paradigm doesn't seem to offer much. I've talked about this with an artists' manager at one of the big managements, who's certainly in a position to know how musicians support themselves. He's also one of the few people (though I think their numbers are growing) in big-time managements who really love alternative performances. And he vociferously thinks that the new performances can't support the musicians who play in them.

I always want to learn more about how this works, so at DePauw I asked the musicians in eighth blackbird and the Bang on a Can All-Stars how they make their living. For eighth blackbird, as I've already said, the answer was simple. They get hired for university residencies. In this way, they're not different from chamber music groups that (unlike eighth blackbird) don't specialize in new music. A detailed study commissioned some years ago by Chamber Music America found that musicians in chamber groups -- apart from a few of the biggest ones -- have no chance to make a living from their playing if their group doesn't have a paying residency somewhere.

eighth blackbird, then -- just as its flutist Tim Munro insisted -- isn't really a post-classical ensemble, because it makes its living from the classical music mainstream (university division). Merely playing concerts wouldn't keep the group alive.

The Bang on a Can players, meanwhile, present a different picture. They're truly post-classical. They never get university residencies (and might not be likely to, because they play pieces written in a far more colloquial style than the new music favored in academia). Only one of them has any university connection, and that's hardly in classical music: He leads a gamelan ensemble at MIT. The others more or less make their living by their wits, playing freelance classical and non-classical gigs, or teaching privately (and not necessarily with students who only play classical music).

So they, too, can't survive simply from their Bang on a Can tours. They said the All-Stars might play 10 weeks out of every year, which (here's the half full glass) is more than I might have expected, but (here's the half-empty glass) isn't enough to support them. I should have asked how many weeks they'd have to tour to make a living from touring, but I didn't think to.

I'm reasonably sure that anyone in the alternative classical world (or whatever we want to call it) would report more or less the same thing. A year or so ago I asked Todd Reynolds, a new-music violinist who was one of the founders of Ethel (the new music string quartet that lives in more or less the same aesthetic world as the Bang on a Can All-Stars) whether he thought many people could make a living playing that style of music. He got very serious, and said the financial problems could be crushing. And I remember meeting another Ethel musician (Todd, by the way, doesn't play with the group any more) in the West Palm Beach airport, her mission in West Palm Beach being to play with a pops orchestra, which was one of the things she had to do, if she wanted to survive.

The emerging new classical world is full of promise, at least musically. How it's going to support classical musicians -- in anything like the numbers of people making a living from classical music now -- we don't yet know.

Last Wednesday, I flew to Indiana for a "Post-Classical Symposium" at the DePauw University School of Music -- and it was just a fabulous event. Some of the high points:

·         Hearing classical music students -- freshmen and sophomores -- play a concert of improvised music

·         Hearing the first concert of the DePauw New Music Ensemble, with a truly unusual program

·         Getting to know the terrific people in eighth blackbird, who're in residence at DePauw

·         Hearing a concert by the Bang on a Can All-Stars (not that I don't hear them in New York, but notice what high-quality groups were around during the symposium)

·         Hearing Joe Horowitz make a fine presentation, and making one myself, which I liked far better than most of the talks I give.

All this was organized by Eric Edberg, cellist and DePauw professor, though of course not without help from several fine colleagues. Eric gets major props, though. He's a fine cellist, a fine teacher, a fine thinker, and a deeply sensitive improviser. We improvised together, in his office one afternoon, and I'd say that he's about as responsive, as alive to what's happening at every moment, as any musician I've ever heard. All this is high praise, and I mean every word of it. (I should add that Eric often comments on this blog, and in fact it's through my blog that we met.)

So, some details.

Student improvisation. What other school requires classical music students to improvise? Eric and I couldn't think of any. The concert showed how much these kids loved improvising, and how fearless they were. They worked out their plans (to hear them tell it) only minutes before they came on stage, and that only seemed to make them looser, and encourage them to have fun. Apparently they move away from improvising in their junior and senior years. And not all the music faculty are down with improvising. Still -- it plainly opens the students' creativity, and, again, they plainly love doing it.

New music concert. The program was called "The Passing of Time," and it was a mirror of itself. First a movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, then two movements from Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, then Arvo Pärt's Spiegel Im Spiegel, in the version for clarinet and piano. Then intermission, and then, reversing the order, Pärt (the same piece, in the viola/piano version), Piazzolla (the remaining two movements), and another movement of the Messiaen. Many new music programs need students with lots of chops. This one -- at least in Messiaen and Pärt -- taught them to be peaceful, to focus, and to play long, long lines. Very unusual! And then Piazzola made them dig in, and be earthy. Not your everyday new music concert, not by miles, thanks to Carlos Carillo, the composer on the DePauw faculty who programmed it.

eighth blackbird. We had such a good time with each other, the six of them and me. Everyone knows how well they play (or certainly everyone should), but I didn't know they were so relaxed, and so open. They played an open rehearsal, and invited comments, which they took very seriously. In another presentation, they showed how they stage some of the pieces they play, and again fielded comments, even criticisms, with good humor and grace, and with quiet grit, too, when they disagreed. And they also took part in every discussion led by anyone else. Their feisty flutist Tim Munro called me a "professional troublemaker" on their blog, and I'm proud. (He should know -- he reads me here.)

Presentations. For three days, everyone seemed to agree that classical music, as we know it today, has run its course. That's heady stuff for any music school. I'm sure some people disagreed, but the presentations -- including a lively one by composer Erich Stem, who runs a new-music record label at Indiana University -- all kept saying this. And also a final panel discussion on what music schools ought to teach. Joe Horowitz feels this no less strongly than I do, though our approaches are very different. We complemented each other, and more than once I found myself saying (since my talk came after his) how much I agreed with him. We probably disagree on the remedy, but the more ideas for change we've got, the better off we'll be. My presentation started with the idea that classical music swims in a sea of popular culture, and that this is both a wonderful thing and also the source of classical music's problems. All this, with musical illustrations. But I'll summarize myself in another post.

One more highlight. Joe -- who invented the term "post-classical" -- kindly cited eighth blackbird as a post-classical ensemble. But Tim Munro, in the time for questions and comments after Joe's talk, rather firmly disagreed. Since, he said, they survive by setting up residencies at university music programs, they're tied into current classical music institutions, and can't be called post-classical at all. He didn't mean to put his group down by saying this (nor do I, by quoting it), but he's got a point -- and he provided yet another example of how honest the eighth blackbird people are. (And of all the reasons I enjoyed talking to them.)

This leads into some fascinating stuff about how new music ensembles make a living. But I'll save that for my next post.

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(Note to Seth Rosenbloom: If you'd provide your e-mail address, I could better respond to the latest things you sent me, which seem more like private communications than like comments on the blog.)