November 2008 Archives
Thanks so very much, everyone, for all the comments and discussion, after my post about ways that classical music doesn't connect with the world we live in. So many of you added so many good points. Together, we're going to make a really strong list, stronger than I would have come up with on my own.
So here's a step toward doing that. I've started with my original post, and followed that with the points you've added, plus doubts you've raised about my points and others. I've added a few comments, but the important stuff here is what all of you wrote.
Next step -- to refine this wonderful stew, to pare it down to the most important points, and find the best way to phrase each one. Anyone want to take a shot? There's a lot to work with. When we're done, I'll make a final list, subject to comments from all of you (of course), and post it in the "Resources" section of the blog on the right. I'll also put it in my book, with thanks and credit to all of you.
Though I think there's at least one more poiint to be added -- something about the way classical music is played, a kind of detachment, a subtext that says "This is classical music," a restrained, scholarly approach to performance which comes from a belief that structure is a supremely important thing about classical music, and then dampens the contrasts between one moment and another that would allow the structure to be heard. A lack of "grain of the voice" (to use Roland Barthes' expression), no swing in the rhythm.
Here we go:
1. Most of the music at classical concerts comes from the past. So we're rarely engaged with contemporary life. (Is this one reason the people who go to these concerts like them?)
2. Formal dress looks archaic, and out of touch.
3. The musicians don't talk to the audience. In our culture today, people expect musicians to talk.
4. Musicians subordinate their own personalities. They play the music the way they've been taught to. They don't take much initiative, don't make their concerts personal statements, don't play the music their own way.
5. Even when new music is played, much of it doesn't sound like the world around us. The sounds of popular music aren't much heard, though they were in past centuries.
6. More general statement of point five: There's rarely even a hint of current popular culture at classical concerts. That's not true of other forms of art -- novels, poetry, visual art, dance, theater.
7. The audience is old.
***
I think your #4 point is the main problem. If musicians play music they believe in, play it sincerely, all other sticking points just naturally fall away. But if not, well, we get 2% 'niche' market share.
***
Hey there. I don't think point 7 belongs on your list, because it is a direct result of points 1 through 6; because of points 1 through 6, the audience is old.
Or, the classical music you outline in points 1 through 6 does actually connect to an older audience's version of "larger culture". My larger culture is different than someone of a different age or geography's larger culture, so what or whose version of larger culture should classical music seek to connect with?
I think classical musicians not talking to the audience is one of the bigger points in the list, and one of the biggest problems in current classical concerts. In my experience, audiences love feeling connected to the performer. They respect his/her skills and dedication and musicality so they want to feel like they know the person, like they can go grab a beer with the person after wards. Talking is the quickest and easiest way to connect people, so to me it doesn't make sense not to talk with the audience and let them feel like they are taking part in the musical experience rather than just watching it.
It's like us classical musicians are deliberately withholding information from the audience so they have no idea what we are really doing up on stage. I personally ALWAYS talk at my shows and I can feel it makes a huge difference; if anything just to break the ice a little.
In classical music it is especially important for a true audience-performer connection because of your other point, the music is VERY OLD, it is already more difficult to relate to. So if we don't relate to them on a lingual level, the music by itself is probably not going to take them there either.
***
Stuffy concert hall atmosphere. In clubs (where increasingly classical music no longer fears to tread). you can drink a beer, talk between songs.
***
Audiences are required to sit quietly and pay attention instead of having the option to sit and pay attention or to chat or drink or dance or whatever else they want to do.
***
The temple-like edifices in which orchestral music is typically performed lock out passersby and seek to cocoon their attendees.
The formal, museum-cum-ersatz-religious-experience concert which became codified after WWII. There's no fun in this, no spontaneity, no interactivity, and no connection to the contemporary world.
***
The problem with classical music ticket sales is NOT (for the most part anyway) the fault of the music. It is the fault of the performer for not adapting to modern culture and presenting the music in a way in which the average modern audience member can understand and relate.
***
No visual impact. I know this is true of most concert performances, but even at a rock show with no projections or dance, the bands can be fun to watch. we live in an increasingly visual age.
***
One other item that occurred to me: most classical concerts are untheatrical.
It's one of the things that strikes me most forcibly, since most pop-music events have long been highly theatricalized--by contrast, classical music often seems downright anti-theatrical.
***
Any kind of physical response to the music is discouraged for both performers and audiences.
***
Audiences, especially subscription audiences, are expected to substitute the Music Director's taste for their own.
***
Many rock clubs I go to don't have chairs, so you have to stand up for the entire show. At the concert hall, you have no choice but to sit down, often for hours on end with no respite whatsoever. That's another huge, glaring example of how classical music differs from the larger culture: seating.
***
And how removed really is auditorium seating from the larger culture? No one's about to suggest that we should all stand up at the movies?
***
Programs are rarely animated by a discernible idea that would allow one to have a conversation about the idea's aptness or lack thereof.
Advertisements for wealth-management firms whose services are inaccessible to the vast majority of human beings due to lack o' cash dominate major-orchestra programs.
***
Classical music appears to be the music of the upper class but we live in a middle class world. Many classical music organizations actively cultivate and promote that attitude.
***
Classical music concerts are monocultural, i.e., European. They are the whitest events I regularly attend.
***
When new music is played, it is treated as the red-headed stepchild, rather than as a special treat for the audience, which gets to experience something novel. I have never understood this.
The large share of contemporary classical music that employs atonality and highly variant rhythms through out the music confuses even seasoned pros upon first hearing. Most musicians need at least three hearings to really get into the piece and start to understand the structure and meaning, if there is a meaning. If musicians have difficulty on the first pass, how is an average audience member going to be able to relate to it?
***
Many pieces, especially new ones, are treated like music that is good for you rather than music that you will naturally like.
***
Classical music is, to my knowledge, the only musical genre in which many of its devotees demand fealty to it above all others. None of my fellow hip-hop fans ever badgers me about how useless classical music is...
***
Classical music claims not just to be better than other genres (most genres think they're better) but that it's in a superior class all by itself.
***
The term "serious music."
***
Using the education system as a tool for the indoctrination of new audiences also cultivates the attitude that classical music is good for you.
"Education" style concerts in which pieces are presented and then analyzed for the audience cultivates the attitude that classical music is something you have to _understand_ rather than something you can enjoy.
***
Program notes like this one.
***
Another one I thought of builds on the point made earlier about the languages used in classical programs, and that's the weird metadata so fetishistically cultivated for classical works. Newbies to the concert experience don't know what "BWV," "K.", "D.", "Hob.", "WoO," "Op.", et al. mean. I'm still not sure why Hoboken catalogue numbers even exist for Haydn's works, and I love Haydn's music to death. (But that's the point - I love the music.)
I'm trying to think of another artistic field in which you see that level of incomprehensible-without-decoding information presented as high-level text attached to each and every work, but I cannot. Maybe I'm missing something here.
***
Another audience connection problem is that especially with the canon of classical symphonies that are being played all the time, all the titles are in Italian or German! What kind of average American knows enough Italian or German to be able to understand the titles of the different movements of a piece? Isn't a title pretty important to the piece?
***
The classical music industry has built a wall of separation between itself and film score, even though film score is the area of classical music with the strongest connection to the mainstream. The occasional performances of film scores by orchestras are treated as novelties, and film composers who get played regularly as "serious" composers (Takemitsu, for instance) are treated like they've transcended the presumed banality of film score.
***
The standard media narrative reinforces all of these attitudes and beliefs.
So here's a step toward doing that. I've started with my original post, and followed that with the points you've added, plus doubts you've raised about my points and others. I've added a few comments, but the important stuff here is what all of you wrote.
Next step -- to refine this wonderful stew, to pare it down to the most important points, and find the best way to phrase each one. Anyone want to take a shot? There's a lot to work with. When we're done, I'll make a final list, subject to comments from all of you (of course), and post it in the "Resources" section of the blog on the right. I'll also put it in my book, with thanks and credit to all of you.
Though I think there's at least one more poiint to be added -- something about the way classical music is played, a kind of detachment, a subtext that says "This is classical music," a restrained, scholarly approach to performance which comes from a belief that structure is a supremely important thing about classical music, and then dampens the contrasts between one moment and another that would allow the structure to be heard. A lack of "grain of the voice" (to use Roland Barthes' expression), no swing in the rhythm.
Here we go:
1. Most of the music at classical concerts comes from the past. So we're rarely engaged with contemporary life. (Is this one reason the people who go to these concerts like them?)
2. Formal dress looks archaic, and out of touch.
3. The musicians don't talk to the audience. In our culture today, people expect musicians to talk.
4. Musicians subordinate their own personalities. They play the music the way they've been taught to. They don't take much initiative, don't make their concerts personal statements, don't play the music their own way.
5. Even when new music is played, much of it doesn't sound like the world around us. The sounds of popular music aren't much heard, though they were in past centuries.
6. More general statement of point five: There's rarely even a hint of current popular culture at classical concerts. That's not true of other forms of art -- novels, poetry, visual art, dance, theater.
7. The audience is old.
***
I think your #4 point is the main problem. If musicians play music they believe in, play it sincerely, all other sticking points just naturally fall away. But if not, well, we get 2% 'niche' market share.
***
Hey there. I don't think point 7 belongs on your list, because it is a direct result of points 1 through 6; because of points 1 through 6, the audience is old.
Or, the classical music you outline in points 1 through 6 does actually connect to an older audience's version of "larger culture". My larger culture is different than someone of a different age or geography's larger culture, so what or whose version of larger culture should classical music seek to connect with?
[Maybe I could refine the age point this way. Classical music reflects only one kind of culture, one demographic, in an age where we're multicultural. And multisubcultural. If classical music was, as it claims to be, a really comprehensive musical art, able to speak for our entire culture, then it would reflect many subcultures, as our entire culture does. And beyond that, many people the same age as the classical audience have a wider culture that doesn't include classical music. So even given the age, and not making an issue of it, by itself, there's a big part of culture missing. ]***
I think classical musicians not talking to the audience is one of the bigger points in the list, and one of the biggest problems in current classical concerts. In my experience, audiences love feeling connected to the performer. They respect his/her skills and dedication and musicality so they want to feel like they know the person, like they can go grab a beer with the person after wards. Talking is the quickest and easiest way to connect people, so to me it doesn't make sense not to talk with the audience and let them feel like they are taking part in the musical experience rather than just watching it.
It's like us classical musicians are deliberately withholding information from the audience so they have no idea what we are really doing up on stage. I personally ALWAYS talk at my shows and I can feel it makes a huge difference; if anything just to break the ice a little.
In classical music it is especially important for a true audience-performer connection because of your other point, the music is VERY OLD, it is already more difficult to relate to. So if we don't relate to them on a lingual level, the music by itself is probably not going to take them there either.
***
Stuffy concert hall atmosphere. In clubs (where increasingly classical music no longer fears to tread). you can drink a beer, talk between songs.
***
Audiences are required to sit quietly and pay attention instead of having the option to sit and pay attention or to chat or drink or dance or whatever else they want to do.
***
The temple-like edifices in which orchestral music is typically performed lock out passersby and seek to cocoon their attendees.
[Christopher Small wrote a vivid chapter about this in his book Musicking. I often assign it in my Juilliard course on the future of classical music.]***
The formal, museum-cum-ersatz-religious-experience concert which became codified after WWII. There's no fun in this, no spontaneity, no interactivity, and no connection to the contemporary world.
***
The problem with classical music ticket sales is NOT (for the most part anyway) the fault of the music. It is the fault of the performer for not adapting to modern culture and presenting the music in a way in which the average modern audience member can understand and relate.
***
No visual impact. I know this is true of most concert performances, but even at a rock show with no projections or dance, the bands can be fun to watch. we live in an increasingly visual age.
***
[This came via email, from my friend and fellow blogger Terry Teachout]
One other item that occurred to me: most classical concerts are untheatrical.
It's one of the things that strikes me most forcibly, since most pop-music events have long been highly theatricalized--by contrast, classical music often seems downright anti-theatrical.
***
Any kind of physical response to the music is discouraged for both performers and audiences.
***
Audiences, especially subscription audiences, are expected to substitute the Music Director's taste for their own.
***
Many rock clubs I go to don't have chairs, so you have to stand up for the entire show. At the concert hall, you have no choice but to sit down, often for hours on end with no respite whatsoever. That's another huge, glaring example of how classical music differs from the larger culture: seating.
***
And how removed really is auditorium seating from the larger culture? No one's about to suggest that we should all stand up at the movies?
***
Programs are rarely animated by a discernible idea that would allow one to have a conversation about the idea's aptness or lack thereof.
[So true. Often there isn't any animating idea. It's Thursday, so we're playing a subscription concert, and we've filled up the time with these pieces, one of which is the only concerto the soloist tonight is willing to play.]***
Advertisements for wealth-management firms whose services are inaccessible to the vast majority of human beings due to lack o' cash dominate major-orchestra programs.
***
Classical music appears to be the music of the upper class but we live in a middle class world. Many classical music organizations actively cultivate and promote that attitude.
***
Classical music concerts are monocultural, i.e., European. They are the whitest events I regularly attend.
***
When new music is played, it is treated as the red-headed stepchild, rather than as a special treat for the audience, which gets to experience something novel. I have never understood this.
[The mainstream audiences mostly hate it, so from another point of view it's amazing that new music gets played at all at mainstream concerts. But nothing is done to engage/involve/interest the audence, or even to challenge their brains and imagination.]***
The large share of contemporary classical music that employs atonality and highly variant rhythms through out the music confuses even seasoned pros upon first hearing. Most musicians need at least three hearings to really get into the piece and start to understand the structure and meaning, if there is a meaning. If musicians have difficulty on the first pass, how is an average audience member going to be able to relate to it?
***
Many pieces, especially new ones, are treated like music that is good for you rather than music that you will naturally like.
***
Classical music is, to my knowledge, the only musical genre in which many of its devotees demand fealty to it above all others. None of my fellow hip-hop fans ever badgers me about how useless classical music is...
***
Classical music claims not just to be better than other genres (most genres think they're better) but that it's in a superior class all by itself.
***
The term "serious music."
***
Using the education system as a tool for the indoctrination of new audiences also cultivates the attitude that classical music is good for you.
"Education" style concerts in which pieces are presented and then analyzed for the audience cultivates the attitude that classical music is something you have to _understand_ rather than something you can enjoy.
***
Program notes like this one.
***
Another one I thought of builds on the point made earlier about the languages used in classical programs, and that's the weird metadata so fetishistically cultivated for classical works. Newbies to the concert experience don't know what "BWV," "K.", "D.", "Hob.", "WoO," "Op.", et al. mean. I'm still not sure why Hoboken catalogue numbers even exist for Haydn's works, and I love Haydn's music to death. (But that's the point - I love the music.)
I'm trying to think of another artistic field in which you see that level of incomprehensible-without-decoding information presented as high-level text attached to each and every work, but I cannot. Maybe I'm missing something here.
***
Another audience connection problem is that especially with the canon of classical symphonies that are being played all the time, all the titles are in Italian or German! What kind of average American knows enough Italian or German to be able to understand the titles of the different movements of a piece? Isn't a title pretty important to the piece?
***
The classical music industry has built a wall of separation between itself and film score, even though film score is the area of classical music with the strongest connection to the mainstream. The occasional performances of film scores by orchestras are treated as novelties, and film composers who get played regularly as "serious" composers (Takemitsu, for instance) are treated like they've transcended the presumed banality of film score.
***
The standard media narrative reinforces all of these attitudes and beliefs.
I'm making a list -- and checking it twice -- of all the ways in which classical music doesn't connect to our larger culture. This'll eventually be a detailed blog post. I'd love comments. Can anyone add to the list?
1. Most of the music at classical concerts comes from the past. So we're rarely engaged with contemporary life. (Is this one reason the people who go to these concerts like them?)
2. Formal dress looks archaic, and out of touch.
3. The musicians don't talk to the audience. In our culture today, people expect musicians to talk.
4. Musicians subordinate their own personalities. They play the music the way they've been taught to. They don't take much initiative, don't make their concerts personal statements, don't play the music their own way.
5. Even when new music is played, much of it doesn't sound like the world around us. The sounds of popular music aren't much heard, though they were in past centuries.
6. More general statement of point five: There's rarely even a hint of current popular culture at classical concerts. That's not true of other forms of art -- novels, poetry, visual art, dance, theater.
7. The audience is old.
I know that many of these things are changing. Point three, for instance. So I'm talking about classical concerts in their traditional form.
And I'm not saying that any of these things are bad. If you enjoy these concerts, you enjoy them. It's just that concerts with these characteristics don't resemble other current cultural events, don't connect with our larger culture, and therefore might not attract many people, especially younger people -- no matter how fine the music is.
1. Most of the music at classical concerts comes from the past. So we're rarely engaged with contemporary life. (Is this one reason the people who go to these concerts like them?)
2. Formal dress looks archaic, and out of touch.
3. The musicians don't talk to the audience. In our culture today, people expect musicians to talk.
4. Musicians subordinate their own personalities. They play the music the way they've been taught to. They don't take much initiative, don't make their concerts personal statements, don't play the music their own way.
5. Even when new music is played, much of it doesn't sound like the world around us. The sounds of popular music aren't much heard, though they were in past centuries.
6. More general statement of point five: There's rarely even a hint of current popular culture at classical concerts. That's not true of other forms of art -- novels, poetry, visual art, dance, theater.
7. The audience is old.
I know that many of these things are changing. Point three, for instance. So I'm talking about classical concerts in their traditional form.
And I'm not saying that any of these things are bad. If you enjoy these concerts, you enjoy them. It's just that concerts with these characteristics don't resemble other current cultural events, don't connect with our larger culture, and therefore might not attract many people, especially younger people -- no matter how fine the music is.
Here's a comment from Eric Lin, a college student, to my "Why I'm Here" post. I'm giving it a post of its own, because I think it's important:
But when he's in an orchestra office the day after a concert, nobody says a word. The concert just as well might not have happened.
This doesn't mean that many people, in the audience and on the orchestra's staff, might not have loved the concert. But in a very tangible way, classical concerts are non-events. If the people most directly involved can't get aroused to talk about them, why would anybody else?
There is some overlap between the theater folks and the classical music folks at the school I currently attend, and I happen to have worked and know people in both circles.When I posted the comment, I added an anecdote of my own. I know a consultant who's worked with theater companies and orchestras. He told me once -- with real perplexity -- that if he's in a theater company's office the day after a new production premieres, everybody talks about it. Everyone debates the play, the acting, the directing, the sets, the costumes, whatever.
This season, student dramatic productions include works by Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sondheim, a Mac Wellman play from the mid-1990s, and The Front Page, a comedy from the 1920s. This is not including the bi-annual productions of Gilbert and Sullivan and Shakespeare. Sarah Kane's controversial Blasted and Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses from 2002 both graced the main theatrical venue...
On the other hand, what has the classical music scene done? One orchestra does a composition contest each year and another chamber strings group generally does some student work, and I'm quite grateful that these opportunities exist. But beyond this?
The pattern is quite obvious. Theater types go around talking excitedly about the crazy Sarah Kane play. Sondheim productions are events. For the actor, yes, Shakespeare is great. But I certainly don't hear many (or any) person going around talking about how Shakespeare is better than Miller or Albee. That sort of distinction just doesn't register with them. It doesn't make sense. Albee's plays are great too...but for different reasons. Further, and more importantly, the plays are mostly chosen by THE STUDENTS themselves. People actively recruit teams of production staff to put together an Albee play. And people are genuinely excited to do a play/musical because they picked it.
Classical music? The new commission for the orchestra (if there is one at all) is usually treated like its spinach. The Classical music equivalents of Albees and Kanes barely register with the performers, let alone the larger community. Why? The performers don't know about them. So how can they get excited about their music?
Whereas your average theater geek with know who Edward Albee is, chances are the violinist in the orchestra will not know who Thomas Ades or Helmut Lachenmann is. Or care.
Whereas Shakespeare and Albee are equals, Beethoven and Birtwistle are not. At least not for the practitioners. Until these attitudes change, Classical music is and will be marginalized.
But when he's in an orchestra office the day after a concert, nobody says a word. The concert just as well might not have happened.
This doesn't mean that many people, in the audience and on the orchestra's staff, might not have loved the concert. But in a very tangible way, classical concerts are non-events. If the people most directly involved can't get aroused to talk about them, why would anybody else?
More from the current Rolling Stone, featuring their list of the 100 greatest rock singers. This is from Jonathan Lethem's introductory piece, an overview of rock singing:
(When someone sings Schubert, do we expect tension between the singer and the song? I think we look for unity, which -- does anyone agree? -- eclipses the singer's presence as an artist, and also evades any distance between Schubert's time and our own.)
...what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it's a bridge we're never sure the singer's going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience's expectations. In any case, there's something beautifully uncomfortable at the root of the vocal style that detines the pop era. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style's inception, i.e. Elvis Presley: at first, listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan's television show tossed this disjunction into everyone's living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it but also a little deranged, in ways we haven't gotten over yet....When I say I want classical music to connect to the world around us, this is part of what I mean. I want classical music to push against its boundaries -- and our boundaries -- to thrill our culture and derange it. As it did in centuries past.
Ultimately, the nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. That's to say, if it isn't pushing against the boundaries of its form, at least slightly, it isn't doing anything at all.
(When someone sings Schubert, do we expect tension between the singer and the song? I think we look for unity, which -- does anyone agree? -- eclipses the singer's presence as an artist, and also evades any distance between Schubert's time and our own.)
I'm willing to smile at PR exaggerations. But what about this one, from a Detroit Symphony press release?
(Niggling point: There shouldn't be a comma after "now." It should come after "and": "Hundreds of music artists across every genre - R&B, rock, pop, jazz, blues, techno and classical - have called Motown home, and now the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) welcomes another music superstar..." To avoid comma errors -- and forgive me for this, but these errors are very common -- read the sentence out loud, and see if you'd pause where the comma is. If not, move it, or take it out.)
Hundreds of music artists across every genre - R&B, rock, pop, jazz, blues, techno and classical - have called Motown home and now, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) welcomes another music superstar - Leonard Slatkin - to its ranks as the DSO's 12th Music Director.
Is this plausible? Does Leonard Slatkin rank with Aretha Franklin, Motown Records, the Supremes, and Marvin Gaye? And if not, does the DSO look silly for implying that he might?
Or do they make it all true, simply by saying this?
(Niggling point: There shouldn't be a comma after "now." It should come after "and": "Hundreds of music artists across every genre - R&B, rock, pop, jazz, blues, techno and classical - have called Motown home, and now the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) welcomes another music superstar..." To avoid comma errors -- and forgive me for this, but these errors are very common -- read the sentence out loud, and see if you'd pause where the comma is. If not, move it, or take it out.)
...while I work on a larger post about what classical music would look like if it really did connect with the world around us.
Bono on Bob Dylan, from the current issue of Rolling Stone:
(Historical note: interesting, to see two soul singers (well, Womack was a guitarist, too, and a songwriter) talking about Bob Dylan. Cooke died in 1964, so this was very early Dylan they were hearing. This also would have been around the time that Cooke was writing and recording "A Change is Gonna Come," in which, after years of recording light pop hits, he certainly did tell the truth. Just now, after writing that line, I've learned from Wikipedia that Cooke was directly inspired by Dylan. Cooke's widow later married Bobby Womack. Did they listen to Dylan at home?)
Bono on Bob Dylan, from the current issue of Rolling Stone:
When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.I read this today to my Juilliard class on music criticism. My question to them (and to everyone in my blog community): How often do any of us ask if a classical artist is telling the truth?
(Historical note: interesting, to see two soul singers (well, Womack was a guitarist, too, and a songwriter) talking about Bob Dylan. Cooke died in 1964, so this was very early Dylan they were hearing. This also would have been around the time that Cooke was writing and recording "A Change is Gonna Come," in which, after years of recording light pop hits, he certainly did tell the truth. Just now, after writing that line, I've learned from Wikipedia that Cooke was directly inspired by Dylan. Cooke's widow later married Bobby Womack. Did they listen to Dylan at home?)
I want to thank everyone, and really warmly, for all the responses to my query earlier, and for all the comments you post here every day. You encourage me, teach me, tell me things I didn't know, make me think more deeply, and just generally make me glad to be blogging. This isn't just my blog, i've come to think. It's in some way all of ours, mine and yours together. We're all engaged in a grand joint effort, to rethink classical music, and to change it and make it better.
But I also want to say that not all the queries spoke exactly to what I'd asked. I wanted classical music events that exploded into our culture, or else made a community somewhere sit up and pay attention. What many comments offered were attempts to do this, or maybe even more modestly, attempts to create classical music events that might connect classical music with the outside world, without any reason to think that they'd succeeded, or at least not in any large way.
i don't blame anyone for this. It's a sign of where we are, of one of the reasons why classical music needs to change. The plain fact is that it doesn't reach very far outside its cocoon, though it certainly used to, far in the past. And because it doesn't reach very far outside itself, we've come to take that for granted, and I think we literally don't notice that the field -- as a cultural force -- has shrunk from where it once was. And therefore we perk up a lot when someone proposes even a small step toward reestablishing contact with the rest of our culture.
It's that reestablished contact, or the hope of it, that keeps me doing what I do. I could give -- have given -- all kinds of impersonal reasons for advocating change. The audience is aging, ticket sales (long term) are down, the chance of raising money from a new generation of donors, at the levels we raise it now, seem slim. A younger audience won't like -- doesn't like -- classical music as we currently present it.
But in my heart, that's just froth on the wave, though it's all important for the field to consider. In my heart, the reasons are far more pressing. I love classical music, but when I go to mainstream performances, I feel cut off from the rest of my life. I feel cut off from the world I live in. If I watch old episodes of The Wire (a current craze of mine), I know why I'm doing it, I know what the show is saying about things I've seen (at least at a distance; I haven't had direct contact with drug dealers or police work). I know who it's speaking to. I can talk to almost anyone I know about it.
But if I go to a classical concert, I slam the door behind me. Just about the only people I can talk to about it are people in the classical music world. Of course that wouldn't bother me in many other areas. I like 1950s horror comics; I don't feel any need to talk about them to most people that I meet. (Though there was a wonderful book, The Ten-Cent Plague, by my Entertainment Weekly colleague David Hajdu, about how those comics were suppressed, which speaks directly to cultural issues we still have now.) I love subways, but I don't feel stifled because people who watched The Wire might not care about them.
Classical music, though, is far bigger than that, and one of the implicit messages conveyed by mainstream classical performance is that something important is going on, that this is art -- no, Art -- that it's profound, that it needs and deserves special funding. And the music tells me, with every moment of its sound, that it really is art, but an art that's lost its voice. Back in the '80s, when I was plunged as deep in the classical music world (mainstream style) as I've ever been, I used to tell myself that my dedication was, at bottom, a religious quest. Not literally religious, but very like religion (at least some kinds of religion), because it was otherworldly, owing loyalty to something far beyond mere everyday life. Which wasn't true of the art films I've loved (Antonioni, Godard), or the pop music I've loved, or the novels (Saramago, lately Balzac).
When I started feeling this intensely -- and, even more, when I started understanding what I felt -- the classical music world started to seem abnormal to me. Take new music. Why has new music been such a problem? Lisa Hirsch, in a discussion we've conducted in comments to my "Query" post, suggests that new operas have trouble making contact with the outside world because so few of them are produced. Fifteen years ago, perhaps, I might have said that, too. But now I'd take a different view (and Lisa, this isn't meant as criticism of you; you have every right to disagree with me, and I've learned a lot from our disagreements). Now I'd turn what Lisa says (and of course what many others say as well) upside down, and suggest that few new operas are produced because classical music isn't in contact with the outside world.
Or, to put it differently, if we were in contact with the world around us, we'd naturally do a lot more new work, and do it with far less commotion, which is what classical music routinely did in past centuries, and what the other arts do now.
So that's what animates everything I write here, even (ultimately) my delighted disquisitions on bel canto opera. I want a world in which classical music isn't separated from the other parts of my life, a world in which classical music comes alive with the sound and content of everyday life, including popular culture. Just as, for God's sake, James Joyce did (to use an example I've used many times before), even in his two huge difficult masterworks of modernism.
And that's why I'll often argue for simple everyday connections, even ones that might seem trivial artistically, like the use in social networking. I don't think we can join the world by halves. If we want a profound artistic connection with the heart of modern life, we'll have to have the light connections, too. They're all part of the same package, and I doubt there's an example of an art with a flourishing and rooted lofty edge (rooted, I mean, in the life around it), that wasn't also tied to the everyday culture of its time. So we should forge these connections in every way we can, only making sure that we keep them easy and spontaneous, without pretending that we're something that we're not, that our art is simple (for instance), or that we all speak the language of the present, when some of us are only now learning it.
I feel lucky to be alive right now, and working in classical music. Things are changing. Everything I've said here is now up for grabs, and all of us who gather at this blog -- maybe even those who disagree (because their opposition gives us energy and understanding) -- are engines of the change.
But I also want to say that not all the queries spoke exactly to what I'd asked. I wanted classical music events that exploded into our culture, or else made a community somewhere sit up and pay attention. What many comments offered were attempts to do this, or maybe even more modestly, attempts to create classical music events that might connect classical music with the outside world, without any reason to think that they'd succeeded, or at least not in any large way.
i don't blame anyone for this. It's a sign of where we are, of one of the reasons why classical music needs to change. The plain fact is that it doesn't reach very far outside its cocoon, though it certainly used to, far in the past. And because it doesn't reach very far outside itself, we've come to take that for granted, and I think we literally don't notice that the field -- as a cultural force -- has shrunk from where it once was. And therefore we perk up a lot when someone proposes even a small step toward reestablishing contact with the rest of our culture.
It's that reestablished contact, or the hope of it, that keeps me doing what I do. I could give -- have given -- all kinds of impersonal reasons for advocating change. The audience is aging, ticket sales (long term) are down, the chance of raising money from a new generation of donors, at the levels we raise it now, seem slim. A younger audience won't like -- doesn't like -- classical music as we currently present it.
But in my heart, that's just froth on the wave, though it's all important for the field to consider. In my heart, the reasons are far more pressing. I love classical music, but when I go to mainstream performances, I feel cut off from the rest of my life. I feel cut off from the world I live in. If I watch old episodes of The Wire (a current craze of mine), I know why I'm doing it, I know what the show is saying about things I've seen (at least at a distance; I haven't had direct contact with drug dealers or police work). I know who it's speaking to. I can talk to almost anyone I know about it.
But if I go to a classical concert, I slam the door behind me. Just about the only people I can talk to about it are people in the classical music world. Of course that wouldn't bother me in many other areas. I like 1950s horror comics; I don't feel any need to talk about them to most people that I meet. (Though there was a wonderful book, The Ten-Cent Plague, by my Entertainment Weekly colleague David Hajdu, about how those comics were suppressed, which speaks directly to cultural issues we still have now.) I love subways, but I don't feel stifled because people who watched The Wire might not care about them.
Classical music, though, is far bigger than that, and one of the implicit messages conveyed by mainstream classical performance is that something important is going on, that this is art -- no, Art -- that it's profound, that it needs and deserves special funding. And the music tells me, with every moment of its sound, that it really is art, but an art that's lost its voice. Back in the '80s, when I was plunged as deep in the classical music world (mainstream style) as I've ever been, I used to tell myself that my dedication was, at bottom, a religious quest. Not literally religious, but very like religion (at least some kinds of religion), because it was otherworldly, owing loyalty to something far beyond mere everyday life. Which wasn't true of the art films I've loved (Antonioni, Godard), or the pop music I've loved, or the novels (Saramago, lately Balzac).
When I started feeling this intensely -- and, even more, when I started understanding what I felt -- the classical music world started to seem abnormal to me. Take new music. Why has new music been such a problem? Lisa Hirsch, in a discussion we've conducted in comments to my "Query" post, suggests that new operas have trouble making contact with the outside world because so few of them are produced. Fifteen years ago, perhaps, I might have said that, too. But now I'd take a different view (and Lisa, this isn't meant as criticism of you; you have every right to disagree with me, and I've learned a lot from our disagreements). Now I'd turn what Lisa says (and of course what many others say as well) upside down, and suggest that few new operas are produced because classical music isn't in contact with the outside world.
Or, to put it differently, if we were in contact with the world around us, we'd naturally do a lot more new work, and do it with far less commotion, which is what classical music routinely did in past centuries, and what the other arts do now.
So that's what animates everything I write here, even (ultimately) my delighted disquisitions on bel canto opera. I want a world in which classical music isn't separated from the other parts of my life, a world in which classical music comes alive with the sound and content of everyday life, including popular culture. Just as, for God's sake, James Joyce did (to use an example I've used many times before), even in his two huge difficult masterworks of modernism.
And that's why I'll often argue for simple everyday connections, even ones that might seem trivial artistically, like the use in social networking. I don't think we can join the world by halves. If we want a profound artistic connection with the heart of modern life, we'll have to have the light connections, too. They're all part of the same package, and I doubt there's an example of an art with a flourishing and rooted lofty edge (rooted, I mean, in the life around it), that wasn't also tied to the everyday culture of its time. So we should forge these connections in every way we can, only making sure that we keep them easy and spontaneous, without pretending that we're something that we're not, that our art is simple (for instance), or that we all speak the language of the present, when some of us are only now learning it.
I feel lucky to be alive right now, and working in classical music. Things are changing. Everything I've said here is now up for grabs, and all of us who gather at this blog -- maybe even those who disagree (because their opposition gives us energy and understanding) -- are engines of the change.
Sunday night at Le Poisson Rouge, the new NY club where lots of good music happens. Among much else, it's the new home of the Wordless Music series, no surprise, since Ronen Givony, who founded Wordless, books classical music at Le Poisson Rouge.
I'm there Sunday to hear my friend Bruce Brubaker, along with Elissa Cassini, Susan Babini, and Ben Fingland, play Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Opening the show is Goldmund, who plays ambient music on piano, with electronics, and closing is Sylvain Cheveau, with more ambient music, mostly electronic. Messiaen comes in the middle.
I was fried. Drove in from the country, got caught in two traffic jams, and got stuck in a third when I took a cab to the club from my NY apartment. Somehow I got there on time, and Goldmund -- such lovely sounds, such a delicate touch on the piano -- calmed me down.
Then Messiaen. Good performance. Many in the audience crowd -- 175 people in all, Ronen told me -- had probably never heard the piece before, or even heard of Messiaen. That's the kind of crowd Wordless Music draws. Ronen programs classical music and smart pop (indie bands, ambient, whatever; Sylvain Cheveau, for instance, has opened for Sigur Ros), but the pop acts are usually the draw.
For five minutes or so, while the Messiaen started, I heard some rustling, and some whispered conversation. Then silence. Silence for 35 more minutes, while the piece hung in its special kind of space. And then cheering -- applause, whoops. The people loved it. The piece just conquered them.
So how wonderful is that? This proves, if you ask me, that nobody needs special preparation to like classical music. You just have to encounter it in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way. So shouldn't performances like this -- and I've seen things like it before -- be a big and hopeful part of the future? And shouldn't it be deeply rewarding to play a piece like this for a crowd who wouldn't sit silently, and wouldn't whoop, unless they loved it? More rewarding, in many ways, than playing the piece in a concert hall, where everyone sits in silence because they're supposed to?
No, I'm not saying that the normal classical audience has anything wrong with it. But only that there's something really wonderful about playing classic pieces for people whose silence and applause are completely spontaneous.
(Footnotes:
(One reason the Messiaen came off so well was smart programming. Messiaen, plus others who create something of the same mood. Draws an audience that might like Messiaen, and gets put in a spacae where they're ready to hear him.
(Ulrelated, but...when I went to the Poisson Rouge website just now, a VIctoria motet was playing. Such an oasis in the middle of a working day...)
I'm there Sunday to hear my friend Bruce Brubaker, along with Elissa Cassini, Susan Babini, and Ben Fingland, play Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Opening the show is Goldmund, who plays ambient music on piano, with electronics, and closing is Sylvain Cheveau, with more ambient music, mostly electronic. Messiaen comes in the middle.
I was fried. Drove in from the country, got caught in two traffic jams, and got stuck in a third when I took a cab to the club from my NY apartment. Somehow I got there on time, and Goldmund -- such lovely sounds, such a delicate touch on the piano -- calmed me down.
Then Messiaen. Good performance. Many in the audience crowd -- 175 people in all, Ronen told me -- had probably never heard the piece before, or even heard of Messiaen. That's the kind of crowd Wordless Music draws. Ronen programs classical music and smart pop (indie bands, ambient, whatever; Sylvain Cheveau, for instance, has opened for Sigur Ros), but the pop acts are usually the draw.
For five minutes or so, while the Messiaen started, I heard some rustling, and some whispered conversation. Then silence. Silence for 35 more minutes, while the piece hung in its special kind of space. And then cheering -- applause, whoops. The people loved it. The piece just conquered them.
So how wonderful is that? This proves, if you ask me, that nobody needs special preparation to like classical music. You just have to encounter it in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way. So shouldn't performances like this -- and I've seen things like it before -- be a big and hopeful part of the future? And shouldn't it be deeply rewarding to play a piece like this for a crowd who wouldn't sit silently, and wouldn't whoop, unless they loved it? More rewarding, in many ways, than playing the piece in a concert hall, where everyone sits in silence because they're supposed to?
No, I'm not saying that the normal classical audience has anything wrong with it. But only that there's something really wonderful about playing classic pieces for people whose silence and applause are completely spontaneous.
(Footnotes:
(One reason the Messiaen came off so well was smart programming. Messiaen, plus others who create something of the same mood. Draws an audience that might like Messiaen, and gets put in a spacae where they're ready to hear him.
(Ulrelated, but...when I went to the Poisson Rouge website just now, a VIctoria motet was playing. Such an oasis in the middle of a working day...)
We hear a lot these days about niche markets, and often enough -- as happened just a few days ago in a comment to one of my posts -- someone talks about classical music as a niche market, and therefore likely to thrive in the emerging niche culture.
But I don't think that's right. Oh, it's a hopeful idea, with (if it were true) an encouraging payoff. Classical music wouldn't have to change, and it wouldn't matter if we never reach a new audience. Our own niche audience would be all that we'd need.
Think about that, though. A niche market is, more or less by definition, a small market. And a move toward more niche markets mean that big markets get smaller. People magazine has fewer readers, fewer people watch network TV.
But isn't classical music a small market? Maybe, but -- in its glamorous mainstream form -- it depends on big-market funding. It depends on donors and corporate sponsors and government agencies that think (for instance) that an orchestra is the crown jewel of a city, that the city needs the orchestra to attract corporations, that the arts are glorious and essential to civilization. These aren't niche market notions. Instead, they place classical music right at the center of civic pride.
Case in point: the Cleveland Orchestra. Back in the last century, they were raising bankloads of money to finance the renovation of their concert hall. One of their board members told me he'd approached the Ohio state legislature. The legislature always gave the orchestra money, but now this board member asked for quite a lot more. And he got what he wanted. If the Cleveland Orchestra needed the money, the orchestra -- or so the legislature thought -- should get it. Too bad that now they'd have to give other arts groups less, but the orchestra came first.
But now suppose everyone thought of the Cleveland Orchestra as a niche market. What would the answer have been? Maybe something like, "Hey, cool, good luck with the concert hall. But we'll pass. It's all niche markets now, and we don't see why you matter more than anyone else."
Thinking like that would be a disaster for big-time classical music, at least as we know it today. If we really do move wholesale to niche markets, all the alternative classical stuff I love will do fine. But the big-ticket institutions -- which depend on big-market money -- surely would shrink.
But I don't think that's right. Oh, it's a hopeful idea, with (if it were true) an encouraging payoff. Classical music wouldn't have to change, and it wouldn't matter if we never reach a new audience. Our own niche audience would be all that we'd need.
Think about that, though. A niche market is, more or less by definition, a small market. And a move toward more niche markets mean that big markets get smaller. People magazine has fewer readers, fewer people watch network TV.
But isn't classical music a small market? Maybe, but -- in its glamorous mainstream form -- it depends on big-market funding. It depends on donors and corporate sponsors and government agencies that think (for instance) that an orchestra is the crown jewel of a city, that the city needs the orchestra to attract corporations, that the arts are glorious and essential to civilization. These aren't niche market notions. Instead, they place classical music right at the center of civic pride.
Case in point: the Cleveland Orchestra. Back in the last century, they were raising bankloads of money to finance the renovation of their concert hall. One of their board members told me he'd approached the Ohio state legislature. The legislature always gave the orchestra money, but now this board member asked for quite a lot more. And he got what he wanted. If the Cleveland Orchestra needed the money, the orchestra -- or so the legislature thought -- should get it. Too bad that now they'd have to give other arts groups less, but the orchestra came first.
But now suppose everyone thought of the Cleveland Orchestra as a niche market. What would the answer have been? Maybe something like, "Hey, cool, good luck with the concert hall. But we'll pass. It's all niche markets now, and we don't see why you matter more than anyone else."
Thinking like that would be a disaster for big-time classical music, at least as we know it today. If we really do move wholesale to niche markets, all the alternative classical stuff I love will do fine. But the big-ticket institutions -- which depend on big-market money -- surely would shrink.
In a new and most unfortunate development, an otherwise reputable orchestra the American Symphony Orchestra tried to advertise a concert by posting a comment on my blog. And also on Amanda Ameer's, and no doubt on other blogs, too on at least one other ArtsJournal blog. These comments were nothing but advertising copy. I deleted the one on this blog the moment I saw it, and sent a stern e-mail to the orchestra's marketing director. [I was kind, and didn't name the ASO in my original post. But Amanda outed them, so there's no point in saving their face.]
I hope it's clear that this way of advertising is completely inappropriate. (And also that my outrage at this has nothing to do withthe orchestra's ASO's music.) For one thing, ArtsJournal sells ads on these blogs, and can hardly tolerate people trying to use them to advertise for free. But far beyond that, spam comments would disrupt the fine conversations we have on this blog. Nobody wants to wade through advertising to see the latest posts. I can't quite imagine what this orchestra the ASO was thinking, but clearly they have no idea how blogs work (a milder way of saying that they don't respect the integrity of what we do here).
So if anyone else, God forbid, is thinking of doing this -- don't. I don't care how terrific your music might be. Your ads, if they showed up here as comments, would just be a new kind of spam.
I hope it's clear that this way of advertising is completely inappropriate. (And also that my outrage at this has nothing to do with
So if anyone else, God forbid, is thinking of doing this -- don't. I don't care how terrific your music might be. Your ads, if they showed up here as comments, would just be a new kind of spam.
For my in-progress book on the future of classical music, I'd love to know about classical performances that engaged a community, reaching far beyond the normal orbit of classical music fans.
And I'm especially interested in classical performances that reach to the heart of our current culture. It's a point I've often made, in talks I give on the future of classical music, and here on the blog as well -- classical music doesn't seem to speak for our current culture. It doesn't (to be a little grandiose) go out and forge the uncreated conscience of our time (to paraphrase a famous line from Joyce). I can think of one classical music event in my time that was important for just about anyone involved in forward-looking culture in New York, the performances of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera house in 1976 (though not produced by the Metropolitan Opera). Maybe Dr. Atomic is having some of that appeal now, though not as strongly.
Maybe there are other examples in classical music. Certainly it's easy to find them in other arts -- Angels in America, Brokeback Mountain, The Sopranos, the very existence of many people in pop music (Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, many, many more).
So if you have ideas about this, or know of any examples, I'd love to know them. Tell me about classical music events that rang to the heart of either current culture -- not just in theory, but in practice, with wide response from many people -- or some particular community.
And I'm especially interested in classical performances that reach to the heart of our current culture. It's a point I've often made, in talks I give on the future of classical music, and here on the blog as well -- classical music doesn't seem to speak for our current culture. It doesn't (to be a little grandiose) go out and forge the uncreated conscience of our time (to paraphrase a famous line from Joyce). I can think of one classical music event in my time that was important for just about anyone involved in forward-looking culture in New York, the performances of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera house in 1976 (though not produced by the Metropolitan Opera). Maybe Dr. Atomic is having some of that appeal now, though not as strongly.
Maybe there are other examples in classical music. Certainly it's easy to find them in other arts -- Angels in America, Brokeback Mountain, The Sopranos, the very existence of many people in pop music (Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, many, many more).
So if you have ideas about this, or know of any examples, I'd love to know them. Tell me about classical music events that rang to the heart of either current culture -- not just in theory, but in practice, with wide response from many people -- or some particular community.
Had a drink last night with someone in the orchestra business, and found myself challenged to change the way I think. "Admit it," this person (whom I like a lot) said to me. "When the New York Philharmonic plays a concert in the park, you think that's less valid than their concerts in Avery Fisher Hall."
I had to admit that he was right, at least in the sense that I think the parks concerts are less interesting. (And no, my friend doesn't work for the Philharmonic.) But why do I think that way? My friend kept pointing out that orchestras are reaching out to their communities, and -- maybe in a profound sense -- rethinking their mission. Their responsibility, in the future, might be to serve the cities that they're in, maybe even more than they serve the classics of the repertoire, or the cause of art. I've run into to thoughts like that before, and in fact last spring I heard two notable orchestras (one very large, the other not so large) talk at a private meeting about how they'd reoriented some of what they do.
But now my friend posed the challenge even more strongly. Why shouldn't the Philharmonic's parks concerts be at least a part of their central mission? Why -- at least for the sake of argument -- shouldn't they play more parks events, and fewer paid concerts (paid for the audience, I mean) in their concert hall?
I have to admit I found this alarming. Is this just me, or is the idea my friend proposed -- and which the orchestra world might be considering -- not quite right? Parks concerts typically get just one rehearsal, and almost always offer easy repertoire. The conductors might not be top-rank. And when I say "easy repertoire," I don't just mean that they don't include new music, or the lesser known pieces from the past that critics like to hear. I mean that we're not likely to hear Mahler symphonies. Is anyone going to play Mahler's Sixth for a festive audience of picnickers in Central Park?
So the parks concerts function on a lower artistic level. That doesn't mean they're bad, that their audience might not love them, or that they don't fulfill a function. But it's not the function I want orchestras to have. It's not the reason I want them to exist.
I'd also like to see a financial model showing how this could work -- how it could keep orchestras alive. Parks concerts are cheaper to perform, and make the orchestra more visible, which might open doors to new funding. But performances in the concert hall bring in ticket income, and also are crucial, I'd think, for bringing in traditional big donors, many of whom respond to the glitz and glamour, to the star quality (not to mention the artistic heft) of orchestras playing at their very best.
And what about the orchestra musicians? How would they feel about this new proposed arrangement? My friend made sure I understood that 25% of all orchestral events are free community performances. (This is a national average; the percentage for individual orchestras varies quite a bit.) So in many orchestras, including many big ones, musicians understand that they'll be playing at community events. But suppose the percentage rose? Suppose it was 50%, or even higher? Would musicians then be excited about playing in orchestras? Or would the jobs be less attractive? Would orchestras eventually find that they were hiring musicians who are (how should I put this) less ambitious, less demanding, or just plain not as good?
And would that then lower music school enrollments, and make donors less interested in giving money to music schools? Or would a new emphasis on community relations make orchestras more attractive.
Comments?
I had to admit that he was right, at least in the sense that I think the parks concerts are less interesting. (And no, my friend doesn't work for the Philharmonic.) But why do I think that way? My friend kept pointing out that orchestras are reaching out to their communities, and -- maybe in a profound sense -- rethinking their mission. Their responsibility, in the future, might be to serve the cities that they're in, maybe even more than they serve the classics of the repertoire, or the cause of art. I've run into to thoughts like that before, and in fact last spring I heard two notable orchestras (one very large, the other not so large) talk at a private meeting about how they'd reoriented some of what they do.
But now my friend posed the challenge even more strongly. Why shouldn't the Philharmonic's parks concerts be at least a part of their central mission? Why -- at least for the sake of argument -- shouldn't they play more parks events, and fewer paid concerts (paid for the audience, I mean) in their concert hall?
I have to admit I found this alarming. Is this just me, or is the idea my friend proposed -- and which the orchestra world might be considering -- not quite right? Parks concerts typically get just one rehearsal, and almost always offer easy repertoire. The conductors might not be top-rank. And when I say "easy repertoire," I don't just mean that they don't include new music, or the lesser known pieces from the past that critics like to hear. I mean that we're not likely to hear Mahler symphonies. Is anyone going to play Mahler's Sixth for a festive audience of picnickers in Central Park?
So the parks concerts function on a lower artistic level. That doesn't mean they're bad, that their audience might not love them, or that they don't fulfill a function. But it's not the function I want orchestras to have. It's not the reason I want them to exist.
I'd also like to see a financial model showing how this could work -- how it could keep orchestras alive. Parks concerts are cheaper to perform, and make the orchestra more visible, which might open doors to new funding. But performances in the concert hall bring in ticket income, and also are crucial, I'd think, for bringing in traditional big donors, many of whom respond to the glitz and glamour, to the star quality (not to mention the artistic heft) of orchestras playing at their very best.
And what about the orchestra musicians? How would they feel about this new proposed arrangement? My friend made sure I understood that 25% of all orchestral events are free community performances. (This is a national average; the percentage for individual orchestras varies quite a bit.) So in many orchestras, including many big ones, musicians understand that they'll be playing at community events. But suppose the percentage rose? Suppose it was 50%, or even higher? Would musicians then be excited about playing in orchestras? Or would the jobs be less attractive? Would orchestras eventually find that they were hiring musicians who are (how should I put this) less ambitious, less demanding, or just plain not as good?
And would that then lower music school enrollments, and make donors less interested in giving money to music schools? Or would a new emphasis on community relations make orchestras more attractive.
Comments?
I'm sure I should have blogged yesterday about the election, if I were going to do it at all. But I was drained -- drained from excitement, happiness, even crying when the outcome was clear, and at other times, too.
And while I've read so many stories about reactions to what happened, I can't resist one of my own. This morning I went down from my NY apartment to buy newspapers, as I do every morning I'm there. At the local deli, I bought the Times and the Daily News. The guy behind the counter -- Ethiopian, I think -- said hello, as he and I do, and asked me how I was. "I'm good," I said. And then, unable to resist, pointing at the Daily News front page on the counter in front of me, with a photo of Obama and a headline about hope, I said, "I'm happy about this!" The guy gave me a gigantic grin. "About this!" he said, agreeing.
As I left, I turned around and saw him. He was grinning at me even more, waving his hands above his head. "Happy about this!" he said. "Happy about this!"
On election night, the moment all the networks called it -- about four seconds, I thought, after the polls closed in the far-west states -- Anne and I saw the discussion change. No more stats, no more analysis of voting trends. Instead, on every network (except Fox), everyone began talking about what this meant for history. Black commentators, and even black reporters, shed their objectivity, and talked simply as themselves. (While on Fox, Karl Rove and others were previewing every bad thing they thought Obama would soon do.) Awe and joy poured from our TV.
At one point, I saw old-line black leaders, Al Sharpton among them, linking arms, singing "We Shall Overcome." Now, nobody should misunderstand what I'm going to say. I sang "We Shall Overcome" myself, in the '60s, with linked arms, more times than I could count. I was at the march on Washington when Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. I understand the deep feeling in the song, and I know that for anyone black who's my age, or Al Sharpton's it has a deeper meaning -- and Obama's election even more so -- than it can ever have for me.
But still I thought, "This is the past." While the future was everybody on the street, in Times Square, in front of the White House, in cities all across America, and all across the world -- black, white, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, everybody you could think of (I'll bet including even some Republicans), everyone together. That's a moment prepared by Morgan Freeman as the president in a movie; black lawyers, judges, doctors on TV; young people surveyed in the 1990s, who watched the same TV shows whether they were black or white (while older people made different choices, associated with their race); mixed audiences at hiphop shows (really noticeable when I was a pop critic in the late '80s and early '90s, and only at Prince and hiphop shows were audiences truly mixed; at a Luther Vandross show, by contrast, I might be the only white person, and at a Springsteen show maybe the only black person in the arena would be Clarence Clemons). The feeling that I'm getting now is that, whatever the future's going to bring, we're all in it together.
One more thought. As -- choking up -- I watched Obama give his Grant Park speech, I thought the age of irony was over. I remember realizing, late in the '80s, that people in their 20s then didn't have the optimism people of my generation had when we were young. They'd been burned, I understood, from (among much else) the failure of the '60s, which didn't bring as much change as everybody thought it would. As time went on, this got much worse. Irony became the main line of our younger culture. And why shouldn't people be ironic? What promise did we have that things could change?
Then, in the past five years or so, I began to think that there would be a change, that a new generation would emerge, hopeful and determined, ready to fight for something new. And it happened. But I never thought that it could happen at the same time that a hopeful president emerged. In the '60s, that at first was inconceivable. Presidents, we thought, were empty suits. Then came Eugene McCarthy, but he lost, and Robert Kennedy, but he was shot. And then presidents were empty suits again -- that dismal choice in 1968, between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. And they could hardly be imagined as anything else. (You understand that I'm exaggerating, not speaking of real politicians and the virtues they might have, but about how they looked from the perspective of the '60s.)
And now comes Obama. We can believe he means it, means to bring us change. And the hope that rises, meeting him, is beautiful to see. The age of irony has ended.
And while I've read so many stories about reactions to what happened, I can't resist one of my own. This morning I went down from my NY apartment to buy newspapers, as I do every morning I'm there. At the local deli, I bought the Times and the Daily News. The guy behind the counter -- Ethiopian, I think -- said hello, as he and I do, and asked me how I was. "I'm good," I said. And then, unable to resist, pointing at the Daily News front page on the counter in front of me, with a photo of Obama and a headline about hope, I said, "I'm happy about this!" The guy gave me a gigantic grin. "About this!" he said, agreeing.
As I left, I turned around and saw him. He was grinning at me even more, waving his hands above his head. "Happy about this!" he said. "Happy about this!"
On election night, the moment all the networks called it -- about four seconds, I thought, after the polls closed in the far-west states -- Anne and I saw the discussion change. No more stats, no more analysis of voting trends. Instead, on every network (except Fox), everyone began talking about what this meant for history. Black commentators, and even black reporters, shed their objectivity, and talked simply as themselves. (While on Fox, Karl Rove and others were previewing every bad thing they thought Obama would soon do.) Awe and joy poured from our TV.
At one point, I saw old-line black leaders, Al Sharpton among them, linking arms, singing "We Shall Overcome." Now, nobody should misunderstand what I'm going to say. I sang "We Shall Overcome" myself, in the '60s, with linked arms, more times than I could count. I was at the march on Washington when Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. I understand the deep feeling in the song, and I know that for anyone black who's my age, or Al Sharpton's it has a deeper meaning -- and Obama's election even more so -- than it can ever have for me.
But still I thought, "This is the past." While the future was everybody on the street, in Times Square, in front of the White House, in cities all across America, and all across the world -- black, white, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, everybody you could think of (I'll bet including even some Republicans), everyone together. That's a moment prepared by Morgan Freeman as the president in a movie; black lawyers, judges, doctors on TV; young people surveyed in the 1990s, who watched the same TV shows whether they were black or white (while older people made different choices, associated with their race); mixed audiences at hiphop shows (really noticeable when I was a pop critic in the late '80s and early '90s, and only at Prince and hiphop shows were audiences truly mixed; at a Luther Vandross show, by contrast, I might be the only white person, and at a Springsteen show maybe the only black person in the arena would be Clarence Clemons). The feeling that I'm getting now is that, whatever the future's going to bring, we're all in it together.
One more thought. As -- choking up -- I watched Obama give his Grant Park speech, I thought the age of irony was over. I remember realizing, late in the '80s, that people in their 20s then didn't have the optimism people of my generation had when we were young. They'd been burned, I understood, from (among much else) the failure of the '60s, which didn't bring as much change as everybody thought it would. As time went on, this got much worse. Irony became the main line of our younger culture. And why shouldn't people be ironic? What promise did we have that things could change?
Then, in the past five years or so, I began to think that there would be a change, that a new generation would emerge, hopeful and determined, ready to fight for something new. And it happened. But I never thought that it could happen at the same time that a hopeful president emerged. In the '60s, that at first was inconceivable. Presidents, we thought, were empty suits. Then came Eugene McCarthy, but he lost, and Robert Kennedy, but he was shot. And then presidents were empty suits again -- that dismal choice in 1968, between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. And they could hardly be imagined as anything else. (You understand that I'm exaggerating, not speaking of real politicians and the virtues they might have, but about how they looked from the perspective of the '60s.)
And now comes Obama. We can believe he means it, means to bring us change. And the hope that rises, meeting him, is beautiful to see. The age of irony has ended.
No, not this blog post. But rather Ron Rosenbaum's blast at Dr. Atomic, on the Slate site and linked today from ArtsJournal. The picture it paints is pretty devastating. Smart, educated, cultured writer isn't an opera fan, but respects opera. He goes to the Dr. Atomic premiere at the Met, expecting serious art, and instead thinks he's seen something empty and pretentious. Of course, you might say that this is just his own take, and you also might damn him for leaving at intermission, which means that he's disqualified (by the normal standards that apply to critics) from writing a review.
But this isn't a review. It's a personal essay, and the motivation for walking out was how much Ronsenbaum hated what he'd seen. I think he's on to something, the question being whether classical music has anything to say to the world outside it about contemporary life, and the answer, in this case, being no. Some people -- maybe a lot of people -- will disagree, of course, and one thing I noticed when I went (not to the first night, but to a later performance) was that the audience was clearly not an opera crowd.
That's a good thing for classical music, and compares very favorably with the audience at the Santa Fe Opera this summer for Saariaho's Adriana Mater, which was essentially the opera crowd, meaning (at least to me) that the piece didn't register (in a very artsy city) as a serious piece of contemporary art. From that point of view, it's good to see non-opera people at the Met for Dr. Atomic, just as it was to see them at Zimmermann's Die Soldaten earlier this year, even if I didn't like the piece at all. Bringing classical music into contemporary artistic life is a good thing, more important than my own taste.
Mostly I agree with Rosenbaum. I might not feel as strongly as he does, maybe because I'm a musician, and responded strongly to the music, which is mostly very strong, and sometimes powerful. Overall, Dr. Atomic is miles above most new operas, both musically, and in how contemporary it feels, and, even more, how contemporary it wants to be. But that makes me all the more upset at what I think it doesn't do.
My view of it was echoed -- or really pre-echoed, since I heard this before I saw the piece -- by a friend, who said he'd grade it as a B, but that this was a problem, because it needed to be an A. I'd browsed through the vocal score, and had formed some tentative opinions, and suggested that I'd put my friend's opinion a little more strongly -- the opera, I thought, announced it was an A. And so of course it even more strongly needed to be that good.
When I saw it, I thought I'd sensed exactly what the problem is. The piece, for me, carries a constant subtext about its own significance. "This is strong, important art." All that, of course, is reinforced by the opera's presence at the Met, by its subject, by Adams' reputation, and by the New Yorker printing part of Adams' newly published memoir, to coincide with the production. But beyond all that, the piece itself seems to say that it's important.
Which meant, for me, that it felt pretentious, especially since (and here's where I most strongly agree with Rosenbaum) it doesn't say very much. In fact, it's very safe. It shows us something that's well-known, and much discussed -- the shock of the first atomic bomb, the feeling that something dangerous had been unleashed, and the doubts of Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the effort to create the bomb. None of this is new, to put it mildly, and the opera had nothing new to say about it. Oppenheimer is distressed. Well, we knew that, and no matter how powerfully he sings about that at the end of the first act -- to the text of a John Donne poem which, like much of the libretto, only tangentially touches what was going on -- we still haven't learned or even felt anything that we (as a society) haven't gone through many times before.
Reinforcing this is how obvious some moments on. About the Native American character (whom Rosenbaum very neatly skewers), the less said the better. An earth mother, who's more connected to what matters than the shallow, white scientists -- a cliché that made me roll my eyes. And, in a way even worse, the ending of the opera, with a Japanese recorded voice asking for help, after the bomb goes off.
This worked quite wonderfully as music -- a stronger ending, purely sonically, than simply letting the orchestra die out. And, again musically, it balanced the recorded sound at the start of the opera. But it's another cliché, and one with hoary antecedents all over popular culture. For instance: the final moment of Fail-Safe, a film about atomic war, where we see ordinary people going about their business -- children playing -- just before the Russians nuke New York. For instance: an early episode of the Battlestar Galactica remake, where the space command is forced to abandon some ships with many people on them, and, just before the robot Cylons nuke the ships, we see a child at play.
Yes, nuclear bombs have victims, but my two examples actually come off more strongly (at least to me) than the end of Dr. Atomic does, because in both cases the victims die because of genuinely difficult (and new) developments. We see things that actually could happen, dilemmas that might afflict us in the future, instead of (in Dr. Atomic) a well known piece of history from which we can't learn anything we don't already know. Better to have shown us something from a nuclear dilemma we might face today -- North Korea cynically manipulating nuclear fears to gain some diplomatic points; the Pakistani scientist who wanted to give nuclear help to terrorists; Israel's reported determination to use nuclear bombs (more readily, apparently, than other countries would -- which isn't a judgment, by the way, on the state of Israel, but might be something Israelis think about); officials of the former Soviet Union who might have thought of selling (or maybe did sell) nuclear material to terrorists.
All these things are genuine dilemmas in our current world, and there are many more of them. (The India/Pakistan nuclear faceoff; the constant nuclear readiness of the US and Russia, and so much more.) The opera is supposed to be about a Faustian bargain -- you gain knowledge, you gain power, but there are consequences. We now live in the troubled wake of that bargain, but what strikes me -- and could be a powerful subject for a novel or an opera or a play -- is how little people think about the consequences, about the meaning of any kind of nuclear war. Do the North Koreans or Iranians or Israelis or the American military or Pakistanis or Al Quaeda or the Russian military think much about what nuclear attacks would actually be like? Do they think about the victims?
I'm guessing that our sensibilities have been dulled, through long familiarity (and also from how lucky we've been not to have any nuclear attacks since Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Maybe, if that's really true, Dr. Atomic is a healthy wakeup call, but on the other hand, it might help to lull us further, because in a way it pats us on the back (and pats itself even more) for being so concerned. There's nothing in it that could help us figure out what Israel (for instance) ought to do, if its back is to the wall, with its survival hanging by a thread.
About the music. For me the most successful music comes in the second act, which has been criticized because nothing happens. Essentially we wait until the bomb is tested for the first time, with concerns about the weather (and larger concerns about whether the bomb will work at all) coming off as very minor. But opera is a perfect medium for drama in which nothing happens, because the music can carry us. Adams' music triumphantly does, and then tops itself with the moments leading right up to the explosion. I think -- and I really mean it -- that this is, in purely visceral terms, one of the most powerful musical sequences in any opera.
But the music that does all this is instrumental, or rather it's the orchestral music that's powerful enough to carry the opera. I found the vocal music more pedestrian, both when I looked through the score, and when I heard it. It's not awful, and sets the words with a fair amount of finesse. But it doesn't have much character -- one person on stage sounds pretty much like another, except for obvious things, like moments where words might be highlighted to make a sarcastic point, or sequences of lyrical introspection. There's no inner character, no sense that the people on stage have distinct personalities, no sense of who they are, or really that they're anyone at all, except (again) for the very broadest strokes of external characterization.
One exception is Oppenheimer's John Donne aria, which ends the first act (and it's surely one not-so-secret secret of the opera's success that the endings of both acts are powerful), and which really does succeed (for me) as vocal music, though as drama it seemed to say nothing more than "I'm suffering! I'm suffering!" But it said this with a lot of musical refinement. I wonder, if the opera had been called Oppenheimer (in place of the rather coy title it actually has), whether many people then might have expected more from it, if they'd have asked whether anything it says about its title character is really new or cogent.
As a footnote, I'll add that similar questions -- and reactions similar to Rosenbaum's -- surfaced, at least to me, at the long-ago New York premiere of Adams' first opera, Nixon in China. All the music professionals I spoke to at intermission were tremendously impresssed: "At last an opera that really says something." While dance and theater people I spoke to -- maybe because they were more used to seeing art in their fields with some contemporary relevance -- weren't happy at all: "What this opera says about Nixon is completely wrong." It's like the fabled talking dog. After you get used to it talking, you start to look at what it says.
Adams' second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, of course really does go into new and tricky territory, trying to get inside the minds of terrorists, And therefore it's had a lot of trouble. I don't mean to say that controversy is any proof of value, especially artistic value, but I'm struck again by how safe Dr. Atomic is, how there's nothing in it anybody could object to. (Except, maybe, extreme militarists, who might insist that any hesitation in the possible use of America's nuclear arsenal would be a kind of treason. But such people, if they still exist, haven't been part of America's national debate for quite a while.)
And that, for me, should raise some doubts. The opera, in the end, seems far too easy to be saying things with any chance of being as important as the subtext of the work (again, at least to me) keeps telling us they are.
But this isn't a review. It's a personal essay, and the motivation for walking out was how much Ronsenbaum hated what he'd seen. I think he's on to something, the question being whether classical music has anything to say to the world outside it about contemporary life, and the answer, in this case, being no. Some people -- maybe a lot of people -- will disagree, of course, and one thing I noticed when I went (not to the first night, but to a later performance) was that the audience was clearly not an opera crowd.
That's a good thing for classical music, and compares very favorably with the audience at the Santa Fe Opera this summer for Saariaho's Adriana Mater, which was essentially the opera crowd, meaning (at least to me) that the piece didn't register (in a very artsy city) as a serious piece of contemporary art. From that point of view, it's good to see non-opera people at the Met for Dr. Atomic, just as it was to see them at Zimmermann's Die Soldaten earlier this year, even if I didn't like the piece at all. Bringing classical music into contemporary artistic life is a good thing, more important than my own taste.
Mostly I agree with Rosenbaum. I might not feel as strongly as he does, maybe because I'm a musician, and responded strongly to the music, which is mostly very strong, and sometimes powerful. Overall, Dr. Atomic is miles above most new operas, both musically, and in how contemporary it feels, and, even more, how contemporary it wants to be. But that makes me all the more upset at what I think it doesn't do.
My view of it was echoed -- or really pre-echoed, since I heard this before I saw the piece -- by a friend, who said he'd grade it as a B, but that this was a problem, because it needed to be an A. I'd browsed through the vocal score, and had formed some tentative opinions, and suggested that I'd put my friend's opinion a little more strongly -- the opera, I thought, announced it was an A. And so of course it even more strongly needed to be that good.
When I saw it, I thought I'd sensed exactly what the problem is. The piece, for me, carries a constant subtext about its own significance. "This is strong, important art." All that, of course, is reinforced by the opera's presence at the Met, by its subject, by Adams' reputation, and by the New Yorker printing part of Adams' newly published memoir, to coincide with the production. But beyond all that, the piece itself seems to say that it's important.
Which meant, for me, that it felt pretentious, especially since (and here's where I most strongly agree with Rosenbaum) it doesn't say very much. In fact, it's very safe. It shows us something that's well-known, and much discussed -- the shock of the first atomic bomb, the feeling that something dangerous had been unleashed, and the doubts of Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the effort to create the bomb. None of this is new, to put it mildly, and the opera had nothing new to say about it. Oppenheimer is distressed. Well, we knew that, and no matter how powerfully he sings about that at the end of the first act -- to the text of a John Donne poem which, like much of the libretto, only tangentially touches what was going on -- we still haven't learned or even felt anything that we (as a society) haven't gone through many times before.
Reinforcing this is how obvious some moments on. About the Native American character (whom Rosenbaum very neatly skewers), the less said the better. An earth mother, who's more connected to what matters than the shallow, white scientists -- a cliché that made me roll my eyes. And, in a way even worse, the ending of the opera, with a Japanese recorded voice asking for help, after the bomb goes off.
This worked quite wonderfully as music -- a stronger ending, purely sonically, than simply letting the orchestra die out. And, again musically, it balanced the recorded sound at the start of the opera. But it's another cliché, and one with hoary antecedents all over popular culture. For instance: the final moment of Fail-Safe, a film about atomic war, where we see ordinary people going about their business -- children playing -- just before the Russians nuke New York. For instance: an early episode of the Battlestar Galactica remake, where the space command is forced to abandon some ships with many people on them, and, just before the robot Cylons nuke the ships, we see a child at play.
Yes, nuclear bombs have victims, but my two examples actually come off more strongly (at least to me) than the end of Dr. Atomic does, because in both cases the victims die because of genuinely difficult (and new) developments. We see things that actually could happen, dilemmas that might afflict us in the future, instead of (in Dr. Atomic) a well known piece of history from which we can't learn anything we don't already know. Better to have shown us something from a nuclear dilemma we might face today -- North Korea cynically manipulating nuclear fears to gain some diplomatic points; the Pakistani scientist who wanted to give nuclear help to terrorists; Israel's reported determination to use nuclear bombs (more readily, apparently, than other countries would -- which isn't a judgment, by the way, on the state of Israel, but might be something Israelis think about); officials of the former Soviet Union who might have thought of selling (or maybe did sell) nuclear material to terrorists.
All these things are genuine dilemmas in our current world, and there are many more of them. (The India/Pakistan nuclear faceoff; the constant nuclear readiness of the US and Russia, and so much more.) The opera is supposed to be about a Faustian bargain -- you gain knowledge, you gain power, but there are consequences. We now live in the troubled wake of that bargain, but what strikes me -- and could be a powerful subject for a novel or an opera or a play -- is how little people think about the consequences, about the meaning of any kind of nuclear war. Do the North Koreans or Iranians or Israelis or the American military or Pakistanis or Al Quaeda or the Russian military think much about what nuclear attacks would actually be like? Do they think about the victims?
I'm guessing that our sensibilities have been dulled, through long familiarity (and also from how lucky we've been not to have any nuclear attacks since Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Maybe, if that's really true, Dr. Atomic is a healthy wakeup call, but on the other hand, it might help to lull us further, because in a way it pats us on the back (and pats itself even more) for being so concerned. There's nothing in it that could help us figure out what Israel (for instance) ought to do, if its back is to the wall, with its survival hanging by a thread.
About the music. For me the most successful music comes in the second act, which has been criticized because nothing happens. Essentially we wait until the bomb is tested for the first time, with concerns about the weather (and larger concerns about whether the bomb will work at all) coming off as very minor. But opera is a perfect medium for drama in which nothing happens, because the music can carry us. Adams' music triumphantly does, and then tops itself with the moments leading right up to the explosion. I think -- and I really mean it -- that this is, in purely visceral terms, one of the most powerful musical sequences in any opera.
But the music that does all this is instrumental, or rather it's the orchestral music that's powerful enough to carry the opera. I found the vocal music more pedestrian, both when I looked through the score, and when I heard it. It's not awful, and sets the words with a fair amount of finesse. But it doesn't have much character -- one person on stage sounds pretty much like another, except for obvious things, like moments where words might be highlighted to make a sarcastic point, or sequences of lyrical introspection. There's no inner character, no sense that the people on stage have distinct personalities, no sense of who they are, or really that they're anyone at all, except (again) for the very broadest strokes of external characterization.
One exception is Oppenheimer's John Donne aria, which ends the first act (and it's surely one not-so-secret secret of the opera's success that the endings of both acts are powerful), and which really does succeed (for me) as vocal music, though as drama it seemed to say nothing more than "I'm suffering! I'm suffering!" But it said this with a lot of musical refinement. I wonder, if the opera had been called Oppenheimer (in place of the rather coy title it actually has), whether many people then might have expected more from it, if they'd have asked whether anything it says about its title character is really new or cogent.
As a footnote, I'll add that similar questions -- and reactions similar to Rosenbaum's -- surfaced, at least to me, at the long-ago New York premiere of Adams' first opera, Nixon in China. All the music professionals I spoke to at intermission were tremendously impresssed: "At last an opera that really says something." While dance and theater people I spoke to -- maybe because they were more used to seeing art in their fields with some contemporary relevance -- weren't happy at all: "What this opera says about Nixon is completely wrong." It's like the fabled talking dog. After you get used to it talking, you start to look at what it says.
Adams' second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, of course really does go into new and tricky territory, trying to get inside the minds of terrorists, And therefore it's had a lot of trouble. I don't mean to say that controversy is any proof of value, especially artistic value, but I'm struck again by how safe Dr. Atomic is, how there's nothing in it anybody could object to. (Except, maybe, extreme militarists, who might insist that any hesitation in the possible use of America's nuclear arsenal would be a kind of treason. But such people, if they still exist, haven't been part of America's national debate for quite a while.)
And that, for me, should raise some doubts. The opera, in the end, seems far too easy to be saying things with any chance of being as important as the subtext of the work (again, at least to me) keeps telling us they are.
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Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
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