Bang on a Can 2008

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.

June 9, 2008 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

3 Comments

By Colin on June 10, 2008 8:21 AM

Do you think that this sort of scene/event can thrive outside of New York? Owen Pallett (AKA Final Fantasy) and Dan Deacon almost definitely helped bring in some of that non-new-music feel. They aren't New York-based (Toronto and Baltimore, respectively), but they do have a big following in indie rock scenes all over the country.

When I'm optimistic, I feel that indie rockers are going to open up to a lot of new music. When I'm pessimistic, I feel that this is limited to downtown New York nostalgia. This is in part (if I may generalize) because indie rockers tend to branch out into different types of music via a couple of artists without delving deeply into the separate style. (For example, how much of a big deal is it that Thurston Moore interviewed Steve Reich at South-by-Southwest recently? And that So Percussion played a lot of his pieces? Is that a notable shift, or a quirky one-off?)

Thanks
Thanks back to you, Colin, for these important questions. First, about the indie-rock feel of the Bang on a Can Marathon -- that's an interesting point. There were, as you say, a couple of people with indie rock followings. And certainly the Bang on a Can composers know about indie rock, and take it seriously. And certainly the Bang on a Can touring ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, plays music with a beat. New composed pieces, that is, but (as Mark Stewart, their guitarist once said to me) by composers who owe as much to Jimi Hendrix as to Ligeti. (Fill in whatever rock and classical names you like.)

But the indie rock connection wasn't, as far as I know, a selling point for the marathon, and certainly the indie rock people weren't headliners, the way indie rock bands are at the Wordless Music concerts in New York. So the connection -- especially when we talk about attracting the audience -- seems indirect.

And about replicating this elsewhere -- very, very good point. During that evening, I was talking to someone with a major music job, someone who runs an operation that fosters art music of various kinds. He said he'd love it if there were events like this one all over the country. We talked about that; I thought about it a lot. And I suspect that it's possible to make this happen, but not easy. I suspect there's an audience -- or certainly would be in certain cities (starting with the obvious ones: Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Philadelpha; I'm sure it's my ignorance that stops me from listing another three or four places just as quickly). But the problem, I think, would be the locally grown music. I'm not saying that it's bad, that all the good stuff comes from New York (especially since some of the good stuff in NY comes from elsewhere). But I wonder if other local scenes are as highly developed as the one in NY. Because NY is so large, it's easier to get traction for various indie phenomena than it might be elsewhere. But then of course we see indie rock scenes growing up in other cities, so why couldn't an indie classical scene emerge, too? In any case, we should remember that Bang on a Can has been around for 20 years, so they have a headstart in launching their marathon to the spectacular point it's reached now. Still -- I can't see why it's not possible elsewhere. I'd love to see people try.

And as for Steve Reich happening at South by Southwest, I wondered about that, too. I think it's a little more, at least in intent, than a quirky one-off. But I wonder whether the people who made it happen really had a strategic plan, larger than those couple of events, to develop an indie-rock audience for Steve Reich. I'm concerned that they didn't, though maybe I'm too pessimistic. I just know how rarely people in classical music develop really thorough strategic plans. (If I'm wrong in this case, I hope my friends involved in the operation will set me straight.) So this might turn out to be a quirky one-off, despite better intentions on the part of the people doing it.

By Robert Gordon on June 11, 2008 3:27 PM

You really should have Los Angeles on your list, the main difference from New York being that the classical music establishment (i.e. Disney Hall/LA Phil) also puts on big events like this, in addition to the usual suspects: Monday Evening Concerts, Piano Spheres, Jacaranda, Ojai Festival, Calarts, etc.

A few weeks ago Disney Hall turned over the big pipe organ to Terry Riley for a couple of hours of quasi-improvised, uh, Riley-ism. The concert was a sell-out, with a sizable cancellation line out front, and the crowd looked about 50% indy-rock.
Thanks.

Do the usual suspects draw a new kind of audience? I don't think this happens in New York. Zankel Hall, for instance, will host concerts this new audience would probably like, but the crowd is mostly the familiar in-group. Only BAM, of the major institutions, can draw the kind of audience I saw at Bang on a Can, and of course that's because they've been successfully drawing that kind of audience for more than 30 years, and have made it a priority in their programming.

By David Lang on June 12, 2008 11:16 AM

Thanks for nice note, Greg - I am glad you enjoyed the show - it is always a pleasure to see you at Bang on a Can because you go through the whole concert with such a big grin on your face! About the ability to do this kind of work in other places, I just wanted to mention that this past year we have started doing marathon concerts on tour. We are still working out the formula for how to make sure they are all great, with the right mix of music from the community, rockers, and outsiders. So far we have done them in Lincoln, Nebraska, Baton Rouge, SUNY Purchase, and in San Francisco, the latter being the one that came the closest to feeling like the one in New York, and we have several more coming this season. I think the biggest issue about whether or not they are successful is not so much the program but how the message about the program gets presented. It is true that we have oddballs who want to hear this stuff in New York but there are oddballs everywhere - I think the difference is that New York is our community so we know where all the oddballs are - in other places we have to depend on the venue to find them and they may not know. But I am confident that they are there. I want to follow up on Colin's comment, if I may. It is true that a lot of what we do takes some energy and spark from indie rock. I do think that the interesting thing is not what we are taking from them, but that there is a lot of strange music in indie rock that has no idea what classical music or experimental music is or does. They are curious and innovative for the most part without us - classical music education has become so weak and the pull of the rock world is now so strong that thoughtful, restless young musicians learn to express themselves as rockers because that's the only world they know. I think that's the real reason why there was a Steve Reich concert at South by Southwest. I don't really know, but I suspect that that world isn't familiar enough with the hierarchies of experimental music to care about building a bridge to it - it's just that if music is cool it is on the radar screens of a new generation of music makers, whatever it means and wherever it is from. That seems like a good thing to me! Best, David
Thanks so much, David. And so how can these venues find out where the Bang on a Can audience is in their cities? I mean that as a question for everyone, not just for you. I wonder, too, how many of these venues really know that there is the audience you're talking about, in their cities. I'm not sure they could reach it immediately. But they ought to be able to figure it out -- if they wanted to try.

As for the big grin on my face -- that's first of all because so much of the music makes me happy!

Old debates
Seems like a couple of points often -- always? -- come up when I talk about changes -- aging, shrinkage -- in the classical music audience.

Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.

(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)

But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.

But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.

These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/

For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16% rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.

(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)

Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.

One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!

This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.

But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens' Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.

And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

So if the people in their 20s went to the opera constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.

Back in the day
Once upon a time, a generation ago or so, classical music was far closer to everyday life than it is now. We all know this, I'm sure. But it's good to be reminded. So here are four quick appearances of classical music in the popular culture of the past.

The Birds (the classic Hitchcock film, released in 1963): Tippi Hedren, the star, playing a woman in her 20s, visits a normal middle-class family, husband, wife, 11 year-old daughter. The family has a piano. Hedren sits down and plays Debussy's First Arabesque, which isn't identified, any more than her playing is remarked on in any way. Nobody says, "Oh, you play classical music." It's just taken or granted that she might.

Laura (the classic noir -- or, more accurately, semi-noir -- thriller, released in 1944): Vincent Price, playing a high-society type who appears to be in his early thirties (Price himself was 33 when the film was released), is a suspect in a murder case. Where was he, the detective asks, on the night of the murder? At a concert, he says. What music was played? Brahms's First and Beethoven's Ninth, he replies. And whether a concert program like that makes sense, or would have been heard back then, the fact that he's at a classical concert is simply taken for granted. There's nothing special about it. Of course he might have been there.

House Dick (a hard-boiled mystery thriller by E. Howard Hunt -- yes, the Watergate burglar, though that doesn't matter for my purposes here, and he turns out to be quite a sharp writer): The world-weary hotel detective, banged around by life, attracted to the wrong kind of women, has had a hard day. He goes home, and listens to Brahms on the radio. This is just a throwaway reference, nothing special about it, no need to explain why a tough ex-cop would listen to classical music. He just did it. The book was published in 1961.

And now my favorite, an extravagant interlude from Skylark Three, the second (despite the "three") in a trilogy of science fiction novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the greatest name in the great old tradition of "space opera," stories in which evil aliens plot destruction, planets explode, and the laws of physics are pretty much ignored. This book was serialized in Amazing Stories magazine in 1930.

For our purposes here, it doesn't matter why two married couples in their twenties are traveling through space, many times faster than the speed of light, saving the galaxy from a ghastly threat. Or why one of them plays a Strad. But here they are, entertaining themselves in a rare quiet moment:

"What say [says the hero, Richard Seaton] you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we'll sing us a little song? I feel good...it's the first time I've felt like singing since we cut that warship up."

Dorothy brought out her "fiddle" -- the magnificent Stradivarius, formerly Crane's, which he had given her, and they sang one rollicking number after another. Though by no means a Metropolitan Opera quartette, their voices were all better than mediocre, and they had sung together so much that they harmonized readily.

"Why don't you play us some real music, Dottie?" asked Margaret, after a time. "You haven't practiced for ages."

"Right. This quartette of ours ain't so hot," agreed Seaton. "If we had any audience except Shiro [their Japanese servant, an ethnic stereotype from a thankfully bygone age], they'd probably be throwing eggs by this time."

"I haven't felt like playing lately, but I do now," and Dorothy stood up and swept the bow over the strings. Doctor of Music in violin, an accomplished musician, playing upon one of the finest instruments the world has ever known, she was lifted out of herself by relief from the dread of the Fenachrone invasion and the splendid violin expressed every subtle nuance of her thought.

She played rhapsodies and paeans, and solos by the great masters. She played vivacious dances, then "Traumerei" and "Liebestraum." At last she swept into the immortal "Meditation" [this would be by Massenet, the "Meditation" from Thais], and as the last note died away Seaton held out his arms.

"You're a blinding flash and a deafening report, Dottie Dimple, and I love you," he declared -- and his eyes and his arms spoke volumes that his light utterance had left unsaid."

It's sweet that she plays light classics, which Doc Smith reveres as if they were the greatest masterworks. But note that these aren't culturally fancy people. Great scientists the men might be, and galaxy-spanning warriors, but as the dialogue shows, these are colloquial people (well, three of them are -- Seaton's buddy Crane is adorably stiff), in their behavior perfectly normal twentysomethings from their time. But classical music (which, if my memory is accurate, shows up just twice in the Skylark trilogy, is an easy part of their lives.

Dion on YouTube
He's singing his first big hit in the balcony of a theater, with his group (aka two backup guys) the Belmonts. The song is gentle, and if you listen to the words, it's supposed to be sad. "Why must I be a teenager in love?" But Dion is cocky and confident, enjoying his easy triumph. So this -- in Milan Kundera's famous definition -- can't be kitsch. There's no subtext telling us that he knows he's being sad, because he's not being sad. But the song is honest. It's about something he might have felt before he was famous. And surely it catches the helpless longing all the girls listening to him felt, all the girls clapping dutifully, right on the beat (because we white people hadn't yet learned what a backbeat is).

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Smart, searing TV series. For instance: Cameron looks like a teenage girl, but really she's a killer robot from the future, reprogrammed to help people, rather than kill them. But she's still a killer. And though she tries to understand human beings, she can't grasp empathy. Someone finds a turtle on its back, and turns it over, so it can walk again. Why do that? Cameron asks. Later she attacks -- with unrelenting violence -- a friend of the people she's helping, because she thinks he's a liar. "Stop," she's told. She looks down at the man -- battered, groaning -- and with no expression turns him over.

Lucinda Williams, Little Honey
Her most joyful album, but also her roughest -- very frayed, vocally, with edgiest band she's ever had. I don't know if I trust the joy (and I'm sad to say that), but she sounds like she's bitterly earned it.

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