{"id":304,"date":"2009-07-29T10:18:46","date_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp\/?p=304"},"modified":"2009-07-29T10:18:46","modified_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:18:46","slug":"scene_and_not_heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/2009\/07\/scene_and_not_heard\/","title":{"rendered":"Scene and (not) heard"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second joint blogging exercise with my friend, composer Nico Muhly<\/a>.   The first Co-Bloganza topic was Programming and can be found here<\/a> (him) and here<\/a> (me). This time, in a collaboration we hope will someday turn into a PBS talk show called “Crack Margaritas with the Arts”, the topic is The New Music Scene in New York City. We originally discussed our posts over, you guessed it, crack margs, and then over IM, and then exchanged entry drafts, and then revised so we could refer to what the other had actually written. In exchanging drafts, we realized he had named his entry “Scene but not Heard” and I had named mine “Scene and (not) heard”, which is embarrassing on a lot of levels.<\/p>\n

Now read his post.<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ll start with three short stories, but as anyone on any scene knows, there more where that came from.  By definition, scenes create expectations: expectations of time, expectations of attitude, expectations degrees of commitment.  Here I’ll use myself – because that’s how it goes on Life’s a Pitch –<\/i> as an example of what every industry “insider” goes through when it comes to performances and artists for which they don’t have direct responsibility.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

*   *   *<\/div>\n

On Thursday, July 16, I got texts from four different people around 8 p.m.:<\/p>\n

“Are you here?”
“Where are you?”
“Are you going tonight?”
“Are you Kronos-ing tonight?”<\/p>\n

Before I got the “Kronos-ing” text, I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I could only assume the others weren’t asking whether I was at Candide <\/i>at the Berkshire Theater Festival, which is in fact where I was. I Googled “Kronos Quartet” on my phone and clicked on the schedule. Turns out they were playing a piece by Michael Gordon, who I work for, at a Celebrate Brooklyn!<\/i> Prospect Park show. Gabriel Kahane’s voice was also used in a piece on the program. It wasn’t a Michael premiere, and Gabriel wasn’t performing, but because of those associations, it made sense that industry friends would assume I would be at that concert.<\/p>\n

An almost similar situation happened with the “New Music Bake Sale” this spring; Galen Brown, who writes for Sequenza21<\/i><\/a>, and a few other industry friends said they were surprised I wasn’t there. Again, I had a sense the event was going on, but didn’t really understand 1) why I would go, or 2) why anyone would think I would go. Looking at the website<\/a> now, I see a list of groups I have mostly heard of, but no one with whom I have any direct professional link. Kronos Quartet in Prospect Park: clear work responsibilities, thus my scene. New Music Bake Sale: vague peer pressure to see and be seen but no real personal or work obligations.<\/p>\n

I was sitting on the aisle waiting for Nico’s ScentOpera<\/a><\/i> to start at the Guggenheim in early June when my friend Dan Bora, an audio engineer\/producer who has worked with Nico and Alarm Will Sound, among others, came up on my left. “Why do you hate New Amsterdam<\/a>?” he opened. I twisted my mouth and paused; best to do an internal TV-style flashback-clip sequence of any time I might have said something about New Amsterdam Records (possible), might have commented on someone affiliated with New Amsterdam Records (also possible), or (most likely) said something in general about the demise of the recording industry as we know it. Nothing terribly incriminating flashed through my head, so I asked Dan what he meant. “You didn’t come to any of the Friday night shows in May,” he said. “I thought I would see you there.”<\/p>\n

New Amsterdam Friday night shows in May. Right – at Galapagos in Brooklyn, including Nadia<\/a>‘s CD release concert. I remembered the very cool-looking post-er post-ed on Sequenza21<\/i><\/a>. But let’s break this down: Darcy James Argue. I used to see his name on Wordless Music Series<\/a> guest lists. Someone recommended his blog<\/a>, so I asked him to participate in the Michael Gordon Trance<\/i> scavenger hunt<\/a>. (He declined.) I do not know what his music sounds like, and I do not know if his Secret Society is a website or a band. The following Friday, Nadia Sirota. An actual friend of mine, plus Nico – another friend -performed that night. I did think about going to the concert, but wanted to see the Jenny Holzer show at The Whitney before it closed. Nadia didn’t invite me specifically, and I figure that if I’m friends with someone and she wants me to be at a concert, she’ll just ask or put me on some kind of mass e-mail. We’ll come back to this later in this blog entry.  <\/p>\n

Moving on to May 22. I’ve worked with but am not friends with anyone in Signal, and have a total work-crush on So Percussion. So Percussion is related in my head to David Lang, whom I work for, and Signal is related in my head to Michael Gordon. Not related enough, though, that I feel it is my job as David and Michael’s publicist to support those groups. And I have no idea who Sarah Kirkland Snider is. As for the last Friday show, I didn’t know any of the participants but was invited by my friend Damian, a music writer. He canceled, and I didn’t want to make the trek alone.<\/p>\n

So except for being friends with Nadia, I have no connection to New Amsterdam Records. Yet the aura of the thing led Dan Bora to assume I’d be there.  <\/p>\n

If there is just one new music scene in New York City, I suppose I’m “on” it. I worked for Wordless Music last season, I’ve handled publicity for Hauschka and Max Richter through FatCat Records, I represent David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and Gabriel Kahane – all living composers. I’m friends with Nico Muhly and Nadia Sirota, and I have a good friend who works at Works and Process at the Guggenheim. My friends Rob and CJ – collaborators with Gabriel – started a new new-music ensemble<\/a>. Eric Owens, Hilary Hahn, and The King’s Singers have all commissioned or been directly involved with world premieres. Through work responsibilities and friendships that formed through those responsibilities, yes, I’m on some kind of a scene.<\/p>\n

“On the scene.” What a completely bizarre phrase. Is one on a scene if one is on a record label? On a management roster? On a music series? To get off “on” for a moment, are classical music scenes created through teachers? Through universities and conservatories? What about physical neighborhoods? Rob, Hilary\/Gabriel’s manager, and I live within a 10-block radius; when do we become a scene? Can sites like Sequenza21<\/i>, Brooklyn Vegan<\/i><\/a>, or Pitchfork<\/i><\/a> be defined as scenes, or do you not get to be a scene without physical interaction? Perhaps most important, once you’re friends or work with an artist, is there an obligation to attend his friends’ and collaborators’ concerts? The answer here is yes; were it not for that pressure, we would be scene-less.  Note: the transitive property of liking music – if I like something on this label or on this series, I will like that other thing on the same label\/series\/scene – doesn’t always work, which complicates matters. Not unlike the transitive property of friendship; who actually likes all her friends’ friends?<\/p>\n

It should be noted that I’m talking about the new music scene as it applies to intra-industry audience building. Perhaps there will be another post about audience members who come to a scene on their own and eventually become part of it after arriving purely as fans.  I’ve also been focusing on the contemporary classical scene as a scene focused on music by not-dead composers, not the contemporary classical scene as it relates to music presented or recorded by my contemporaries. As Nico points out in his post<\/a>, we all know who we’re going to run into at basically any Zankel concert, at the Met’s opening gala, and at the Avery Fisher Career Grant Awards. Or at least we think we do. If we’re wrong, we’ve probably missed some marketing opportunities.
 
Not only is there not one classical music scene, there’s not one contemporary classical scene, either. I had thought about doing a diagram of the artists\/bands\/ensembles I perceive as being part of The Monster Scene. But as I started doing that, I wondered: Does everyone connected to these scenes perceive them the same way? Can you define a scene if you’re on it? Are the scenes I could list for blog readers simply narcissistic projections of my own interactions with them?  Nico, looking back at perceived music scenes of the past, writes<\/a>, <\/p>\n

In school, we’re taught that fin-de-si\u00e8cle Paris was a very specific scene: we fantasize about Picasso and Stravinsky and Ravel and Debussy sitting around a table, drinking absinthe and smoking skinny cigarettes.  Maybe that even happened one day!  Maybe it happened every week!  But to what extent, I wonder, does that make sense only when viewed a century later, and to what extent are we New York musicians involved in producing (or resisting) our fantasy versions of the past?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it was last spring when Ronen Givony, who founded the Wordless Music Series, asked me what time I was going to “our Superbowl” – sometimes known as the Bang on a Can Marathon<\/a>. If you work in or write about new music, you don’t miss Bang on a Can.  Bang on a Can has been around for 20 years, so – at least in New York City – it serves as the meeting point of the scenes. But this doesn’t mean Bang on a Can can slack off in the marketing department. I work for the composers who founded it, and I still saw River to River<\/a> posters all over the city, got e-mail blasts, and read press previews. Where the various new music scenes get into trouble, I think, is assuming people are part of their sub-scene because they work for and associate with people on related scenes. By defining the new music scene so broadly to both ourselves and the outside world, we miss audience-building and networking opportunities.<\/p>\n

Now, back to Nadia not inviting me to her concert. As my mother would ask me when I was growing up, “Who owns this problem?” That is, how much are any of us responsible for the scenes we’re a part of? Should the New Music Bake Sale or New Amsterdam Records have found a way to get me to their concerts? Should an artist’s\/group’s publicist? Their manager? Perhaps not; I’m only one body, and I’m not new audience blood. At the same time, I’m a body that works with artists who commission new works, a body whose client list is involved in new music, a body with a blog. This argument goes both ways, of course: Nadia & Co. could potentially help me and my clients down the road, in which case I then own the problem of staying informed.<\/p>\n

I did see both the New Music Bake Sale and the Galapagos concerts on Sequenza21<\/i>, so that’s getting to me once. But as we in the marketing business know, getting potential audiences’ attention once is not enough; you have to hit people on multiple fronts. I know about Nico’s concerts because he sometimes invites me, sometimes someone else asks if I’m going, and most of the time I see his concerts listed on his website. But I go to his website because he has a blog that I read at least weekly on the homepage. What would drive me to the New Amsterdam homepage unless something outside of it (press, word of mouth, link forwarding) led me there? If putting a concert on your record label or personal website isn’t enough, if targeted press coverage isn’t enough, is that e-mail necessary? Or a text? Or an IM or a phone call? More and more, I think that personal interactions really are necessary in creating, curating, and promoting a scene. A record label can have consistent album art and a series can have its logo on everything, but it’s those people with their individual motivations, their inexplicable musical tastes, who not only fuel a scene but are the scene itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second joint blogging exercise with my friend, composer Nico Muhly.   The first Co-Bloganza topic was Programming and can be found here (him) and here (me). This time, in a collaboration we hope will someday turn into a PBS talk show called “Crack Margaritas with the Arts”, the topic is The New Music […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}