Unanswered Question: January 2010 Archives

America's struggling orchestras face a double need with a single obvious but controversial solution.

The first need is to play fewer concerts. In countless communities, large and small, the concert supply outstrips demand. Orchestras are burdened with contractual obligations that compel them to produce - laboriously and expensively - concerts without a ready audience. Fundraising and marketing resources are overstretched and stretched again.

The second need is for orchestras to define themselves less narrowly as concert producers and more broadly as education providers, engaged with schools, universities, museums, with the community at large.

The obvious but controversial solution is "service exchange." Mandated services - typically rehearsals and performances - are swapped for, say, visits to high school classrooms.

Service exchange is not a new idea and has for some time been implemented to a marginal degree. Musicians - and their unions - tend to resist it as a dilution of the roles they have been trained to serve. But with the realization that symphonic jobs are scarce and getting scarcer, the training of young musicians is rapidly changing. And one adventurous orchestra has managed to implement service exchange so substantially that it may be said to have re-invented itself.

The orchestra is the Memphis Symphony and the testimony of Ryan Fleur, the CEO, was a highlight of the recent Orchestral Summit at the University of Michigan. Eighty per cent of the Memphis Symphony's 36 fulltime musicians engage in "approved partnership activities" totaling up to 45 of 266 contracted services per season. They mentor students at an inner-city charter school. They furnish "leadership training" for local corporations. They produce performances outside the concert hall, replacing traditional subscription weeks.

I asked Ryan what it all means. A "cultural shift in thinking," he replied. How did he sell service exchange to his musicians? "It took a while to build a culture open to the concept. The musicians, the staff, and the board view this as a complete redefinition of what it means to be a musician, rather than an 'exchange of time.' Musicians have sold the concept to fellow musicians because they believe that by doing so they have become equal partners in the orchestra's success. And they believe this redefinition is essential to the survival and necessary transformation of the orchestra, so we can remain a vital part of Memphis's cultural life."

I also discovered at the Ann Arbor conference at least one union representative who, in private conversation, seemed prepared to advocate service exchange to reluctant constituents.

There are many other Memphises, big and small - cities that have changed, demographically and sociologically, in ways that are making the traditional symphonic template anachronistic. Will the Memphis model work? Will other orchestras adopt it? I cannot think of any questions more important to the future of classical music in the United States.

The recent Cleveland Orchestra strike has produced a flurry of commentaries about the financial woes of American orchestras and the impact of declining urban centers on declining audiences. A longer view and a larger picture will be pursued at the forthcoming "Orchestral Summit" at the University of Michigan.

I remember when the annual conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of American Orchestras) was a sanguine affair. By the late 1980s, concerns about graying audiences had fixed worried attention on marketing and fund-raising strategies. Gradually, the field has come around to the inescapable realization that artistic methodology and purview could benefit from some fundamental rethinking.

The look and sound of concerts are changing. Earlier this month, I had occasion to script and produce a multi-media "Tchaikovsky Portrait" given on subscription by the Pacific Symphony (Orange County, California). A conductor/commentator, a host, an actor, a visual track, and musical examples were employed in a concerted attempt to promote intense personal engagement with the Pathetique Symphony. We surveyed our audience and discovered that 88 per cent reported "deeper appreciation" of classical music. Twenty per cent reported having "concentrated conversations" about the concert. For that matter, hundreds stayed for post-concert discussions lasting 45 minutes all four nights.

In the US, the traditional template for symphonic concerts was well established by 1900. In terms of concert-giving, Henry Higginson's Boston Symphony, founded in 1881, was strikingly similar to the orchestras of today in all respects save one: no guest conductors. Its subscription concerts, tours, and summer pops programs totaled more than 100 per season. Overtures, concertos, and symphonies were purveyed, same as today. There was no talking from the stage.

But the context, in retrospect, was strikingly different. Four factors produced an automatic sense of occasion. There were no radios, phonographs, CD players, or TVs to reproduce the sound of the orchestra in a living room. With the exception of Theodore Thomas's Chicago Orchestra, there were no other great orchestras to be heard. Contemporary music (Tchaikovsky, Dvorak) was popular, not esoteric. Local composers (Chadwick, Loeffler, Foote, Beach) greatly mattered.

In fact, Higginson's Boston Symphony completely fulfilled Theodore Thomas's credo that "a symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community." Because of the multiple worlds occupied by Higginson himself (a banker/aesthete), because of Higginson's insistence upon reserving 25-cent non-subscription tickets, the orchestra interfaced with a network of Boston constituencies. State Street bankers, university students and professors, Brahmin families were all represented in force.

Two generations later, when Virgil Thomson reviewed his first New York Philharmonic concert as music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune, not one of the conditions for an automatic sense of occasion any longer prevailed. And the Philharmonic was run not by a Higginson, but by a self-described music businessman: Arthur Judson. Thomson notoriously ended his review (Oct. 11, 1940) with the sentence: "As a friend remarked who had never been to one of these concerts before, 'I understand now why the Philharmonic is not a part of New York's intellectual life.'" (Thomson's friend was the painter Maurice Grosser.)

Many things can be said about the sea change separating Higginson's Boston Symphony from Judson's New York Philharmonic (and I will say some of them in Ann Arbor this week). The larger failure, as the twentieth century would make increasingly evident, was a failure to emulate people like Higginson and Thomas. They were artistic leaders, artistic innovators.

When I was teaching graduate students in Orchestral Performance at the Manhattan School of Music many years ago, I invited my friend Larry Tamburri to address the class. Larry was running the New Jersey Symphony at the time (he now runs the Pittsburgh Symphony). Larry drew two circles on the blackboard. The smaller circle, he told my students, represented the traditional function of the orchestral musician: rehearsing and performing concerts. The larger circle signified what orchestral musicians would need to become: partners in adaptable cultural institutions that served the community in a variety of ways. The same simple metaphor applies to orchestras themselves.

The larger circle suggests what my historian's perspective tells me: that orchestras need to think of themselves more as education providers, less as concert producers. This redefinition, which may already be glimpsed in various parts of the country, can take many forms. It may mean subscription concerts like Pacific Symphony's "Tchaikovsky Portrait." It may mean sending musicians to inner-city schools. It may mean collaborating with local museums and universities. It will be the topic of Larry's presentation at the Orchestral Summit on Wednesday morning -- and will likewise be addressed by Ryan Fleur and Rob Birman, who are exploring new roles for orchestras in Memphis and Louisville. More than 200 participants are expected. The time is ripe.

As anyone who is a parent or teacher keenly appreciates, the cultural vocabulary people of my generation (b. 1948) once took for granted is fast disappearing. High school students and college freshmen can no longer be expected to know Marlene Dietrich, or Rodgers & Hammerstein, or Porgy and Bess. Such knowledge was once instilled at home, or via Life Magazine or the Ed Sullivan Show.

The absence of the arts and humanities in middle and high school classrooms is widely decried, but this is mainly lip service. In New York City (where I live), you can graduate from a "top" public or private high school without learning anything much about music or the visual arts. Compensatory action of some kind is urgent.

The period I know best, as a cultural historian specializing in music, is America's Gilded Age - the decades from the Civil War to 1900. It seems merely obvious to me that even the most cursory acquaintance with this period would necessarily include Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (once the best-known, most-read work of American literature) and the paintings of Frederic Church (which toured nationally to huge and appreciative audiences). Longfellow and Church apprise us how Americans have gone about understanding themselves. But they are not taught in American History classrooms. Nor is Dvorak's New World Symphony (1893), which served a comparable function.

In fact, the story of Dvorak in America (1892-1895) is a singular tool for integrating music, visual art, and literature into the Social Studies curriculum. It interfaces seamlessly with Longfellow and Church, with the Indian Wars and the slave trade, with plantation song and Stephen Foster, with Buffalo Bill and Yellow Journalism. As director of an NEH National Education program, I was able to write a young readers book, Dvorak and America, and to commission a state-of-the-art interactive Dvorak DVD from Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff at UCLA. These will be the core materials for a three-week NEH Teacher Training Institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony this July. The eligibility requirements are liberal (e.g. administrators, librarians, home-school parents can apply). The deadline for applications is March 1. The faculty includes leading scholars of American painting and music (including Foster and blackface minstrelsy), as well as the bass-baritone Kevin Deas and the pianist Steven Mayer. The Pittsburgh Symphony website has complete information.

That the Pittsburgh Symphony is the first orchestra ever to host an NEH institute is itself auspicious. Orchestras have valuable educational programs, but they tend to be satellite enterprises focused on elementary school and Young People's Concerts. As orchestras continue to move toward a new model of inter-disciplinary thematic programming, new educational opportunities will emerge, facilitating linkage to high schools, universities, and colleges. Certainly they can play a vital role in reconstituting Social Studies instruction as a "vertical slice" embracing culture as an integral part of the national experience -- and of personal identity.

When a few years ago Doug McLennan invited me to write an ArtsJournal blog, I thought about it and said no. Having been born as long ago as 1948, I remain somewhat a stranger to the internet. And, as I am always writing a book (a form of therapy) when I am not producing concerts, I felt I didn't have the time.

Two considerations changed my mind. These days, writing books seems increasingly quixotic. I am almost finished with my ninth, and I don't have an Opus 10 in sight. The second factor was a Eureka moment during the recent NEA Music Critics Institute at Columbia University (I'm the Artistic Director). I was describing the weekly column my friend Antonio Munoz-Molina writes for the Madrid newspaper El Pais - a casual yet sophisticated first person mulling over of things cultural and political - and regretting that there's nothing comparable in the American daily press. "It's like a blog," I explained - and realized that, if Antonio's column is like a blog, I could be a blogger.

The NEA Institute is now six years old and has charted many rapid changes in the wind. Suddenly, the participants are bloggers, predisposed to personal, proactive commentary. We no longer see the critics of yesteryear, who filed reviews and safeguarded their "objectivity" by drawing a line between critics and practitioners. That line is disappearing: we no longer debate "conflict of interest" at the Institute. There is an increasing awareness of shared community and shared needs.I passionately believe that this is a timely development.

Other lines are disappearing. In classical music, the "performance specialist" - the Arthur Rubinstein or Claudio Arrau who toured the musical capitals of the world, purveying sonatas and concertos by dead European masters - can already be retrospectively regarded as a twentieth century anomaly. Pianist are increasingly prone to conduct. Young pianists are increasingly prone to improvise and compose. We are returning to the old status quo. (Can you name a pianist of consequence before 1900 who was not a composer and/or conductor?) (I can think of one: Vladimir de Pachmann.)

In fact, the borders defining "classical music" itself are fast eroding. If any American framed this term, it was the Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight in the mid-nineteenth century. By "classical music" Dwight meant a supreme musical stratum, superior to "popular music" (he called Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" a "melodic itch"). This definition no longer serves. In our time classical music has been crucially refreshed by popular music, by non-Western music. Long ago I began calling the outcome "post-classical music" (my 1995 essay collection is titled The Post-Classical Predicament.)

I myself crossed a line two decades ago when I decided I no longer wanted to be a New York Times music critic. I thought the classical music events I was reviewing were mainly redundant and superfluous. I felt cut off from the artists and arts administrators whose efforts I was judging.I wrote a notorious Jeremiad - Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987) -- attempting to comprehend how classical music had become a cul de sac. I wound up running the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, pursuing post-classical programming strategies. Since then I've pursued a double career, writing books and producing concerts. The DC chamber orchestra I co-founded in 2003 is called Post-Classical Ensemble. I also create thematic programming for a variety of orchestras and presenters.

And, both as writer and producer, I remain obsessed with the story of Dvorak in America (1892-1895). Dvorak's mandate, as director of New York's National Conservatory of Music, was to help American composers find a distinctive voice. His enthusiastic response, espousing Native-American and (especially) African-American roots, was both influential and controversial. The Dvorak saga investigates the still exigent questions "What is America?" and "Who is an American?" It illuminates the uses of culture to define personal and national identity. It also, as I have been led to discover, furnishes a singular tool for infusing the arts and humanities into middle and high school classrooms. It links to the Indian Wars and the slave trade, Hiawatha and Buffalo Bill, plantation song and blackface minstrelsy, immigration and Yellow Journalism. This summer, I will direct a "Dvorak and America" NEH teacher training institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony. We will train 25 teachers to integrate the Dvorak story into Social Studies and Music curricula. I look forward to reporting and contemplating this experience on my new blog.

The music historian Jeff Magee, recently reviewing my Classical Music in America: A History, shrewdly observed a contradiction in my approach to history. Of the rise-and-fall narrative I extrapolate, he writes that "on one hand, it seems to transcend human agency; on the other, Horowitz suffuses almost every page with humane empathy for individual achievement. He even uses the word hero without irony." It's true: the historian in me observes ineluctable forces, inescapable trajectories. The activist in me has to believe in the potency of individual agency. I lead two lives.
Quoting Ives, Leonard Bernstein called his 1973 Norton Lectures "The Unanswered Question." The question Bernstein posed was "Whither music in our time?" - and he had a lot of trouble answering it. And yet the answers came swiftly after that - from post-classical composer/performers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. If many questions remain unanswered - if many an American orchestra is today in a state approaching panic - the Mahlerian gravitas and gloom that freighted Bernstein's pronouncements seems a dated twentieth century condition; post-classical music beckons.