“Are We Rotting Our Brains? Is This the End of Classical Music?”

I know the conductor Thomas Fortner, now based in Berlin, from his years as assistant conductor of the remarkable South Dakota Symphony. Thomas recently posted a 70-minute podcast posing earnest questions about the state of classical music. Excerpts follow.

JH (1:55):  People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t talk about the arts. And I think my understanding of this deterioration is mostly as a deterioration of cultural memory. If you don’t have cultural memory, you can’t have a flourishing arts environment. Traditionally, creative artists have relied on the past, have relied on forebears, have relied on tradition, have relied on cultural memory. We now are losing touch with the past because of cell phones and social media and artificial intelligence.

This is a new situation. We’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . Things can only get worse because the driving force, the major problem, is technology. And technology is not going to vanish from our world.

What does technology do? For one thing, it shortens attention spans. The music that we love and we grew up with and that we promulgate depends on an attention span of some duration. You can’t experience the Eroica Symphony, or even just the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, or even just the coda to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony without an attention span. If you’re talking about “Träumerei” by Schumann, fine. But if you’re dealing with a sonata form, it functions partly on the basis of memory—what the ear remembers, what the brain processes. Why is the coda of the first movement of the Eroica so long? Why does it introduce a new theme? Because there’s so much that Beethoven has to deal with and resolve that we’ve already heard. If you can’t experience that piece in time with sustained concentration, there’s not a whole lot going for it. It’s not about the tunes. It’s not even about the ambience or the mood. I think it’s fundamentally an exercise in structure.

I know a guy who used to teach at a major university in the United States who discovered that he could no longer teach sonata form to music students for this reason. [The pianist] Emanuele Arciuli, whom we both know, says a perfect example of an American piece would be music by Philip Glass or Steve Reich, where you don’t really need to remember what happened before. It just evolves moment to moment. That’s not to denigrate the music. It’s just situated in our own experience today.

                                    UNPLUGGING

TF (5:30): I’m trying to unplug my life . . . I don’t listen to music anymore. Joe, I don’t read like I used to. This is a real problem. Only when I attend concerts do I listen to music. . . .

JH: Let me tell you a story. I just heard Iván Fischer conduct Mahler Three at Carnegie Hall, which is about 90 minutes long. The hall was full. It was a memorable performance. It was really the first time I was able to take in the entirety of the symphony, partly because the performance was so well put together. I wrote a blog in which I worried that conductors like Fischer and Manfred Honeck, who are based in tradition, are increasingly rare. I got a very interesting email from somebody who listens to a lot of recordings. He said, “Here are twelve recordings by conductors active in Europe right now who are major exponents of the Central European repertoire.” The first was Eliahu Inbal doing Mahler 5 with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. These were all YouTube links. So I went on YouTube and listened to Inbal—which means I listened to the opening of the first movement, the opening of the third movement, the opening of the fourth movement, and the end of the symphony. I thought, yes, this is really great. But I didn’t listen to the whole symphony. And similarly with all these other YouTube links. There are so many of them. I listened to two, three, four minutes.

This is something you can do today. You couldn’t do it before. The idea of listening to bits and pieces, sampling a performance, sampling a symphony, is almost irresistible right now. . . . There is no way to listen to Mahler’s 3rd Symphony except to swallow the whole thing. You’ve got to take it all or forget it. It’s not like Mahler 5 where you can enjoy the Adagietto. Mahler 3, you either take it all, or don’t listen to it at all. . . .

TF: Think of Facebook. It’s very difficult to live without social media.

JH: It’s possible. I do. I don’t use social media. It hurts me professionally. I would have a much bigger audience if I did. I post my blogs on Facebook, but I don’t correspond with anybody on Facebook. As a result, I have very few followers on Facebook. I’m not willing to make the effort to behave otherwise. Even though I know I could enlarge my audience. . . . I don’t really have an option. I couldn’t bring myself to behave otherwise. . . .

I’ll tell you a story. This just popped into my head because I’m writing a kind of memoir. I have a new book. It’s a novel about Anton Seidl and Wagnerism in New York called The Disciple. I was interviewed by Tom Service from the BBC maybe a decade ago at the Carnegie Hall Archives. The third participant in the conversation was Gino Francesconi. Gino is the man responsible for creating the Carnegie Hall Archives. It was a labor of love, a prodigious feat. He had just digitized the archive. He was very proud of that. I found myself saying that I regretted that he had digitized the archive. It had become too accessible.

The story I told was that I learned about Anton Seidl and Wagnerism in New York in the 1880s and 1890s mainly by visiting two archives that were not digitized or even cataloged. One was at Columbia University, and one was at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The only way to use them was by physically handling the materials and discovering what was there. One thing I discovered, which I’ll never forget, was a letter that Seidl wrote in pencil in his own hand. It was a speech he was going to give at Brighton Beach, where he conducted in the summers, about how important it was that music be democratically shared. There had never been any record of this speech. I didn’t find any reference to it in the newspapers. I was the first person to discover that this document existed. I was holding it in my hand. My intimate communion with Seidl, as a result of holding his letters and documents like this, created a bond. I felt as if I got to know him. Ultimately, that led to the writing of [The Disciple]. It could never have happened if I were dealing with screens. I would never have written a novel. I would never have acquired a feeling of intimacy with this man who died in the 1890s had I been using screens. It’s a game changer. . . .

COULD THERE BE AN INFORMED DISCUSSION ABOUT THE ERASURE OF THE ARTS?

JH: (18:35) My blog about my experience hearing Iván Fischer conduct Mahler 3, and my experience of hearing Manfred Honeck conduct the suite from Elektra, was ultimately about  tradition and lineage and what will happen as we have fewer and fewer conductors or soloists who belong to a tradition—a national tradition, French tradition, Russian tradition. I mentioned the young 23-year-old Spanish violinist María Dueñas who performed the Beethoven concerto with Honeck. She’s recorded it with Honeck. She’s a huge talent. I wish her well. I hope she has a major career. She already has a major career. She can do anything she wants with the violin, and she’s original. You can’t place her. Her Beethoven concerto doesn’t remotely resemble any version you’ve ever heard. So what do you do with such an artist? At one extreme, they could be just self-indulgent. This woman is not self-indulgent. Her Beethoven performance is deeply felt. I’m also impressed by two Koreans who are very popular right now—Yunchan Lim and Seong-Jin Cho. I heard Cho play the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I thought it was staggering. I was deeply moved. Other people in the audience were turned off by it. It didn’t sound like Rachmaninoff at all.

I wrote in my blog that this phenomenon will either lead to a refreshment or a dilution.

It would be nice if I could foster a conversation with such a blog. I’ve gotten three or four responses that were substantive. One or two were posted publicly. The others were emails from people who were deeply engaged by the issue and see it as crucial. However, since I’ve never done anything to cultivate a following, I don’t see that I’m able to engender a fruitful conversation on a topic that seems to me absolutely vital. If I were to plug myself in to attempt to enlarge that conversation, I have no confidence that it would work. It requires a certain degree of initiation on the part of the people who are conversing. I sometimes get very angry and vituperative responses from people who have no sympathy for or understanding of where I’m coming from. They are numerous, because I’m not woke, and I don’t think social justice is what the arts are about. The possibility for a larger conversation seems to me pretty toxic at the moment. The more you enlarge the conversation, the more you risk cancel culture and other forms of toxicity. It’s a conundrum. . . .

JH (35:35): The conversation we’re having should be a much larger conversation. The topics we’re talking about should be talked about in a sustained and informed and meaningful way, and they’re not. Partly because the institutions of culture—at least the institutions of classical music—do nothing, so far as I’m aware, to foster such a conversation. Certainly in New York, the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall have not been institutions that were invested in having a conversation.

For instance, the Met mounts Porgy and Bess—this is our most important American opera, I would say. It’s the highest achievement in American classical music. And yet it’s very controversial and remains remarkably misunderstood. People don’t know even the basics: who wrote it, who wrote the libretto, what’s it based on, what was Porgy the play, what was Porgy the novella, what were the original reviews like, what was the original response, what’s its performance history, how does it speak to us today.

It should be a no-brainer, if the Met mounts a production of Porgy and Bess, to create some kind of forum for informed conversation. It could involve Wayne Shirley, who did the critical edition, or James Robinson who did the production, or the singers who are singing Porgy and Bess, or various other music historians such as myself. I’ve written an entire book about Porgy and Bess, to ponder what it says to us today and what it says about American culture generally—that our most important product in classical music, our most important creative product, is both unfinished and controversial. You could say the same about the United States. It’s unfinished and controversial. But the Met under its current leadership is simply not equipped to do that.

It’s the kind of thing I always tried to do when I was running orchestras. My biggest success was at BAM, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the 1990s [when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra]. I was handed an exemplary audience by Harvey Lichtenstein. These were people who wanted to think, who wanted to talk, who were culturally sophisticated, who were worried about the future of the arts. If we had a conversation, it could last for an hour and everybody would be raising their hand and contributing. It was really great.

I have never known that anywhere else, because there’s never been another Harvey Lichtenstein. He created that audience very consciously by creating programming that could not be experienced at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. That was his strategy. And people came in droves. The Public Theater under Joe Papp was such a place, too. This kind of performing arts institution, to my knowledge, doesn’t exist today. Maybe it does someplace outside of New York, but I’m not aware of it. . . .

WHAT ARE THE ARTS FOR?

TF (43:10): Joe—what are the arts for? I think I know. I think I feel that. But can you help me articulate this? You talk about cultural memory and culture. What is that? And why do we need orchestras?

JH: Partly, I think the arts are an instrument for self-understanding, national understanding, and mutual understanding. One of the reasons that we’re so screwed up right now in all those categories is that the arts are fading from the American experience.

David [Gier, Music Director of the South Dakota Symphony] will tell you that when all else fails—if you can’t get some kind of mutual understanding going between Native Americans and non–Native Americans in South Dakota—what’s the last resort? It’s going to be music. That’s also a truism in diplomacy. It’s soft diplomacy. What worked in the Cold War more than anything else was music that helped Russians and Americans find common ground.

One of my books is The Propaganda of Freedom, which is about the cultural Cold War. When I went to the New York Philharmonic archives and looked at the material about Bernstein’s visit in 1959 with the New York Philharmonic in Moscow and Kiev, it’s really impressive to revisit his cultural ambassadorship. He was very proactive. He was fearless. He was completely committed to the ideal that music would foster mutual understanding. At that moment (this is all in my book) the Americans were pursuing the cultural Cold War tendentiously, adversarially. They were demonizing the Soviet Union. They were telling the world the Soviet Union is a cultural wasteland. That was bad propaganda. For one thing, it wasn’t true. And it was bad propaganda because it was obnoxious.

What Bernstein did was different. He didn’t go there to say, “We’re better than you.” He went there to say, “We’re the same as you.” It wasn’t implicit. It was explicit. He talked about it.

He was eager to share American music and eager to perform the music of Shostakovich because he felt Shostakovich was an immensely important composer at a time when a lot of people in the West were treating him like a stooge or a simpleton.

So this encapsulates an answer to your question. There are many other answers to your question, and it’s not even necessarily a fruitful question because the arts are not a practical remedy. They’re not practical. They’re visionary. Yet one can say, certainly in my case, my personal identity would be much different minus the arts. The environment in which I grew up or the environment in which I raised a family would be fundamentally different without the arts.

I do think the arts are humanizing. . . .

SHOSTAKOVICH TODAY

TF (47:28):  I’ve been encountering a lot of Shostakovich lately.

JH: He’s a timely composer. There’s no question about it. . . . Gianandrea Noseda just conducted Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony with the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center. It was serendipitous. . . . You should read Philip Kennicott’s review in the Washington Post, in which he talks about how appropriate the symphony was to the occasion at hand. Here is an orchestra that’s essentially been manhandled by the President, who’s now going to close the Kennedy Center for two years. They’ve lost their audience. They’ve lost their donors, at least the traditional donors. Here’s a concert that was full, featuring a piece of music that serendipitously seemed to suit the occasion and express defiance rather than capitulation. It was a concert that would have had a completely different temper had it not been for the selection of this symphony for this occasion. . . .

Shostakovich is a composer whose entire mission is bearing witness. That’s what he’s about. He’s a people’s artist. He’s bearing witness on behalf of the Russian people to the situation at hand, whether it’s Stalin or World War II. He had an immense impact on a cultural community, and that is not lost even on Americans today. Those pieces retain their impact even if they’re bearing witness to something that’s passed.

Of course it’s passed, and it’s not. The situations to which he bore witness would never be literally replicated. But in spirit, Stalin was not the last. World War II was not the last. He’s addressing human travail. That’s a permanent part of the human condition. . . .

JH (54:05): I talk about Stravinsky [in The Propaganda of Freedom] being free not to matter in Los Angeles. Stravinsky is in a vacuum. He doesn’t have a community.

TF: In your book The Propaganda of Freedom, one of your main theses is about the life and plight of the artist in the Soviet Union versus the life and plight of the artist in the United States.

JH: There are trade-offs in both situations. There are strengths and weaknesses about the Soviet arts and the American arts. You can’t really say one is better than the other. They’re both very flawed.

TF: In the Soviet experience, you could be killed if you write the wrong thing.

JH: But you get a salary. Your music is published. Your music is performed. Your music is noticed. There’s a big audience for it. Nobody’s going to kill you in the United States or tell you what to do, but you can be completely ignored.

TF: It seems like the American way of doing things was through commercialism. You’ve talked about Toscanini’s impact.

JH: Yes, we commercialized. A chapter in that book deals with the popularization of classical music in Russia versus the United States during the interwar decades. Again, it’s a trade-off. In Russia, there were limitations on what music could be performed. There were ideological constraints, ideological verdicts. And yet you had factories with opera companies, factories with orchestras, factories with choruses. You had an emphasis on native music, on new music.

In the United States, there were no such restrictions. But there were no opera companies in factories, and there were no orchestras in factories. It was a commercial enterprise, mainly under the thumb of David Sarnoff—RCA and NBC—the recordings, the radio broadcasts, the primers: an enormous library of music appreciation books. In all of this propaganda, there was nothing much to be said about new music or American music.

So the Americans did certain things right and certain things wrong, and the Russians did other things right and other things wrong. The Russians wound up preserving an audience. Certainly it was conventional wisdom then. I don’t know what’s happened since the fall of communism, but Americans like Byron Janis or Van Cliburn who went abroad during the Cold War were astonished by Russian audiences. . . .

                                    WHAT HAVE I TRIED TO DO?                                

TF (1:02:05): Joe, let’s talk actually about you a bit more. Two questions: Can you talk about your background and how it led you to this life of the arts? And secondly, what would you like your legacy to be?

JH: These are weighty questions, Thomas. The first thing I would say is that I experienced a sense of betrayal when I was at The New York Times in the 1970s and discovered that the concert life of New York was moribund. I grew up thinking classical music was vibrant and indispensable. I could see that it was dying.So this impelled me to try to figure out why. I became a historian of American classical music, focusing on institutional history, which had been very little studied. We’ve been talking about that—how the popularization of classical music was mishandled in the United States.

So I wound up pursuing at least two different careers. One was as a historian, looking at the history of classical music in the United States and the failed attempt to dig roots. It was initially very auspicious, but then it went awry after World War I. I’ve created this entire narrative, which is personal to me, about the rise and fall of classical music in America.

I don’t think people care about it very much. It would be nice if they did, because I think many lessons can be learned . . . I think the 1880s and the 1890s, especially in New York, marked the apex of classical music in the United States. I’ve left fourteen, fifteen, sixteen books on this topic. It would be nice if they were adequately noticed and discussed.

The other thing I’ve done is attempt to explore new ways of presenting music in concert that would address the crisis and the dwindling audience through contextualized programming and a kind of educational effort that’s very unusual among orchestras. Orchestras have satellite education departments that produce young people’s concerts. I’m interested in using the main subscription concerts to create partnerships with universities and conservatories.

It’s hard to do. It depends on who’s around. In South Dakota [where I am “scholar-in-residence”], we’re lucky because we have guys like David Earnest and David Reynolds at South Dakota State who are ready and willing. So we [at the South Dakota Symphony] have a great educational partnership there, even though that campus is an hour away.

That’s a template that has failed to thrive. I’ve pursued it since the 1990s and produced such programming, often with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, all over the country—east, west, north, south. The only place where it’s become permanent is Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where it works because of Delta David Gier, who’s the music director.

It worked for a time in El Paso because Frank Candelaria was the associate provost of the University of Texas at El Paso and a member of the board of the El Paso Symphony. When he left, that was the end. It’s worked to a degree in Buffalo because of JoAnn Falletta, who’s the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic.

TF: Your model of concert programming has been hugely influential on me. With your blessing, I’m looking for ways to carry on the torch.

JH: Very few people have the desire or the capacity to do what David [Gier] has done. I’ve done everything I can to publicize what’s happened in South Dakota. Alex Ross writes about it. The New York Times has done two stories about it. It’s sitting there as a success story for anybody who’s interested in how to make classical music “relevant.” There it is. It works.

But I don’t think there’s sufficient interest elsewhere in what it is and why it works and how this model can be adopted. Because it can be adopted.