I’ve always thought that classical music celebrities, Bring Your Own Air Quotes, occupied a kind of fame ideal: famous enough to make very good livings, famous enough to have passionate fans, famous enough to maybe even be recognized in, say, a bar around Manhattan School of Music. Not so famous, though, that they can’t walk down the street, that cameras are parked outside their apartment, or that they can’t make one fashion slip or gain three pounds without millions of people having their say on the subject. Of course, it’s my job to make my clients more famous, but with great fame comes great perceived fallibility.
Surely a graph exists of level of fame as it relates to quantity and severity of criticism? We need our archetypal heroes to fall; what does Joseph Campbell call it? “The Return to the Ordinary World”? Yes! Britney Spears is better than me and worse than me all at once! There’s just no way I would look that good in a school-girl uniform, but at least I didn’t shave my head! The top three posts on PerezHilton.com right now are: “Sarah McLachlan Admits Lilith Fair Isn’t Selling Well!” (exclamation point? why?), “Mugshot Hall of Fame” (a very pretty 18 year old, apparently involved in celebrity-esque antics?), and “Miley Does Dancing with the Stars!” (“she didn’t sound all that good!” –more exclamation points?).
If someone cares enough to criticize you about matters that don’t attend to your actual talent or creative output, you’ve really made it. This is why I applaud the Chunky Gustavo Dudamel and the Overrated Nico Muhly. Congratulations, boys: it’s media backlash time! I am sincerely happy for you.
The LA Philharmonic is on tour this spring, arriving in New York tomorrow. Tickets are so hard to come by, that rumor has it Itzhak Perlman can’t get his paws on one. The man everyone wants to see is Gustavo Dudamel, and I won’t insult you with a Wikipedia link. While in San Francisco and Chicago, the LA Philharmonic got mixed reviews (loyalty to the home teams?), the most notable of which came from Richard Scheinin, who opened his San Jose Mercury News review–not feature–with the following:
Gustavo Dudamel is the
hottest commodity in classical music — in decades. Yet the 29-year-old
conductor isn’t a physically imposing figure on the podium. He is
short. He is chunky. Appearing at Davies Symphony Hall on Monday for
the first of two concerts that have been sold out for six months, he
didn’t look as youthful and bright-eyed as he did on his last visit,
two years ago.
In Scheinin’s defense, he does begin the second paragraph with, “But, whatever, just hand that man a baton.” Can you imagine anyone calling Alan Gilbert “chunky” in the press? Of course not, he’s not famous enough to have his looks criticized. Even James Levine, classical-music-world famous as he is, would never be called “chunky,” except as it relates to his recent health problems. I believe both those men are heftier than Dudamel, but I’ll report back after I see him in the (apparently significant) flesh later this week.
Last Friday, Jerry Bowles, the editor of Sequenza21 and a friend and colleague, wrote the following post about composer Nico Muhly:
One of my two favorite young conductors, Brad Lubman (the other is
Alan Pearson) is leading the large ensemble Signal in the American
premier of The Corridor by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, one of the most prominent figures in European contemporary music, at Merkin on May 27. A 40-minute scena, The Corridor
is scored for two voices, soprano and tenor, and an ensemble of flute,
clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and a harp functioning as an Orphic
lyre.The highlight of the evening, however, is apparently the world premiere of Stabat Mater by the seemingly inevitable Nico Muhly.
Which leads to this week’s rude question: is Nico Muhly a) the dreams and prayers of a grateful music world or b) not so much? Discuss.
The piece is being premiered on May 27th; why not post this after…actually hearing it? Sixty-seven comments to date also comment on a piece that has not yet been performed publicly, which reflects what can only be described as a remarkable degree of prescience in the new music community.
I know Nico personally. I don’t know Dudamel (see, you can tell by the use of First Name v. Last Name), but neither man has struck me as attention-hungry, pushy, self-promoting, or interested in press for press’ sake. Who among us, though, would turn down a New Yorker profile, or a(nother) 60 Minutes piece? Nico doesn’t have a publicist, and far as I can tell, Dudamel’s publicist spends 87% of her time politely turning down press opportunities for him because he’s too busy working. Neither has teams promoting them as wunderkinds (Nico) or sex symbols (Dudamel), and perhaps most importantly, neither has strayed from the core of their work on account of the press attention. For lack of a less date-rape-associated phrase, these men aren’t asking for it.
So I’m sorry, Classical Music Industry, but we can’t have it both ways: we can’t whine that it’s impossible to get mainstream media attention for our artists and simultaneously call those getting the attention overrated; who was it, after all, who rated them in the first place? No one is claiming they are better artists because they are in the New Yorker or on 60 Minutes. They are intangibly fascinating to the media, and that is something that can rarely be artist-faked or publicist-created.
And on a related note, why must the press fault Nico and Dudamel for being young when we are an industry that consistently elevates instrumentalists to stardom before their 16th birthdays?
I leave you satisfied that I have given Nico Muhly and Gustavo Dudamel even more coverage.
Right on. Well said.
Are you coming to LA this week?
Nope, he’s here in my own backyard! -AA
Great post–love it! It’s all so carefully choreographed, isn’t it?
Respect!
!
I would like to point out some inconsistencies in your piece.
That’s an illogical statement. It is quite possible for classical artists to have difficulty getting mainstream media attention and yet for some overrated artists to get media attention. Are you saying that we should just not say anything when overrated classical artists get mainstream media attention, because it’s good for the industry?
You seem to be painting the entire classical music community with one brush, as if it is a monolithic entity, when it is in fact composed of individuals, each with their own unique opinions. Surely some within the community can champion artists such as Dudamel and Muhly, and some can feel they’re overrated, and say as much. You seem to be claiming hypocrisy where none exists.
That’s quite a naive statement, which overlooks the fact that the imprimatur of powerful media such as the New Yorker or 60 Minutes is, to a great extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, “no one” is claiming they are better artists? How about the New Yorker and 60 Minutes? Aren’t they making claims for these artists? Otherwise, they wouldn’t profile them.
And finally, those artists are most decidedly not “intangibly” fascinating to the media. Rather, their allure is quite quantifiable. They appeared in those media because there was sufficient hype about them to make the editor decide their appearance would boost sales or viewership.
It happened to Bernstein, it’ll continue to happen to others, like Dudamel, who get that famous. There’s a residual suspicion of musicians who achieve mainstream popularity with the non-classical-nerd audiences that dates back to 19th-century Romanticism. There are a ton of 19th-century musicians who received critical potshots for being too “pop” and unserious — not just people like the handsome, wunderkind conductor Jullien,who courted audiences, but also virtuosi like Paganini. Saint-Saens wouldn’t allow performances of “Carnival of the Animals” until after his death, because he was afraid of being pegged as an unserious, pops composer. And on it goes.
We’ll never be rid of the faction of the classical music audience, critics in particular, who regard the adulation of the masses as an artistic demerit.
“Neither has teams promoting them as wunderkinds (Nico) or sex symbols (Dudamel),…”
Why not promote Nico as a sex symbol? He’s cute …