On hearing all four Ives symphonies on a single concert (Spring for Music, May 10, the Detroit Symphony, Leonard Slatkin):

The fourth, despite its bristling reputation — so much dissonance! needs more than one conductor! full of wild collages! — is the easiest to hear. Maybe some people in the old-line classical audience would find it difficult, but for anyone who swims in contemporary culture, it’s a rapt and sometimes romping soundscape. You just sit back, and let it flow. The other symphonies, by contrast, will make most sense if you follow their symphonic form, their unfolding of musical themes and motifs.

Which makes the third symphony the hardest to follow, because its symphonic form is attenuated, introverted, hard to hear.

The most astonishing of these pieces is the first, though it’s also the most traditional. It’s astounding because Ives wrote it when he was in college! And already was just about a master of German symphonic form.

The most impressive — and the most deeply fulfilling (for me, at least) — movement in these symphonies is the third movement of the second. Because, written at a time when classical music was an European art, and “American composer” was an oxymoron, it conjures a perfect fusion of Europe and America. As if the two traditions had always been the same.

More on all of this:

The fourth symphony comes with a backstory, almost a mythology. It seemed too difficult to ever be performed. And then, when Leopold Stokowski conducted the first complete performance in 1965, many people couldn’t understand it. (Leonard Slatkin himself had been there, as he said at the Detroit concert, and couldn’t comprehend the piece.)

But those days have — or by now should have — vanished into the past. As perhaps should another trope in the symphony’s mythology (and, more generally, the Ives mythology), which is to marvel at how Ives wrote modernist music before Schoenberg and the other European modernists.

Which is true, but misleading, because Ives was doing something very different. The plainest mark of Schoenberg’s modernism is how dissonant his music grew. At first, in Schoenberg’s free atonal music, this dissonance was searing, angst-filled. Later, in his 12-tone works, the dissonance supposedly was neutral. The 12 tones of the chromatic scale were equal. End of story.

For Ives, too, the most obvious modern trait was dissonance. But it had a different meaning, an American meaning, which isn’t well remembered now, but which we also find in other American modernist composers (Dane Rudhyar, for instance). Dissonance, in its American construction, suggests huge and universal things, democracy, masses of people. And, for Ives, manliness. “Stand up,” he’d shout at concerts, “and take your dissonance like a man!”

So we can hail him as a pioneer, and patriotically praise him for being first. But he was doing something different. Linking him to Schoenberg doesn’t quite make sense. What Ives most anticipated, in my view, was postmodernism. Just look at the third movement of the fourth symphony, a deeply peaceful  fugue, wholly tonal, glowing comfortably next to all the modernist collage.

No European modernist would have done anything like that. It’s as if Kandinsky, on fire with his first abstractions, had made a large, realistic, reverent painting of people worshipping in church. Unthinkable. But for Ives it’s simply what he did.

I think I’ve gone on long enough for now. I’ll continue this post next week. Tomorrow I’ll unveil something new in the blog, the Friday Post, in which, each week, I’ll share things that have come my way, and which you might like to know about. 

On the musical frontier, all around the country, there’s a new sheriff in town. Increasingly, many performing musicians, including several of my close friends and colleagues, are taking charge and instating a new order in the dual role of performing artist and concert presenter, in communities nationwide. People like cellist Zuill Bailey, who’s building a nationwide franchise of imaginative chamber music festivals, transforming towns from El Paso, TX to Sitka, AK with a vision of bedrock-deep community engagement. Like pianist George Lepauw, who founded the International Beethoven Project in Chicago in 2009, and by last year had elicited this rave from John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune:

Revolution 2012 is something you can’t catch anyplace else on the planet, an event of world-class importance.

These are musicians who are fundamentally changing the cultural life of cities and towns across America. The passion and insider perspective that a practicing musician brings to the table, combined with creative vision and entrepreneurial determination, strong artistic networks and musical connections, make the artist as curator a powerful force in shaping the musical landscape. Artists have a unique ability to understand all sides of the concert equation.  George Lepauw puts it like this:

Any serious performer will have been through so many venues and situations that they will have identified the best and worst experiences, and therefore be a in a great position to create a more ideal format for presenting other artists. It’s really a question of finding the right balance of backstage and audience satisfaction. You want the artists to be excited to perform at your venue, because that translates in the emotional content of what they present and is received by audiences as a true gift as opposed to a commercial transaction.

I know that in my new role as Artistic Director of The Artist Sessions in San Francisco, I am tapping into that performer-specific knowledge base every day, with a protective instinct for both my artists and my audiences. And I find that one main idea unites all of us performers who have taken the presenting reins: the desire to facilitate connection, on a deep level, between artists and audiences. We know better than anyone about the frustrations of the fourth wall, and we want to break it down. As Zuill has said:

I find a majority of concerts in classical music similar to going to the aquarium—there’s such a disconnect between the performer up onstage and the audience. You don’t know what they’re thinking; they’re just watching you. But by speaking to people during the concert, I feel a more personal connection.

Other musician/presenters include Sarah Rothenberg at Da Camera Houston, Mark Peskanov at Bargemusic, Alexander Platt at Maverick Concerts… And of course in the sphere of new music, artist-led ventures are front and center, from Bang on a Can’s upstart beginnings in 1987 on down to composer/violinist Matt McBane’s Carlsbad Festival, and any number of composer/musician-run festivals and series.

Sarah Rothenberg is an interesting case. What she’s done in Houston over the last decade as Da Camera’s Artist and General Director has been focused, in large part, on the development of multimedia concerts that connect music with literature and the visual arts, like The Blue Rider: Kandinsky and Music, Chopin in Paris: Epigraph for a Condemned Book, Marcel Proust’s Paris and other similar efforts. The NY Times has hailed this work as “the birth of a new genre.” Maybe so – certainly this mining of other art forms for connection and context yields a wealth of fascinating material, and is fertile ground for the growth of a culturally inquisitive audience. It’s work that has created an effective change to the city’s cultural life.

The communities that house these artist-led projects seem to begin to reflect the distinctive aura of the artist at the helm. The artist/director, too, who can shape the musical life of his or her hometown feels a strong bond to that community. A home base where your music matters is a tremendous gift to an artist, on both personal and professional levels.

Since settling in Houston to raise twins with her husband, a mathematician at University of Houston, Sarah Rothenberg has been able to pull back from the gypsy touring artist life while bringing colleagues like Gidon Kremer, The Juilliard Quartet,  Leon Fleisher, Richard Stoltzman, and Dawn Upshaw right into her own backyard.

Likewise, it was husband and children that originally moored me in Davis, CA, where my artist residency at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts has allowed me, over the last decade, not only to develop my own performance practice in some critical directions, but to enjoy collaborations with colleagues from around the world, and to build an intense connection with the local community. (Example, I’m in tech week right now for a mammoth performance of Rob Kapilow’s Gertrude McFuzz this weekend at Mondavi Center, with guest artists including the Davis High School Orchestra, narrators pulled from the local elementary schools, and two alumni of the National Young Artists Competition I’ve started here. You really can’t beat that for community engagement!)

Zuill Bailey’s road to El Paso was  family-driven too. He’s raising his boys there, with a teaching post at UT El Paso and a comfortable house to provide respite from a frenetic touring schedule. One of the first things you see, when you drive into the airport, is a giant billboard with Zuill’s giant face upon it. A born leader as well as a brilliant musician, he has made the town resoundingly his own.  As Artistic Director of El Paso Pro Musica, he touches every part of the community. Visiting EPPM artists, and Zuill himself, do outreach concerts in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, you name it. Outreach in the literal sense of the word – an inclusive reaching out through the music and the musicians for the good of the people, and the music. And it has paid back in spades. An El Paso Pro Musica concert brings out a joyous, packed house filled with everyone from awkward teens on a date to whole families with grandma in tow. Also a significant number of the single ladies. Zuill isn’t bad-looking.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped in Chicago, on tour to promote my new album Exiles’ Café, and I was able to fit in a performance at at a benefit concert for George LePauw’s International Beethoven Project, held in a splendid private home in Evanston. It was so good to see how much the IBP has grown. In 2011, I was invited to be part of the inaugural festival. There was an absolutely electric sense of possibility and excitement in the air that week. The crowd was young and gorgeous, the musicians were playing at 200%, everyone was doing ten things at once, flying by the seats of pants, scrambling to find more chairs, more wine, a page turner, another driver. Everyone’s moms and girlfriends and boyfriends were pulling double shifts, and every possible favor was called in.  No one got paid very much, and no one really cared. It was terrific.

At that first festival, I gave a midnight concert of my project 13 WAYS of Looking at the Goldberg  in a cavernous industrial art space in Pilsen, a groovy, recently-rehabbed section of Chicago’s Lower West Side.  13 WAYS is a set of contemporary reimaginings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, commissioned from thirteen contemporary composers. It’s a wonderful example of continuity in the concert tradition, of something monumental and iconic moving forward, boldly, into the future. The variations range in mood from lyrical to tempestuous, traveling from neo-romanticism to jazz and back again to Bachian contrapuntalism, with echoes of thirteen wildly diverse voices responding to Bach in their own terms. The piece was a perfect reflection of the heady sense of endless scope and potential for the future that we were all feeling, in that utterly modern, urban space, at midnight after a long day of non-stop music.

 Two years later, with a second festival under his belt, and the 2013 edition just announced, George is looking forward at a long-term plan, a serious fundraising campaign, and a reckoning between early fire and enduring ice. He’s facing the question of longevity after the initial splash, no matter how huge. Because there are big challenges ahead, and those of us who take this leap into the director’s chair face a new level of accountability and responsibility. Now we’re taking an active role in the business of music, and anyone who is reading this blog in the first place knows that the business of music is a troubled one.

But the road ahead for George seems promising if steep. By fortune and by design, he has built a loyal and reliable following in these first two years. The guests at that house concert last month was made up of polished, wealthy Chicagoans from many walks of life: business leaders, doctors, bankers, and young start-up moguls. George made an impassioned pitch for financial support, the usual “give what you can”  offering incentives for giving at every level from $150 to $150,000. But he also asked, explicitly and convincingly, for community, for the festival supporters to contribute in other, equally important ways, like the “tell your friends” word-of-mouth building I talked about in my previous post.

It’s a new day, and even the youngest artists on the national stage seem to take a self-presenting/producing role for granted. 18-year-old pianist/composer phenom Conrad Tao is applying the considerable rewards of his Gilmore Young Artist Award and Avery Fisher Career Grant to the curatorship and production of UNPLAY, a 3-day mini-festival next month at Brooklyn’s powerHouse arena. The central event is the release of Voyages, Conrad’s debut full-length album on EMI Classics,  featuring works by Ravel, Rachmaninov and Meredith Monk, as well as his own compositions vestiges, for solo piano, and irridescence, for piano and iPad. UNPLAY is a far cry from a DIY “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” effort. It’s a highly produced, generously funded project with some serious industry players behind it, and I predict a fairly glittery mix of uptown and downtown in attendance. Guest performers represent a wide swath of the NY scene, from hipster band thingNY to elder statesman (and perennial hipster) Todd Reynolds. Conrad’s presence at the helm of this festival is an indicator of a rather revolutionary strategy in shaping the skyrocketing career of a very young pianist who has any number of options in hand. A strategy that involves thinking big, diversifying, and investigating the role of the artist and his art, as laid out in UNPLAY’s mission statement:

What space does the musician occupy today?

As methods of making, composing, performing, and experiencing music rapidly change, and the lines between those different practices start to blur, it becomes more and more difficult to define the place of “classical music” in our culture…Whether through interrogation of the concert as a recognizable, specific event, consideration of classical music’s (potential and current) role in dominant paradigms, or works that actively resist the “significance” that has aggrandized classical spaces in recent decades, these three conceptions provide alternatives to the standard-issue narrative of classical music.

Amen, I say.

The great game-changer Christopher O’Riley, who plays Liszt and Radiohead with equal commitment, calls Conrad “The kind of musician who is shaping the future of music.”  Music, notice, not classical music.

Which brings us to the question of the Capital C. When people ask me what I do, I always say “I’m a pianist”. And then, often, comes the follow-up: “What kind of music do you play?” And hardly ever do I evoke the Capital C. Well, not that Capital C. “Concert music”, I sometimes say, but not “Classical”. A new profile of the concert musician has taken shape in the last generation. We don’t, as a rule, define ourselves with the old Capital C. Our defining qualities are flexibility, comfort across genres, curiosity about and collaboration with a range of artists, an appetite for new music, that desire for communication with audiences, a reconsidering of  traditional structures… And when these qualities are a central piece of the curatorship of concert music, you have a driving force for change, and one that will have permanent and real effects in a new, brighter day.

During the first [Boston] performance of Brahms’s Third Symphony the audience left the hall in hundreds.…During the last movement of the first performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (1887) there were more people on the stage than in the audience.…[One critic] suggested that in case of fire Bruckner’s Seventh should be played so that the hall would empty instantly.

Do most of us know that new music could be greeted this way, decades before modernism? I didn’t. But I shouldn’t be surprised. We all know how controversial Wagner was. That might tell us that audiences, in the 19th century, were conservative.

But a fuller picture starts to emerge once we know how much of the music performed in those days was by dead composers. Once the concept of “classical music” developed, early in the 19th century, old music — rarely played in the 18th century — began to be valued.

And so more and more of it was played. In William Weber’s The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms, I read that as early as 1860, the number pieces by dead composers on concert programs ranged from 77% to 94%, depending on which European city you looked at.

One senses [Weber writes] that a tough set of discussions went on between composers and the directing boards of concerts, from which emerged the practice of keeping a slot open for a work by a living composer at some concerts in a series. [my emphasis]

Sounds like our own time!

And so I don’t think the problems we’ve had with new music in our era can be blamed on composers, for writing music that audiences wouldn’t like. Instead, given the history I’ve just described, I’d think it’s baked into the concept of classical music, as we’ve come to understand it. If most of our performances — in 1860 or 2013 — are old music, then of course that’s what audiences want to hear. It’s what they’re used to; it’s what brought them to our concerts in the first place.

So who is Spring for Music for?

If you go to the concerts, the answer seems obvious. This festival — which finished its third season at Carnegie Hall last week — features orchestras from around the US, some of which haven’t played in New York before, or haven’t done so for years. Their hometown fans (sometimes more than a thousand at a time) flood Carnegie Hall, waving colored banners.

So that’s who the festival in practice is for, the people who most visibly come to it, the ones who most clearly care. The hometown fans.

But I don’t think that was the original plan. The founders of the festival talked about programming. Unusual programming. Programs that orchestras couldn’t normally do, or could only do by taking big risks, because they might not please the normal audience.

And that’s what’s stressed in the Spring for Music mission statement:

Spring For Music provides an idealized laboratory, free of the normal marketing and financial constraints, for an orchestra to be truly creative with programs that are interesting, provocative and stimulating, and that reflect its beliefs, its standards, and vision. Spring For Music believes that an orchestra’s fundamental obligation is to lead and not follow taste. As such, programming needs to advance, and not just satisfy, expectations.

So this year the Detroit Symphony played all four Ives symphonies. The Albany (NY) Symphony played Gershwin’s not so well known Second Rhapsody, and a symphony by Morton Gould. The Buffalo Philharmonic played a Giya Kancheli piece, and a symphony by Glière.

Clearly this isn’t mainstream stuff. But it’s not what’s bringing people to the concerts, despite a low, low ticket price — all seats are $25. What brings people to the concerts is hometown pride.

I wonder if the founders of Spring for Music expected that. And I wonder if they asked themselves whether the programming — the heart of their concept — would itself have an audience.

My sense is that it doesn’t, that there isn’t any established audience, even in New York, for adventurous classical programming. There’s a young new music audience, but that’s a different thing. It’s not showing up for Glière.

There’s an audience that’ll come to mixed classical/indie rock events. There’s an event audience — people who’ll go to classical programs at Lincoln Center festivals that include all kinds of performances, not just music (and where not all the music is classical). Performances that in the context of the larger festival seem like events. Or people who for 30 years have been going to the Next Wave Festival at BAM.

And there’s an audience for free or inexpensive classical performances, the audience that goes to hear the Met and the New York Philharmonic when they play in city parks, or who show up when ticket prices drop. But these people, from everything I’ve seen about them, would look at Spring for Music’s programming, and say, “But I don’t know this music!” They want the familiar masterworks.

Without the hometown crowds at S4M’s concerts, Carnegie Hall would look pretty empty. Of course, the orchestras can buy tickets for their hometown fans in advance, so maybe the seats, if they’d been available, would have been filled by New Yorkers.

But I’ve heard that S4M tickest are hard to sell in the NY market, and I’m not surprised. Because, again, I’ve never seen or heard of any large NY audience drawn by the kind of programs S4M does. Someone I know who’s involved with classical programming in New York used to complain — sometimes wryly, but also sometimes bitterly — about how few people would come to unusual programs. 

And I think of someone in her 30s whom I met at a birthday party years ago. She’d just moved from San Francisco to NY. When, as we talked, I told her what I do for a living, she responded with great excitement. She’d heard MTT conduct the Ives Fourth Symphony at one of the San Francisco Symphony’s “Mavericks” concerts, and been thrilled. But she wasn’t an Ives fan. Before the concert, she hadn’t known who Ives was. It was the Mavericks brand that drew her, the sense of event, the buzz around those concerts that told people they’d have a great time no matter what was played.

And this is what Spring for Music seems to miss. Look at their website. Utterly blah. Routine graphics (like the one at the start of this post) — standard shots of conductors and orchestras, signifying nothing, offering not even interest, let alone excitement.

And on the home page there’s not one word about the programming mission! Nothing that says, “These are special concerts! Not like anything else. Pick one at random. You’ll be intrigued, absorbed, captivated, thrilled. Go to several, to multiply that. No two of these concerts are alike.” I’m just improvising these words. S4M, if it wanted to, could do much better.

And of course I’m looking only at the website. Maybe, in other marketing, other PR, S4M did do what I’m suggesting. But not doing it on the website is — not to mince words here — an amazing omission. Why aren’t they selling what they most care about? Why aren’t they offering (at least in my opinion) any selling points at all? When someone goes to the site, what’s there to make her care?

One last thought. Back to those exuberant, whooping hometown fans. I loved seeing them at the Detroit Symphony concert I went to. But if S4M did draw a NY-based event audience, would there be two not wholly compatible groups at the concert? The event audience would be an arts audience. The hometown fans come off simply as fans. I don’t mean to say they don’t love classical music, and might not know lots about it. But what comes across is their not arts-based enthusiasm. They’re cheering, in the end, for the home team, much more than for the programming.

The event crowd, from what I’ve seen of it, is an entirely different group, hipper, more clearly urban, edgier, more visibly interested things that are new and advanced. What would they think of the hometown fans? Maybe they’d love them! But on the other hand, I’m not sure anyone would deliberately go out to create an event meant to appeal to both groups at once. An unlikely marketing strategy, I’d think

Three posts, in reaction to Spring for Music, an orchestra festival at Carnegie Hall, now in its third and next to last year.

I’ve been to only two of the concerts, because I no longer live in New York. But the one I went to last Friday — the Detroit Symphony, under Leonard Slatkin, playing all four Ives symphonies, which I very much enjoyed  — certainly made me think.

So first my reaction to the concert’s audience, to the Detroitness of the whole thing, because one feature of this festival is the excitement of the hometown audience for each visiting orchestra, which brings hundreds of people (sometimes even more than a thousand) to Carnegie Hall from Detroit. Or Baltimore. Or Toledo. Or Buffalo. Then I’ll talk about a marketing problem. And then about Ives!

The Detroit audience. Hundreds of them, Exuberant, thrilled, even before the concert began. Waving red  banners. A very fine idea — Spring for Music makes banners for each orchestra, in a different color for each. Hometown fans get the banners, and wave them with splashing excitement.

I loved that. Who wouldn’t? How often do we see real excitement at any orchestra event? And for the four Ives symphonies! Not exactly standard orchestra programming. That’s one key to Spring for Music — creative programs. But I’ll talk about that in my next post.

But now I have to be Scrooge, and ask one sad question about the celebration that burst out Friday night on the Carnegie Hall stage. A celebration, I’ll stress, not just of the orchestra, but of Detroit. A city, we were assured, that’s coming back, from what surely are the most dire problems faced in our time by any US city. The arts, we were told — there was celebratory talking before the performance, as upbeat as could be, with two Detroit representatives, one from GM and one a Detroit official (if memory serves) — the arts were crucial for this recovery.

There were just two (unreferenced) problems. First, Detroit seems to be going downhill, if you believe current news reports, not up. In March, the state of Michigan invoked a law allowing it to replace local elected leaders with an emergency manager, if a town or city is heading toward financial disaster. On Sunday, two days after the concert, the New York Times ran a story about a report the emergency manager would issue on Monday, saying that “the picture of [Detroit's] debt and disarray he paints may be bleaker even than earlier grim portrayals.”

We’re talking here about a city with just about unprecedented corruption, disastrous police and fire departments, and (according to the Times piece) 78,000 abandoned buildings. I don’t claim to be an expert on all of this (though I did read an arresting, if anecdotal, book about it).

I’m also not going to say that the Detroit Symphony hasn’t made an extraordinary comeback from its own near-death experience, or that it’s unconcerned about its city, or that it hasn’t tried to get involved in efforts to make Detroit better.

Nor am I going to say that Detroit hasn’t gotten better in many ways. Look at the revival of the auto industry, or the growth of urban farms and community gardens (wonderful idea for a city with so much abandoned land),  or (admittedly looking toward the future) an eager plan to remake Detroit’s downtown. Or the orchestra’s rebirth!

But it’s also possible for good things to happen while the bad things get worse. Or for a city to go in two directions at once. We had, in the US, before the economy tanked, an economic boom combined with growing inequality, so the boom was very far from benefitting everyone. I don’t want to be cruel, but the revival of the Symphony could reflect something similar in Detroit.

And there’s one more thing. Detroit is a black majority city, hugely so — 83%. So its revival unavoidably needs to be an African-American story. Which we’d never have guessed from the pre-concert festivities in Carnegie Hall. Apart from the orchestra’s very few African-American musicians (I’m told there are four, more than some orchestras have, but of course a tiny number), there wasn’t a black face visible on stage. And very, very few in the audience. Though I’m told, once more, that the Symphony has more African-American ticket buyers than most other orchestras — and that this is something consciously aimed at, with its success being a fine achievement — the people waving red banners were overwhelmingly white.

It’s bad form, I think, to celebrate the revival (or alleged revival) of a black majority city without anyone black taking prominent part. I’ll make more disclaimers — this wouldn’t exactly be the first time African-Americans were publicly ignored in situations concerning them, and it also wouldn’t be the first time people got carried away with small improvements in a situation that might be getting worse.

So what I saw, Friday night, is in part just another installment in the ongoing tale of understandable, not at all uncommon human failings.

But on the other hand, it’s also not exactly new for classical music music, as an enterprise in our society, to be a little blind to external realities, to not fully grasp the world it lives in. Or for the arts to exaggerate their importance, in the face of chilling social and economic realities. Or for classical music, in our time, to be overwhelmingly a white enterprise.

So I think what I saw on Friday is also a classical music problem. To take only the racial aspect of it: It’s hard to think of another field that, at a moment like this, wouldn’t make a point of including African-Americans  — in some prominent way — in what happened at Carnegie Hall. It’s politically tone-deaf not to do that. Also bad form. Also wrong.

But classical music, which for so many years has dealt overwhelmingly with white people, may not quite get this. Despite all its other achievements, the Detroit Symphony (along with Spring for Music and Carnegie Hall, since both organizations could have asked for some action) seemed to reflect that on Friday night.

Next: Spring for Music’s marketing. Including a marketing point one of its leaders made to be when the festival launched, which showed poor understanding of the racial realities of 21st century New York. 

Today, two orchestra tales.

When Leopold Stokowski was music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra

he somehow discovered that the Philadelphia police force had a motorcycle officer who was an expert xylophonist.  So he invited him to a children’s concert and made him the centerpiece of a surprise charade. Stokowski himself opened the program with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture. But he played it at a mile-a-minute clip — so rapidly that the orchestra could hardly keep up with him. Just as it was ending, the motorcycle cop, in full uniform including helmet, goggles and black gloves, strode out on stage and firmly seized Stokowski’s elbow. “You’re going too fast,” he told him while the children gaped. “I’m giving you a ticket for speeding.” Stokowski, in the manner of most citizens in similar situations, attempted to talk his way out of it. The policeman finally offered to let him go in exchange for a chance to play with the orchestra. “What do you play?” asked Stokowski in pretended astonishment. “The xylophone,” said the cop. One was promptly wheeled out, off came the gloves and goggles, and The Flight of the Bumblebee resounded through the Academy — one of the most tumultuously acclaimed performances it ever had there. With events like these taking place, it was small wonder that adult Philadelphians tried to crowd into the children’s concerts — so much so, that a rule was adopted that grownups were not allowed unless they were chaperoning no fewer than ten children. Even at that, all sorts of ruses were attempted to gain entrance. One prominent Philadelphia couple attempted to get in my having the wife dress up in pumps and a short skirt, while the husband put on a false beard and passed himself off as her father. Some Philadelphians remember Stokowski’s children’s concerts more vividly than those they attended in later years.

[from Herbert Kupferberg, Those Fabulous Philadelphians: The Life and Times of a Great Orchestra, pp. 92-3. The xylophone stunt woud have happened in the 1920s or '30s. Maybe more likely in the '30s, when people drove more, and motorcycle cops were out on the road enforcing speed limits.]

And from Houston, during the second world war:

On one famous occasion  at the urging of local sports writers and his own patriotic emotions, [Roy Cullen, the president of the Houston Symphony] allowed the orchestra to be used in conjunction with a professional wrestling match, as part of a war bond show. It was a grotesque spectacle, with the the orchestra sounding a dirge while the gory gladiators beat each other about in the ring. Unluckily the scene was recorded by a newsreel camera and the pictures created a scandal. What was not told was that this atrocity sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in war bonds.

[from Hubert Roussell, The Houston Symphony Orchetra, 1913-1971, p. 108n]

So our era didn’t invent the classical music showmanship that some people now think gives the field a band name. Hubert Rousell, of course, was outraged by the Houston stunt, and apparently others were, too.  But it happened! 

Those Philadelphia children’s concerts must have been jammed, if a rule of one adult to 10 children was even conceivable. And lots of adult concertgoers didn’t disdain the showmanship, didn’t ask whether it dumbed classical music dumb down.

[How that typo happened: I was getting new lenses put in my eyeglass frames, because I had a new prescription. Had to wait in Reihle Opticians in Warwick, NY (recommended, if you're in the area) for almost two hours. Working on the blog post on my MacBook Air, without glasses. (Not recommended.)]

This is a post about assumptions. We all make them. And we couldn’t do without them. None of us approaches anything we do as some kind of blank slate. We have opinions, preconceptions, things we like and things we don’t, and all of this colors everything we do. Even research. If you want to find a new audience for classical music, and do research to find how best to do that, the direction of your research — and even your conclusions — will blow with the winds of the assumptions you made at the start.

To show what I mean, here are two assumptions you might — consciously or not — make about the new audience:

You might — again, consciously or not — believe that the new audience won’t be too different from the old one. Younger, yes, and more informal. But still ready to fall in love with the great classical masterworks, and to share the same classical music culture we have inside the field.

Or you might believe it doesn’t work like that, that the new audience won’t be like the old one. Years ago, B. H. Haggin wrote an introduction to classical music called Music for the Man [sic] Who Enjoys Hamlet. Now, after decades of cultural change, it would have to be Classical Music for People Who Like Mad Men. That’s another universe.

Where would these two assumptions lead us?

If you share the first one, you might reasonably ask who your new audience would most likely be. Where’s the first place you might go to find it? You wouldn’t have to look far, you might all but unconsciously think, since you’ve assumed your new audience would be, in many ways, much like your old one.

So you might ask who, in the world around you, already is close to classical music. Maybe, you’d think, you could approach people who play classical instruments, whether or not they go to classical concerts. So you might commission research on these people, trying to find out why they don’t go to your performances, and what might make them want to. 

An approach like that — minus the research — worked at the University of Maryland when I was artist in residence there. Students who played in the music’s school’s symphony orchestra and wind orchestra (a fine group that mostly plays contemporary classical works) visited marching band rehearsals, and also rehearsals of the Gamer Symphony, a student group that plays videogame music (with a full-sized symphonic orchestra), and is — since it sells out all its concerts — the most successful musical group on campus.

The result? Success! More than 200 new people showed up at the next symphony orchestra and wind orchestra concerts.

Or you might want to do what the Cincinnati Symphony did a few months ago — play Beethoven’s Ninth, stream the performance to video screens all over town, and arrange listening parties in various neighborhoods. You might do research to find out which neighborhoods in your town would work best for something like that.

But if the art museum in your town did a show of punk fashion, you might not think to reach out to those involved (either the curators or the crowds coming to see the show), because you might think these weren’t your people. Even if this show was the talk of the town, as seemed to happen in New York (at least to judge from more than one piece in the New York Times), when the Metropolitan Museum of Art did just such a show.

If you made the second assumption, though, then the punk show would be on your radar. You’d know that punk is much loved in current culture, that kids who were in high school or college when punk hit in the 1970s now are 50 years old or more, and that punk has been revived both in music and (as the Met Museum show exemplified) in fashion. This is one place, you might think, that you’d find today’s cultured people. So how — your research might ask — could you find common cause with them?

Or maybe you’d just reach out to people geographically near you, without first asking who’d be mostly to care about classical music. An approach like that worked, once again, at the University of Maryland, when students who played in the symphony orchestra promoted their concerts in the dorms where they lived. The result? The hall, which before that was normally just half full, now was overflowing (as I saw myself) with excited students, most of them there for the first time.

Or you might think you could do what the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment did, which was to brand special concerts as young, current, maybe even hip. Using members of their actual young audience who — with tattoos and edgy clothes — were clearly not the old classical music crowd. You could do research to learn how the OAE did that, and whether their approach would work, transposed from London to your own town. 

Or you might, as Lara Downes did, try to craft concerts that speak the cultural language of smart, savvy, arts-friendly people who don’t normally go to hear classical music. I don’t think Lara did research, because I imagine that the cultural gap  — between us and the people we want to reach — seemed obvious to her (as it does to me). But if someone wasn’t so sure, they could do research to find what the people Lara wanted to reach might respond to.

Now I’ve outed myself as someone who makes the second assumption — as if that would surprise anyone who’s been reading my blog for a while. But which side I take isn’t the point in this post. I just want to highlight the two very different mindsets, and show how they might send you down very different paths, even if you honestly think your research is objective.

And I also want to ask one last question. What research could we do to show which assumption is right?

When I walked onstage at Yoshi’s San Francisco last Wednesday night, it was with a completely new version of butterflies in the stomach. This time, after a lifetime of going onstage as a concert pianist, I was going on as a concert presenter, welcoming the audience as Artistic Director to the very first program on my new series The Artist Sessions. I was launching the series with the West Coast release party for my new CD Exiles’ Cafe, and I’d invited the genre-bending Quartet San Francisco as my guests, along with a co-host, Rik Malone from SF’s Classical radio station KDFC. It was going to be an evening of celebration, conversation, and exploration – in this case, a musical searching into a kaleidoscopic range of time and place, through music of exile and diaspora.

My idea for the Sessions came out of a lot of thinking over the last few years, about all the issues we explore here on Greg’s blog. Lots of thinking about the present and future of the art, about putting some ideas to the test, building something new, creating the kind of concert experience where real engagement, on a personal, human level, can bring artists and audiences together in a game-changing way. I’ve been out on the front lines for some time, talking the talk about new and better ways to make music happen. Next step: walk the walk.

Late one night last fall I was talking with my great good friend Christopher O’Riley about these ideas, and my plans to find a venue in SF to give them a try. He suggested Yoshi’s, where we’d both played in the past and had appreciated the unbeatable combination of a magnificent Hamburg Steinway, swanky room and excellent cocktails. So I asked my old SF Symphony Youth Orchestra buddy and fabulous trumpet player Chris Grady, who knows his way around Yoshi’s as a frequent performer with various jazz groups, to get me a meeting. I pitched my idea, we agreed to move forward, and I became, suddenly, a concert promoter. And then began months of planning, building, and organizing. Talking to my friends, curating programs, working with the media, booking artists and dates. And understanding, at a completely new level, just what is involved in presenting music, after all.

These last months, I’ve thought really hard and deep about the structures of relationships and community. As we discuss often in this space, there are many different audiences for music, and part of the puzzle of presenting is defining the audience you want to reach, and how. In the case of The Artist Sessions, I wanted to find a mixed audience: people who go to concerts regularly and people who don’t. I wanted to seek out the people who support music and art in the city, and would be excited about the different style and content that the series would be offering, and I also wanted to reach people who are curious and adventurous but not yet initiated -  the people who direct their entertainment/culture selections into other channels: food, art, film, fashion – and could be drawn in by a resonant aesthetic to try something new, and, hopefully, to love it.

I guess my search was directed in large part towards an audience of my own peers. What I see from the stage, night after night in concert halls all over the country, is a real absence of people who look like me out in the audience. I mean people in their 30s and 40s, with busy careers, young kids, limited opportunities for nights out and plenty of competition for their fun money. And I get why they (we) aren’t there. We who are in the thick of things with developing careers and raising families are overworked and overwhelmed. We  feel that our nights out are limited by many things, and when we do get to go out, we would like to have a really good time I believe absolutely that classical music needs to step up its game and offer its audiences not only transcendent art, but also a really good time. Tall order much?

As I waited in the wings on Wednesday I was a little terrified. I was feeling all the anxiety that comes with accountability, and all the expectancy that comes with having put in a lot of hard work. And when I walked out onstage and saw the people sitting out front, it was a moment of exhilaration and blessed relief.  The audience–about 100 ticket holders and some invited friends and family–was made up of a beautiful range of ages and faces, exactly that mix I had hoped for. The usual suspects from the concert circuit around town, but many brand new faces too. There was a full-out energy flowing back my way.  The room felt great, and I was so happy that we were all there together.

It was a pretty wonderful night. Here’s a review.

When we as artists talk about the future, when we talk about building our audience and increasing our opportunities, I think we need to recognize two things:

1)    The job of building that audience is our job. I hear musicians complaining, so often and so loud, about the state of the art. But we can take an active role in addressing this, both when we’re onstage and when we’re off.

2)    The job is a hard job. I think that many musicians believe that concert presenters have access to mysterious resources and powers. Really, they don’t have any magic. Ultimately, they have the same basic tools as everyone else: the courage of conviction and the power of persuasion. How they use those tools, how we all use them, is at the heart of the matter.

Here I am, talking with Classical KDFC’s Rik Malone about my vision for the Artist Sessions, at last Wednesday’s launch. (You can watch us on video.) 

***

Back to what I did behind the scenes, before that. Basically, I called everyone I knew. I started with my inner circle – got my family and close friends to swear blood oaths that they would come to the show, and would try to get their friends out too. Then I called my music colleagues around the Bay Area to get their support, advice and ideas. I brainstormed with the staff at KDFC — the station had sponsored a classical series at Yoshi’s a couple of years ago, with great success, and they were enthusiastic about getting involved with this new venture. I made personal calls to my friends in the media, the bloggers and writers who have their fingers always on the local musical pulse. I was fortunate that my new record was in its release phase during this time, so I had a lot of support from my label’s PR team, and I was able to leverage some of the visibility the record was getting in the press and media all around the country to bring attention to the series. But, above all, I just talked to people, over coffee, over drinks, over the phone…

Our easy access to social media is one thing. It’s kind of great to be able to send a Facebook invite to thousands of people, or retweet a great review. Our circles get wider and wider. But our messages get diluted as well, precisely because of the ease of their dissemination. Marketing as a group message is just that, and we all know it when we see it. We need that kind of marketing, obviously, and we need to do it well. We need to put the information out into the world so it’s there for the seeing and hearing, and we need to do that in the most creative, interesting, attractive, informative ways possible.

But still, there’s nothing that replaces the immediacy of a personal suggestion that comes with some individual caring and effort. And I think this is a simple, obvious answer to our questions about building audiences too. Word of mouth. If everyone who came to Wednesday’s Artist Sessions launch invites two friends to the next Session, that’s about 300 people next time. If, in turn, those 300 people each bring two friends next time, well, you see where this goes. It’s really easy to do, and I think we’re all guilty of not doing it. When I need a new babysitter or hair stylist, or a recommendation about a movie, a restaurant, a book – I ask a friend. You do too. We trust our friends, and they trust us. So if we care about music, out here on the front lines, we need to mine that trust and share information. We need to walk the walk.

Try this: the next time you go to a great concert, text two friends on your way home. Tell them about it. Tell them why you loved it, and why you think they would too. Look up the next concert on the series, or the next appearance by that artist. Find a bar nearby. Invite your friends to meet you for a drink and go with you to that next concert.

By the way, I recommend The Artist Sessions in San Francisco! May 29, Chris O’Riley with the West Coast launch of his new album O’Riley’s Liszt. Please come. Please bring a friend. Walk the walk.

Well, part of this isn’t imaginary. I have speaking gigs coming up — late May at the Bergen International Festival in Norway, and June 19 at the League of American Orchestras annual conference in St. Louis.

In Bergen, I’ll be speaking privately on May 30 to Klassisk, the association of Norwegian concert promoters, and then I seem to have top billing in a debate on the future of classical music, from 5 to 6 PM on May 31. Debating with me will be Rolf Gupta, a conductor, and the manager of the classical music at NRK Radio (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), Ragnhild Veirs. Hilde Sandvik is the moderator. She’s the Culture and Debate Editor (that’s how Google Translate puts it) at Bergens Tidende newspaper.

I’m eager to hear what my co-debaters have to say. And to learn what concert life in Norway is like, especially about the audience, whether it’s similar to ours in the US

At the League I’m billed (see the press release) — as one of the five featured attractions at the conference, under the title “A Conversation with Greg Sandow.” The theme of the conference — and where this post leaps into imagined terrain —  is “Imagining 2023,” imagining orchestras 10 years from now. And what I’ll do with whoever comes to talk with me will be to imagine a happy future for orchestras just a decade away. They’re describing this as a “group visioning experience”:

Where will your orchestra be in 10 years? Can you imagine having thousands of fans in your community who go to any concert you put on, buy any recording you make – even buy your merchandise? How far could you actually go, and what is holding you back?

I’m so eager to see where this goes. It’s like a leap into another dimension. The 1000-lb rhino in the room, of course, is what would have to change for this dream to come true. Orchestras? The community? Both? Neither? I’m looking forward to leading this discussion.

If you’re there — and if you’re in Bergen — come say hello. I’ve always had a good time on my travels, and have forged lasting bonds. With any luck, I’ll be at the entire League conference, and hope I’ll have a chance to see many of my old orchestra friends, and to make new ones.

Cue howls of outrage. But opera was in fact funded that way in 19th century Italy. That’s one thing I’ve learned from a book called Bel Canto Bully (not a great title), a biography of Domenico Barbaja, the leading 19th century Italian opera impresario, written by Philip Eisenbeiss, and about to be published.

I knew Barbaja’s name, as many serious opera fans might, because he ran the San Carlo opera house — the grandest in Italy — in Naples. And made Rossini a superstar by giving him a contract to write spectacular operas. So Barbaja will be mentioned in any biography of Rossini, and in most program or liner notes for any of his Naples  operas (Elisabetta, for instance, or Mosè, Armida, or Otello).

I also knew, from extensive reading, that opera in Italy back then was private enterprise. Opera houses were owned either by private individuals or by local royalty (Italy was divided into many small states), but in either case the building would be rented to entrepreneurs — impresarios — who’d pay for and produce the operas, hoping to make a profit. Which they’d better make, because opera house owner was guaranteed a share, with no excuses allowed if the profit wasn’t made.

But now the book educated me. Impresarios often didn’t make a profit. They’d crash and burn, either because they weren’t good at running things, or because the enterprise was so expensive that profit wasn’t likely. So they’d flee town, or maybe get thrown in jail.

How to fix that? Gambling! Set up gambling in the opera house, as many hours as possible each day and night — even (especially!) during performances — and now the money might pour in. Performance nights were the best time to offer gambling, because people were in the opera house, and, according to the custom of the time, didn’t listen from beginning to end, but rather talked, and visited with friends, And wandered out to gamble.

Barbaja was the king of this arrangement. He first got the gambling concession for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, and then proposed he run the operas, too, which he did with fabulous results, both musically and on the bottom line.

Engaging Rossini was one of his coups. But Rossini was no fool. He demanded (beyond the large fees that he was paid) a share of the profits, which included the profits from gambling! He was all of 22 years old, but wise in the ways of the world. He’d made money from his early operas, and — on top of his fees, and his cut of the profits — invested some of it in Barbaja’s double enterprise. So now he had three Barbaja income streams.

I call this a hidden history because we’re not taught it in music school. There’s still a sense that classical music is somehow sacrosanct, and we read that notion back into the past, when it had no truth at all. Time to revise those music history courses! Especially now that we’re teaching entrepreneurship in music schools. Let’s tell students how entrepreneurial — how wildly entrepreneurial — classical music used to be.

And if the Met won’t fund itself with gambling, every time they put Rossini on their stage, he’s laughing at them.

For those without a sense of humor: I know very well that gambling raises moral questions, and legal questions, too, not to mention questions involving real estate. Where would the Met put its new casino? Where in the opera house would there be room enough? 

But let’s not forget that gambling — I’ll never call it “gaming,” its euphemistic marketing mame — has spread throughout the US, and that lotteries are an important source of state government revenue. And let’s also not forget that nonprofit arts institutions are, more and more, going down profit-making paths to fund themselves. And that casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City have been in the performance biz for years, offering glittering shows by superstars. Pavarotti sang in Atlantic City. So is gambling at the Met really so far-fetched?