International music

More about Tunis, following my earlier post on what I presented at the conference there.

This is about the group that presented the conference, the International Music Council. And about international issues in music.

The IMC was founded long ago, in 1949, by UNESCO. It considers international music issues, and advocates positions on them.

So what are the issues?

I won’t claim to be an expert, but I noticed two. One is music advocacy, which we’re certainly familiar with here in the US. And, in particular, advocacy for music education.

Here we run into the same problems, I think, that I’ve talked about in arts advocacy, which can include a sense of entitlement, and grandly specious claims made for the power of art. Especially its moral power.

So in Tunis we had (on a panel on music education), a hopeful presentation on the power of music, which the presenter (from an Asian country) felt could be a tremendous force for good. At one point he stopped to note that music education had to encourage not just love and knowledge of music, but also critical thinking, so that students could resist any use of music as propaganda.

Which, if you ask me, undercut his claims for music’s moral force. If music can also be used immorally, then why should we be so certain of its moral power? The speaker then went on to celebrate an event in which massed schoolchildren sang a song in the presence of his country’s leader — but probably without much critical thinking about the politics involved.

Two speakers presented terrific correctives to this. One was David Price, a consultant from Britain, who talked about music education programs he’d taken part in, which essentially were guided by the students. That is, you find out what music the students like, what use they’re making of music, and you try to build programs around that. Rather than, for instance, teaching them about the music you think they should care about. (Classical music advocates, are you listening?) These programs, Price said, were a great success, and I can well believe it.

The other corrective came from Wayne Bowman, professor of music education at the school of music at Brandon University in Manitoba. “All too often,” he said, “advocacy claims sound like last gasp efforts to defend instructional practices that have simply failed to keep pace with social and musical change.”

He challenged all kinds of conventional wisdom — music, he says, can’t honestly be said to make you smarter, to enhance critical thinking, to develop confidence, or to enhance communication. (In fact, anyone who sees how music works in the real world will notice that it often blocks communication, when people like widely diverse musical genres, and see someone else’s preference as a sign that the person isn’t worth talking to.)

I loved his paper, and Wayne very kindly agreed to let me put it online, which I’ve done. You can read it here. I highly recommend it.

Wayne, by the way, makes a pointed distinction between music training and music education. What’s the difference? A musician who can play the classical piano repertoire note perfectly, backwards and forwards, but who hasn’t heard even a single Charlie Parker recording is trained, but not educated. (My example, not his, though I think I can say he agrees with it.)

More tomorrow, about international music politics — more proof, by the way, that music doesn’t necessarily bring people together.

A week in Tunisia

Well, I’m back. I attended the Third World Forum on Music (as in the third they’ve held, not a forum about third world music), sponsored by the International Music Council.

More later about what that all is, about the international music scene I learned about (with some major issues being debated, one of them involving the US in not a very pretty role). And about Tunisia, a westernized culture whose Arab roots are never all that far below the surface. And about all kinds of crosscultural moments, including a distinguished older singer from Afghanistan whose music i heard on (of all places) her MySpace page. And my friendship with an Australian who works with aboriginal music, which comes from a culture (musically and otherwise) very, very far from our own.

And the phenomenal way younger Tunisians sing and play their own traditional styles, complete with microtones and long rhythmic cycles (more than 100 beats), that western musicians probably couldn’t keep up with.

But later for that. Because it’s most germane to this blog, I thought I’d start with my own presentation, though that wasn’t the most important moment for me while I was there. I should say, first, that (as I only found out after I’d been there a few days) I’d been invited because of this blog. An official of the IMC reads it, and thought I’d be a good choice to talk about (what else) the future of classical music.

So I spoke on a panel about art music and its future, called “Challenges to Art Music: In a world overrun by celebrity and superficiality, is there an audience for the disciplines and profound truths of art music?”

Faithful readers can imagine how little I liked that premise. But in an international context, it turned out to have a special meaning: “In a world overrun by bad American music, and by greedy pop record companies whose interests are promoted by US policy…” I’ll have more to say about that in a later post.

And the art music the panel discussed wasn’t only western. One speaker talked about Indian classical music, another about Tunisian traditional styles. And another about a specific niche for western classical music, in Ugandan Catholic churches. The speaker, a Ugandan, didn’t endear herself to other Africans at the meeting when she said she thought western musical instruments are harder to play than African ones.

You can hear a recording of what I said here. I found myself reacting to earlier panels I’d attended, about “riding the digital tiger” and about music education, where one speaker talked about a “paradigm shift” necessary, he thought, for people who run conservatories, and who teach at them. I began by telling stories, about innovations in music, many of them involving online technology. In part I wanted to get away from the abstractions most other speakers provided, but I also wanted, as vividly as possible, to emphasize two things:

That the digital eruption is only a tiger to those who stand outside it. Inside, it can be a happy riot of hopeful possibilities.

And that “paradigm shift” doesn’t go far enough. There’s been nothing short of a revolution in our culture.

I noted that the innovations I talked about (I’ll list them another time) all happened outside the mainstream classical world. And then I moved on to the ways in which classical music is losing ground in our culture these days, a familar topic in this blog. (I talked, for instance, about the dire data that the NEA recently released.)

I did add something, for the international audience, something I haven’t stressed here, but which I’ll certainly say in my book: That the decline of classical music is — in the last analysis — caused by the end of western cultural (and political) hegemony. How, for instance, can we insist that white European culture is preeminent, musically, in a world that’s largely non-white and non-European? Or in my own country, the US, which is headed toward a non-white majority?

The rise of rock and jazz is, in many ways, a non-western challenge to European music and its former rule. That’s because rock and jazz rhythms ultimately come from African music, and imply a culture that’s not European at all. (On this, see Christopher Small’s Music of the Common Tongue, and Michael Ventura’s essay “Hear the Long Snake Moan,” in his book Shadow Dancing in the USA.)

I ended by telling more stories, about the ways that classical music might change. My favorite is something I thought of at the conference, after a conversation with someone in Europe who runs an organization that deals with classical music competitions. She said she was trying to find new things for competitions to do. And it suddenly occured to me — classical music competitions could reshape themselves as reality shows.

I’m serious. I’m thinking of reality shows like Project Runway, where contestants — in Project Runway’s case, fashion designers — are given challenges each week. Make a garment entirely from newspaper, design an outfit for recent graduates to wear to their first job interview (in collaboration with the graduates themselves, and their mothers), design something extravagant for Cristina Aguilera to wear to an event, with Aguilera herself as one of the judges.

So why not give challenges to musicians in competitions? Competitions, as I think we all know, can be dull. The winners are often consensus choices; musicians with real flair get left out, because some judge might dislike them. And — something I haven’t heard said, but which is obvious, when you think of it — there’s no guarantee that a competition winner will make any impact on the outside world.

So — challenges! Serious ones, that would show what kind of musician each competitor really is. For instance:

One week give the contestants a short piece to play. The judges then pick the one whose playing they like the most. And then, the next week (I’m imagining this as an actual reality show on TV, with weekly episodes), bring the contestants back to play the same piece, but with instructions to play it in an entirely different way. They’d have no advance warning of this, or any other challenge. We’d see in an instant how adaptable and imaginative each one was.

Give the contestants a wildly difficult, outrageous, even wildly ugly short passage written for their instrument. They’d have 30 seconds to look at it, and then they’d have to play it. We’d see who came closest to getting it right — and to making music with it. (The competition could provide reference recordings, made by people who’d taken time to learn the music.)

Give the contestants a new piece, without expressive markings of any sort — no tempo indication, no dynamics, no phrase marks, not even any articulations. Now we’d see who could make the best music from what would look, in musical notation, like something pretty close to an undifferentiated mass of notes.This would show us who had true musical imagination, and would expose — mercilessly, I think — the kind of competition entrant who can only play what he or she has been taught. (This isn’t my idea. I’ll happily give credit to the man who invented it, Ben Verdery, guitar teacher at the Yale School of Music, who told me he gives this challenge to guitarists who audition to get into the school. It’s a brilliant idea.)

Of course we could think of many more challenges. These are just the first that came to my mind. We could ha

ve musicians forced to make instruments to play on, musicians challenged to improvise, musicians given most of a new piece (written in a famliar style), and then challenged to make up the ending. Or musicians given something beautiful from the standard repertoire to play, and then challenged to play it again, even more beautifully. (This comes from one of Tom Johnson’s pieces from the ’80s, called, collectively, Music for Unrehearsed Performers, if I remember correctly. He wrote one of these pieces for Richard Stoltzman, and that was one of the things Stoltzman had to do.)

I really like this idea. It could be done on TV, but could also be done live. I suspect that the winners would be almost guaranteed to be interesting, if the challenges were potent enough.

Two footnotes. First, nearly everyone I met, when I told them I worked on the future of classical music, said classical music had to change, maybe drastically. This included people whose positions might make you think they’d be far more conservative.

Second, I recorded my talk on my iPhone. I’m amazed at the quality of recordings I can make with it. And it’s always in my pocket, so there’s no need for any presentation I give to go unrecorded.

Another book riff

Here’s another riff from my book — or, rather, again, a riff on what’s going to be in the book. It continues the last riff I posted here, as I gradually riff my way from the beginning of the book to the end.

Comments are more than welcome, as always. And an apology for not keeping up with the comments many of you have recently posted. I’ve been a little crazed with many things, including preparations for my Tunisia trip.

Here’s the riff:

Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music

by Greg Sandow

[Again from Chapter I, Rebirth and Resistance, extending my previous riff about how the chapter -- and the book -- might start. This is how the chapter might continue.]

So we’ve had a dose of heady inspiration. Rebirth! What a terrific concept for classical music.

Where do we go from here?

Well, it might be time to step back, and ask some questions.

First:

If classical music really is changing, which it is — and if, through those changes, it might be reborn – why are the changes happening?

For two reasons, I think.

First, there’s the crisis in classical music, the fear that classical music is slipping away from thecontemporary world, and that its audience is shrinking. That leads people, even at the biggest classical music institutions, to wonder how they might reach out, and speak to the outside world.

Second — and, I think, much more important — there’s the simple fact of change. Cultural change,going very deep, and gaining speed for the past two generations. Ever since the 1960s. Maybe since the ’50s!

So who does that cultural change affect? More or less all of us. Including those of us who work inclassical music. We’ve all changed. We think differently, we have different ideas. And so we want to do classical music differently. Thus, we — individually, collectively, sometimes independent of each other, sometimes inspired by each other — start doing new things.

And that’s especially true of younger people in the business, music students, young musicians, youngerpeople in classical music management. Younger people in classical music — as I’ve seen from teaching them, for a start — live in two worlds at once, the classical music world, and also in the wider cultural world they share with everyone else their age. They watch the same TV shows their friends do, go to the same movies, listen to the same bands.

But their friends, often enough, don’t pay attention to classical music at all. So younger people in classical music become a bridge to the rest of their world. They can leap the gap, if anyone can. They can find ways to present classical music, that will grab the attention of people their own age.

Which is a big reason why I’m hopeful for the future. But don’t think classical music won’t change, when younger people start giving classical concerts in their own way.

Rebirth won’t be rebirth, if it’s only a new way of packaging something old.

More questions. How far have the changes gone? Not all that far, to tell the truth. So many exciting things have happened, as I’ve said (in my first riff). But you can still go to classical concerts — as we all know — and see more or less what we would have seen five, ten, or twenty years ago. Musicians in formal dress. An older audience. And, on the program, the same old lovely, familiar, comfortable classical masterworks. Nothing against them, but they just don’t reflect our own time.

And yes, I know some things have changed. Musicians might talk to the audience. Program books, at least at a few of the biggest orchestras, might be designed to look like slick, professional magazines.

But guess what — these changes, and others like them, aren’t enough to make a big difference. A conductor can say a few words to the audience, and then turn around — wearing formal dress — and conduct the same familiar masterworks to the same older audience.

Same with other changes — conductors not wearing formal dress, for instance. By themselves, these things don’t change the essential concert ambience. Maybe they’re first steps down the road of change, but they’re only first steps.

Even new works — classical pieces written this month, or this week — may not make much difference. The audience might hate them. And, more crucially, they may taste like they were written for the classical concert hall, without any savor, not even a trace, of the world outside.

Which brings me, to end this riff, to what I think are the two kinds of classical music change. First, changes made by mainstream classical institutions. And, second, changes made outside the classical music mainstream, which, taken together, create a new kind of alternative classical music world, which I’ve been labeling (on the model of indie rock), alt-classical, though maybe indie classical would be just as good, if not better. The alt-classical changes go a lot further. Here we see classical music starting to be fully reborn. But of course there are more of the mainstream changes, since there are so many mainstream classical music institutions, and alt-classical is still something new.

There’s also money. You can make a living in the mainstream classical world. If you’re lucky, if you get an orchestra job, if you really hustle. It might not be easy, but many people (especially including musicians) do it.

But you can’t make a living in the alt-classical space. Maybe a few people can, but the financial models for doing it basically don’t exist. If you’re a string quartet, life might be hard, but at least, if you’re booked by a mainstream performing arts center, you get a fee. Play in a club, and maybe it’s a thrilling gig, with a new young audience right in front of you, but where’s the money? Well, you’re not doing it for money, but without your mainstream bookings — and, most likely, your university residency — you won’t survive.

The mainstream is shrinking, though. So chances to make a living from it may well start to disappear. So here’s a challenge for the future. How can we develop financial models for the alt-classical space, so musicians (and everyone else who makes a living from classical music, managers, administrators, publicists, you name it) can survive in it? And even thrive.

What I’ve been up to

Besides Rebirth, my book on the future of classical music, of course. (Go here and here for that)

I’ve been — and I’m honored by this — appointed Artist-in-Residence in the College of Arts and Humanities of the University of Maryland, for this academic year and 2010-11. I’ll be working with students and faculty of the School of Music, and with the staff of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, to find new ways of giving classical concerts. I’m especially interested in finding ways for students to reach an audience their own age.

Of course this follows the terrific time I had last summer with students from the National Orchestral Institute, also at the university. For the university’s website about their artists in residence (there are three of us, quite a varied group), go here.

And earlier this month, I had fun (and I hope I was useful), talking about technology via Skype video to a large group of people from British orchestras. This was courtesy of the London Symphony, which has done good things, technologically. My main message was that new technologies create a new culture, and so the opportunities they create go way beyond finding new delivery methods for the same old messages. Recording from Skype wasn’t in the cards that day, but I recorded my talk myself on my iPhone (believe it or not), and you can listen to it here. Along with some Q and A with participants.

This summer, I spoke at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, about the future of…well, you know. Seemed to be very well received, by both students there and some of the lovely people in the area who go to the concerts. They seem to be pretty much like the classical music audience we see in most places, so it meant a lot to me that they responlyded so happily to my calls for change. You can listen to this talk, too.

Finally, I’m off to Tunisia tomorrow (10/16), to speak at an international conference on music, courtesy of the International Music Council. I’ll be there for six days, and have no idea what my schedule will be like, or how easy Internet access will be. I may or may not be blogging. More on this in another post.

The point of my…

…”Technology or culture” entry, which I posted yesterday. As I didn’t quite get around to saying, it’s that technological changes, these days, are also changes in our culture. Which means that classical music institutions can’t just use new technologies as if they were just more tools for doing the same old things.

I’ve also thought of a much shorter way to make my point about Magnus Lindberg. But I’d better catch up with the comments first. There’s a lot of book stuff happening behind the scenes, and of course it’s eating at my time.

Sandow

Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Monthly Archives: October 2009

International music

A week in Tunisia

Another book riff

What I’ve been up to

The point of my…