Sandow

No-star game

2009-11-06T16:31:27Z

Last night I went to the gala season-opening show at the New York City Opera. That was a night with special meaning, obviously, because the company was coming back from the dead, with a new directo, a refurbished theater, and a new point of view. Let's wish them luck.

But in past weeks I also went (without addressing them here) to the season openers at the Met and the New York Philharmonic, which of course are the other two big classical music performing institutions in New York. And, looking back, as I sat in the audience last night, it struck me that all three events had something in common -- a lack of star power.

The Met, maybe, came closest, partly because it's the Met, and has inherent starry institutional heft. And because celebrities were there. And also because a big-time opera production is, even if it fails, something with heft of its own.

But there wasn't much star power on stage. I guess -- especially given the Met's current artistic strategy, which is to bring itself into the contemporary theatrical world -- the new Tosca production mgiht have been the star. But it wasn't. I'm not going to get into the silly fight over how non-traditional it was. Better just to look at it as we'd look at a new movie, or a new production of a classic play. It was (by any reasonable measure) drab, and not really convincing.

And then there was Karita Mattila, in the title role. She's a serious artist, with a major voice, and real dramatic force. The only thing she doesn't have is star power, that unmistakable magic, which, if she had it, would make space seem to curve in her direction. Which in Tosca is more than a casual problem, because the music (as in almost any leading soprano role in Italian opera) more or less demands that kind of force, simply to deliver its musical punch. And also because the character herself is a diva, a star (as we're told in the piece, and as she shows by how she behaves) does make space curve.

The Philharmonic? Well, there the idea might have been to show that the orchestra was serious, musically. So we had, on the first half of the program, a world premiere (by Magnus Lindberg), and a major and not often performed modern piece (Messiaen's song cycle Poèmes pour Mi). Clearly not the programming of some bimbo orchestra, that mostly wants to play blockbusters for adoring fans.

But the Lindberg piece...well, I've said that I didn't like it ("drab" might again be the word), but of course other people did. What no one can deny, though, is that it didn't create much excitement. It came and went. The Messiaen offered a top classical name, Renée Fleming, but she was miscast in music that needs a bigger voice and especially a stronger lower range, and so she made an impression for serious artistry (and serious work, which I completely respect, to overcome the vocal problems the piece threw at her).

But no star power came through, especially -- and this was the biggest problem -- since the work itself asks to be sung and played with utter transparent sincerity, and no amount of seriousness, even at a very high level, can substitute for that. On supertitles over the stage were translations of the text, all glowing with simple and radiant Catholic faith. The performance had none of that, nor even a point of view on what Messiaen believed with every fiber of his soul. So -- judged by the standard Messiaen himself was visibly giving us -- the performance fell flat.

After intermission, we had the standard rep blockbuster, the Symphonie Fantastique, and here we come up against the Alan Gilbert problem, the question of what, exactly, he's bringing to his new job as music director of the orchestra. There are various views on that (the ones I hear privately in the business being none too favorable), but even if you liked his Berlioz on opening night, you couldn't pretend that it jumped off the stage.

So again, no star power. Especially compared to Dudamel's inauguration in Los Angeles, which I wasn't at, but which by all reports had enough star power to light up the sky all the way to Mars. Dudamel got a ten-minute ovation, one review said. While Gilbert got respectful applause, no more (or very little more) than a good guest conductor would have gotten in the middle of the season. (With, unless I missed something, not so much as a tap of the bow from anyone in the orchestra.)

City Opera. Again, the plan, I think, was seriousness. The gala program was a celebration of American music, from Bernstein to Rufus Wainwright. The opening looked terrific on paper. First Stravinsky's Fanfare for a New Theater, written for the opening of Lincoln Center lo these many years ago, and of course appropriate here, because the theater we were in had been renewed.

And then a premiere, a new fanfare by Peter Lieberson. And then one of Bernstein's irresistible orchestral pieces from On the Town. All played without pause. Except that none of it was played very well, especially the Stravinsky (he's legitimately an adopted American composer), blatted out by a small brass ensemble with every note seemingly getting equal emphasis. Which is about the last thing you want to do in an atonal piece, where listeners who don't know the piece or the idiom can't supply the musical ebb and flow on their own.

The program ended with another choice that looked good on paper, a song called "Take Care of This House" (get it?), from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the many later Leonard Bernstein pieces that has never caught on. And so here there were two problems. First, it maybe wasn't strong enough to end the program, though Joyce DiDonato sang it gorgeously (and I do mean gorgeously). But even if you liked it (and opinions can legitimately differ), nothing led up to it, and in fact the whole gala seemed to flow more or less at random.

And, on top of that, with the pieces not in the order that was shown in the program book, something that was never explained or even mentioned, either from the stage or in any kind of program insert. (There was in fact an insert, but all it said was that Anthony Dean Griffey wouldn't be singing. It didn't even state that the piece he was scheduled to do -- "Singin' in the Rain" -- would be dropped.)

The gala, in the end, didn't feel very gala-like. I didn't sense excitement, or even a sense of celebration. The musical numbers came and went. In the old days, you'd have opera galas with genuine stars, so not much planning might be needed. Someone new would came out on stage, and often enough, space curved. I remember one Met gala in the '80s when Leonie Rysanek crashed in flames in "Suicidio!" (from La Gioconda), but -- she was Leonie Rysanek, so even her train wrecks were compelling. City Opera had some good singers, and Lauren Flanigan really did curve space a bit, but she was singing an aria from Samuel Barber's Vanessa, music that's certainly classy, but doesn't curve space on its own.

So really -- some stage direction was badly needed, to give the gala from spark. And I haven't even talked about the music, which often didn't rise to the occasion. We can talk piously about an American opera canon, and we can even believe we mean it, but put a scene from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah on a program with "Billly's Soliloquy" from Carousel, and -- if you're honest with yourself -- I think you discover (as I did when I saw the South Pacific revival at Lincoln Center) that Richard Rodgers is the real deal, the unforgettable composer, whose music grabs you, makes you smile, makes you get teary, and most of all sticks with you. As Leonard Bernstein said years ago, our American operatic heritage is really our musicals. (Well, that's not quite how he put it, but he pointed that way.)

One piece that really did grab me was an excerpt from Rufus Wainwright's opera, Prima Donna, which the Met apparently declined to produce (after commissioning it), and which apparently didn't have all that much success when it was premiered abroad. I can't speak to any of that, but the excerpt struck me as lovely and quite original.

One more problem was the singer in the Carousel piece, who was perfectly charming, coming off like a sweet guy you'd love to have as a next-door neighbor, which if you know the show tells you that he didn't even begin to fill his character's shoes. And he couldn't get the high notes the soliloquy ends with, so apart from the big burst of love that Richard Rodgers drew from me, the excerpt fell flat.

Bottom line -- not much star power. I don't think this is good. Star power isn't all that classical music needs, or should have, but without it, our art is falling behind in yet another way. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame anniversary celebration had star power, and so did the world series (to name two big events that happened in New York this fall). If classical music -- especially since, like it or not, people look toward it for glamour and romanice -- doesn't make space curve, if it merely, even at gala moments, puts on nice serious, professional shows, then something's wrong. It wasn't like this in the past.

Quotation of the day

2009-11-05T16:49:56Z

From my wife Anne Midgette's probing review of classical music in the White House, in today's Washington Post:

...what becomes clearer, in this presentation, is that classical music no longer automatically holds a position of predominance among today's power elite. The day's message was, "Look, classical music can be fun," even though this message is also a tacit admission of the widespread assumption that it isn't.
President Obama reflected that, indeed, in his opening remarks, joking that newcomers to classical music shouldn't worry if they weren't sure where to applaud: President Kennedy had the same difficulty, said Obama, who noted that he himself fortunately had Michelle to cue him properly. It was not exactly a hopeful sign of classical music's artistic significance, though to judge from the hearty laughs, it resonated with many in the audience.

Anne has a lot more to say, all of it true and valuable, about how classical music strains to make itself seem easy and natural, even though everyone involved doesn't quite believe that's true. And how classical music falls back on a vague sense that it's passionate, in order to explain what it means and where it fits

See my last blog post. Zombieland did it so much better! Classical music really did seem natural when it showed up in that film. Also look at the sweet Amex commercial with the smiley and frowny faces, where a Bach cello suite sounds like the most natural thing in the world:

Unexpected classical music

2009-11-04T22:06:11Z

In Zombieland (a delectable movie), there's a scene where the four dysfunctional people we're learning to love smash up a store full of tacky western-style souvenirs. And have loads of fun doing it. They're allowed to, because as far as we and they know, they're the only human beings left in the US. It's them against millions of zombies.

And what do we hear on the soundtrack while they're smashing the souvenirs? The Marriage of Figaro overture, sounding like wild, crazy fun, just as it ought to in the opera. (It would work even better in the film if they'd chosen a better performance.)

This is another example of the new use of classical music on soundtracks and in commercials. It's chosen, apparently, simply for its sound, without any overlay of classical music romance or pomp.

Compare this to the last movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto during an especially violent murder scene in There Will Be Blood. Again, the music suggests wild and crazy fun, though this time with a biting ironic edge, and without any overlap with anything Brahms most likely had in mind. (It's a much more violent scene than anything in Zombieland, even though -- or maybe because -- the only monster around is human.)

Crossing cultures

2009-11-04T21:08:21Z

Three quick notes about things I learned in Tunis.

First: Composers in Guatemala incorporated Afro-Caribbean music into their compositions -- in the 18th century! I learned this from Dieter Lehnhoff, an Austrian violinist and conductor who's been living in Guatemala for many years, and has studied, published, and recorded Guatemalan compositions from past centuries. There are recordings of some of these pieces with the Afro-Caribbean influence, but they're not (I gather) available outside Guatemala. Dieter says the composers used pizzicato strings to mimic the sound of the local marimbas, which played a large role in the local music.

Of course, most of us think this kind of fusion has happened only in our own time. But apparently not!

Second. I learned about one kind of Australian aboriginal music, in which there are separate rhythmic and melodic cycles that fit together very freely. (I don't claim to be an expert on world music, and I'm only repeating here what I was told. If I've gotten it wrong, I'm sure it's my own fault.)

What this means: there would, in this style of music, be cycles of note-lengths. Maybe a note four pulses long, then a note one pulse long, then two pulses, then three pulses. I'm making this up, just to give an example of how it might work.

And then meanwhile there would be independent melodic cycles, little repeated melodies. Or rather repeated collections of pitches, because the pitches don't become a melody until they're joined with a rhythm.

How does that happen? Like this, I gather: Someone starts singing. And then everyone else says, without having to think about it very hard, "Oh, OK, he started the rhythmic cycle on the fourth note, and the melodic cycle on the third note. And then everyone joins in, continuing what the first singer did, easily fitting the melodic and rhythmic cycles together. Something I can't believe a western-trained musician would be able to do at all. (There's a similarity here, in the western tradition to procedures in serial music, and also in medieval music.)

Third: I learned to hear microtones in Tunisian music. For some people, that wouldn't have been an achievement. I know people in the new music world (the contemporary branch of classical music) who live and breathe microtones. But I never got them.

Here's how I learned. A Tunisian speaker mentioned, in an offhand way, that in former times Tunisian music had over 100 modes. That seemed impossible to many of us. How many arrangements can there be of the standard tones of the scale? Which is how we understand modes, in the western tradition. They're scales, different from our familiar major and minor scales, but still drawn from the same notes.

The answer turned out to be simple. Tunisian modes use microtones. The Tunisians had set up a display table, with books and CDs for sale. I browsed through a thick book on Tunisian music, and found descriptions of traditional Tunisian modes. They used microtones. There seemed to be four inflections for each note -- the natural version (a white key on our pianos), and a version of the note that's half a tone lower (this would be one of our black keys). And then notes that fall into the cracks between our piano keys, notes either a quarter tone or three quarters of a tone lower than the note on the white key.

These microtones change the game. I had my netbook with me, and Sibelius, the notation software I use, installed on it. Sibelius can play these Tunisian microtones. So I got it to play one the Tunisian modes, a scale that goes like this: D, E quarter flat, F sharp, G, A, B quarter flat, C, D.

Up to that point, I would have thought that these quarter tones were inflections of western pitches. That, in other words, the scale might just as well be written D, E flat, F sharp, G, A, B flat, C, D, with the understanding that E flat and B flat would be sung and played just a little higher than we'd sing and play them.

But that's not right at all, as I found out when I listened to Sibelius play the mode first as I've just given it in western pitches, and then in its proper Tunisian form. The Tunisian notes aren't just inflections of the western ones. They're an entirely different pitch system. The interval between E quarter flat and F sharp, especially, is something rich and individual, not at all familiar to western ears. I've put what Sibelius played online, so you can hear it yourself. First the Tunisian mode in standard western pitches, and then with the proper Tunisian ones.

This opened my ears, and I began hearing the microtones that Tunisian musicians were singing and playing. Maybe not as many as they would have used generations ago (one study of music in the Congo showed that recent Congo recordings have more western pitches than recordings made decades ago). But the microtones are certainly there.

There also are long rhythmic cycles. I began to be aware of them, simply by listening. The singers and musicians would embark on one of their characteristic long and subtle unison melodies, which would curve upward, wonderfully ornamented, and then eventually sink back toward the keynote of the mode. I tried counting how many beats this took, and kept getting lost, though it was clear that more than 100 beats would pass till the keynote returned. Later I learned that Tunisian music routinely incorporates rhythmic cycles of more than 100 notes, cycles whose length is predetermined or otherwise agreed on (if I understand this correctly).

Again that's a concept we don't have in the west. And most of us, I suspect -- even if we can easily improvise over, let's say, a blues progression, or something more complex from a standard pop song -- would get lost following rhythmic cycles of more than 100 beats.

Again, please note: I'm not, not, not offering myself here as any kind of authority on world music. I'm recounting all this as a narrative of my very elementary but for me very striking world music education. If it helps others understand how different from ours other musics can be, then I'll have done some good.

Future of, international edition

2009-11-03T03:19:57Z

We hear a lot about classical music in Finland -- about how many orchestras they have, how they train and nourish musicians, how many fine composers they have. Etc.

But apparently they have no more luck getting younger people to go to classical concerts than we do. Timo Cantell, an arts management professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, gave a paper in Tunis about this. He interviewed people in their 20s and 30s who don't go to classical concerts. He asked them, among many other things, about advertisements for classical concerts:

"A typical advertisement [for a classical concert] might have a black-and-white picture of a soloist or conductor or ancient composer and the text might read: Bach - Beethoven - Sibelius. This format does not communicate to the non-attendees at all."

One of the non-attendees got off a terrific one-liner. He called these ads "obituaries."

***

The Australian Music Council has links on its website to stats about classical concert attendance in various countries, Australia of course included.

This is good news and bad news. It's good news that any numbers at all are available, and that the Australian Music Council took the trouble to collect them, and make them available. I've asked people in various countries if they know of any stats like these, and the answer has always been no.

But the bad news is that I don't know what these stats are worth. It's fascinating -- or ought to be -- to learn that classical music attendance is down in Ireland and up in Spain (and that it's down in 8 of the 13 countries listed). But what do the numbers actually mean? Are they comparable from country to country?

As the website drily observes:

"[T]he data available from the various countries differs considerably. In some cases we are given audience numbers - although it is not always clear whether this is the total number of individual people attending, the total number of attendances (paid and free), or the number of tickets sold. In some cases we are given a percentage, presumably the percentage of population attending. But we do not necessarily know whether this is total population or adult population and in some instances, the percentage is so high that there is some question as to whether these are percentages of total population or, for instance, percentage of population that attends the performing arts. Finally, of course, in some cases we might be reading the results of sampling surveys and in others, the results of e.g. census questions to the entire population."

In Australia, the performing arts audience has been getting older, with the classical music audience taking the lead. "In 1991, the highest attendance rates [this is for all the performing arts] were among the 35-44 and 45-54 year age groups, both at 10.2%. By 1995, the peak had shifted to the 45-54 year group, by 1999 to the 45-54 and 55-64 year groups, with a further aging peaking on the 55-64 year age group in 2006." Which is more or less exactly what NEA statistics show for classical music in the US, during more or less the same period.

One surprise is the reported increase in classical concert attendance between 1991 and 2006, while attendance at other performing arts events -- even rock concerts! -- was going down. But an Australian told me privately that this increase apparently was due to crossover events produced by orchestras, so (if this is true) the numbers are deceptive. They don't show an increase in classical attendance. They show an increase in nonclassical events produced by classical music organizations, with the sales figures for the nonclassical concerts folded into an overall total.

Which once more shows that we have to look at numbers like these very carefully.

International music politics

2009-11-02T16:23:08Z

Two more posts on Tunisia, before I get back to business as usual, including my book. (My other posts on the Third World Forum on Music, held in Tunis, and which I spoke at, are here and here.)

I'd mentioned international issues in music, and discussed -- a familiar subject here -- music advocacy, which the organized international music community likes to talk about. Another one, more important, I think, is cultural diversity. Countries around the world want to preserve their local musical cultures, whether that's their ancient musical tradition, or else their contemporary styles.

And one way to preserve these things, as I understand it (this is mostly new to me, and I may be getting some of it wrong), might be to reserve, by law, some percentage of air time on local radio for music produced locally. I know that Canada has a law like this, and at one time reserved, I believe, 30% of its music broadcasts for Canadian music.

So who's the big opponent of this, worldwide? I was surprised -- though, I admit, not astonished -- to learn this. It's my own country, the United States. In the name of free trade, the US has opposed these local laws, and its weapon against them has been trade agreements. NAFTA, for instance.

When NAFTA was passed, bringing the US, Canada, and Mexico into a free trade zone, there was lots of controversy, and even demonstrations against the agreement in the US. But I never heard anyone object to its music provisions. In order to get freer access to US markets, Canada, at least, had to ease up on its "Canadian content" laws, the laws that guaranteed a certain percentage of air time for Canadian music. Or so I was told in Tunis. I was also told that Australia, negotiating its own free trade agreement with the US, had to make a similar concession.

The US, in other words, is using free trade agreements to protect big global record companies. One irony is that only some of these are American. Sony, for instance, is Japanese (though its CEO is British), and Universal is currently owned by a French conglomerate. (Though stay tuned: Universal has changed hands before, and may do so again.) Still, the US protects them. There was talk, on a panel about cultural diversity, of a UN vote that did no more than encourage UN member countries to protect their local music. Only two nations voted against it -- the US and Israel.

These are complex issues. By protecting local music, countries might also isolate themselves from the rest of the world, including authentic musical developments that their own citizens might want to embrace. Which includes the blend of local traditions with international music, which on one hand can be schlocky, but on the other can lead to really exciting new styles, including Algerian Rai music (a meld of Algerian music and dance beats) and the many varieties of African pop. Not to mention the way Chinese traditional instruments have been used by Chinese classical composers, or the many stars on all kinds of traditionall instruments who've done creative collaborations with people in pop and jazz.

But I can't say I like the position my own country takes on all of this. It doesn't exactly make me proud to be American.

International music

2009-10-27T14:59:00Z

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

2009-10-26T16:39:46Z

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 have 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

2009-10-15T23:45:07Z

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 the contemporary 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 in classical 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, younger people 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

2009-10-15T18:33:09Z

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.

A riff from my book

2009-10-09T19:35:11Z

Here's a riff from my book. It's a quick and dirty version of the beginning, not the actual text, but a riff on what the beginning is likely to say.

Why did I write this? Because of thoughtful comments from a number of people, including some highly placed in the classical music business, not to mention (and just as valuable to me) a reader of this blog. Maybe, said these comments, the book as I outlined it earlier spends too much time proving that classical music (as we know it) is in trouble. Because everyone knows this! Instead, I should jump in with visions of classical music's rebirth -- since "Rebirth," after all, is the book's title.

I do get a lot of arguments, though, about classical music's health, and so do others. So I'm trying to split the difference -- reserve space for demonstrating how bad the problems are, but also jumping right in with something positive. Hence the riff. See what you think. Comments, as always, more than welcome (but completely optional).

And note that the copyright notice at the end allows all of you to spread this riff -- and the outline -- as widely as you'd like, subject to some fairly obvious provisions the notice sets forth.

Riff:

[from Chapter I --Rebirth and Resistance]

Let's look at the rebirth part.

So many changes in classical music, going off like fireworks. And nobody has ever catalogued them (which of course becomes one more reason why I'm writing this book).

All of these changes bring classical music right into the culture shared by the rest of the world. Just imagine what would happen if these changes gathered strength. Classical music could be reborn. It could rejoin the culture around it. Which would mean incisive classical concerts, with lots of new music, and a much younger audience. The musicians might look both sharp and informal. They'd talk to their audience. They'd be empowered -- controlling their concerts, playing for people much like themselves, playing the music they care about, in ways we can hardly dream of now.

Though if we want any hints, we can look at how freely classical music was performed in past generations. Or at what students at the National Orchestral Institute did when they took control of one of their concerts this summer. Or at alt-classical concerts in New York -- the Wordless Music orchestra concert, with two sold-out houses of 1000 people each, or the Bang on a Can marathon, playing one year to 1000 people, and the next to 2000.

Some other straws blowing in this strong new wind:

Maestro, classical music reality show on the BBC. Celebrities try to conduct an orchestra. OK, minor-league celebrities, like David Soul, sometime blonde hunk on Starsky and Hutch, a ghost from the '70s, now a folksinger. But the job they had to do was very real, and the judges -- who included two top conductors, Sir Roger Norrington and Simone Young -- were very serious, though of course fun. You haven't lived till you see a dance DJ told that he hadn't indicated upbeats clearly enough, when he conducted an aria from Cosi fan tutte. The payoff from this? The winner got to conduct a piece at a Proms concert, and viewers got to see -- and hear -- exactly what conductors do

A concert I hosted and helped plan, on a Pittsburgh Symphony series called "Symphony With a Splash." We programed the "Bacchanal" from Samson et Delila, and -- shades of the Biblical Samson -- shaved the head of a volunteer from the audience while the music played. (I can't take credit for this. The idea came from the Symphony's VP of Artistic Planning, Bob Moir.)

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, played at Le Poisson Rouge, the club in New York that's becoming a classical music destination. On a bill with two ambient electronic pop musicians. The audience of 275 or so equally split, or so I was told, among fans of all three acts. Which meant most of the crowd had -- it seems safe to guess -- never heard the Messiaen before, or even heard of it, or heard of Messiaen. The result? A restless crowd for the first five minutes, then silence. And then an ovation.

Commercials that use classical music. A huge new crop of them. Classical music no longer is used to signify something, elite, like Poupon Grey mustard. It's just used for fun, or because it sounds lively. Like the start of the first Bach cello suite, used in a terrific AMEX ad, where smiley faces show up unexpectedly on buildings and in the street, formed by windows and headlights. The message conveyed here, about classical music? That it's part of our lives, both classy and fun.

I could go on. Supply your own examples. We've all seen them, or heard of them. How many classical musicians these days play in clubs? Classical music, meet the real world.

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. The proper link is http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2009/10/a_riff_from_my_book.html

The point of my...

2009-10-05T14:49:52Z

..."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.

Technology or culture?

2009-10-04T16:11:38Z

Fascinating New York Times piece on college student blogs -- and how colleges and universities are flaunting these blogs on their websites (with MIT in the lead), even if the students don't always say favorable things about the schools.

Why is this happening? Because high school students trust these blogs. They want to know what various colleges are really like. That's how they decide where they want to go. And who better to tell them, than students already there?

Some schools resist this, though. They want to control their message. They want prospective students to have the school's own official view of itself. This, the piece seems to say, is a losing strategy. The students see through the official message, and want something more authentic, something that feels more like the truth.

So here's a question. Do we file this story under technology, or culture? I'd say both, and that the two subject headings are largely inseparable. New technologies have helped create a new culture. With information so widely available, and with so many chances for any of us -- all of us -- to put ourselves, in the most personal way, out there for anyone to see, people now look for a personal view of things. That's how, increasingly, we decide on purchases, by reading user reviews of products we're considering. And that, says the Times, is how students are deciding where to go to college.

What does this mean for classical music?

It means that you can't use new technologies -- or at least not use them to their full potential -- without embracing the new culture. If you're on Twitter, you can't (as I've said before) just send out tiny press releases, as so many classical music organizations do. Your tweets can't be anonymous. And it's not enough to give them a tiny bit of ersatz sparkle, by saying things ("Hey, today is Mahler's birthday!") that you've manufactured because you think they might be fetching, even though you yourself don't even care about them much. Your tweets need to come from an actual person, and say things that this person cares about.

And what's the lesson from the students' blogs? Maybe classical music groups -- even major institutions -- should let their staff, musicians, board, and audience start talking on their websites. With critiques of performances! "Last night just wasn't our best. The performance -- from what I heard in the oboe section -- just plodded along." Disputes might develop. "Plodded along? The trombones were irresistible."

Do that for a while, and word will spread. (Especially if you work to spread it virally.) People you've never heard of will start checking in, because they know that something real is going on.

Does anybody dare to try this? (Or maybe someone already has. Please let me know!)

Forty years behind

2009-10-02T14:32:08Z

I got beat up by some of my valued readers when I said -- in an earlier post -- that Magnus Lindberg's music "plunged me back into the Second Vienna School." Or, more broadly, that Lindberg composes "in a style that, broadly speaking (and whatever may have been added to it since) was new around 1910."

Nor did I help myself by mistakenly saying he's Swedish. Finnish, rather.

And OK, I did admit I was exaggerating. But when I said that the Philharmonic -- where Lindberg is now composer in residence -- is thirty years behind in its approach to new music, I feel 100% vindicated by what Lindberg said at a Philharmonic concert last night.

Once again, the Philharmonic played Lindberg's Expo, which they commissioned from him as a kind of musical celebration to kick off the new season -- not to mention Alan Gilbert's reign as the Philharmonic's new music director -- and premiered a couple of weeks ago at their opening gala. Last night I thought, as I thought at the opening, that the piece was weighed down by its debt to European modernism of all generations, so much so that it didn't sound (to me) very celebratory.

Though certainly it's well written, and there are terrific moments in it. But LIndberg also talked about the piece, and there I just rolled my eyes. Not that I mind a concert that starts with Gilbert and Lindberg coming out on stage together, to talk to the audience about the new work. The more of that the better, I say. Bravo to Gilbert for changing the rules. (And more about that in a later post.)

But what Lindberg said! Expo, God help us, has triads in it. Triads! And these, Lindberg said, were absolutely forbidden when he went to music school in the 1970s.(As they were at the Yale School of Music, when I studied composition there in the same era.) But now, at last, and evidently after much pondering, Lindberg feels he can write them, as long as he takes proper care to integrate them into his otherwise nontriadic compositional language.

I could say that his caveat -- the care he needs to take with triads -- sounds to me like the weight of his modernist background is bearing down hard on him.

But maybe I'm wrong, and anyway, that's not what matters. Let's think about triads. Lindberg, after maybe years of pondering, thinks he now dares to use them. But since his days in music school -- and mine -- more than a few composers beat him to it.

I'm not talking now of composers (Ned Rorem, Samuel Barber, Menotti, Bernstein, Carlisle Floyd, so many more) who'd always written triads, and never joined the modernist camp. I'm talking about composers with a genuine radical pedigree, who way back in the '70s started clearing some new triadic paths.

George Rochberg, when I was in school, was a special inspiration, a former 12-tone composer who now wrote lush, tonal music (in his Third String Quartet, for instance), which sounded almost like Mahler. David Del Tredici blazed his own, somewhat similar (and certainly triadic) path.

Penderecki joined the new tonal camp some years later. And we've also had -- writing triads, if not in every case full-fledged tonal scores -- Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Golijov, Meredith Monk, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, Gorecki, Schnittke. Arvo Pärt, such a long list. Plus names I'm surely blanking on. Charles Wuorinen, in his 12-tone fortress, has written triads. Reich, Glass, and Monk have been writing them for the entire length of Lindberg's student and professional life.

More: when Lindberg and I were in music school, Britten and Shostakovich were writing triads. But at least where I was (the Yale School of Music) we never talked about them. It's as if they were embarrassments. Great living composers who somehow wrote tonal music. Too good to dismiss, but embarrassing to praise. Better not to mention them. Now, of course, their music bothers very few people (Pierre Boulez, and who else?), and we accept them in the pantheon. Add them, then, to the composers using triads during Lindberg's life in music.

Given all this, how can Lindberg come out on stage and talk about writing triads as if that's something new? New for him, sure. And his history is just as valid as anyone else's. But everyone else's history doesn't stop existing just because his own is different. He might more embracingly have said, "Look, when I was in music school, triads were forbidden. But since then, all kinds of composers started using them. I didn't. Well, now I've started to, and here's what I think about it." What a breath of fresh air that would have been! No blame to him for not writing triads earlier. But at least he'd acknowledge the world he and the rest of us are living in.

By not doing that, he basically told us, "Hey, I'm living in a bubble." And the Philharmonic, by choosing him as composer in residence, is living in that bubble, too, even if they've programmed Nico Muhly (who writes not just triads, but often a pop-music beat) on one of the upcoming concerts by their new contemporary music ensemble.

Maybe Lindberg feels that this triad thing is very American. Well, fine, and others have taken that view. But he's in America now -- and, even more, in New York, where a whole new generation of young composers is happily writing triads -- and it's simple courtesy to acknowledge what goes on here.

Besides, look again at my list of triad-using composers -- Penderecki, Pärt, Schnittke, major European names. (Gorecki maybe not so much, because he wasn't all that well known before the amazement of the Third Symphony, and he more or less dropped out of sight after his big success. Though he'd been using triads earlier. His Second Symphony, which no one seems to play, has, for me, a more triumphant use of triads than the Third.)

Or maybe Lindberg hates a lot of this non-modernist triadic stuff. Fine. That's his right. But he could say so, in a considerate way, maybe like this: "Other composers, and I'm sure you know their names, have been using triads for decades. But I haven't always found them convincing, because they seemed to move too far from the tradition I'm loyal to. I had to learn to use triads in my own way." That, too, would have been lovely -- honest, courteous, informative.

Bottom line -- Lindberg should get out of his bubble. I'm not saying he's a bad composer, or a bad guy. He strikes me as completely honest. And nobody, least of all me, should dare tell him what sort of music he should write.

But he just can't come on stage and talk about new music as if -- implicitly -- his own modernist concerns are the only ones that really matter. Especially since the modernist composing community used to think and talk that way a lot. And in fact got the intellectual part of the classical music world talking as if the mainline of composition (after the 19th century) was atonal, running from Schoenberg to Boulez, and then to later modernists like Lindberg. Leaving out, of course, some of the most important composers of the time (Sibelius, Ravel, Puccini, Poulenc, Britten, Shostakovich, Steve Reich, so many more). As if these great names were mere outsides, not writing the music that really mattered.

We have to get out of this bubble. Not just Lindberg -- and please, I'm beating up on him here not as a composer, but only as a musical figure, representing new classical music to the wider Philharmonic audience. So, yes, not just Lindberg, but the Philharmonic, too. Out of the bubble! On stage at Avery Fisher Hall last night, Lindberg, Alan Gilbert, and (because of them) the entire institution sounded nut just thirty years behind the times, but almost forty.

Enough of that. Time to wake up.

Music or presentation?

2009-09-29T14:59:37Z

(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.