September 2009 Archives

(What follows will be explored in my book, in chapter VII, as the outline currently stands.)

Yesterday I impulsively -- after a thoughtful e-mail from a friend -- raised a big question on Twitter:

Key question for the future of classical music. Is the music itself a problem, or only the way we present it?

Plus a followup:

Two problems with the music. Too much of it comes from the past. And our performance style is more constricted than it used to be.

So here we see the virtues and limitations of Twitter. I'd "mindcasted" a thought that a lot of people picked up on. I got 18 responses, more than I usually get. They ranged from this:

constricted? As someone who has been through the puppy mill they call classical music training, i'd say that's an understatement. (from @colettecello)

To this:

surely that's not a serious question?! The music itself is, of course, perfection.(from @JAMES_RHODES)

But of course a tweet doesn't give enough room for subtleties. So -- since this seems to be such a pregnant question for so many people -- let me go a little deeper.

Of course the music itself -- the actual compositions -- can't be a problem. The classical repertoire is a wildly mixed bag, as we should recognize, ranging from the heights of art to happy entertainment, but that's what all kinds of art have been. The classical repertoire stands firm through history, however we choose to use it.

But -- unlike, let's say -- a painting, classical pieces need to be performed. So there's always an element of presentation involved. The question I asked, therefore, ought to be reframed. Maybe like this. Is the problem, right now, only the external ways we present the music? By which I mean concert hall formality, and the like. Can we, in other words, improve things simply by changing the external presentation, while we play the music exactly as we currently do? (Which means not just how we play the repertoire, but what repertoire we choose to play.)

Or do we need to change the way we play the music, too?

I think we do. In two ways, as I said in my tweet. We need to stop losing ourselves in the culture of the past. Doing that can be fascinating, maybe, for us, inside the classical music bubble, but it's not so compelling to the outside world. Name another art that's so fixated on the past. As I and others have pointed out, many times, art museums are way ahead of us. Their shows of contemporary art are often their most distinguished -- and popular -- attractions.

And we can play the music much more freely. Which might mean radical freedom, by present standards. But it might simply mean playing more like Artur Rubinstein and other great classical artists of a couple of generations ago, whose performances -- which can be wonderfully personal, and even populist, while still being stylistically correct -- often astound the students I currently teach.

Big questions. I hope i've defined them more clearly.

(You can follow me on Twitter. Or friend me on Facebook.

Jeez.

I blogged about my book on the future of classical music. And tweeted about it. And put an update on Facebook.

And in all of that, I forgot to mention the title! It's Rebirth. Meaning -- of course -- that classical music won't die, but instead will be reborn. Or, more formally, the title might be Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music.

From the mine of thoughts that will go into the book (this one goes in the very first chapter): I know the rebirth may be painful for people who like classical music in its traditional form. And I know that some of them -- including people whose comments I value here -- might think the rebirth will dumb classical music down.

I sympathize. But I think classical music in fact will get smarter. Does it present an intelligent face to the world right now? No way, and chapter VIII of the book, "World Gone Wrong," will give many reasons why.

The rebirth, in any case, is already happening, and it can't be stopped. I'm excited about it. Understatement! And I think it'll make classical music better for just about everybody. Including people like me, who grew up under the old rules, and want to keep diving into classical music's depths.

(On my book outline, what follows would come in chapter three, Falling Behind: The Problem of Funding. Why money for classical music will be harder to raise.)

I've been hearing from many people about trouble ahead on the financial side of classical music. In the background of this -- at least in my view; I'm not going to say that everyone I talk to shares it -- are some long-range troubles, as I'll explain in the funding chapter of my book. If the classical audience is shrinking, then money should be harder to raise, because the first people any institution raises money from are the people in its audience. Fewer people, less money.

But then if classical music -- speaking more broadly -- is retreating from our culture, than again money gets more difficult, because fewer people will want to give money to classical music. I think we're already seeing this (correct me if you think I'm wrong) with younger donors. They're more likely to support social causes, and may not be inclined (or at least not as inclined as a previous generation was to give money to the arts). A friend in her forties, who says she's normally the youngest person at classical concerts she goes to, also says that people her age won't give money to classical music.

And then there's Baumol's Dilemma, an economic principle I've written about here before, which shows why classical music institutions, over many years, need to raise larger and larger amounts of money. To see this principle in action, look at the proportion of orchestra budgets that comes from ticket sales, which has steadily declined from 70 to 90 percent in the 1930s to around 30% today.

But this is all in the background as institutions try to deal with the current problem, which is the recession. I hear from many people that ticket sales and donations are down, and projected deficits for this season loom rather high. Endowments, too, have fallen (can you spell "stock market"?), and the impact of this hasn't yet fully hit. That falling endowments would affect current budgets is inevitable, since organizations typically take a fixed percentage of their endowment income, to use for current expenses. A smaller endowment means less income, and thus less money available for this year's budget.

But the "draw" -- the amount taken each year for current expenses -- is calculated from a three-year rolling average of what the endowment has been. That's to even out pesky year to year fluctuations.

But now we've had a really large fall in the stock market, and thus in the value of endowments. The immediate impact of the fall was pretty bad, but it was cushioned in the first year, because the three-year rolling average would have included the two previous good years. Now that's not true, and the rolling average includes more bad years than good. Thus endowment draws will be even lower than they were, which puts pressure on everybody's budget.

And the draw will take a while to return to normal, if it ever does. That's because of that three-year average, again. Even if the stock market goes way up, it'll take a year or two for that to be fully reflected in endowment draws. So the budget pressure could continue for the next couple of years.

But will the stock market return to its previous highs? Nobody's betting on that. Or at least not for it to happen in the next couple of years. And that brings me to the main point of this post. What if there are long-term structural changes in our economy? There's plenty of suggestive evidence, possibly showing that structural changes really will occur, or have happened already.

For instance, a New York Times piece about women reentering the workforce, because their husbands are unemployed, or because their families have lost their investments. One woman is described:

She pointed to investment losses "in the healthy six figures," along with "some very high medical expenses for a family member and having two daughters in college. And then the value of our home and pension plan has taken a tumble."

Does a family in this condition have money for concert tickets (or at least for as many as they might have bought in the past), or for donations to the Metropolitan Opera? When will the value of the family's home -- and their investments and pension plan -- come back?

Another story, for which I don't have a link, talked about fashion designers no longer being able to sell much in the highest price brackets, and therefore retooling their lines, to sell less expensive clothes, and even sell more to mass market retailers. This would be new, because normally luxury goods do well even in recessions.

But then another recent Times story said that even multimillionaires are putting themselves on budgets. Here's an excerpt:

The Boston Consulting Group predicted this week that worldwide wealth would not return to 2007 precrisis levels until 2013. It also said it found that the number of millionaires was down 18 percent and that, across the board, clients of wealth management firms had lost trust in their advisers.

"There is a shattered confidence we haven't seen in a long time," said Bruce Holley, senior partner at the firm. "The wealth management business is a very emotional business, and people can react in kind to that."

This explains how someone with more than $100 million in assets can ask her adviser to put her on a budget. As far-fetched as it may sound to someone struggling to make a mortgage payment, such a request reflects the changes in attitudes about wealth in the last year.

If this comes even close to describing the current climate, of course there'll be less money for classical music. Until 2013, if we can believe the projection. And of course reality might be different, and of course people panic or exaggerate in the middle of a crisis, but on the other hand, haven't people been saying in the past month or so that the recession may be ending? Maybe it is, but many people think that structural changes will persist.

What will this mean for big classical music institutions? Almost certainly it means cutbacks. Shorter seasons, smaller staff, less ambitious programming. That, at least, is a sampling of what people talk about. If things don't change, that is. But will they?

We're also seeing some major donations from wealthy donors. The Philadelphia Orchestra got one, and so did the Charlotte Symphony. (These are only the most recent examples, of course.) But these donations are both good news and bad news. They're good news, because they're big donations. But they're bad news, because they're emergency donations. The Philadelphia donation, in fact, is mentioned deep into a story about the orchestra's current crisis. An emergency donation wouldn't happen if there weren't an emergency.

And yes, these donations do show that there are still some people willing to give lots of money to classical music. What they don't -- and of course can't tell us -- is how many such people there are, and (most important) what happens in future years if the emergency persists, and all major donors are tapped out?

A structural crisis, perhaps, in classical music funding. Not a surprise, unfortunately, if you know how vulnerable classical music budgets are, how hard it is for even the biggest institutions, even in more or less good years, to raise the money they need.

The mountain -- the one where my book on the future of classical music has been hiding -- has cracked itself open. And out of the crack comes...a skeleton. A skeletal outline of what's going to be in the new, final version of the book.

Previously, as many readers know, I improvised drafts of the book, in a kind of online performance. They're here. But this is the real deal. A real book. I'll be unfolding it in stages, in future months. Details to come.

The new skeletal outline gives you some idea of the whole book -- what it's going to say, what subjects it covers, what some of its main points are. What's not there? Details. Objections that I know people have to what I'm going to write (and of course my answers).

And also missing, inevitably: How much fun I hope the book is going to be. And how much music there's going to be in it. It's going to be full of music -- descriptions of music, evocations of music, delight in music. In future, more detailed outlines you'll see how that's going to work.

But enough. A roll on the xylophone, please. It's time for the skeleton. Comments welcome. I'm happy with this. It's quick, but comprehensive: Chapter titles are very much subject to change. Ideas for them are welcome -- as are all other comments.

 

I -- The Crisis

Chapter I --Rebirth and Resistance

Classical music is changing. The changes can lead to its rebirth. One reason for change is the classical music crisis - the fear that classical music is receding from our culture, and that its audience might disappear.

But there's resistance to change, and some people don't even believe that the crisis is real.

Chapter II - Dire Data

Why the crisis is real.

Proof that the audience really is aging. How dramatically younger it used to be. How its aging signals a very large cultural shift.

Tangible evidence that this shift really happened. The decline in classical music ticket sales. Recent data from the National Endowment for the Arts, and how it shows that the classical music audience will almost certainly shrink.

Chapter III -- Falling Behind (The Problem of Funding)

 

Why money for classical music will become harder to raise.

Chapter IV -- Renegade Culture

The central problem -- our changing culture. The world has changed, but classical music (mostly) hasn't. Which explains why people -- of all ages -- have lost interest in it.

Part II --The Nature of Classical Music

Chapter V -- Defining Classical Music

What classical music really is, and why we should save it. Its great tradition.

Chapter VI -- The Myth of Classical Music Superiority

Why classical music isn't better than music of other kinds. Why it's harmful to think that it is.

Chapter VII -- World Gone Wrong: The Failure of Classical Music

Why classical music - in the ways it's presented today - no longer makes sense. Why it functions now as a refuge from contemporary life.

Part III -- Alternatives

Chapter VIII -- Pop Music and Popular Culture

Why popular culture is smart and valuable. What it can teach classical music. Why classical music has to coexist with it.

Chapter IX -- Classical Music in the Past

How classical music used to be freer, and more expressive. How this can inspire us now.

Part IV -- The Rebirth of Classical Music

Chapter X -- What Should We Do?

How classical music has already changed. Problems we still have to solve, and recommendations for further change.

Chapter XI -- Rebirth for Real

The future. What classical music might look like, after it reconnects with current culture, and becomes a truly contemporary art.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Which means that you may share this, redistribute it, and put it on your own blog or website, as long as you don't change it in any way. You can't charge money for it, or use it for any other commercial purpose. You also must include my comments on what's left out of the outline, and you must give me credit, which means naming me as the author, and either providing a link to this blog post or else giving people its URL.

Last week I went to my first concerts this season, all from the part of the music world I've been calling alternative classical. David Lang, one of the Bang on a Can composers (and Pulitzer prizewinner), with a program of films set to his compositions, at the Museum of Modern Art (all this in New York)...Nico Muhly, Doveman, and Sam Amidon at the Miller Theater...and Glenn Branca at Le Poisson Rouge.

David's pieces were very severe, some of them, and the films equally so. Elevated was the longest. Relentless music, like bells tolling doom, that kept playing while the film showed us shots of New York in past decades. Almost as if an asteroid had hit, and New York was extinguished. Now we were seeing its happier days, knowing that they would decisively end.

The simplest and (for me) most affecting piece -- film and music -- was Heroin, David's rewrite of the Velvet Underground song. Lyrics intact, music new, for voice and solo cello. The film so lovely, so still. People lying in bed. Are they high? Or should we look at them through the prism of Ellen Willis's famous reaction to the power of the original song (I'm paraphrasing): "You don't know whether to run and save Lou Reed, or else plunge the needle into your own vein." A great moment in rock criticism. Were the people in bed overcome like that? Not knowing what they should do?

Nico Muhly, composer; Doveman, singer-songwriter; Sam Amidon, banjo player and folksinger. Inadequate labels. How is someone just a "composer" when he writes string arrangements for pop bands and performs with such sweeping force onstage? How is someone a "singer-songwriter" when his singing proves -- at least to me -- that the last thing you need, as a singer, is voice. Not when you've got soul and can make the notes happen, even with no voice.

And how is someone a "folksinger" when one thing he does is emit primal cries, as if he were howling to gods unknown on a hillside in Arkansas, maybe in 1935?

And how can all of these people be labelled, when they fuse what they do, and go onstage together? One thing I loved was how cooperative they were, Muhly and Doveman playing the piano whenever they felt like it, separately or together, and then doing other things. At one point Muhly brushed Doveman's hair, the amplified sound of that becoming part of the music.

Throughout I heard streams of music coming together. Classical music -- Steve Reich, Ligeti, back through Stravinsky, and then before that everyone else, Haydn and Mozart, present perhaps the way Dufay might be present in Wagner. Pop music, folk music -- too many people to name, to ancient folk screamers to  R. Kelly, the Band (one song had a sound in the bass -- though not the bassline -- of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," the Band's version.

All this, coming together, as if genre didn't matter. That's one reason it's alternative classical. We get musical traits from classical music, and an openness to anything that comes from the classical avant-garde, but without old classical instruments or classical sounds, or (most of all) the culture of classical music, the silence, the reverence, the scent of the past.

Glenn Branca, ironically, had the strongest past scent. I first heard his music for (mostly) electric guitars and drums, back in the '80s, when it was so new and strong it swept me away. Of course, at LPR he couldn't have 100 guitars, as he has in his symphonies, and had (or some number like that) when I heard him last, between the World Trade Center towers, obviously before 9/11. (A pang of nostalgia and history. I heard him now on 9/11 -- my way, I think, of marking the anniversary.)

But the music was strong, and sat, vollume-wise, just on the good side of hearing loss. And it hadn't changed since the '80s. Nor had Glenn. More nostalgia. The shock of the once-new, coming from the then-shocking insert of rock into classical music...the presence (as the electric guitar music builds from the simplest repeated elements) of minimalism, as the unavoidable dominant style...those things still lived in the music, put into it back in the '80s, and still ringing out with full '80s force.

What I liked most: Knowing that much of the music resides in the overtones, listening not to the notes the guitars played, but to the cloud of sound above and around those notes, hearing sound like a dark gray stone wall, pitted and fissured, with new fissures showing up every few moments. That's not the '80s. That's timeless.

Meanwhile, back in the classical world (not alternative) -- people are programming what passes for new music. Look at the NY Philharmonic. Messiaen on the opening gala, along with their new composer in residence, Magnus Lindberg, a Swedish Finnish modernist [very dumb mistake on my part; many thanks to the commenters who pointed it out], which means he's a Swedish composer writing in a style that, broadly speaking (and whatever may have been added to it since) was new around 1910. (OK, I'm exaggerating, but not by too much. To check on myself, I'm listening to Lindberg's cello concerto, which, in its sound, really did plunge me back into the Second Vienna School -- 1910, in other words s-- with updated footnotes. Old stuff, though very well done. Likewise some of Lindberg's piano music.)

I don't want to single the Philharmonic out here, and in fact if I were taking an orthodox view, I'd praise them for doing new music, not just on an opening gala (new music, in the past, has been excluded from opening galas, by leaving out the new piece on the first subscription series, and reinstating it only for concerts after the opening).

But I don't take the orthodox view. I think what the Philharmonic and other mainstream classical music groups do, when they feature new music, is 30 years out of date. What's currently new is what I heard on my first nights out. Except Glenn Branca, who's 20 years old. But the style he represents hasn't yet entered the classical world. The classical music world is free to do whatever it wants, but to call their new music sallies even remotely new -- no matter how new they might be to the classical audience -- is like living in a time warp.

Footnote: Someone is likely to say that alternative classical music is just something that -- however interesting, however much I might like it -- lies outside the true classical music world. I'm sure people said that about Schoenberg in 1910. And, for that matter, in 1940!

I'm also sure I haven't helped this perception by giving alt-classical a special name. But the perception is wrong. Alternative classical music, in its new-music branch, might function as its own little world within the larger classical umbrella. (As if, by the way, Elliott Carter didn't largely function the same way. For all his mainstream acclaim, he hardly has a mainstream following.) But if David Lang wins a Pulitzer, and Nico Muhly is being played this year by the NY Philharmonic's new music ensemble (and if he has a commission from the Metropolitan Opera) then obviously alternative classical music has started, at the very least, to enter the mainstream.

But this is the wrong way to look at it -- counting mainstream scalps, looking to the Pulitzer Prize or the Met Opera for authority to deem alternative classical music truly classical. Better to look at the other arts. In visual art and in literature, it's hardly remarkable to see people with this kind of artistic profile accepted as part of the mainstream. What particularly happens, in this artistic profile, is an embrace of popular culture, which leads to a strong strain of popular culture in the work these artists do.That's one of the distinguishing characteristics of alternative classical music, which mostly divide it from new music in the classical mainstream.

But, as I've said, in other arts, an embrace of popular culture is exactly where the newest work largely is. So in that respect, alternative classical music is exactly where new classical music actually is, even if, in the mainstream world, a piece by an old composer like Messiaen (no disrespect to him!) passes as something new, when it shows up on an opening gala at a major orchestra.

In classical music, a Schoenberg festival would be something daring, that felt very new. At a museum, a show of work by Kandinsky -- Schoenberg's friend, who developed abstract painting at the same time that Schoenberg developed atonal music -- would be classic art.

I should praise the Philharmonic, though, come to think of it. With such small steps do we eventually reach the future. I hope they'll forgive me, Allan Gilbert included, if I keep pointing out how far they still have to go.

(Lots of scanning involved in this post. Too much work! But a labor of love.)

As I said in my last post, I went on an E.M. Forster binge this summer -- all the novels I hadn't read, plus his essays and short stories, and his terrific, quirky, completely honest book about the novel as an art form.

And among other things -- the quiet way he turns a phrase, to say exactly what he means -- I found him wonderful on music. I've already talked about the famous passage from Howard's End about Beethoven's Fifth, in which people (all but one of them quite young) go to a concert, hear the piece, and react to it:

Beethoven chose to make all right in the end [one of the characters thinks]. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. [This is about the moment in the last movement where, amid triumph, the more sinister music of the previous movement returns, only to be banished once more by triumph.] He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

But this is only one musical moment of many. Forster loved music, and returned to it, in novels and essays, over and over. Among much else, he gives us anecdotal evidence that younger people had no trouble with classical music 100 years ago. In The Longest Journey, he has Cambridge undergraduates noodling the prelude to Das Rheingold on a piano during a party, or else letting their hesitant attempts at Beethoven piano sonatas waft through open windows out over the campus.

Though that's shop talk, in this blog. Let's just savor Foster's great feeling for music, and the way he gets to the heart of its meaning, as he does when the young heroine of A Room With a View plays the piano:

The grandchildren asked her to play...She played Schumann. 'Now some Beethoven,' called Cecil, when the querulous beauty of the music had died. She shook her head and played Schumann again. The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete -- the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art -- throbbed in its dejected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb.

Or else this, from Aspects of the Novel, where, better than I ever could, he evokes what we get from symphonic classical pieces:

When [a] symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in War and Peace? ... Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have ,finished does not every item -- even the catalogue of strategies -- lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

But my favorite Forster music writing comes in his very first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Three British people, one of them quite staid, are in a small town in Italy. They go to the opera. The performance is...well, let Forster tell it himself. I guess this is shop talk again, another installment of my campaign to show that classical music hasn't always been very classical. But forget about that, if you like. Just read. It's delicious. (And don't worry about the encounter of Philip and Gino, toward the end. To really understand what's happening there, you'd have to read the book. But for now, just think that the operatic chaos helps two people to find each other.)

Philip had tried for a box, but all the best were taken; it was rather a grand performance, and he had to be content with stalls. Harriet was fretful and insular. Miss Abbott was pleasant, and insisted on praising everything; her only regret was that she had no pretty clothes with her....

Harriet, meanwhile, had been coughing ominously at the drop-scene, which presently rose on the grounds of Ravenswood, and the chorus of Scotch retainers burst into cry. The audience accompanied with tappings and drummings, swaying in the melody like corn in the wind.' Harriet, though she did not care for music, knew how to listen to it. She uttered an acid 'Shish!'

(Click below to continue. You won't regret it.]

Two summers ago was the summer of hedgehogs. Cute, messy, dumb little things, busy eating slugs and worms, with babies getting sick near our house in the Yorkshire Dales. And then nursed back to health, no charge, by the local vet. Full reminiscence here.




But now we had the summer of renegade cows. Three of them, always the same three, would break out of their field, and come up our driveway. Here are two of them, peering into a French door that leads from our dining room to a small enclosed garden:



They'd walk around, trample the grass and some flowers. Turns out they're easy to drive off. You just walk towards them, and they trot away. When sheep break loose and come around, they're much more stubborn.

And then there were long, hard walks on the local fells -- hills, in America-speak, which in that part of the world manage to be both domestic and wild. We'd climb 2000 feet, and look down in one directions at fields and a town, and in another at a cleft in the earth that could have been left over from just about the dawn of time.

Other delights. An E.M. Forster binge, very productive not just for literary pleasure, but for the future of classical music. I'll blog about this. He writes about music often, and among other things shows so clearly how -- going back to the first decade of the last century -- younger people had classical music as an entirely normal part of their lives. And then there's the Lucia di Lammermoor performance in a small Italian town, with the audience shouting hello to their friends and family in the chorus. "That's not classical!" deplores a staid British lady. "That's not even respectable!"

And also my long-lost book on the future of classical music. No longer lost, but fully coming to life. Watch this space!