I was recently entrusted with delivering the graduation address for the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I wound talking about the future of orchestras. My larger point was that this is a moment for young musicians \u2013 and not so young institutions \u2013 to hone their sense of mission. Here\u2019s what I had to offer: <\/p>\n
A lot of the writing that I\u2019ve done over the past 25 years has explored the story of classical music in America in its most dynamic period \u2013 the late nineteenth century. <\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a vignette: the Metropolitan Opera presented the premiere of Wagner\u2019s Tristan und Isolde<\/em> in 1886. When the curtain fell on Isolde\u2019s Liebestod, stunned silence ensued for a period of minutes. Then \u2013 as we can read in the Musical Courier<\/em> \u2013 women in the audience stood on their chairs and \u201cscreamed their delight for what seemed hours.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a second anecdote about the same event. In the third act, Wagner has Tristan tear the bandages off his wound when he sees Isolde\u2019s ship approach. The wound bleeds copiously, and Tristan expires. When Albert Niemann, the Met\u2019s first Tristan, tore his bandages and bared his wound, many in the audience swooned. At subsequent performances, the bandages remained intact. I don\u2019t think that this story is about an audience\u2019s timidity; what it documents is an unbearable intensity of experience.<\/p>\n I would suggest that at least four ingredients account for the astounding urgency and immediacy of this epochal 1886 operatic performance. The first of course is Wagner\u2019s opera \u2013 it was radically new. The second is the condition of the people who swooned and screamed. That the vast majority of Wagnerites in late nineteenth century America were women tells us that Wagner answered powerful needs, needs for self-realization not otherwise answered for corseted and sequestered Gilded Age housewives and mothers. <\/p>\n The third ingredient is the Metropolitan Opera of the 1880s and 90s \u2013 never again would the Met be such a hotbed of innovation and experimentation. Its visionary mastermind was a charismatic conductor who had lived with Wagner almost as a surrogate son: Anton Seidl, the central missionary for Wagnerism in the United States. Fourth, and finally, Americans of the late nineteenth century were acutely susceptible to sophisticated art and culture: it crucially helped them to discover and define who they were, and what America was as a nation.<\/p>\n I have a new book, published this month, titled Moral Fire<\/em>. Here are three sentences from my introduction:<\/p>\n \u201cIf screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.\u201d<\/p>\n The full of title of my new book is Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from <\/em>America\u2019s Fin de Siecle<\/em>. The portraits are of Laura Langford, who presented Wagner concerts 14 times a week in summertime at Coney Island; of Henry Krehbiel, the onetime dean of New York\u2019s music critics; of Charles Ives, arguably the most important concert composer that this country ever produced; and of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The binding theme is that all four of these heroic individuals embraced the notion that art is morally empowering. <\/p>\n They inhabited a moment half a century before the music lovers Hitler and Stalin discredited art as a moral beacon. But we can still, I believe, draw inspiration from their example, and from those screaming Wagnerites at the Met.<\/p>\n This afternoon, I would mainly like to ponder the saga of Henry Higginson and his Boston Symphony \u2013 its gestation and subsequent history \u2013 and ask what lessons this history might teach today.<\/p>\n Higginson was not born to wealth. As a young man he went to Vienna to become a musician. When he discovered that he lacked sufficient talent to excel, he adopted a different life plan: to amass enough capital to create a world class orchestra for the city of Boston. He entered the family business, which happened to be banking. Then, in 1881, at the age of 47, he placed an announcement in every Boston paper headed \u201cin the interest of great music.\u201d<\/p>\n What Higginson announced was the creation of a Boston Symphony Orchestra, wholly financed by himself. It would perform twice weekly, October thru March. Its membership would be stable \u2013 no playing for dances on rehearsal or performance days. Also, a certain number of 25 cent tickets would be set aside for all performances \u2013 because Henry Higginson was a cultural democrat.<\/p>\n By 1900, Higginson\u2019s Boston Symphony was already internationally acknowledged as a great orchestra. It was already a catalyst for the creation of important orchestras in Cincinnati and Chicago. It already gave more than 100 concerts a season. It already offered a summer series of Promenade concerts \u2013 today\u2019s Boston Pops. In format, length, and ritual, its concerts were virtually identical to the Boston Symphony concerts of today.<\/p>\n That by 1900 Higginson\u2019s orchestra looked and sounded like American concert orchestras a century later either documents resilience \u2013 or inertia: resistance to change. Meanwhile, the world was changing \u2013 and in ways that impacted on the symphonic experience.<\/p>\n A useful criterion in assessing any cultural event is \u201csense of occasion.\u201d Higginson was lucky: his concerts created a sense of occasion automatically. In 1900, you couldn\u2019t hear an orchestra in your living room on the radio or phonograph. Also, orchestras the caliber of Boston\u2019s were few and far between. Also, Higginson\u2019s audience was keenly inquisitive about new music: new symphonies by, say, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. Also, Boston\u2019s audience equally appreciated local composers. Everyone understood that George Chadwick was no Beethoven \u2013 but every new symphonic work Chadwick composed was promptly premiered by Higginson\u2019s orchestra. Theodore Thomas, the founding father of American symphonic culture, preached that \u201ca symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community.\u201d Higginson\u2019s Boston Symphony did that.<\/p>\n If this late Gilded Age moment marks the apex of classical music in America, that\u2019s because it\u2019s a moment buoyed by a central aspiration, an aspiration influentially pursued by Antonin Dvorak as director of Jeannette Thurber\u2019s courageous National Conservatory of Music \u2013 the aspiration to create for American orchestras and opera companies a native repertoire of operas and symphonies that would gird American classical music to come. But this never happened. We instead acquired a mutant musical high culture, a Eurocentric culture privileging masterpieces by dead Europeans. <\/p>\n How that occurred and why are questions that have long preoccupied me. Certainly, after World War I, visionaries like Higginson \u2013 or Thurber, or Dvorak, or Anton Seidl, or Henry Krehbiel, or Thedore Thomas \u2013 were little in evidence. Instead, the central powerbroker for classical music was a businessman: Arthur Judson, who simultaneously ran the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Columbia Artists Management \u2013 the major booking agency for conductors and solo instrumentalists. It was Judson\u2019s frank opinion that an orchestra\u2019s programming could QUOTE \u201conly go as far as the public will go with us.\u201d <\/p>\n This notion that the audience sets taste was something new, a concession unknown to the pioneering tastemakers of turn-of-the-century America.<\/p>\n With the advent of recordings, of radio and TV, orchestras could be heard at home. With the advent of modernism, audiences were estranged from contemporary music as never before. That every concert would generate a sense of occasion, as in Higginson\u2019s Boston, could no longer be assumed. All of this challenged orchestras — or might have — to rethink the concert experience. Then came exigent challenges of another kind. Since 2005, the average orchestral deficit \u2013 and most American orchestras run deficits \u2013 has more than tripled. Classical music participation has dropped 30 per cent over the past two decades. Costs continue to rise faster than revenues. According to Jesse Rosen, who heads the League of American Orchestras, \u201cThe current problems are not cyclical problems. The recession has merely brought home and exacerbated longterm problems.\u201d<\/p>\n And here\u2019s one more statistic \u2013 according to a survey of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers \u2013 by reputation, a conservative body of listeners \u2013 only 21 per cent are in favor of standard format concerts with no talking. This hunger for information, I would say, reflects both fatigue with business-as-usual among \u201cold listeners\u201d and the growing needs of \u201cnew listeners.\u201d<\/p>\n I cannot recommend a panacea. But I\u2019d like to cite one sign of constructive change. As never before, American orchestras are experimenting with what\u2019s known in the field as \u201ccontextualized programming.\u201d \u2013 explicating music in the context of cultural and political history, and in relationship to literature, the visual arts, dance and theater. The Chicago Symphony calls it \u201cBeyond the Score.\u201d The New York Philharmic has used the rubric \u201cInside the Music.\u201d Philadelphia offers \u201cAccess Concerts.\u201d <\/p>\n In particular, a landmark $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supports a consortium of orchestras intent on absorbing contextualized programs not as a tangential option, but as part of their central artistic mission.<\/p>\n During the season just concluded \u2013 the first year of this NEH \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d initiative — three orchestras performed Dvorak\u2019s New World<\/em> Symphony in tandem with a visual presentation restoring the cultural vocabulary of the symphony\u2019s first New York audience, culling pertinent excerpts from Longfellow\u2019s The Song of Hiawatha, culling iconic paintings of the American West by Albert Biestadt, George Catlin, and Frederic Remington. <\/p>\n The Buffalo Philharmonic\u2019s \u201cDvorak and America\u201d festival incorporated an event at an art museum exploring the relationship between Dvorak\u2019s symphony and what art historians term \u201cthe American sublime.\u201d The North Carolina Symphony\u2019s Dvorak festival, last February, linked to 11th grade American History classrooms that made Dvorak\u2018s American sojourn a major curricular component. When the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra did its Dvorak festival, last March, all 100 members of the orchestra, grades 9 to 12, studied the Dvorak story in detail, and inquired into the possible impact of extra-musical readings on the way musicians hear and interpret Dvorak\u2019s American symphony.<\/p>\n The success of these festivals \u2013 all the participating orchestras are eager for more \u2013 suggests that today\u2019s orchestras, unlike Henry Higginson\u2019s Boston Symphony, cannot take their mission for granted. This is a moment for orchestras to refresh and even to reformulate their reasons to exist. <\/p>\n And I would like to further suggest, in closing, that this lesson may pertain to young artists such as those assembled here today.<\/p>\n Certainly those of us in classical music occupy a milieu in flux. It is, I would say, incumbent on us to discover and articulate, as never before, a personal sense of mission. We cannot assume that we can slip into existing niches of professional experience \u2013 because those niches are vanishing or evolving. When I meet with young pianists, I urge them to study composition and improvisation, and music outside the Western canon \u2013 to identify objectives that are specific, novel, and individual \u2013 new pieces or little-known composers that they believe in, or new ways of presenting music in live performance. And in fact a fresh wind of entrepreneurial innovation is everywhere apparent.<\/p>\n Those 1886 Wagnerites screamed and stood in their chairs because Tristan und Isolde answered the needs of the moment \u2013 needs demanding a new kind of artistic expression, and new realms of aesthetic experience. Today\u2019s moment again generates substantially new needs, needs impacting on artists and on artistic institutions.<\/p>\n This challenge is equally an opportunity.<\/p>\n Thank you very much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was recently entrusted with delivering the graduation address for the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I wound talking about the future of orchestras. My larger point was that this is a moment for young musicians \u2013 and not so young institutions \u2013 to hone their sense of mission. 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