{"id":1147,"date":"2018-09-11T13:57:33","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T17:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2018-09-11T13:57:33","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T17:57:33","slug":"the-future-of-orchestras-part-six-whats-an-orchestra-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/09\/the-future-of-orchestras-part-six-whats-an-orchestra-for.html","title":{"rendered":"THE FUTURE OF ORCHESTRAS — Part Six: What’s an Orchestra For?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Back in the 1990s, Harvey Lichtenstein \u2013 who recreated the Brooklyn Academy of Music \u2013 invited me to lunch and asked me if I wanted to run an orchestra.<\/p>\n

Harvey had just read my notorious Jeremiad Understanding Toscanini:<\/strong> <\/a>How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New<\/em> Audience for Old Music<\/em>. That was published by Knopf when a book about classical music might generate four or five dozen major reviews, including Newsweek<\/em> and Time<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Understanding Toscanini<\/em> ends with a diatribe about Lincoln Center. I speculate that if an audience exists for a refreshed, reconsidered presentation of classical music in live performance, it would be the inquisitive and diversified audience Harvey had cultivated at BAM.<\/p>\n

BAM had its own orchestra: the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Harvey had some years before decided to jettison traditional programing. He had also jettisoned the orchestra\u2019s remarkable music director, Lukas Foss, in favor of Dennis Russell Davies \u2013 a gifted conductor of world stature who better fit BAM\u2019s \u201cNext Wave\u201d identity. In response, audience members flung their subscription renewal forms at the musicians\u2019 feet backstage and the Brooklyn Philharmonic lost over two-thirds of its subscribers. So in offering me the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Harvey had nothing to lose.<\/p>\n

I took him up on it on condition that I could experimentally implement thematic, cross-disciplinary programing \u2013 and nothing else — in place of the traditional overture\/concerto\/symphony template. Harvey liked that idea and a wild ride ensued.<\/p>\n

The biggest Brooklyn Philharmonic festival, in 1994, was \u201cThe Russian Stravinsky,\u201d based on Richard Taruskin\u2019s ground-breaking research into Stravinsky\u2019s Russian roots. Richard came, and so did (at his suggestion) Dmitri Pokrovsky\u2019s revelatory Pokrovsky Folk Ensemble from Moscow. We also had half a dozen interesting scholars at hand. There were three concerts, all exploring new formats. The festival was reviewed all over the place, including scholarly journals. It felt important \u2013 it made the orchestra matter.<\/p>\n

Some years later, BAM discovered itself deeply in debt and the financial relationship between BAM and the Brooklyn Phil collapsed \u2013 which precipitated my departure and foredoomed the orchestra itself (which no longer exists). Nevertheless, the new artistic template worked (we rebuilt an audience) \u2013 and I have ever since pursued humanities-infused thematic programing. That\u2019s the nub of the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium<\/strong><\/a> I direct.<\/p>\n

The humanities template flourishes in its purest form, however, in DC, where fifteen years ago I co-founded PostClassical Ensemble<\/strong> <\/a>with the wonderful Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ord\u00f3\u00f1ez. We just announced our Fifteenth Anniversary Season. The big events are at the Washington National Cathedral, where we\u2019re Ensemble-in-Residence. You won\u2019t find anything like them anywhere else. They furnish an original answer to the question: What\u2019s an orchestra for?<\/p>\n

In a recent blog<\/strong><\/a> about Leonard Bernstein, I wrote about \u201ccurating the past.\u201d That\u2019s something conductors and orchestras should do \u2013 and don\u2019t. Next January 23, PCE is curating the past with a program called \u201cCultural Fusion: The Gamelan<\/strong> <\/a>Experience.\u201d<\/strong> Its starting point is the observation that gamelan is the non-Western musical genre that (by far) has most influenced the Western classical tradition. This story (which, amazingly, has yet to generate a book) begins with Debussy\u2019s discovery of Javanese musicians and dancers at the 1889 Paris Exposition — the one with the Eiffel Tower. He later wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut my poor friend! Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts? . . . Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises . . . what force one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story continues with Ravel, Poulenc, Messiaen, Britten, and Harrison \u2013 as well as lesser known composers of consequence like Colin McPhee. Both Javanese and Balinese gamelan \u2013 the first fragrant, the second metallic — cast their spell. For our concert, we\u2019ll transform the cathedral\u2019s Great Nave into an exotic cultural kaleidoscope, with Javanese and Balinese gamelan and dancers, archival film, two pianists, and a chamber orchestra.<\/p>\n

The entire exercise is a sequel to the 1996 Brooklyn Philharmonic festival \u201cOrientalism,\u201d which featured two gamelan and a roster of distinguished participants including Steve Reich. It was also at BAM that (thanks to Dennis Russell Davies) I met and fell under the spell of Lou Harrison.<\/p>\n

Harrison\u2019s synthesis of Javanese gamelan sounds and techniques with the Western tradition is a profound achievement \u2013 and has been a longstanding PCE cause. (Our Harrison Centenary CD has been widely acclaimed abroad [and mainly ignored in the US]; we also produced a Harrison Centennial radio special.) In fact, Lou Harrison is one of three composers PCE has most championed \u2013 the other two being Silvestre Revueltas and Bernard Herrmann. With the waning of modernism (whose canons they did not endorse), these are twentieth-century masters whose time will come. And one of the things that orchestras are for is to support missionary work for composers who need and deserve it (cf. Bernstein and Mahler; Bernstein and Ives; Bernstein and Nielsen).<\/p>\n

PCE\u2019s month-long Bernard Herrmann festival in 2016 celebrated his versatility as \u201cthe most under-rated twentieth century American composer.\u201d Herrmann\u2019s justly famous film scores (Psycho, Vertigo<\/em>, etc.) were juxtaposed with the inspirational war-time radio dramas he scored for Norman Corwin, and with his neglected concert music (of which his bewitching clarinet quintet is my favorite chamber music by any American).<\/p>\n

In the course of all that, we struck gold: the 1944 Corwin\/Herrmann radio drama \u201cWhitman\u201d; revisited in live performance, it turned out to be a major American concert work. That was with a student actor as Whitman, at the National Gallery of Art. And so on June 1, at the National Cathedral, our next Herrmann tribute will include \u201cWhitman\u201d with the distinguished American baritone William Sharp in the title role. The performance \u2013 celebrating Walt\u2019s 200th<\/sup> birthday — will be broadcast live over the WWFM Classical Network. And we\u2019ll record \u201cWhitman\u201d and two other Herrmann works for Naxos.<\/p>\n

Our goal: to instate Bernard Herrmann\u2019s \u201cWhitman\u201d as a concert melodrama (in musical parlance: a work mating music with the spoken word) of high consequence, a significant addition to the American symphonic repertoire.<\/p>\n

And we have one more National Cathedral concert, on Nov. 5: \u201cI Sing the Body Electoral.\u201d Another Whitman celebration, it attempts to engage Whitman\u2019s democratic ethos to ignite a musical town meeting on the eve of the crucial mid-term elections. Is that also something orchestras are for? We will find out.<\/p>\n

For more on PCE and Bernard Herrmann, click here<\/a>.<\/strong> For PCE\u2019s two-hour Bernard Herrmann radio special, click here.<\/strong><\/a> To access the original 1944 \u201cWhitman\u201d radio play (with Charles Laughton \u2013 and terrible sound) click here<\/a>.<\/strong> To survey PCE\u2019s four 2018-19 events at the Washington National Cathedral, go to postclassical.com <\/em><\/p>\n

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vonicfic, and also the orchestra\u2019s gifted music director, Lukas Fosssic abrcherchrbucaHarvey rea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the 1990s, Harvey Lichtenstein \u2013 who recreated the Brooklyn Academy of Music \u2013 invited me to lunch and asked me if I wanted to run an orchestra. Harvey had just read my notorious Jeremiad Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music. That was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1147","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-iv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1169,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}