Fourth book riff

Previously:

outline of my book

riff 1: The rebirth of classical music

riff 2: Why is the rebirth happening?

riff 3:  Resistance to change: the value of classical music

And now, riff four: Resistance to change: reasons for resistance. (Feel

free, if you like, to copy and paste all of this and keep it for

reference, or send it to anyone you like. Just don’t violate the

Creative Common license at the end.)

Some of the resistance feels like nostalgia, deep nostalgia. People

love classical music. They enter a classical concert hall, and feel

like they’re coming home. So of course they don’t want classical

concerts to change. They won’t feel at home anymore.

 

I remember – and the memory touches me – a leading figure in the

symphony orchestra business, saying at a private conference that, if

classical music collapsed, he and his colleagues might need grief

counseling.

 

But there can be other reasons for resisting change, which in some ways

function as explanations of nostalgia – explanations of what people

think they’ll be losing – but which people take seriously:

 

• Change will dumb classical music down.

• There’s no need for change, because classical music is doing just fine as it is. There isn’t any crisis.

•  Any problems that classical music might have can be blamed on

  our culture. There’s nothing wrong with classical music, but our

  culture is now too dumb to support serious art.

Let’s look at these reasons. (And can anyone suggest more?)

 

Change will dumb classical music down

What, some people might think, could be better proof of this, than Maestro,

the BBC classical music reality show that I talked about in my first

riff? Because what could be dumber than a reality show? Or take that

further. What could be dumber than TV?

 

But this is an old cultural prejudice.

 

It was stronger in the past, for instance in the early

1960s, when CBS (yes, the TV network) commissioned an opera from

Stravinsky, and even though they let him write anything he wanted, some

of his friends thought he’d sold out by having anything at all to do

with TV.

 And now this prejudice comes into conflict with (no pun intended)

reality. Some reality shows are dumb. Or, for all I know, nearly all of

them. But some aren’t, and Maestro surely wasn’t. Yes, it was

brash, slick, and breezy, and full of dumb jokes. But the contestants

(as I said in my first riff) really had to conduct an orchestra, and if

they conducted badly, we could hear that they were bad.

 

One of the contestants (Goldie, a dance-music DJ) lived and breathed

music, right to his fingertips, but he fell down when he conducted an

aria from a Mozart opera, accompanying a singer, and couldn’t handle

the upbeats (quick little notes that the orchestra had to play after a

pause, but before the main beat of the melody).

 

Goldie – even though he melded beautifully with the singer – couldn’t

show the orchestra exactly when to play these upbeats. And so, for just

those few notes, the music sounded thin, and tentative. The judges (two

of whom were famous conductors) told us what was wrong, talking exactly

as classical music professionals would normally talk.

 

 Here’s another example. 

     

“The violins come in, in the second quaver in the bar,” said one of the

judges, Simone Young, music director of the Hamburg Opera, in Germany,

pointing out a problem she’d noticed. (She’s Australian, and uses a

British musical term, “quaver,” when we in America would say “quarter

note.” Though her meaning would be clear in any language. The violins,

at this moment in the music, start playing on the second beat.) “And on

the second note they play, the brass come in. And you showed me nothing

in that bar that would have showed the brass when to play.”

     

Which is exactly how she’d talk if she taught  conducting at a top music school.

You could watch more serious classical music telecasts for years -

telecasts of performances by major orchestras or soloists – and never

learn half as much (or a tenth as much) about conducting as one Maestro episode could teach you. 

 

And of course in the book I’ll run through other ways

classical music has changed, and show that they’re not all dumb. For

instance:

     

Jordi Savall, the probing viola da gamba star, conducted Haydn’s Seven

Last Words, a musical meditation from the 18th century on the last

words Jesus spoke, as recorded in the Bible. Except that Savall used

new texts, new literary meditations on those final words, written by

two important writers, one of them being José Saramago, surely among

the most profound literary voices of our time. And an atheist. This

doesn’t demean Haydn’s music. Instead, it gives the music new meaning,

and new power, as it finds new context in the way we might think today

about the meaning of Christianity.

         

The Royal Opera, in London, holds a competition for very young

composers, asking them to write a fanfare that the company can use, at

performances, to signal the end of intermission.

         

An opera company in Europe produces Bartok’s short opera Bluebeard’s

Castle, performing it twice in one night, staged in radically different

ways, to show how the opera can have many meanings.

         

Though of course some new developments really are dumb. Like this

deranged PR thrust from the Philadelphia Orchestra, inviting the world

to come to a performance on Thanksgiving Day:

         

Gobble up the sounds of The Philadelphia Orchestra this

Thanksgiving. Don’t miss the chance to purchase tickets to this

weekend’s Mozart and Bruckner concert for only $30. Log in at

www.philorch.org/login with the promotion code TURKEY or call

215.893.1999. Take advantage of this great offer! You will be thankful

you did

The link between turkeys and Bruckner would be…well, what?

 So how could Maestro – at least to some people – seem dumb? The

problem has to be the TV culture that pervades the show, the chatter,

the bad jokes, the breezy soundbites, sometimes coming even from the

judges. This isn’t an artistic tone of voice, the tone used in the past

when people talked about art.

 

I could say that’s a good thing, because it puts classical music into the world that most people live in.

 

But for some people, tearing classical music out of its refuge would

surely be a problem. They won’t feel at home anymore. Classical music,

they’ll think, has lost its dignity. It doesn’t feel like art. It feels

cheap. And dumb.

 

This, once more, is a cultural prejudice. Why should intelligence come only in one kind of package?

 

But I can sympathize. As I’ve said, I grew up in that high-culture

world myself. I remember how superior I felt – and also how isolated –

even as a kid, because I liked opera. And how insulted I was, way back

in sixth grade, when our music teacher had us singing show tunes.

 

Of course, I could turn this prejudice upside down. I could ask if

people who want to keep classical music in its protected place are,

really, just uncomfortable in our current world. Which they have every

right to be, if that’s how they feel, but why then say (or imply) that

people who feel comfortable watching a reality show have to be dumb?

 

I’ll want to say that gently. And not at any great length, because it’s

a thought that really belongs later in the book, in the chapters (see

my outline) where I’ll ask what classical music is, and explore how it

functions in our current world.

 

Though here’s a question I’ll ask right now. Why should we think that

classical music, in its traditional form, isn’t dumb already?

 

Heresy! The music, of course isn’t dumb.

 

Though wait!

     

We should remember that not all classical music shines with scholarly

intelligence. Quite a lot of it was written, back in its day, simply as

entertainment. And was, in a sense, the TV of its day. Rossini, just

for instance, wrote many operatic comedies, full of silliness. In one

of them, L’Italiana in Algeri (“The Italian Girl in Algiers,” a

perfect setup for a sitcom) there’s a moment of wild confusion, and

everyone onstage sings about the noises they hear in their heads – a

bell going “ding, ding, ding,” a hammer going “crack, crack, crack,” a

drum going “boom, boom, boom.” While the music sweeps up and down with

wild abandon. Somehow, in the classical music world, this now counts as

refined high art, when really it might just as well be a skit on Saturday Night Live.

But I’m not talking about the music. I’m talking about how we present it:

 

• Musicians wearing formal dress – with the men looking like butlers in a 1930s movie.

•  Music from the distant past dominating concert programs. 

• The same familiar pieces, repeated over and over again. (As if a symphony orchestra was Top 40 radio.

• New music forced on the mainstream concert audience, which

  doesn’t want to hear it. Nobody looking for the audience that might

  want to hear new music.

• Scholarly program notes, printed in concert programs -so scholarly, sometimes, that much of the audience can’t understand them.

And which might also miss the whole point of the

enterprise. I’m remembering a program note for a Metropolitan Opera

performance of L’Italiana in Algeri, which talked at length

about details of Rossini’s orchestration, which instruments he favored,

and how some of what we hear isn’t what he actually wrote. Without ever

saying that the opera is meant to be funny

• Institutions – symphony orchestras, for instance – that never

  talk about what’s intended in a performance. That play a Beethoven

  symphony for the 23d time, or the 123d time, and never say what makes

  this performance different, or what the musicians are trying to

  accomplish with the piece.  

•  Not connecting to present-day culture. And, worse, being visibly unsure about contemporary life.    

Example: A recent Philadelphia Orchestra press release – I

guess it’s my day to beat up on the Philadelphia Orchestra – which

talked about music that was “downloaded.” With the word in quotes, as

if downloading was something new, which we’re not quite sure of.

This list would just be a start.

 

Disclaimer: Many things I’ve listed here are changing. We see less

formal dress, for instance, than we used to. But I’m talking about

problems classical music has had for many years, in its traditional

form, which some people don’t want to change.

 

There’s no need for change, because there isn’t any crisis.

What’s remarkable here is that people don’t seem to know the facts.

 

For instance, you hear people in the classical music world say that the

audience for classical music isn’t aging. Which of course would mean

that its present age – 50 and above – wouldn’t be a problem.

 

And some of the people who say this are important people in the field.

“Classical music has never been the passion of the young,” wrote one of

them, a year ago, in the Wall Street Journal. “It is an acquired taste that requires both encouragement and education.” 

 

Note how special this man thinks classical music is. It’s so great an art that only mature people can understand it.

 And a New York Times article – by one of the paper’s classical music critics, splashed a few years ago all over the Sunday Arts and Leisure

section – said both that the audience wasn’t getting older, and that

studies of the age of the audience were never done in past generations.

 

But all of this is wrong. Studies of the audience age were done in the

past, and they show a younger audience than we have now – dramatically

younger, in fact, with a median age in its thirties.

 

Readers of my blog have seen me present this data, which you can find here.

 And there’s a lot of anecdotal data to support those studies.

 

There’s also more recent data, gathered by the National Endowment for

the Arts, which shows the classical music audience steadily growing

older since 1982.

 

So here we have a telling disconnect. People are making proclamations

without knowing any facts. I’ve even seen one very prominent person in

the field cite studies from the past that, or so he said, showed that

the audience has always been old. But when I asked him what studies

these were, he couldn’t name them.

 

And people don’t even know the NEA data, which for decades has been

published and publicized, and now can be downloaded from the NEA’s

website.

 

Is what’s going on here – at least to some extent – willful self-deception?

 

But then the classical music world, as I’ll show later on, isn’t good

at keeping track of data. Or even gathering it. We don’t know – and

isn’t this just a bit shocking, given all the talk of a crisis? -

whether classical music ticket sales have, in recent decades, gone up

or down.

 

So this is yet another way in which the classical music world seems

dumb. Even in a time of perceived crisis, it can’t (or won’t) measure

how well – or how badly – it’s doing.

 

But – returning now to people who don’t believe in the crisis (and who,

of course, can be protected from needing to believe, because data is so

scarce) – sometimes these people just aren’t very logical. They make

optimistic arguments, which really don’t make sense.

 

For instance, the Wall Street Journal essay I quoted from earlier also says:

 

[T]he classical music world has never been healthier; since the early 1970s the growth has been robust….

The number of concert venues, summer festivals, performing ensembles

and overall performances in classical music and opera has increased

exponentially over the last four decades. There are currently nearly

400 professional orchestras in America, according to the League of

American Orchestras, while 30 years ago there were 203.

But our population has grown. So if we also have more orchestras,

wouldn’t that (in part, at least) be because we have more people?

Cities that once weren’t able to afford an orchestra – because they

didn’t have enough funding, or a large enough audience – now, with a

growing population (and also, maybe, more prosperity) can build a base

for one.

 

And If we adjust the growth of orchestras (using the numbers in the Wall Street Journal piece) for the growth in population, then that growth really does look quite a bit smaller.

 

Meanwhile, according to new NEA data, the percentage of adult Americans

who go to classical music concerts – even if we have more orchestras -

has fallen nearly 30% in the past 30 years. That looks like a sign of

serious trouble.

 

In my next riff – which will take us into chapter two of my book –

I’ll show why there really is a crisis. In the book, I’ll present

detailed data, though maybe not too much of it, because (as readers

have told me) many people do realize that we’re in a crisis, and also

because I don’t want the book to get mired in statistics. If I need to,

I can always present more detail in an appendix.

 

Classical music’s problems can be blamed on our culture.

Here we cut to the chase, to some of the deepest reasons why some

people – as part of their support for classical music — reject the

contemporary world. They think our culture is stupid. And also shoddy,

loud, and devoid of any creativity.

 

If this were true, then of course we’d need classical music as a refuge, and an antidote.

 

I’ve heard so many people talking like this. I remember, for instance,

a keynote speech delivered at an orchestral gathering, by a symphony

conductor who said that in our culture there isn’t any quiet, there

isn’t any peace, there isn’t any room for thoughtful reflection.

 

These polemics go beyond classical music, and involve all the arts. Or,

rather, all the canonical high arts. Because the arts as a collective

enterprise – meaning the arts as traditionally conceived, and also as

organized into advocacy groups, like Americans for the Arts – are

looking for a stronger toehold in our culture, for more support (and,

very specifically, for more funding).

 

And often the argument for supporting the arts will either ignore

popular culture, or assume we all agree that popular culture is

horrible. I’ve seen, for instance, a speech by a foundation executive

(it circulated widely on the Internet) that hyped the arts – in lovely

poetic terms – by saying that they function as our collective family

photographs. They’re the memories that tell us who we are.

 

The speaker then noted that he’s (among other things) a southerner, and

gay. And so his family photographs include William Faulkner and dance

pieces by Bill T. Jones.

 

I can only smile at that. Isn’t he forgetting country music, which

tells a lot of southerners who they are? (White southerners, anyway. If

they’re African-American, they might look towards blues, gospel, and

old-time roadhouse R&B.)

 

And don’t gay men identify with the Village People and (at least when I

was in the pop music business) the Pet Shop Boys? Not to mention Judy

Garland.

 

So this argument for the arts is both unconvincing and incomplete. It’s

unconvincing, because who’s going to believe that we need the arts as

family photographs, when we already have cultural reference points

(most of which go deeper, I’d have to say, than Bill T. Jones).

 

And it’s incomplete because it doesn’t say what the arts really might

offer. What, for instance, could William Faulkner tell us that country

music doesn’t? This might be more profound question than you might

think, if you read – just for instance – Greil Marcus’s evocation of

southern culture in Mystery Train, his pioneering study of the cultural roots of rock & roll.

 

Which is to say that the musical roots of southern culture go very

deep. But that doesn’t mean that Faulkner doesn’t offer anything. What

is it, though?

 

Arguments like this one will only convince people who are convinced

already. Or who, along with the speaker, think that we live “in an age

of demonization and fear of difference,” that our “popular cultural

context…often seems to value humiliation over humanity,” and that our

young people (apparently as a general rule) “prioritize the

‘bombardment’ of sensation through violent film and video over the

contemplation and deep understanding of experience.” (I’m quoting from

the speech, of course.)

 

Not that these things don’t happen, but they’re addressed in popular

culture, which provides its own critiques of its problems, and offers

its own antidotes.

 

Besides, are the arts any guarantee of humanity? History would seem to

say otherwise. Just think of the Nazis, who (let’s never forget)

promoted classical music. Or think of the Metropolitan Opera, which

desegregated its stage only in 1955, seven years after major league

baseball signed its first black player.

 

Another prominent arts figure gave a commencement address at Stanford

University, back in 2007, in which he wistfully looked back to the

1950s, when on network TV we could hear performances by (among others)

opera singers like Anna Moffo and Robert Merrill. (Those were the

singers he named.)

 

His point, of course, was that the absence of opera on network TV shows our culture growing shallow:

 

Graduates [now] face the choice of whether they want to be

passive consumers or active citizens, whether they want to watch the

world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that they change it.

That’s no easy task, so we must hope they don’t forget what the arts

provide.

     

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world…[and so on]

 But did watching Robert Merrill help make you an active citizen?

 

Here I’ll speak as a lifelong opera fan. We don’t have baritone these

days who sings Merrill’s repertoire – the heavier Verdi roles, for

instance – with a voice as lush as his.

 

That touches on something I’ll go into later in the book,

the state of classical music performance today. Classical music, as

I’ll show, can learn a lot from its own past.

 But nobody ever said, back in the old days, that Merrill was a smart

or creative singer. When he sang opera, what he did got called art,

because then, as now, we automatically classical music as art. But

that’s no guarantee that anything would really be artistic.

 

Contrast Bruce Springsteen, whom we might see on television now. He

writes his own music. He writes his lyrics. He thinks about where we

are and where we’re going. He inspires millions of us. And not cheaply.

One of our leading psychiatrists and social philosophers, Robert Coles,

wrote a book about what he means to people.

 

The book, published in 2004, is called Bruce Springsteen’s America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist (and a conservative,

no less, not the kind of thinker who’d usually write in praise of rock

stars) wrote this about Springsteen, just a couple of days before I

finished this riff:

 

[Springsteen's] manager, Jon Landau, says that each style

of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is

jolting and exhilarating.

     

Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked….

     

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the

explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage

couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close

down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law….

     

What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the

stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of

reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their

dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on

an epic and anthemic scale.

     

There are certain prominent neighborhoods on his map — one called

defeat, another called exaltation, another called nostalgia. Certain

emotional chords — stoicism, for one — are common, while others are

absent. “There is no sarcasm in his writing,” Landau says, “and not a

lot of irony.”

     

Then there is the man himself. Like other parts of the emotional

education, it is hard to bring the knowledge to consciousness, but I do

think important lessons are communicated by that embarrassed

half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself. I do think a

message is conveyed in the way he continually situates himself within a

tradition — de-emphasizing his own individual contributions, stressing

instead the R&B groups, the gospel and folk singers whose work

comes out through him.

So by putting Springsteen on TV instead of Robert Merrill (or whoever

his contemporary equivalent might be), have we gained or lost?

 

I’d say we’ve gained a lot. We have a star who creates his own art, who

says something of his own, who helps to show us who we are. (Robert

Coles’s book is full of people for whom Springsteen provides some

treasured family photographs.)

 

And we also have a working-class guy from New Jersey, who reflects his

roots, not someone trained to lose himself in an elite form of art.

Which shows us how art and creativity have spread through our society,

and aren’t just limited to those trained in the art forms sanctioned by

our elites.

 

If this isn’t progress, I don’t know what is.

 

Of course I’ll have to defend Springsteen as an artist and

a musician, from anyone who says that his character and his influence

might be stellar, but that his music is trivial. And that something

might erode in us, if we hold Springsteen up as any kind of musical

model.

     

Should I put something about this here, or save it for my later chapter on pop music and popular culture?

     

Here’s one example of Springsteen as a musical artist, from a film about the making of his album Born to Run

(included in the boxed set celebrating the 30th anniversary of that

album). His sax player, Clarence Clemons, talks about recording a solo

in one of the Born to Run songs. He laid down many versions of it. And

then he kept on playing, while Springsteen, sitting at the mixing

board, cut between the recorded versions (which he knew by heart),

showing Clemons exactly which spots he’d liked the best. Clemons said -

with the greatest admiration – that this was the most rigorous artistic

leadership he’d ever encountered. (Clemons, I’ve read, also talks about

this in his just-published book.)

     

But of course I’ll have to say at least a little about Springsteen’s

songs, and how I think they stand up in a musical universe that also

includes classical music.

     

A later chapter in the book will be all about popular culture and pop

music, and will demonstrate in full detail how – in our era, if not

necessarily in the past — pop songs can be serious music.

     

And of course there are many, many more examples I’ll give, to show how

creativity has suffused our society, in a way we’ve never seen before.

     

People, in fact, demand participation in their culture now.

So we have companies inviting ordinary people to make commercials for

them. People, all on their own, making endless video mashups, taking

off from Brokeback Mountain, finding unexpected gay subtexts in

old movies and TV shows. People knitting clothes to put on stuffed

animals, imitating Project Runway,

     

But of course the problem, for many people, is that much of this new

expression doesn’t happen in “the arts,” or more precisely in the areas

we’re used to calling art. Can clothes knitted for a stuffed animal be

as artistic – as valuable to all of us – as a poem printed in The New Yorker?

     

That question (and, even more, the reasons people might give for their

answers) could almost serve as a Rorschach test for attitudes toward

art. I wouldn’t even try to answer it, except maybe to say that – for

me – the fact that endless numbers of people are doing creative things

with knitting (and sharing it all online) is more important than any New Yorker poem. And that if you think New Yorker

poems, taken all together, are more important than anything anybody

knits, then would you deny that a society with an explosion of creative

knitting might not – as another flower from a growing tree of

creativity – produce more poets (even good ones) than a society where

people largely do what they’re told?

Though – returning now to classical music – there might be one more

question to ask, before this chapter ends. It’s a teaser for something

else I’ll talk about in much more detail later in the book. Many people

in the classical music business think we need change. So – as one of my

friends asked this week in an e-mail — “Given all this, why don’t we

do it? Why is it so hard? What’s keeping us from doing what we know we

have to do?”

My next riff (exploring chapter two of the book): Why there really is a crisis.

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