{"id":4095,"date":"2026-07-05T23:57:37","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T03:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=4095"},"modified":"2026-07-05T23:57:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T03:57:38","slug":"american-classical-music-at-250-take-two-the-bam-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2026\/07\/american-classical-music-at-250-take-two-the-bam-experiment.html","title":{"rendered":"American Classical Music at 250 \u2013 Take Two: The BAM Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PocpiBx3hfk?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The &#8220;New World&#8221; Symphony visual presentation created by Peter Bogdanoff for the Brooklyn Philharmonic&#8217;s 1994 Dvorak festival. Building on research by Michael Beckerman, it extrapolates the influence of Longfellow on Dvorak. It has since been used by dozens of other orchestras. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am still processing an avalanche of responses to my <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2026\/06\/at-250-has-america-delivered-on-its-classical-music-promise.html\"><em>New York Times<\/em> piece<\/a><\/strong> on the state of American classical music 250 years in. I\u2019m particularly grateful to readers who wrote to remember the Brooklyn Philharmonic festivals during my 1990s tenure as the orchestra\u2019s Executive Director. That experiment was the subject of the Postlude to my essay collection <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.josephhorowitz.com\/the-post-classical-predicament\">The Post-Classical Predicament<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (1995). Below, I\u2019m reprinting all 5,000 words \u2013 before it all fades from living memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was invited by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/03\/mulling-salonens-resignation-take-three-harvey-lichtenstein-and-bam.html\">Harvey Lichtenstein<\/a> to take over the BPO \u2013 the Resident Orchestra of his incomparable Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) &#8212; there was nothing left to lose. The orchestra had lost over two-thirds of its subscribers over two seasons. And Harvey was a world-class gambler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I remarked in my <em>Times<\/em> piece, the new programing template now controversially proposed for the Boston Symphony, replacing eclectic fare with thematic festivals, has in effect been implemented by the <a href=\"https:\/\/theamericanscholar.org\/shostakovich-in-south-dakota\/\">South Dakota Symphony<\/a>, for which I serve as scholar-in-residence. But its initial manifestation was at BAM, where the impact was immediate. We more than tripled our audiences. We became the first orchestra to be funded by the NEH. We landed major foundation grants from Mellon, Hearst, Rockefeller, and Knight. Among the composers we brought to BAM were Louis Andriessen (the happiest, best-fed composer I have ever encountered), Sofia Gubaidulina, Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Lukas Foss, Gunther Schuller, Zhou Long (not yet famous), Chen-Yi (ditto) and \u2013 not to be forgotten \u2013 P. D. Q. Bach aka Peter Schickele.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Re-reading my Postlude today, I discover that I was overly optimistic that American orchestras would succumb to innovation. I also worried about alienating \u201ctraditional\u201d BPO subscribers. That proved a groundless fear \u2013 we polled our audience and discovered no interest in standard repertoire or \u201ccelebrity soloists\u201d (among whom I only engaged Gidon Kremer). I was the beneficiary of Harvey\u2019s BAM audience, which he boldly cultivated by offering what could not be found at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What ended it all was a BAM audit that disclosed a crisis. Overnight, Harvey cancelled the financial favors the orchestra enjoyed as a \u201cresident ensemble.\u201d It afterward died a lingering death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here\u2019s my Postlude:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Post-Classical Music in Brooklyn<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As program editor for concerts at New York\u2019s 92nd Street Y through 1994, I had the good fortune to serve as artistic advisor to the \u201cSchubertiade\u201d\u2014the Y\u2019s distinguished Schubert festival, anchored by the baritone Hermann Prey. One of my responsibilities was to create an annual Sunday symposium. And so I was thrust from my writer\u2019s desk\u2014a secluded outpost, overlooking a courtyard with trees and unmolested by visitors or telephone calls\u2014and onto the stage of the Y\u2019s Kaufmann Concert Hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first Schubertiade symposium, in 1988, was a hastily organized afternoon exploring Schubert\u2019s earliest songs alongside settings by such forgotten contemporaries as Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg. The following year, \u201cSchubert <em>Lieder<\/em> in Performance\u201d was fully six hours long, starting at one P.M. and ending at eight, with a break for dinner. We considered the relevance of fortepianos, of improvised ornaments, of historic recordings. The participants included the musicologist and pianist Robert Winter, the fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, the baritone Sanford Sylvan, and the critic Will Crutchfield. The day had its interesting ups and downs. The advocacy of original instruments and interpolated appoggiaturas was, I thought, more clever than persuasive. The most vivid, most spontaneous moment came in the closing panel discussion, when I pressed Prey for an opinion about the elaborate ornaments\u2014based on ornaments once sung by Johann Michael Vogl with Schubert at the piano\u2014we had heard sung by Timothy Mussard. \u201cI hated them!\u201d he exploded. The audience roared its approval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The following season, in January 1990, we hit stride with \u201cPerspectives on \u2018Erlk\u00f6nig.\u2019\u201d The entire six hours were allotted to a four-minute song, Schubert\u2019s most famous composition for more than half a century after his death. How was it that \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d made Schubert\u2019s reputation and shaped it? How assess its popularity and impact? Two lengthy presentations\u2014each, in effect, a concert with commentary\u2014addressed these questions. First we heard, in chronological sequence, seven settings of Goethe\u2019s poem \u201cErlk\u00f6nig,\u201d performed by Prey and two other singers, with commentary by the musicologist Walter Frisch. The second presentation, with commentary by Frisch\u2019s Columbia University colleague Christopher Gibbs, sampled nine adaptations of Schubert\u2019s setting; here, the central performer was the pianist William Wolfram. In short, we surrounded Schubert\u2019s achievement with popular ditties and flamboyant concert works, with kitsch and <em>Sturm und Drang<\/em>, with music obscure and famous, all of it fostered by Goethe\u2019s ballad of 1782.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d song turned out to be a meek strophic rendering by the actress and composer Corona Schr\u00f6ter, who performed it as part of the Singspiel <em>Die Fischerin<\/em>: a wife passes the time by singing about a child scared to death by a phantom; upon finishing, she remarks that the men are late for dinner. Equally improbable, alongside Schubert\u2019s, was the final \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d in our survey, a Biedermeier diversion composed by Ludwig Spohr\u2014who adds a suave obbligato violin impersonating the evil erlking. Anselm H\u00fcttenbrenner\u2019s \u201cErlk\u00f6nig Waltz,\u201d with its dainty hand-crossings, was a hilarious Schubert parody. In Joseph Roth\u2019s <em>Schubertiana<\/em>, a beer-garden medley for two violins, accordion, and guitar, snippets of \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d and of the Great C major Symphony took turns with \u201cHeidenr\u00f6slein\u201d and \u201cAve Maria.\u201d Of another order were Liszt\u2019s \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d\u2014his most famous, most virtuosic Schubert song transcription\u2014and the terrifying harmonics of Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst\u2019s version for solo violin. Of two other solo piano adaptations that we exhumed, Stephen Heller\u2019s \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d proved a fascinating, free paraphrase after Schubert, and Geza Zichy\u2019s, for left hand alone, proved unplayable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The day\u2019s most insightful comment came from an audience member who conjectured that Schubert was drawn to \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d through bitter personal experience: Goethe\u2019s poem depicts a son who cannot share with his father what he sees and feels; there is evidence that Schubert himself was not understood by his father. The day\u2019s most electrifying moment was supplied by Prey. In his dressing room he had listened to Karen Smith Erickson sing Corona Schr\u00f6ter\u2019s \u201cErlk\u00f6nig,\u201d then to Nathaniel Watson in \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d settings by Carl Friedrich Zelter, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, and Bernhard Klein. Distinguished exponents of the Berlin <em>Lieder<\/em> school Goethe himself endorsed, Zelter and Reichardt support Goethe\u2019s eight stanzas gently and inconspicuously. Klein, by comparison, agitates both singer and pianist; he remolds the poem. This trajectory from reticence to skilled manipulation\u2014a relentless \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d drama of its own\u2014culminated with Schubert\u2019s harrowing night ride, and with that of Karl Loewe\u2014a famous and harrowing 1818 \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d in its own right. With this build-up, Prey stopped the show with a rendition of the Loewe \u201cErlk\u00f6nig\u201d pitched at the very edge of the doomed child\u2019s abyss of terror. It was the performance of a lifetime, galvanized by a sense of occasion no ordinary format could have generated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Schubertiade symposiums that followed built upon \u201cPerspectives on \u2018Erlk\u00f6nig.\u2019\u201d They aimed to refresh the experience of famous music by creating a new framework for understanding. Crucial to this framework were samplings of popular music and popular culture, contradicting the solemnity of \u201cclassical music.\u201d Lectures and discussions, slides and film were incorporated. At the same time, music in live performance increasingly dominated\u2014so that the format became that of a concert framed by topics in social and cultural history. \u201cSchubert the Man: Myth versus Reality,\u201d in 1992, revisited portrayals of the demure, sweet-tempered <em>Lieder<\/em> genius: \u201cThe Music Master,\u201d an unintentionally whimsical Hollywood film biography from 1941, and <em>Das Dreim\u00e4derlhaus<\/em>, Heinrich Bert\u00e9\u2019s phenomenally popular Schubert confection of 1916, an operetta that reinvents Schubert\u2019s life in conjunction with retooling his tunes. Prey triumphed in Tsch\u00f6ll\u2019s yodeling aria, performed in juxtaposition with its improbable source: the sublime E-flat <em>Klavierst\u00fcck<\/em>, D. 946. The speakers on this occasion included Susan McClary, whose talk \u201cSchubert\u2019s Sexuality\u201d was a reconsideration of the <em>Unfinished Symphony<\/em> inspired by Maynard Solomon\u2019s contention that Schubert inhabited a homosexual subculture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cSchubert and the Piano,\u201d in 1993, was offered in combination with Andras Schiff\u2019s traversal of the complete piano sonatas. Steven Lubin compared Schubert\u2019s E-flat Impromptu on a replica Graf fortepiano with the sound of a modern Steinway. Robert Winter dissected the first movement of the D major Sonata\u2014and its recorded performances by Artur Schnabel and Alfred Brendel. Ruth Solie pondered the parlor piano of Schubert\u2019s day. The two-hour centerpiece was a whirlwind tour of Schubert\u2019s four-hand music by Richard and John Contiguglia, including performances of his three piano duet masterpieces from 1828. \u201cSchubert, Death, and the Wanderer,\u201d in 1994, was a five-hour prelude to Prey\u2019s evening performance of <em>Winterreise<\/em>. The Germanist Cyrus Hamlin showed paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and read poems by Goethe and H\u00f6lderlin. Leon Botstein documented the heightened awareness of mortality in Schubert\u2019s disease-ridden Vienna. Susan Youens, assisted by Nathaniel Watson, argued that the <em>Winterreise<\/em> Wanderer does not descend into madness, but attains stoic understanding. The main event was a lecture-recital by David Owen Norris presenting the belated New York premiere of the complete Schubert-Liszt <em>Winterreise<\/em>\u2014an occasion for exploring Romantic largesse in comparison to the stark proto-modern concision of Schubert\u2019s last songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Schubertiade symposiums acquired a diehard following, including followers from outside New York. <strong>They demonstrated that there exists a classical music audience starved for intellectual engagement. They demonstrated that for certain scholars academia seems as limiting as the concert regime seems to certain listeners. They demonstrated that, in combination, these scholars and listeners can create a unique opportunity for music in performance, one that showcases certain pieces and performers in special ways.<\/strong> Finally, they demonstrated that it was time for me to change careers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Schubertiade audience was unique. Its inquisitiveness set it apart. At the same time, it was undeniably aged. Its core was New York\u2019s German-Jewish audience for <em>Lieder<\/em> and chamber music: wonderful folks, but irreplaceable. Post-classical music needs a younger audience, one more attuned to American and contemporary culture. In New York, such an audience exists, but not in Manhattan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Brooklyn Academy of Music has been truly described, in <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, as \u201cAmerica\u2019s most visible showcase for experimental performance.\u201d Built in 1907, it hosted Caruso and Bernhardt, Rachmaninoff and Casals, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, then declined after World War II. Its rebirth began in 1967, when Harvey Lichtenstein became executive director. As early as 1969, Lichtenstein was presenting Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, and Jerzy Grotowski at BAM. His commitment to vanguard performance eventually spawned the influential Next Wave Festival, beginning in 1983. Lichtenstein helped to introduce Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, and Peter Sellars\u2014and <em>Einstein on the Beach<\/em>, <em>Satyagraha<\/em>, and <em>Nixon in China<\/em>. In 1987, he refurbished the abandoned Majestic Theater, a block away, to host Peter Brook\u2019s epic <em>Mahabharata<\/em>. Brook became a BAM mainstay, as did Ingmar Bergman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Beginning in the late 1980s, Lichtenstein ventured increasingly into opera. Stressing opera as theater\u2014his 2,000-seat Opera House is half the size of the cavernous Met\u2014he presented stagings of Lully, Gluck, Verdi, and Weill by Jean-Marie Villegier, Harry Kupfer, Peter Stein, and Peter Sellars. He also mounted opera in the 900-seat Majestic. BAM Opera acquired a vital following. Lichtenstein was emboldened to tackle chamber and symphonic music. He made the Brooklyn Philharmonic, previously a tenant, BAM\u2019s resident orchestra in 1990. He dismantled BAM\u2019s chamber music series and invited the violinist Gidon Kremer to create something in its place. Kremer proposed a two-week chamber festival combining music, theater, cinema, opera, and dance. Lichtenstein said yes\u2014and engaged me to help plan it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For BAM, Kremer was a choice both obvious and inspired. His satanic intensity defamiliarizes the standard repertoire. Equally wicked are his tongue-in-cheek encores, which provoke amazed laughter and guffaws. He makes a cause of Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Arvo P\u00e4rt\u2014more than anyone else, he has brought to our attention these and other late twentieth-century composers from East Europe and Russia. He collaborates with Keith Jarrett and Laurie Anderson. Alongside the creamy tones and pleasing smiles of Perlman, Pavarotti, and te Kanawa, he is as discomfiting as Lenau\u2019s Mephisto fiddling with Faust. Yet his popular appeal is immediate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For his BAM festival Kremer programmed a Moscow early music group, a chorus from Pakistan, a Soviet jazz pianist, a Cuban-American band, and a one-man Shakespeare troupe. His dual appeal\u2014to Lincoln Center and Next Wave\u2014promised a fusion audience that could save classical music from itself. But Lichtenstein\u2019s box office projections were poor, and he pulled out at the eleventh hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This disappointment proved a postponement, not a cancellation. Kremer did perform at BAM with the Brooklyn Philharmonic\u2014after which Lichtenstein resolved that his resident orchestra, not his abandoned chamber music program, would become an experimental laboratory. I was again invited to plot strategy, and this time the plot took hold<strong>. As of 1993\u201394, the Brooklyn Philharmonic\u2019s main subscription season was reconceived as a series of interdisciplinary, thematically organized weekend festivals.<\/strong> The most ambitious were \u201cFrom the New World,\u201d celebrating Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s historic three-year sojourn in the United States, and \u201cThe Russian Stravinsky,\u201d exploring Stravinsky\u2019s indebtedness to folk culture. Both festivals reassessed canonized masterworks\u2014Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s <em>New World Symphony<\/em>, Stravinsky\u2019s <em>The Rite of Spring<\/em> and <em>Les noces<\/em>\u2014in light of fresh research by scholars whom I knew to be galvanizing speakers. Both stretched the framework of understanding to include popular culture. Both were embellished with lobby activities and with thick, illustrated program booklets generously subsidized by the National Endowment for the Humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For \u201cFrom the New World,\u201d Dennis Russell Davies and the orchestra offered an aural snapshot of America\u2019s turn-of-the-century symphonic culture: the <em>New World Symphony<\/em>, composed in New York in 1893; the \u201cDirge\u201d from the contemporaneous <em>Indian Suite<\/em> by Edward MacDowell, whom Americans considered their leading composer; and the <em>Gaelic Symphony<\/em> by Amy Beach, begun in January 1894 in response to the first Boston performance of <em>From the New World<\/em> less than a month earlier. The weekend proposed a thesis: that Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s New World residency was more influential than we remember; and that the American music on which he drew, and which he inspired, is also worthy of remembrance. Dvo\u0159\u00e1k himself was a student of African-American and American Indian music, echoes and preconceptions of which infiltrate the <em>New World Symphony<\/em>. In New York in 1893, all who heard this music heard its American accent, but in heated debate could not agree on its relevance to forging a native symphonic style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At BAM we aspired to make Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s American accent as audible as it seemed a century ago. In a pre-concert performance piece, Michael Beckerman recited excerpts from <em>The Song of Hiawatha<\/em> accompanied by excerpts from the <em>New World Symphony<\/em>, by way of arguing that parts of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s symphony narrate Hiawatha\u2019s wedding, his homeward journey, and his climactic battle with Pau-Pau-Keewis. Post-concert, Robert Winter presented his state-of-the-art CD ROM on Dvo\u0159\u00e1k in America, including a historic recording of Harry Burleigh singing \u201cGo Down Moses\u201d (as he once sang it for Dvo\u0159\u00e1k), and recorded reminiscences of Czech Americans who knew Dvo\u0159\u00e1k during his Iowa summer of 1893. As Dvo\u0159\u00e1k had told Americans that the middle movements of the <em>New World Symphony<\/em> were inspired by Longfellow\u2019s poem, in our performance the <em>Largo<\/em> and scherzo were accompanied by slides exploring resonances with the American West and <em>Hiawatha<\/em> (memorably poetic canvases by Remington and Catlin), with plantation life, and with the Bohemian homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A six-hour Sunday afternoon \u201cInterplay,\u201d modeled after the Schubertiade symposiums, revisited the debate over Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s agenda for America. Juxtaposing Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s <em>American Suite<\/em>, performed by Alan Feinberg, with a \u201cPlantation Dance\u201d by his African-American student Maurice Arnold, we documented the effect of the American vernacular on Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s \u201cAmerican style.\u201d Exploring the folk pungency of certain Amy Beach songs and piano pieces, we considered the influence of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s example on a leading American composer. The afternoon\u2019s other music was by Dvo\u0159\u00e1k, Burleigh, Scott Joplin, Will Marion Cook, and Arthur Farwell. The speakers included the American historian John Mack Faragher, whose words and slides recreated Buffalo Bill\u2019s <em>Wild West<\/em> (which Dvo\u0159\u00e1k attended in New York) and the Kickapoo Medicine Show (which Dvo\u0159\u00e1k attended in Iowa). In the lobby, during each of three intermissions, Faragher presented rare archival footage of the Buffalo Bill pageant, with its parading or warring Indians, settlers, and cavalrymen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We kicked off \u201cThe Russian Stravinsky\u201d with folk songs and free vodka. There were two orchestral programs plus a six-hour Sunday Interplay. Our premise was that Stravinsky\u2014the cosmopolitan modernist who had called himself French, then resettled in California, then chose to be buried in Venice\u2014was in fact the most Russian of Russian composers. The costumed singers and dancers of Moscow\u2019s Pokrovsky Ensemble presented folk ceremonies, including the ritual sacrifice of a virgin, underlying <em>The Rite of<\/em> <em>Spring<\/em>; they also sampled the regional marriage ceremonies upon which <em>Les noces<\/em> is based. Dennis Russell Davies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic played <em>The Rite of Spring<\/em>. The Pokrovskys themselves performed <em>Les noces<\/em>\u2014not as a ballet, as Stravinsky intended, but as a reenacted peasant wedding. Richard Taruskin, whose landmark research paralleled years of fieldwork by Dmitri Pokrovsky, was a central participant. Taruskin and Pokrovsky agreed that Stravinsky had falsified his past and denied his borrowings in order to conceal his enduring Russianness. But Pokrovsky balked at endorsing Taruskin\u2019s view that the embittered, anti-Semitic \u00e9migr\u00e9 in Stravinsky impregnated <em>The Rite<\/em> and <em>Les noces<\/em> with an \u201canti-humanistic\u201d political philosophy celebrating national community at the expense of individual rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Brooklyn Philharmonic\u2019s 1993\u201394 festival weekends resulted in the highest (and most controversial) public profile in the orchestra\u2019s forty-year history<\/strong>. Ticket sales increased by 40 percent\u2014from rock-bottom lows documenting an aging, alienated subscriber base. Not all the orchestra\u2019s remaining subscribers were entranced: they missed standard-format concerts with notable soloists. The new audience members, by and large, were single ticket buyers trying something different. Whatever their eventual commitment to the orchestra, they have already contributed to its redirection, as the season\u2019s last panel discussion, closing \u201cThe Russian Stravinsky,\u201d made clear. Taruskin\u2014a bearded, Talmudic presence\u2014built his case patiently:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhat is Stravinsky saying about society generally? What is he telling us in the West about how we should be ordering our lives? Stravinsky had definite ideas about that, whether or not you will agree with me that they are implicit in <em>Les noces<\/em>; it\u2019s certainly a matter of record that Stravinsky was intensely antiliberal in his thinking at this time in his life, was traumatized by the Russian Revolution, and placed all his hopes in Mussolini as the regenerator of Europe. And he didn\u2019t just have Western models for this kind of proto-fascist thinking. There were good homegrown proto-fascists as well, and one of them was a very close friend of his whose name is pretty much forgotten\u2014Lev Karsavin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Influenced by Gogol\u2019s <em>Correspondence with Friends<\/em>, in which Gogol \u201cgave voice to the most reactionary political thinking in all of nineteenth-century Russia,\u201d and by Byzantine liturgy, Karsavin theorized a \u201csymphonic society\u201d\u2014\u201ca society in which everybody\u2019s activity is ideally coordinated and harmonized with everybody else\u2019s activity, so that nobody would ever have to think, and there would never have to be a choice exercised.\u201d This was the philosophy that Stravinsky embodied in such works as <em>Symphonies of Wind Instruments<\/em>, which he modeled after a Byzantine service, and <em>Les noces<\/em>, in which the wedding celebrants behave in what is, by liberal standards, \u201ca subhuman way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Theodore Levin, an ethnomusicologist from Dartmouth as calming as Taruskin is needlingly self-assured, offered in response that \u201cone must acknowledge that <em>Les noces<\/em> has not in recent history been viewed as a celebration of authoritarian culture. Tikhon Khrennikov in 1948 accused Stravinsky of mocking Russian customs and animal instincts. My own feeling when I hear the work now is that Stravinsky adopts an epic voice in which he\u2019s neither celebrating nor mocking. He conveys, much as Homer did in the <em>Iliad<\/em>, the relentless logic of tradition, the pitiless logic of the way life is in those villages. And in that sense, I see him as a kind of ethnographer, who just reports.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next speaker was the composer and conductor Lukas Foss, who knew Stravinsky, and who played the piano in a historic recording of <em>Les noces<\/em> under Stravinsky\u2019s baton. \u201cWe\u2019re devoting much too much time to totally irrelevant things,\u201d Foss began in the eager <em>mezza voce<\/em> that excites all his conversation. \u201cThe musicologists are so happy, in a self-indulgent way, when they can point out the influences. But that\u2019s not what\u2019s important. What\u2019s important is that the composer transforms these influences, and makes them his own. Which reminds me of a wonderful Stravinsky statement. He once said, \u201cYou must always steal, but never from yourself.\u201d What he meant by that is quite obvious. When you steal from yourself you learn nothing. When you steal from others, you enrich your vocabulary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A flurry of applause punctuated this opinion as Foss handed the cordless microphone (a wonderful invention) to Dennis Russell Davies. Both Foss and Davies had suffered Taruskin\u2019s exegesis with visible impatience. As Davies now confided: \u201cI said to Lukas, \u2018Who\u2019s going to say, \u201cSo what?\u201d\u2014you or me?\u2019 He said I could say it.\u201d Loud applause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">John Bowlt spoke next. He is a historian of Russian visual art, a specialist in the Diaghilev circle, of which Stravinsky was part. He sailed round the musicians\u2019 debates: \u201cI feel that all these comments about structure and derivations that we\u2019ve heard are of course very important. But when you come down to it there\u2019s something in Stravinsky which is profoundly incomprehensible and, well, perhaps divine. There is suddenly a sensibility that moves us beyond words. And it\u2019s exactly the same kind of experience I\u2019ve had when I look at the black square of Malevich of 1915, or hear \u201ce u iu\/i a o\/o a\/o a e i e ia,\u201d which is a translational poem of 1913.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Elizabeth Valkenier took the microphone and briefly observed: \u201cBeing a specialist in nineteenth-century Russian social history, I would like to add is that this discussion\u2014in which there is only one answer to a question, and anything else has to be pulverized\u2014is also profoundly Russian.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Taruskin now requested the microphone and commenced: \u201cI of course disagree fundamentally with what we\u2019ve been hearing. And I think these are very important issues. I really feel a moral commitment to say something, even though I doubt that many of you will agree with me. The idea that it is somehow an attack on the composer, or a diminishment of his work, to bring up what we are accustomed to think of as extramusical factors that bear upon it, especially when these are things that we don\u2019t normally regard as wholesome\u2014I think it\u2019s a kind of evasiveness. There\u2019s something that makes us uncomfortable about attaching political meanings to a musical work, especially if they\u2019re not political meanings we learned in school to admire. Am I in fact writing off the work? Am I in fact disengaging myself from commitment to it by raising these points? Just the contrary. The reason I became interested in such questions is that I find <em>Les noces<\/em> the most moving experience that twentieth-century music has to offer. And I think unequivocally that it is Igor Stravinsky\u2019s masterwork. When I listen to it I have goosebumps from beginning to end, and in a good performance I shed tears. And yet <em>Les noces<\/em> is abhorrent to me in some ways. The content is abhorrent and the experience is intensely compelling. It creates within me a conflict, it creates within me a tension. And that is what has impelled me to do the research that I\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As moderator of this discussion, I had been wrestling with the impulse to interrupt, to compress and simplify. But it had proceeded so spontaneously\u2014with barely a pause for breath\u2014that I only now interceded to inquire if there were questions or comments from the audience. To my astonishment, a forest of hands\u2014easily fifty, maybe seventy-five\u2014shot up. We ended an hour later only because we had to clear the stage\u2014after which the discussants continued in smaller groups. <strong>This experience violated every precept conveyed by the sound bite. It contradicted the disdain for complexity inculcated by anchormen and talk show hosts, politicians and campaign advisers, media experts and classical music broadcasters. It demonstrated that an audience attending a 1994 Stravinsky festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music could listen with relish and discernment to a debate over the relevance of Lev Karsavin to <em>Les noces<\/em>\u2014a debate, moreover, whose flair and subtlety of expression would not have disgraced Fleischmann\u2019s round table and other Union Square haunts frequented by the likes of James Gibbons Huneker, Anton Seidl, and Anton\u00edn Dvo\u0159\u00e1k a century ago.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The 1993\u201394 Brooklyn Philharmonic season generated collaborations with Da Camera of Houston and with the Chicago Symphony. The 1994\u201395 Brooklyn Philharmonic season, meanwhile, includes Dennis Russell Davies conducting Philip Glass, Marianne Faithfull singing Kurt Weill\u2014and Gidon Kremer performing P\u00e4rt and Schnittke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My 1987 book, <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.josephhorowitz.com\/understanding-toscanini\">Understanding Toscanini<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, was a declaration of symphonic obsolescence. Subtitled \u201cHow He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music,\u201d it argued that the American concert orchestra\u2014a remarkable invention, distinct from the pit orchestras of Europe\u2014lost its way during the interwar decades. An expanded audience, full of upwardly mobile newcomers; a new compositional aesthetic, hostile to Romantic pleasures; an influx of luminary performers, chased west by Hitler, yet retaining European artistic loyalties\u2014these were some of the factors dictating that canonized masterpieces and celebrity conductors dominated as never before. <strong>America\u2019s orchestras turned hostile to American music, to contemporary art, to creativity itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The glamour of what Marc Blitzstein derisively called the \u201cPlatinum Orchestra age\u201d was guaranteed not to last. The celebrity conductors died off. The canonized repertoire grew old and overly familiar. Blitzstein was not the only American composer who saw it coming; they all did. Daniel Gregory Mason decried \u201cmuseums of the past\u201d and \u201cfashion-enslaved, prestige-hypnotized minds.\u201d Virgil Thomson lampooned popularizers for whom Great Music ended with Sibelius. Aaron Copland despaired of the American obsession with \u201cmasterworks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>By the 1980s the complacency of the classical music establishment was stultifying\u2014except to the administrators and music businessmen who preserved the status quo. The only thing that worried them was their aging audience.<\/strong> A 1982 survey by the New York Philharmonic found that 51 percent of its listeners were over fifty-five years old, with only 13 percent under thirty-five, and 69 percent reporting annual incomes of forty thousand dollars and more. Two years later, the Philharmonic undertook a characteristic response: a marketing study. The study\u2019s recommended \u201cstrategies,\u201d equally characteristic, were for improved marketing. As I reported in <em>Understanding Toscanini<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cAcknowledging audience antipathy to \u2018new music\u2019 as documented in the 1982 survey, the study at no point conjectured that fresher repertoire might entice younger listeners; rather, the orchestra\u2019s \u2019image\u2019 needed freshening. Alluding to widespread disenchantment with the music director in the musical press, the study inferred that \u2018bad publicity\u2019 needed rectifying by \u2018increased publicity support, particularly in the form of selected appearances and interviews by Mr. Mehta and\u2014wherever possible\u2014members of the orchestra.\u2019 \u2018The Philharmonic experience,\u2019 according to the study, aspired to fulfill leisure needs by furnishing an \u2018enjoyable\u2019 and \u2018stress-reducing activity.\u2019 How to communicate the Philharmonic experience? \u2018[Get] on the air more frequently in the New York area in TV and cable and radio.\u2019 \u2018High visibility [for] New York occasions, like the Big Ship parade, a dedication of the Statue of Liberty, a Christmas Show, a New Year\u2019s Eve concert, etc.\u2019 \u2018Solo appearances by members of the Philharmonic with other area orchestras.\u2019 \u2018Further development of the management of direct mail and telephone marketing by zip code areas.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Thus did the manipulable needs and aspirations of the classical music audience preempt the needs and aspirations of art. But this survival strategy could only prove self-defeating in the long run.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1992, the American Symphony Orchestra League published a three-part study of the condition of American orchestras. A year later, a follow-up report, \u201cAmericanizing the American Orchestra,\u201d called for substantial and systemic change embracing repertoire, format, and the relationship to the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At recent ASOL conventions, self-congratulation, once a frequent theme, has been displaced by ferment\u2014by a plethora of reports on new tactics for audience development, for music education, for transforming the concert experience. Some proposed strategies seem desperate or expedient: old goods repackaged. But, even where imagination falters, the search is authentic, not cynical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A new subject matter\u2014a diversified \u201cpost-classical music\u201d\u2014is an inescapable outcome of these tendencies if they are to do the work of renewal. What the searchers are groping toward is an integration of concert music and society unknown since the turn of the century, when Dvo\u0159\u00e1k studied African-American spirituals, American Indian chants, and Stephen Foster songs, and Anton Seidl led the <em>New World Symphony<\/em> for a public eager to participate in the quest for an American music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In <em>Understanding Toscanini<\/em>, I mapped five \u2018\u2019worlds of American music\u201d that had been omitted from the curriculum of music appreciation\u2014and therefore withheld from the new interwar audience and its progeny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first was of Koussevitzky, Tanglewood, and [the interwar journal] <em>Modern Music<\/em>: the American composers of the twenties and thirties. The second was a maverick sidebar to the first: rangy American originals in the tradition of Whitman and Melville, beginning with Charles Ives and including Edgard Var\u00e8se, Harry Partch, and John Cage. The third omitted world was of American musical theater: Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers. The fourth\u2014endorsed by <em>Modern Music<\/em>, Ives, and Gershwin, denigrated by highbrow music appreciators\u2014was jazz, its precursors and forms: gospel, blues, ragtime, swing. The fifth omitted world of music mounted the most thorough attack on the \u201cmasterwork\u201d idea, with its elaborate distinctions between \u201cserious\u201d and \u201cpopular,\u201d \u201cart\u201d and \u201crecreation.\u201d Propagated in <em>Modern Music<\/em> by the composers Henry Cowell, Paul Bowles, and Colin McPhee, among others, it prophetically embraced the music of Asia, Africa, and South America, accommodating listening modes more meditative or ceremonial than those of the modern West. . . . McPhee\u2019s <em>Tabuh-Tabuhan<\/em> (1936)\u2014his best-known composition, forecasting the \u201cminimalism\u201d of Steve Reich and Philip Glass\u2014is an orchestral toccata appropriating Balinese gamelan techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Seven years later, our Brooklyn Philharmonic programs at BAM embrace Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives, Kurt Weill (in both his Berlin and Broadway modes), Duke Ellington, Colin McPhee, and Philip Glass. They debunk the distinction between high and popular culture. <strong>Rather than elevating Great Music and Great Performances, they leaven Mozart and Stravinsky with large helpings of folk music and jazz. And this assault on \u201cclassical music\u201d is not a premeditated strategy, but a natural direction dictated by the orchestra\u2019s venue, its audience, its time and place.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we are not alone. Across the river, in Manhattan, Leon Botstein has reinvented the American Symphony Orchestra. American Symphony concerts investigate such topics as \u201cBruckner and the 20th Century\u201d and, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, \u201cParis in the 1860s: The Origins of Impressionism.\u201d Every August, the orchestra anchors the Bard Festival, whose intellectual ambitions are no less enthralling than its bucolic setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Quest and discovery equally prevail at the Baltimore Symphony\u2019s Saturday morning Casual Concerts, where David Zinman conducts not Beethoven\u2019s Fifth and <em>Rhapsody in Blue<\/em>, but Mahler\u2019s Sixth, Elgar\u2019s First, and Michael Torke\u2019s <em>Ash<\/em>. No less than his uncompromising repertoire, Zinman\u2019s maniacal humor subverts. When he sings \u201cFull Moon and Empty Arms\u201d in his high plaintive baritone, he not only illustrates that Rachmaninoff\u2019s melodies \u201ccould be popular songs,\u201d but creates an opportunity for madness: a Casual Concerts contest. \u201cWe want you to send us your lyrics to any Rachmaninoff tune,\u201d he announces; he intends to pick and perform the winning entry. Discussing Brahms\u2019s First Symphony, he features \u201cNews from the Trombone Section.\u201d \u201cDid you know that in Brahms\u2019s First Symphony, the trombones don\u2019t play at all until the fourth movement? What do you suppose they\u2019re doing all that time? Come with me. We\u2019re going to head back to the trombone section and talk to them.\u201d Threading his way through cellos and winds, he winds up face to face with four trombonists. \u201cGentlemen, you\u2019re in the special teams division. You sit there for a long time and do nothing. Obviously you can\u2019t read a book, because people are looking at you. You can\u2019t scratch yourself. What do you think about?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Zinman relishes comedy for its own sake. But by smashing pedestals he also honors the Great Composers thus toppled to earth: listening to Rachmaninoff, listening to Brahms, listening to Mahler, his Saturday morning audience is provoked to hear in ways that are anything but casual. Baltimore\u2019s \u201ccasual\u201d concertgoers pore through the program notes. They rise to the challenge of new music. They compose lyrics for Rachmaninoff\u2019s tunes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Granted, these are initiatives that seek to make a virtue of necessity. Like the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the American Symphony is fighting for survival in a city oversupplied with concerts, musicians, and orchestras. Similarly, the Baltimore Symphony, which promises its musicians more than three hundred services per season, created a Saturday morning series in an attempt to add concerts without depleting its existing market. And yet when Zinman says that \u201cthe days of simply sitting at concerts are vanishing,\u201d what he perceives is less a problem than an opportunity. <strong>His reforms, like Botstein\u2019s, are activated less by a marketing plan than by an artistic vision\u2014and the faith that marketing will follow, because the essential crisis is one of substance, not appearances.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Baltimore Symphony\u2019s Casual Concerts have succeeded in drawing a younger audience. Will the Brooklyn Philharmonic also succeed? The Manhattan audience that flocks to BAM for contemporary dance, theater, and opera dismisses orchestral concerts as old-fashioned and redundant; this plausible stereotype is tough to puncture. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, former Philharmonic subscribers long for bygone comforts. How should they be wooed? What is the orchestra\u2019s largest potential audience? What is its most appropriate audience?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As of this writing, these questions still need answers. But other answers are emerging. In 1987, in <em>Understanding Toscanini<\/em>, I searched for evidence that a new audience for symphonic music could materialize outside traditional precincts, and beyond conventional expectations. Seven years later, I find that I can glimpse the possibility of a post-classical future. (1995)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am still processing an avalanche of responses to my New York Times piece on the state of American classical music 250 years in. I\u2019m particularly grateful to readers who wrote to remember the Brooklyn Philharmonic festivals during my 1990s tenure as the orchestra\u2019s Executive Director. That experiment was the subject of the Postlude to [&hellip;]<\/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_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-143","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095","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=4095"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4102,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions\/4102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}