Archives for December 26, 2003

Where are you, OGIC? The world longs to hear your voice!

Speaking of my sister-in-law (see below), I mentioned at the dinner table yesterday that I was going to Chicago next weekend. “So,” she replied, “will you be seeing the Girl?” It took me two beats before I realized that she was referring to Our Girl in Chicago.

That’s fame.

My mother, who like most septuagenarians doesn’t quite grasp what a blog is, just poked her head in my bedroom and asked, “Are you actually working on something, or are you just piddling?”

Possible answer: “Why, Mom, I’m busy shaping the cultural conversation.”

Probable response: “I’d rather you took out the trash.”

Here’s a better answer: if all of you out there in the blogosphere will be so kind as to click on this link and place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader (out in May from Yale University Press), then I can tell my mother I was working. Otherwise, I was just piddling.

(P.S. Even if you don’t want to order the book just yet, click on the link anyway and you can see the dust jacket!)

In case you’re just joining us, I’m blogging this week from Smalltown, U.S.A, the southeast Missouri town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. My sister-in-law, who lives in Smalltown and reads this blog from time to time, e-mailed yesterday to inform me that she and my brother now have a high-speed modem, thank you very much. (I had previously mentioned in this space that I was having trouble getting used to the dial-up connection at my mother’s house.) Of all the new wrinkles that have come to Smalltown, U.S.A., since my last visit home, that one might just be the most significant.

I haven’t gotten around to replying to Felix Salmon’s recent comment on what I wrote about the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcasts, but it’s relevant here, so I’ll mention it now. In case you didn’t see my posting, I was writing in response to an article by Tony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the New York Times, in which he explained why it was a bad thing that the Met broadcasts, which have lost their corporate funding, might be in danger of cancellation. I begged to differ:

[T]he future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called “terrestrial radio” (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to “narrowcast” a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that’s where the Met really belongs–not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I’d say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.

(In his original piece, Tony had reminisced about how he’d discovered opera by listening to the Met broadcasts as a boy.)

Here’s part of Felix’s response:

The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people

“What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Bruce Weber has an excellent article in today’s New York Times about the state of the Broadway musical–excellent because he talked to a lot of people in the business and got candid answers. This is one piece that really needs to be read in its entirety, not quoted piecemeal (you can read the whole thing here), but if there’s a money graf, this is it:

“You could spell whither either way,” said Jack Viertel,
the artistic director of the Encores! series of musicals in
concert at City Center. “There’s a real reluctance on the
part of producers to take on new composers because to some
degree no one is sure what a Broadway show is supposed to
sound like anymore. Is it supposed to sound like Michael
John LaChiusa? Or Alan Menken? If the Broadway sound were
the pop music of the day, which it used to be, it would
sound like hip-hop, but I don’t think anyone feels there’s
much of a Broadway audience for that at the moment.”

What I think Viertel is groping toward–as well as several other people quoted in the piece–is that the success of the “classic” Broadway musical-comedy idiom was in large part a function of the existence of the common culture that began to dissolve in the Sixties, more or less around the time that the Broadway musical began to lose its way.

Here’s another relevant excerpt:

In any case, as rock took over the radio airwaves in the
1960’s, songwriters began turning from the stage to the
recording studio. A few songs from Broadway managed to
climb the charts – “The Impossible Dream” from “Man of La
Mancha,” for example – but the music of Broadway was being
overwhelmed by the cultural tidal wave that was
transforming the rest of the world.

“I can tell you almost specifically when it changed,” said
John Kander, Mr. Ebb’s partner. “When we did `Cabaret’ in
1966, I was unpacking in my hotel room in Boston, even
before we went to Broadway, and I turned on the radio and
heard five songs from the show. Our next show, in 1968, was
a musical called `The Happy Time,’ and I think we got maybe
one recording. So it was right in there that the changeover
happened.”

The “untheatricality” of rock music is a complicated subject about which I’ve never gotten around to writing. It’s far too complicated to go into in a short posting, but I can say that to blame the decline of the Broadway musical on rock is to mistake a symptom for the disease. What happened in the Sixties was that the old-fashioned standard-style ballad ceased to be the lingua franca of American popular music–and that nothing replaced it. Instead, our musical tastes shattered into a million pieces. After the Sixties, there was never again one kind of music to which “everyone” listened. In the absence of that kind of broad-based consensus of taste, popular music began to take a back seat in the mass media to other forms of pop culture.

Anyone old enough to remember The Ed Sullivan Show will recall that Sullivan regularly booked musical-comedy stars, and even presented whole scenes from hit shows. (It was Sullivan who turned West Side Story and Camelot into box-office hits.) Nowadays, there aren’t any prime-time variety shows, because the culture is so deeply fissured that such shows can’t draw a large enough audience to be commercially viable. Similarly, Top 40 has given way to a large number of sharply differentiated formats with minimal overlap. If you ever wondered why David Letterman and Jay Leno almost never bring on their musical guests until the end of the show, that’s the reason: no pop musician, however successful, appeals to a sufficiently large slice of the demographic pie. Were Leno to open the show with a musical act, no matter what it was, a significant number of his viewers would promptly switch to Letterman in search of something more to their liking–and vice versa.

All this means that there is no “universal” musical language in which a Broadway musical can be written. That doesn’t make it impossible to write good musicals, but it does mean that they will almost certainly appeal to niche audiences, not the masses that once flocked to (and bought original-cast albums of) the great musicals of the pre-rock era. For this reason, my guess is that the really interesting musicals of the coming decade will be small-scale, low-budget shows–and that at least some of them will be written for and premiered by opera companies.