June 2008 Archives

There's no better way to understand why classical music doesn't speak to many people these days than by comparing pop and classical music reviews. I've chosen some from the New York Times, both because I read that paper every day and because the reviews on both sides of the fence are more than reputable. So the comparison, broadly speaking, is fair.

So here's a bit of Ben Ratliff's review last Thursday of Gilberto Gil:

His set was a deep fusion of pop and folk culture...

The name of his band, Banda Larga Cordel, means broadband, and Mr. Gil's communications-technology thoughts lie somewhere between cybertheory and metaphorical poetry about practical things....He's not necessarily interested in the status or time-saving aspects of, say, cellphones; he's an artist, the opposite of a salesman. But he is also the minister of culture for Brazil. In interviews, and in songs like the new "Banda Larga Cordel" and the old "Pela Internet" ("On the Internet") -- a tune from 1996 that he played on Tuesday -- he casts broadband technology as an empowerment issue, a cheap way to have an entire country, and ideally an entire world, included in political and social discussions.

Brazilians have long been obsessed with the past and the future at the same time, a double consciousness that has helped produce a lot of good music over the last half-century. Mr. Gil in particular made peace with popular culture before many of his contemporaries did; the tropicália movement, which he helped build in the late 1960s, was playfully anti-nostalgia and ferociously anti-purist. He is the same as ever, a man of big ideas.

An interesting artist, you'd have to say. (And Minister of Culture! Note to everyone at NPAC who wanted a Cabinet-level arts department in the U.S. government -- beware of getting what you wish for. Suppose Obama wins, sets up a Department of Cultural Affairs, and names John Mellencamp to head it. And suppose Mellencamp, an outspoken populist, says that he thinks symphony orchestras get too much money.)

Now read Anthony Tommasini, the same day, on a New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park:

Standing at the podium looking south from the Great Lawn to the skyscrapers of Midtown, the conductor Bramwell Tovey declared the sight "one of the great views in the world." Best known to New Yorkers from his guest stints conducting the Philharmonic's Summertime Classics concerts, Mr. Tovey brings droll British wit to his impromptu commentaries. He was in good form on Tuesday night.

After opening the program with an exuberant account of Shostakovich's "Festive Overture," Mr. Tovey tried to explain to concertgoers how they could vote to choose an encore for the orchestra. "No superdelegates here," he added....

After intermission there was a refreshingly straightforward performance of Tchaikovsky's "1812" Overture. The composer may have been embarrassed by this made-to-order occasional piece, but Mr. Tovey and the orchestra treated it as a respectable score with a knockout finale, here punctuated with booming cannon shots courtesy of an electric keyboard. The concert ended with three marches by Sousa that had the crowd clapping and children marching up and down the grassy aisles.

If I were a smart Martian, new to the earth, I'd read all this, and decide that pop music is serious, and classical music is light entertainment, a blend of Las Vegas and the fourth of July. Somebody, of course, might object that the Philharmonic concert was designed as entertainment, a happy, unchallenging night in Central Park. To which I'd reply that there's also a pop series in Central Park, and Gilberto Gil could well be on it.

Here's Steve Smith, also on Thursday in the Times, about the Brooklyn Phlharmonic in yet another Central Park orchestral event:

The 29-member ensemble was amplified but still had to contend with an idling truck, cellphones that were answered rather than silenced, and other sporadic nuisances.

The performance too had its rough edges. Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto sounded scrappy, with balances often less than ideal; the robust finale came off best. In Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 the soloist, Tim Fain, played with an easy brilliance and sweet tone. Competing with a nonplused sparrow and a cavorting bystander only seemed to intensify his megawatt smile. Once again, the last movement was strongest.

I took in those works from a seat near the front, then moved to the plaza behind the seats for Beethoven's Symphony No. 4. There the sound was clearer and better blended, and [the conductor's] careful attention to dynamics and rhythm was more readily discerned.

Classical music here seems like a technical exercise. The pieces are known. So how were they played? Badly or well? The Martian visitor -- or any smart person, reading the Gilberto Gil review and this one -- could be forgiven for simply declining to care. Only at the end of Steve's review, and in parentheses, comes something that might spark some interest:

(During the Adagio sounds from the New York Philharmonic concert wafted on wayward breezes, briefly creating an Ivesian jangle.)

And this, of course, has -- strictly speaking -- nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of the concert, or at least not with any meaning the Brooklyn Philharmonic might have intended.

Please note: I'm friendly with both Tony and Steve, and I'm absolutely not saying that either is a bad critic, or that Ben Ratliff (whom I also know) is better than they are. I'm saying that pop music gives Ben more ideas -- more substance -- to work with.

 

In the arts -- and certainly in classical music -- we spend a lot of time talking to each other, and I've just about typed myself blue in the face trying to say that we need to talk to people from the outside world. Especially if we want to reach a new young audience!

One of the people I've long thought ought to be invited to talk to the classical world is J.D. Considine, a veteran pop and jazz writer whom I've known for some years, and currently writes about jazz for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He likes classical music (we used to talk about Baltimore Symphony concerts when he was pop critic for the Baltimore Sun),.and just sent me an e-mail that everyone who wants to extend the reach of classical music should read. I'm reprinting it here with J.D.'s permission. Note two important things: the parts about the audience liking difficult music, and about the limited appeal for this audience ("limited" being an understatement) of musical beauty. These are things the classical world doesn't understand at all (beauty, after all, being one of its favorite selling points, just as J.D. says).

Last week, I had the chance to hear (and cover) a performance of Cage's HPSCHD. It wasn't quite the "standard" performance, as it only ran only three hours and relied on just five actual amplified harpsichords (the other parts were covered by a Yamaha digital piano and a Hohner D6 Clavinet). The quality of the players was wonderful-- Eve Egoyan corralled the group -- and they did a great job with the pre-recorded electronics and the projected art. But the smartest thing they did was to stage it less like a concert than a happening, encouraging people to walk around the room, or even in and out, instead of sitting solemnly and stoically for three hours. (They stressed the freedom of movement in the pre-concert publicity, too.)

And it was amazing. People wandered through the room, listening to the various harpsichords, occasionally chatted with the players, sipped wine or beer, and had a terrific time. The crowd was also mainly young boomers and older X-gens -- just the people symphony boards pray for -- as well as a smattering of seniors and 20- somethings. I swear, I even saw a kid wander through carrying a skateboard!

Now, you and I both know that this isn't the sort of thing a major orchestra can do three times a week. Still, three times a season wouldn't hurt. And this program (which was part of the SoundaXis Festival) pulled a pretty good crowd despite minimal publicity and a major competing arts festival (Luminato).

This made me think about something else. A big part of the attraction for the crowd at HPSCHD was that the music was difficult. Now, I ask you -- would a symphony programmer ever imagine that offering challenging, difficult, abstract music would be a marketing plus? My sense is that most of 'em still believe that the way to bring in new listeners is to emphasize the beauty and melody of classical music.

Here's the thing, though: For anyone who grew up in the rock radio era, the aesthetic "strengths" suggested by such thinking evokes nothing so much as Easy Listening Music. And can you imagine any serious music fan who'd pay money to listen to that crap?

Maybe that's why much of the classical music that has crossed over, like the Kronos recordings or the Gorecki 3rd, hasn't been sweet and lovely, but emotionally powerful and aurally challenging. Just like the rock and jazz also adored by such listeners. (Of course, this is where I'm drifting into stuff you already know.)

But I think the thirst for adventure is there waiting to be exploited. The internet hasn't killed classical sales -- it has helped it, in part I think because people can find what they want or discover new things, instead of having to paw morosely through a limited selection of the same old same old. And I know a lot of people fear the net because of file sharing and the notion that music should be free. But what if an orchestra decided to see that as an advantage, and offered one or two free concerts per season? Concerts full of daring and contemporary music? Concerts they promoted the way rock gigs are promoted (postering isn't just for kids)?

Or am I just nuts?

He's not nuts at all, of course. He's talking about a market (to put this in business terms) that I've identified, too, a market of younger people who like challenging music and would respond to challenging classical programming, as long as that doesn't smell like the concert hall. In New York, as I've noted (most recently in my post about this year's Bang on a Can marathon), they do respond, but the mainstream classical institutions don't seem to notice. I'd love to see an orchestra flexible and aware enough to give standard concerts for their standard audience, and indie concerts for the indie audience (not that he uses that word) that J.D. describes.

Here's a link to J.D.'s Cage review. (Though you have to buy it to read the full text.)

The comments so far on my post about the National Performing Arts Convention -- have been mostly very heartening. As is one private e-mai, which I hope to be able to share. The comments are well worth reading.

One point that emerges from the comments is how silly it is -- to put this in plain English -- to assemble a group of well-meaning amateurs and ask them to solve a serious problem that needs the attention of professionals. Of course I mean amateurs in politics, promotion, and the planning of strategic campaigns. The democratic impulse here is well-meaning, but -- in my view -- terribly misguided. If the arts aren't getting enough attention, locally and nationally, how can we fix that? Well, you might start by talking to people who deal with that kind of problem every day -- people, for instance, in politics, advertising, marketing. If you assemble a group of people without professional experience in those areas, most of the suggestions you get will very likely not be useful. Or, as some of the commenters pointed out, you'll get suggestions that have been made many times before. i'm not saying that amateurs might come up with something really workable that professionals would never think of, but if all we've got is amateurs making suggestions, we won't even know when that happens!

Case in point: the most popular answer (see the NPAC blog for full details) to the question, "What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the NATIONAL level?" (Caps in the original.). The most popular answer -- by far -- was:

Create a Department of Culture/Cabinet-level position which is responsible for implementing a national arts policy.

But this is just silly. Yes, I know that some European countries, maybe many, have ministers of culture in their governments. But what would it take to create one here? Some kind of national upsurge in support of the arts. No president is going to support this innovation just because a convention of happy enthusiasts in Denver proposed it. And no Congress is going to pass legislation creating the post, just because people at NPAC think they should.

Once you understand that, the proposal turns out to be self-contradictory. But that can't happen until the arts get the support they're not getting now! The proposed solution couldn't be implemented unless there wasn't any problem in the first place.

Please note! I'm not saying it might not be possible to build a political movement to support the arts. I think it's unlikely, but I could be wrong. The mistake, though, is to make the cabinet-level arts department a priority now, when you have to create the movement before any such thing would be possible.

I wasn't at the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver last week, but I've faithfully read the strategies for the future that the conference produced. (If you follow the link, keep scrolling down to read all the strategies that were proposed.)

And the whole thing, I have to say, makes me a little sad. Everyone -- and this includes friends of mine, people I respect and have known for years -- got so excited. Which is natural. You meet in a supportive environment, you've all got the same goals (boost the performing arts!), procedures are developed for constructive talk. So of course you come up with hopes and plans:

Organize a national media campaign with celebrity spokespersons, catchy slogans  (e.g. "Got Milk"), unified message, and compelling stories! 

Create a Department of Culture/Cabinet-level position which is responsible for implementing a national arts policy!

Forge partnerships with other sectors to identify how the arts can serve community needs!

Create multi-media marketing strategies (including YouTube, Facebook) to communicate and demonstrate value and relevance!

The exclamation points are mine, and of course there were many more ideas. But what was missing from all of this was any discussion of the world in which these initiatives will have to be launched. And without that discussion, how can anybody know which of the many ideas presented are likely to work? Just imagine a commercial company making plans to promote a product. Wouldn't they do market research? Wouldn't they want to know what people think of the product, and what things about the product might (or might not) be appealing?

And yet here we have the arts -- an endeavor that most people involved would think was far more important than a mere commercial marketing campaign -- and all we bring to it is (forgive me) unfocused amateur enthusiasm. Organize a media campaign! Well, what's it going to say? OK, fine, leave that to the professionals who'll eventually run it. But if you yourself have no idea, how will you know whether the professionals will make sensible plans? (And, by the way, who's going to pay for this campaign? It's going to be expensive.)

What's going on here, I think, is something I've pointed out before. (And also here.) People in the arts won't talk about what the outside world is really like. What they like to do is go running down a hall of mirrors, shouting out in great excitement. The arts are wonderful! If only people knew that! If only people were exposed to the arts, then they'd love us! And so plans are made for eager, not-quite-thought-about-enough exposure.

And meanwhile, out in the rest of the world, people have no problem in principle with the arts, but they're also deeply into popular culture, which has (long, long, long ago) evolved art of its own. They don't make distinctions, any more, between high and popular art. They don't think anything's missing from their lives because they don't spend time enough with everything that people in the arts promote. If you want them to go to opera more, or dance concerts, or theater, one job you'll have to do is to persuade them that they'll get something as smart and as deeply connected to their lives as The Sopranos or The Wire.

A lot of arts marketing and advocacy -- just look at classical music marketing, which might be effective for the core audience, but is absolutely feeble otherwise -- doesn't come near to doing this. But people in the arts don't seem to notice, because they've conveniently assumed that popular culture is shallow, weak...oh, you know the drill.

You can read people saying, for example (I won't name any names here) that our current culture leaves no room for thought or for reflection. This might be followed, in one example I can think of (again no names), with suggestions for ways that classical musicians can learn to think -- to deeply reflect -- on what they do. Meanwhile, newspapers and magazines and TV shows bring us interviews with movie actors, film directors, TV producers, and pop musicians, all of them thoughtful, all of them deeply pondering the issues in their work. But apparently some of us are blind to that.

Enough. There are some useful cautions about the convention from my fellow ArtsJournal blogger Andrew Taylor, who was there. (Scroll down to find the post called ""Changing the players, and the game." I'd go further than he does, and I want to be particularly clear in saying that my ideas are mine, and his may be quite different. But I'm glad he said the following:

Being unique, under appreciated, and in constant jeopardy seem to be part of our DNA now in the nonprofit performing arts, whether or not the evidence supports the assumptions. And our perception of commercial entertainment as the ''other'' and the ''enemy'' still block our larger understanding of our work.

And:

So much of the conversation in Denver was driven by frustration with the lack of perceived resonance, value, and importance of what the performing arts do for society. Government doesn't support us enough. Schools don't work hard enough to sustain and integrate arts education. Audiences don't spend enough on our tickets. We tended to blame the outsiders for this problem -- if they only understood us, they would value us -- but every now and then someone would ask the deeper question: Are we telling our story well? Are we building our story on the values and interests of our community? Are we being as compelling and clear in our organizational narratives as we are on our stages?

These are crucially important issues. We've got to break out of our hall of mirrors, and start living in the same world as the people we say we want to reach.

Because I've complained before that classical music organizations don't say or do do much about the environment (if they do anything at all), it's only fair to note something new from the New York Philharmonic. They're switching to e-mail-only press releases (except for "major items such as season announcements," to quote their e-mail). And at the bottom of every e-mail from anyone at the organization is this, in green type: "Please consider the environment before printing this email." And their annual parks concerts t-shirt is, they say, 100% organic.

These are small things, but I'm glad to see them. Bravo.

One curiosity. Or maybe two. There doesn't seem to be any way to find the Philharmonic's newsroom (where they present and archive press releases) from their main site. Not even with the search function; searches for "newsroom" or "press releases" came up empty. This isn't typical of orchestra sites. The Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and Pittsburgh Symphony, just for instance, all have their press releases readily available. The Philharmonic might say that most people who go to the website don't want to read press releases, and that's probably right. But on the other hand, I can't imagine that any of their visitors would mind finding a press release (or newsroom, or media room) link, and the absence of it might be frustrating for a journalist in a hurry, who didn't bookmark the newsroom and rushes to the main site to find it. (Would all journalists who fit that description please raise their hands? Just about everybody, right?)

Second curiosity: that the environmental news -- the end of paper press releases and the t-shirt -- isn't itself a press release, and can't be found in the newsroom, even though it was sent in an e-mail to the Philharmonic's press list.

But these are footnotes. Bravo again for the Philharmonic for taking a step towards a greener life.

And before I forget! Anyone looking for good things about classical music (I've been compiling a list) should love a quote on the Philharmonic site from one of their bassoonists, Kim Laskowski: "The best thing about being a musician is carrying around works of art in your head all the time."

A while ago, I talked about a lieder recital, at which I thought gentility stifled all meaning. My key example was a group of songs based on Baudelaire poems -- the uneasy meaning of Baudelaire didn't come through at all.

For an antidote, try Gerard Souzay's performance of Duparc's song "L'invitation au voyage," which sets one of Baudelaire's most famous poems. (Dalton Baldwin is the pianist.) It's one of the art songs I love best -- no, one of the classical pieces of any kind I love most. And this performance defines it for me. Souzay goes deep into the mingled sensuality and regret of the original, so that once you listen past his dignity, his conviction, and the uncomplicated but very subtle nuances in the way he makes music, the song is troubling, full of longing, sensuality, and regret.

Follow this link, and you can read the French text of "Linvitation au voyage," along with a not quite adequate English translation. The translation just doesn't go deep enough. Not that this is easy, especially if anyone tries to render the poem with words as direct and simple as Baudelaire's. I'm especially sad about the translation of the refrain:

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.

That second line of the English doesn't ring out with the sonorous and uncontradictable simplicity of the French. And the French is far more specific. "Calme" isn't as generic as "peace" (think of the obvious English cognate), and "volupté" (think again of the cognate) suggests something far more sensual than generic pleasure.

One deep and troubling moment in the performance comes at these lines, about ships the singer says sit sleeping in some canals, waiting to travel anywhere to serve the woman he loves:

C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.

To satisfy
Your slightest wish
They've come from the ends of the earth.

(That's my translation, not the one on the website. It's not so precisely accurate, but closer, I think to the directness of the original.) I choke up a little at these words. Part of me wants to have ships like this for the woman I love. Souzay, too, seems to think the words are important (and certainly Duparc makes them so). Without doing anything dramatic, almost without doing anything explicit at all (except only a portamento at "viennent"), he grows more passionate. But at the end, the ends of the earth, his voice closes, The passion is much less clear. The doors are shut. Maybe she didn't like what the ships brought. Maybe there are no ships. Maybe there's no woman.

The poem raises all those questions, in every line, I think. Does it have even a hint of reality in it, or is it fantasy? And whether it's real or imagined, would the woman accept it? After placing his heart and his body -- his trembling body, full of unnumbered desires -- in every word, is the poet (the singer) calm, spent, hopeful, full of longing, or full of regret? That's what Baudelaire's landscape is like -- along with the most sensual and austere dignity -- and Souzay inhabits it completely.

From my wife Anne Midgette's terrific review on Musical America (you have to subscribe to the site -- well worthwhile -- to read the full text). I agree with all of this, but couldn't have put it this well:

Show Boat," the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, represents a turning point in the history of the American musical. And you'd better remember it; Carnegie Hall certainly did. The gala semi-staged performance it presented for its own benefit on Tuesday night wore its significance like the Pope his heavy golden robes: with a self-consciousness about representing a link to the past and concern about rising appropriately to the occasion. God forbid it should be only perceived as light entertainment.

The American musical has in any case reached a museum-like phase of its history, when it has become appropriate for exploration by the so-called serious classical music organizations. Gone is the sense of tacit disapproval that accompanied New York City Opera's early forays into musicals in the mid-1980's under Beverly Sills - the idea that an otherwise highbrow institution was simply going slumming in search of audiences. This spring alone, we've had "Camelot" at the New York Philharmonic, now "Show Boat" at Carnegie Hall and a revival of "South Pacific" that is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. The question is no longer whether the American musical is appropriate fare, but how high we can make the pedestal on which to place it.

The risk, of course - just as it has long been in opera - is that the original dramatic impulse gets lost in all the pomp. Tuesday night, particularly the first half of the evening, showed the spectacle of a number of people going through some pretty grand motions. The stilted gestures of "The Parson's Bride" - the play-within-a-play that illustrates the charming world of the 1880's that "Show Boat" seeks to recreate - were hard to separate from the "real" acting, as the players spat out lines with cramped intensity or delivered jokes as if within veritably audible quotation marks. The symbol of this particular evening was less "Ol' Man River," sung doughtily by Alvy Powell (who has an earth-shaking bass and very little top) than a cameo walk-on by Marilyn Horne, whose entrance in the last act stopped the show for minutes of applause. She then delivered a couple of throw-away lines and walked off again. History, in short, was represented rather than made anew....

Another component was the Orchestra of St. Luke's, which, under Paul Gemignani (now elevated to patron-saint status) sounded like it was attempting to play "Tosca": the result was not at all idiomatic, but very pretty and very earnest.

Last night I saw Showboat -- the grand old musical -- in what was supposed to be a gala concert performance at Carnegie Hall. I don't know how it can be very gala if hardly anyone in the cast can inhabit their roles. (Nathan Gunn was the big exception. He really knows how this music goes, and both sings and acts well enough to bring it off. He belongs on Broadway.)

But let that be. What fascinated me -- and, I'll admit, made me a little sad -- was the orchestra. The musicians, in theory, were star quality, the A-list people from the Orchestra of St. Luke's. If you're talking about classical freelance gigs in New York, this is as good as it gets. If you read through the list of the players, printed in the program, you can see (if you know the instrumental scene in New York) that these are top people.

But they didn't seem to know how the music goes! I've heard them play 18th century music, Mozart and Haydn, with radiant attention to stylitstic detail, but in Showboat, they sounded -- especially by comparison with their classical work -- like they were merely marking time. They never launched their melodies -- or, rather, Jerome Kern's melodies, as orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett -- with relaxed affection, or lingered over all the little pauses in the tunes with any kind of audible delight. They didn't step up to the climaxes, bounce the brassy Broadway stuff, or energize the sometimes corny transitions from one tune to another with the kind of wise indulgence that can overcome the corniness.

Maybe this was the conductor's fault, though he was a big Broadway name, Paul Gemignani. Maybe he's good with the kind of pit musicians who traditionally have played this stuff, and know how it goes without his help. Maybe he can't inspire symphonic musicians, or teach them the style.

But I think the musicians are a problem, too -- though the problem isn't their own fault; if they don't know the style, they don't know the style. I heard the same thing in South Pacific, at LIncoln Center, a famously triumphant revival, which I loved from beginning to end. (As an aside, I want to say that both shows give me little patriotic thrills. "I'm an American," I found myself thinking, with a grin, "and I love this stuff.")  But the orchestra couldn't make the music go, something that became especially clear after I relistened to the original cast album from 1949. That orchestra knew exactly what it was doing, with the brass (just to cite one example) sounding completely at home in symphonic passages, and also when they had to strut out playing bits of Dixieland. Whoever they were, they sounded like they'd played both styles a lot, and didn't even have to think of making a transition.

Whereas the orchestras I heard last night -- and also in South Pacific, though less so -- sounded like classical players who got timid when they had to step out in some other style. One mark of a serious classical player in the climate of the past few decades has been a kind of dignnified restraint. You just don't get gloopy. But to play Broadway, you can't be restrained, and you have to play things -- and love them! -- that from a strictly classical perspective might well be embarrassing. But still you've got to give them everything you've got, or else you've betrayed the style. (And thus, if I want to get fancy about it, betrayed your prime directive, the very notion that made you so restrained in the first place -- you want to play everything in the proper style. But if that style demands you be improper...)

A year ago I gushed about the annual Bang on a Can marathon, the crucial new music event in New York that had moved to a new space and attracted a new, excited -- and exciting -- audience.

This year (the performance was two weekends ago) the space was the same, the Winter Garden, an extravagant, comfortable public space downtown, with ceilings high enough to accommodate full-sized palm trees. It's right on the Hudson River, in the miles-long stretch that's been developed as a walkway (and skate- and bikeway) and a park. So you'll always have people walking there, and maybe popping into the World Financial Center (the building that the Winter Garden is part of), to eat or have a snack or do some shopping.

Which gives Bang on a Can a readymade audience, especially since their marathon was part of an established downtown arts series. But that didn't mean that the audience would be as large as it was, or would stay as long as it did. Because this marathon was long. Last year's was longer -- 26 hours -- but this year's, at 12 hours, was long enough to run all night.

I got there at 8 PM or so, two hours after things had started, and the first thing I noticed was that the audience was larger than it was the year before. I'm not good with estimating numbers, but the figure thrown around last year was 1000 people, when things were at their height. This year there were more than that, quite a few more, I'd say.

And who were these people? Last year, the organizers didn't know, which is to say that this wasn't a new-music insider audience, but instead what I'll call (in whatever tone of view you choose) a real one, an audience of people who either came or wandered in and stayed becuase they liked the music, not because they had a professional connection to what was going on. They were mostly young. So here again -- as I mentioned in my post about the Wordless Music orchestra concert -- was the new, young audience the classical music world says it's looking for, alive, in the flesh, larger than life, but maybe striking out in directions of its own, toward new music and away from standard classical repertoire and concerts.

I didn't mention that the event was free, which of course helped to draw people. I stayed for seven hours. Among much else, I loved the music. Well, not all of it, of course. I must have heard a dozen pieces, maybe 20. How could I love them all? But overall I did love it, and could cite many highlights, though the highest one for me was Julia Wolfe's Strong Hold, for the astonishing ensemble of eight double basses (played by The Bass Band, students from the Hartt School in Hartford, CT). Julia, of course, is one of the three Bang on a Can composers, and her music often digs into edgy, weighty, thick, and complex textures, so a piece for eight basses might be natural for her. Except, of course, that it's hardly natural for anyone, and that the sound gets quickly muddy in the lower register, where the basses are at home.

Julia, I thought, aced that problem triumphantly, and the piece was pretty much mesmerizing, throbbing through time absorbingly, always keeping me wondering what would be next, until it ended on a major chord so richly scored that it felt like it came from the bottom of the earth. This, with any mainstream audience, would hardly have been a hit, but alternative rock has changed the rules here, and the audience at the Marathon whooped and yelled.

When I left at 3 AM, So Percussion had just finished David Lang's the so called laws of nature. By this time, there might have been 600 people there, still this new and avid audience. David, of course, is another of the Bang on a Can composers, and this ye, ar's Pulitzer Prize winner. The piece, again by mainstream standards, wouldn't exactly be a crowd-pleaser, since it's long (at least 20 minutes), rigorous, and, within each of its large sections, pretty much unchanging, with nothing in it that you'd expect to wow an audience (except maybe the pulsing rhythm, though that would start and stop). But, again, the rules have changed. This audience whooped, and as I headed toward the exit, David was greeting people who'd line up to have him sign CDs.

I wonder how many other Pulitzer Prize composers have faced a line of happy fans at 3 AM? This marathon remains a miracle, and, if you ask me, it's the most important classical music event in New York, both for the quality of its music and the excitement of its audience. Recently, in a private blog about orchestras that I was asked to take part in, some eager orchestra professionals got rhapsodic about performances their orchestras had done (which I'm willing to believe were wonderful), and offered them as wistful proof that classical music will never die. To me that's essentially a statement of faith, and while I respect the faith, I don't see how it answers questions about what might well be diminishing interest in standard orchestra performances in the future. I feel more confident in what Bang on a Can evokes, because the hope for the future I think they offer is tangibly, visibly, andn audibly supported by an excited new and growing audience.

I've gotten an audio recording of the commencement speech I gave at Eastman, back on May 17, and with the school's permission, I've put it online. Just click on the link to hear it. It's 24 minutes long, and if you don't want to sit streaming it for that long, you can download it. I'm sure many Windows users know the procedure -- right click and choose "Save Link As..." (or the equivalent). Sorry that I don't know the Mac procedure.

Feedback welcome. I'm in the midst of writing an outline of what I said. I make notes, and then speak from them, making up the actual text as I go along. Which of course makes it easier to prepare a talk. But I'd have an easier time making my speeches available afterward, if I'd write them out in advance!

Here are some other talks I've given since the fall:

• a presentation on the future of classical music at a conference at DePauw University

• keynote address at a conference on the future of classical music in Seattle

• presentation on the future of classical music -- and especially about the young audience of the future -- at a private gathering of music directors from more than a dozen public radio stations
  

• presentation about the artistic future of orchestras, at a private conference at Princeton University about what research about orchestras social scientists and others should do
  

And next Thursday, June 12, I'll be speaking about the future of orchestras to the young musicians at the National Orchestral Institute, at the University of Maryland. I should record all these talks (and I'll try to record the one next Thursday). Then at least I'd have audio recordings to post.

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