It’s Arts Advocacy Day. I’ve complained before — here, here, here, and (in the Wall Street Journal) here — that common advocacy arguments for the arts have problems.

So to celebrate the day, here’s my two cents on how it might be done. What I won’t talk about is how people in the arts can’t disdain popular culture. I’ve covered that enough in separate posts, here and here.

1. Trust the public

I got some disagreeing comments to my earlier posts on this, and the two that made me sad said that we can’t advocate the arts directly — we have to use indirect arguments, like the suspect (to me) argument that the arts are good for the economy. One problem with that, as I said, is that many other things are good for the economy, too.

And another problem is that we don’t wholly mean it, when we use economic arguments. We really mean that the arts are wonderful in themselves, but since not everyone agrees (or doesn’t feel the urgency about the arts that we feel), we have to bring in other artillery. Others, advocating other things, will of course do the same. But in our case, the disconnect between real love of the arts and excitement about their alleged economic impact is so great that economic arguments, I fear, may end up sounding hollow.

Which is why the disagreeing comments made me said. Two commenters said flat out that the public — or else right-wing politicians — would never support the arts, so we have to use non-arts arguments. So, if I believe these people, I was right! The economic argument is what we use for the Muggles. Among ourselves — among superior beings like us, who understand the arts — we can say what we really mean.

One problem here is that there’s no point worrying about what the right wing thinks. As in all political maneuvering, you can’t hope to convert your enemies. Where you aim your efforts, most importantly, is at the people in the middle, the people who haven’t chosen sides yet, and could go either way.

So why assume those people are immune to art, and any need for its support? Why sell them so short? Some of them are into popular culture that’s just as smart as most of what we tout in the arts, so why assume they won’t care about what we do, if we make it real to them? There’s something very sad in this, and also (I think) smugly elitist. We know more than you do, so to get you on our side, we’ll have to descend to your level.

As I said, that’s sad.

2. The arts vs art

Here a line from a Public Enemy song (I think it’s “Fight the Power”) comes to mind. Chuck D (looking at the then-new Elvis stamp, from a black perspective) says: “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.”

So I feel something similar about the arts and art. A lot of my favorite art doesn’t get advocated, in most of art advocacy. That’s because — and I wonder if some of the people who launch into me for my arts advocacy skepticism will be surprised — I like a lot of very difficult high art. Webern, as I’ve often said, is one of my favorite composers. In film, Antonioni. In poetry, Anne Carson. In novels and theater, Beckett. (And yes, Waiting for Godot distantly approaches being a repertory piece, but has anyone ever launched a defense of the arts by citing — not Tennessee Williams, not Eugene O’Neill, and not Tony Kushner, good as those playwrights are — but Endgame?)

And no, I’m not saying that everybody has to share my taste, that arts advocacy is worthless if it doesn’t touch the high-church realms I’m happy in. Nor do I dislike all the art that’s more normally cited — the familiar list of great composers, great painters, great novelists, and all of that. I’m reading Dickens right now, and loving him. (And also a dire, gripping thriller by Cornell Woolrich.)

But there’s a tendency, in arts advocacy, to go all middlebrow, to talk about the arts in rapturous terms, as a part of life that’s inspiring and elevating. Whereas art is so much more complex than that. Some of it isn’t pleasant. Some of it isn’t inspiring. Some of it paints the world in dire colors. Some of it is confrontational. Some of it is difficult. Caroline Levine, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, read my previous posts on advocating art, and was kind enough to send me her terrific book, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts, in which she argues that one main role of art is to be confrontational.

Arts advocates most often skate right past that. For them, the arts might as well be a Johnny Mathis song: “Wonderful, Wonderful.” Which shows that the arts, properly understood, aren’t at all the same thing as art. Essentially, the enterprise known as “the arts” functions as an interest group, one that’s certainly involved with art, but which also doesn’t tell (not nearly) the whole art story.

3. What we should do

Not to be a tease, but for time management reasons (once again), I’ll have to wait a few hours to get to the meat of my argument.

First, a list of innovations in classical concert-giving, which I compiled for my Juilliard course on the future of classical music. It’s just a start, and leaves out far more things than it includes. Comments are more than welcome. The list needs to be vastly enlarged, and improved, maybe not for my course, but for all the rest of us.

And second, a Wall Street Journal piece on the new alt-classical audience in New York. There’s nothing new in it for regular readers of this blog, and the blog commenter (John), who said I’m wrong to say that people in the new alt-classical crowd (or, more broadly, no younger people) ever go to mainstream classical events, will surely say, “There he goes again.” He’s got a point. I’m oversimplifying (as I acknoiwledged in my response to him).

But what’s important in this piece, I think, is a challenge to the mainstream classical institutions in New York. Why aren’t they trying to attract this new audience? I make an analogy between them and the management of a mainstream supermarket. A Whole Foods store opens down the block, and does terrific business. But the supermarket management doesn’t think that maybe they should put some organic products on their shelves.

Maybe, though, the analogy should have been stronger. Maybe the mainstream institutions are like Kodak, smugly selling photographic film after digital photography started to take hold. The truth, I’ll guess, lies between these two extremes. But the mainstream institutions ought to notice what’s going on. They’re missing the boat, both artistically and with any hope of attracting a new audience.

One thing (of many, to tell the truth) that I didn’t have space to say in the piece. Maybe one problem the mainstream institutions have is artistic. For one thing, to the extent that the alt-classical new music derives from minimalism (or is influenced by it), some mainstream people may well roll their eyes, because they’ve never quite accepted minimal music.

Second, there are two compositional styles — which loom large in the mainstream classical world — that I don’t think we hear in alt-classical work. One is modernism, and especially the European sort. Certainly there’s at least an indirect modernist influence, because I don’t think we’d be hearing all the dissonance that’s in alt-classical music if Schoenberg hadn’t lived. (Though maybe it could just as well have come to us from Ives and Henry Cowell, but that’s another story.) But very little, or maybe even nothing, in alt-classical music sounds like it’s influenced by the second Vienna school — by Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern — or by music descended from that school.

So if you’re in the mainstream classical world, and — like the New York Philharmonic or the Cleveland Orchestra or the Philadelphia Orchestra — you think it’s important to hear music by Matthias Pintscher or Harrison Birtwistle or the Philharmonic’s new composer in residence, Magnus Lindberg (or many others) — well, there’s hardly any trace of this music, or anything in it, in any alt-classical style. So maybe then you think the alt-classical styles have something lacking.

They also don’t have much trace of what we might call neo-romantic music, though that name would be a gross oversimplification for what I really mean, which is new classical music that’s written in approximately the style of older classical works, or at least with an audible line of descent from the standard classical repertoire. So again alt-classical music sets itself apart.

And mainstream purists might also object to the pop influence in alt-classical music. Of course, many people are willing to give it a shot — you might find some organizations programming both Pintscher and an alt-classical star like Nico Muhly. But maybe the alt-classical movement, in full force, might seem one-sided to some mainstream people, who in turn might seem one-sided to the alt-classical crowd. Who, however, have an audience, which (for new music) the mainstream people might not have.

Life has gotten full lately, with all kinds of things, including contacts with many, many people, a lot attention to my Juilliard course, and some writing. My apologies for neglecting the blog. I’ve been saying that time management has to be a number one priority, but another way to put it would be — triage rules. I’m always learning more about how to get the balance right.

But here’s one thing I want to announce. And the simplest way would be to quote the e-mail I sent out to my private mailing list. (Which, since I haven’t vetted it lately, might well fail to include some people reading this, who really ought to be on it. Apologies, and don’t hesitate to submit your name!)

Ten days Eight days from now…

 

Two pieces of mine, at the first concert of Victoria

Bond’s Cutting

Edge Concerts New Music Festival, Monday, April 6, 7:30 PM, at Symphony Space, 95th Street and

Broadway in New York. There’s a pre-concert panel discussion (which I’ll be on)

at 6:30.

 

Which pieces? Two short, tight, expressive little works,

my Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano, and my Short Talks, for a pianist who also

plays a drum.

 

The Short Talks are based on prose poems by Anne Carson.

whose searing intensity is burned into very few words. The music might

sometimes seem calm (deceptively), but it sometimes bursts into violence, and

sometimes falls silent, unable to speak. The drum is its underworld. This is a

work in progress. We’ll here five of the Short Talks. Three have been performed

before, and two will be world premieres.

 

The Sonatina, barely six minutes long, covers a lot of

ground. In the first two movements, piano and clarinet play entirely separate

pieces. Literally so – they could each play independently. Then in the finale

they come together for a wild rhythmic ride, completely in unison.

 

Two truly terrific musicians are involved. Jenny Lin is

the pianist (and drummer), Charles Neidich plays the clarinet.  And my

pieces do reflect the theme of this year’s Cutting Edge concerts: What sparks

the imagination? To see scores of my pieces or hear recordings, go here.

 

I hope you can be there! (And, to my out of town friends,

I hope you’ll be there in spirit.)

 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some testimony, to the power of concerts that blend classical music and indie rock, and draw an excited new audience. Here’s more, sent to me in an email from a friend who works in the mainstream part of the classical music business. He and I had been at Le Poisson Rouge together, seeing a show from the Nonclassical record label (and club night) that’s based in London. A show also cosponsored by New Amsterdam Records, a New York label, which, like Nonclassical, features music by classical composers who’re as much influenced by pop music as they are by classical.

All of which reads, to me, like a boring list of things that many readers might not know about. So let me back up. For decades now, we’ve had an alternative classical scene in New York, starting with the minimalists, moving forward through time with Bang on a Can, and now bursting out with amazing force with, for instance, the big orchestral concerts that Wordless Music did, and the big, free Bang on a Can marathons, which last all night and attract 1000 people or more.

I’ve blogged about a lot of this before. (As you can see from the last two links.) All these events involve composers who write classical music — structured, preplanned, notated — but do it in an environment informed by pop, something that for these composers is as unremarkable as Milton Babbitt being influenced by Schoenberg.

And an audience has grown — an audience of nonspecialists, an audience that surely for the most part never goes to Lincoln Center, an audience that might be attracted by the presence of indie rock on some of these programs, or by a big indie rock star who’s written a classical piece. But above all, this is an audience that doesn’t care about labels, isn’t put off by complexity or austerity, reacts with shouts and whoops, and finds the new classical pieces on all these programs completely comfortable.

On Saturday, a piece I’m writing about all this — and about the challenge it poses to the classical mainstream — should be published in the Wall Street Journal. But now I just want to offer testimony. Two people I know, with a thoroughly mainstream classical background, went to concerts like the ones I’ve described.

One said, in an e-mail she was happy for me to quote:

The melodies and rhythms washed over me throughout the evening, and I was truly moved. OK, I admit…I even shed a few cathartic tears. It just felt so RIGHT to be in a concert hall with an audience of younger people who don’t typically attend symphonic concerts. And they were loving what they were hearing. [For more, see my testimony post.]

And now this, from another friend, after another concert (also quoted by permission):

I can’t tell you how grateful I am you invited me. It was a terrific night, both personally and professionally.  I would love to go back.

One of the things that made it work for the audience was that the whole gestalt was that of an indie rock event, not classical. The age of the performers played into that — they were the same demo and dressed the same as the audience.

Note that the music at this concert — the Nonclassical event at LPR — was wholly classical, and often without any obvious pop music reference. And note also that the audience was largely silent, even though both the guy who runs Nonclassical (Gabriel Prokofiev, the composer’s grandson) and one of the chamber groups that played both told the crowd to make some noise. But still it felt like a rock show. And was tremendously exciting to a mainstream classical person who was there.

(I’m not finished with the arts and popular culture. Just needed to do some time management, a big refrain with me lately, and thought this would be a little quicker to write.)

 

Two books I’d highly recommend:

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You. Ironic title, of course. The book’s about how complex popular culture now is.

Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution. One of the best books I’ve read in years, a real page-turner, but deeply serious in its study of how French art films helped spark a huge change in Hollywood moviemaking. Along, of course, with the emergence of a new culture in the ’60s. (Nice classical music reference in the title, by the way. But we in classical music can’t, I fear, claim any moment like the one Harris describes. Our art largely stood aside when the new culture emerged, and we haven’t had anything after World War II (a very long time ago!) that had as much force for the culture at large as Truffaut and Godard did when they were new. Minimalism comes closest.)

The Mark Harris book, of course, shows the vitality of popular culture, its flexibilty, and its ability to become art, something we see happening in Hollywood, as we keep turning the pages, right before our eyes.

What we in the arts need to understand, of course, is how smart, serious, and artistic some of popular culture has gotten.

And here are two widespread ideas — or, at least, I’ve run into them a lot — that we should look at very critically.

1. People these days have very short attention spans.

Meaning, of course, younger people, though I guess some of us would extend this to the entire culture. The idea is very tempting for a lot of us in classical music, because it seems to explain why we’re losing cultural ground. Younger people don’t pay attention to classical music because they can’t pay sustained attention to anything. They won’t sit there for 20 minutes, listening to a symphony.

But strangely enough, they’ll sit for three hours and see a movie. Oh, well, someone will say, movies are visual. But that’s another conversation! The point we’re considering here is about attention span in general. If people sit quietly — as all of us have seen them do — through a two- or three-hour film, there’s no reason they couldn’t sit still in a concert hall, if they wanted to.

And what about Project Runway? A reality show, as most of us know, on which contestants have to design and make clothes, week after week, with maybe one day to get the entire job done. How could they do that, if they couldn’t concentrate in a focused way for hours?

Likewise Top Chef, where contestants have to cook. Likewise video games, which — despised as they are — take hours of concentration to play, as Steven Johnson explains. Likewise sports. Stars practice their game incessantly. Major league infielders might field a hundred or more grounders in a single practice session.

And we all know that web design (to pick just one example) is a quintessential 21st century endeavor. It takes ages to get right. Again, you have to concentrate, for hours. (As computer programmers of all kinds are famous for doing. Work 36 hours straight, then crash.)

What the attention span argument really means, in practice — peope aren’t paying attention to the things we want them to pay attention to.

2. There’s no creativity in our society these days. See, for instance, the Dana Gioia speech I talked about in my first arts and popular culture post. I’m not sure he puts it quite that way, in exactly those words, but he and others who talk brightly about how they think the arts are needed in our society, to foster creativity — well, aren’t they saying that creativity needs to be fostered?

Which it does. We can never have too much of it. But we should also recognize that it’s breaking out everywhere. In fact, I’ve never seen, in my lifetime (and I grew up in the ’50s), such a creative time as this one. That doesn’t mean we don’t have social problems we don’t know how to solve, but in popular culture, technology, and business the explosion of creativity is — at least in my view — just staggering.

Again, look at Project Runway. (And Top Chef.) The clothes the contestants design are strikingly creative. (As is the food the Top Chef contestants cook.) That’s one of the reasons the show is so addictive. We watch serious creative work going on. A form of art.

Or technology. If you have an iPhone, and buy apps for it at the iPhone app store, it’s easy to be dazzled by the uses people find for the device. My iPhone, thanks to apps I’ve bought, measures the decibel level of sound, and measures wind speed (through a highly creative adaptation of the output from the iPhone’s microphone). It’s also a theremin, a carpenter’s level, and a device for measuring the angle of an incline (the app that does this interesting for hikers, but is raved about by engineeers, who say it takes the place of expensive equipment). It helps me identify birds, and tells me what stars I’m seeing in the sky.

And it’s a slide rule! Someone went to the trouble of designing an app that, in looks and function, perfectly recreates the slide rules engineers and scientists depended on for calculations, decades ago. (My father taught me to use one when I was a kid, to figure out baseball batting averages.) Useless? Yes, now that other iPhone apps will do all those calculations with far more precision. But it’s beautifully executed, a wonderfully crafted triumph of design and nostalgia.

And then there’s the famous ocarina, which you play by blowing in the microphone (another highlly creative adaptation of its input), while you finger equivalents of the ocarina’s holes, on the iPhone’s screen. It sounds quite beautiful (a creative adaptation of current sampling and synthesizer technology), and, best of all, everything you play is transmitted throughout the world for other users of the app to hear. You can listen to them, of course, too. The interface for that, featuring an evocative world globe, is strikingly lovely.

Not that I meant to rave so much about the iPhone and its apps. But as I use my iPhone, I’m struck every day by the amazing creativity involved. (And I’ve barely begun, here, to describe how far that goes.)

Business. Today, in the e-mail supplement to David Pogue’s technology column in the New York Times, I read about a new idea for spreading the use of electric cars. It was one of those things that’s obvious, once someone else thinks of them, and I won’t try to describe it here. Pogue hasn’t posted today’s e-mail yet, but when he does, you can find it here.)

Some businesses, obviously, are mired in stubborn, useless thinking. (Auto industry, anyone?) But a daily reading of the Times business section fills me full of new ideas.

And then there’s the growth of the Internet.

And the way popular culture has become participatory, so you don’t just passively absorb it, but remix it, mash it up, and send it out on your own.

And I haven’t even talked about pop music, or TV shows like The Wire. If the arts can make us even more creative, bring it on, but we’re also doing fine without them. (Difficult, maybe, for people committed to the arts to realize, but it’s true.)

Time management alert — time to stop now. More tomorrow.