Since filing a New York Times piece on the perilous state of American classical music 250 years since the nation’s founding, I’ve written five follow-up blogs and participated in a podcast with the conductor Kenneth Woods. The response has been voluminous and informative. The most telling responses have come from conductors and orchestral musicians. Practically without exception, they don’t buy the mantra “orchestras are better than ever.” Rather, they ponder and regret that something has gone wrong. The malaise in question takes many forms, including (I have written) “a disposition of diminished motivation afflicting our most prominent orchestras, as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”
The weekends’s emails included one from a notable American conductor, now in his seventies, arguing: “Don’t blame the conductors for the attitude of tenured players who are over-worked and no longer love music.” In fact, all of us – conductors, players, audiences – are victims in common of the Zeitgeist: a growing erasure of the arts is a function of the times in which we live.
The other day I stumbled upon a youtube link to a live Detroit Symphony performance of Mahler’s Fifth from 1959, when this big symphony still seemed new. The conductor was Paul Paray. I listened to the finale. It is the fastest version I’ve ever encountered – and also the most memorable.
For readers for whom Paray/Detroit (1952-1963) may be unknown – this was an orchestra considered by many the supreme “French orchestra” of its time with a style all its own: tactile diction, lean sonorities, limpid textures, brisk tempos, gunshot attacks. In frothy corners of the French repertoire, it was unapproachable. A prime sample of Paray/Detroit at full throttle is this blistering 1958 rendition of Berlioz’s Corsair Overture. In Germanic repertoire, Paray/Detroit is more an acquired taste.
A glance at the finale of Mahler’s Fifth explains why Paul Paray, of all people, would have thought to undertake this five-movement behemoth at a moment when few others were playing it. The music teems with cuckoo cries and childish gambols, with madcap fugatos and darting melodic feints, with prickly staccatisimos and vertiginous ascents – stacked atop one another. Its exuberance is partly a function of sustained foreground hyperactivity. In Paray’s performance, it’s all spectacularly articulate at breakneck speed.. And I might add that the famous Adagietto, coming right before, is remarkably impassioned. (Mischa Mischakoff, presiding over Paray’s strings, was previously concertmaster of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra and of Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, )
Among the many things that could be said about Paray’s feat, one crowning observation is that a style deeply acquired will prove applicable, and activating, even in music far afield. A supreme example is Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic (“The World’s Greatest Orchestra”), whose style and sonority were based in Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich – and yet proved irresistible in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. But what clinches Paray’s achievement is the hunger of his musicians. They are at all times going for broke.
It occurred to me to ask AI how many concerts the Detroit Symphony typically played under Paul Paray. Answer: the season comprised multiple weekly performances of a given subscription program over a period of 24 to 30 weeks. During the 1970s, a 52-week contract was negotiated. That is one reason the Detroit Symphony under Paul Paray sounds hungrier than what we typically hear today.
Which brings me to the main topic of this essay: the Ford Foundation, which in 1966 initiated an $80.2 million infusion (about $830 million today) for orchestras. A central goal was to insure a “living wage” for orchestral musicians by assuring fulltime employment. The outcome was lengthened symphonic seasons, with contracts for 40 weeks and more. Certainly the musicians deserved the pay raise. They were accustomed to supplementing their salaried income with jobs of various kinds to the side. In retrospect, the Ford money should have been spent to pay musicians more per service. The unintended outcome was a crisis of concert supply outstripping demand. Ever since, orchestras have mainly engaged in fundraising and marketing. And musicians – to again cite the conductor who wrote to me the other day – have become “over-worked.” They “no longer love music.” The broadcasts of the 1930s and forties about which I redundantly write – from New York, from Boston, from Philadelphia, from Minneapolis – document a condition of hyper-engagement once a norm.
Here is some of what I wrote about the Ford Foundation grants in Classical Music in America:
“In combination with pressure from the ranks, the new money steeply increased the number of concerts. In 1960, full-time, twelve-month employment was unknown. By 1970-71, six orchestras had agreed to fifty-two-week contracts, and another five had contracts of forty-five weeks or more. This new frequency of performance was not audience-driven. It may be safely assumed that neither Beethoven nor Brahms, in music-obsessed Vienna, remotely envisioned a diet of three and four symphonic performances per orchestra per week – or up to 171 per year (the New York Philharmonic in 2000-2001) . . .
“Many who played in American orchestras now attained a respectable living wage for the first time. Whether they knew or admitted it, the victory was Pyrrhic. Scrambling to manufacture new “services” promised by new agreements, orchestras created new concerts that could not adequately be planned, prepared, sold, or assimilated. Many were underrehearsed summer programs, children’s programs, or pops programs, or exhausting ‘run-outs’ to high school auditoriums. Boredom and resentment were rife . . .
“Between 1960 and 2000, the New York Philharmonic’s budget grew from $2 million to $34 million, the Boston Symphony’s from $2 million to $55 million. In combination with precipitously rising costs, excess concerts dictated a new orchestral function: marketing . . . a dense scaffold of merchandising activity behind which many an orchestra plotted to standardize its produce. Burdened with an expanding gap between income and expenses, orchestras found themselves thick in the business of fund-raising; the Boston Symphony’s development staff grew from seventeen to twenty -nine in the final decades of the twentieth century. . . . “
Simply put, today’s big American orchestras give too many concerts. Supply outstrips demand. Compared to previous generations, symphonic musicians are run down. Their union representatives typically resist reducing the season. But that’s not the same as reducing the number of “services” an orchestra member performs. As I’ve many times written, the happiest musicians I’ve ever encountered in a professional American orchestra are the nine salaried members of the South Dakota Symphony, comprising a string quartet and woodwind quintet. They furnish 150 services annually, most of which are not symphonic concerts. Among other things, they travel to Indian reservations to teach and make music. And they are largely self-governing – another topic for another time.
The blogs in this series enumerate challenges large and small. The big picture, as drawn by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is “social acceleration.” Every parameter of human existence is changing ever more rapidly. We’re increasingly condemned to live in the moment. We ever more rapidly forget the past. But symphonic performance thrives on style, lineage, and tradition. When the New York Philharmonic, in its program book, profiles a young violinist and asks: “What is your favorite music?”, when she replies: “Whatever I am playing at the moment,” that’s a red flag. The contributing factors, all highlighted in my podcast with Ken Woods, include the audition process, conservatory education, an ageing repertoire, and a failure to promote an American canon sufficient to generate an American style of performance. As Ken points out: when an actor prepares a role, they read about the play and the playwright. If the play is based in history, they read some history. Can today’s young musicians even play a Viennese waltz? Tscho Theissing says: no, not even in Vienna. A faceless “international style” reigns in the conservatory studio.
A story I’ve told before: Decades ago, I briefly taught at the Manhattan School of Music. My course, which proved abortive, was mandatory for graduate students in a two-year “Orchestral Performance” sequence. I shared historic recordings. I lectured on the institutional history of the orchestra. I assigned reading and writing. One day Larry Tamburri visited the class. At the time, he was Executive Director of the New Jersey Symphony. Larry drew two circles on the blackboard, one large and the other small. The small circle, he said, represented the traditional role of the orchestral musician. The big circle represented the enlarged role he wanted his musicians to undertake as full stakeholders in a cultural institution. He wanted them to do more than rehearse and perform. The class responded with a prolonged silence. I said: He’s telling you what I’ve been preaching for the last two months – what do you think? A bassoonist answered: “We are here to hone our instrumental skills and to learn how to win an audition. Everything else can wait.”
But it can’t. One way or another, orchestral musicians need to re-acquire a sense of agency. They need to “feel it.” They need to matter.
For more on the Ford Foundation orchestra grants and what went wrong, click here.
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