Sounds & Fury

Schmuck

We can think of no more appropriate word to characterize this postmodern twit/hypocrite and those who think as he does.

[Andre] Rieu insists that musical categorisation is meaningless; that there is no difference between classical and non-classical music, or high art and low art. [...] He depicts his critics as members of a stuffy musical elite with narrow aesthetic tastes, yet regularly demeans in interviews music that is not to his taste and classical musicians who choose not to perform in his manner.

Although Rieu's thinking in this case may be just a tendentious matter of good business much in the same way that it may be just a matter of business when a Mafia don orders a hit on a longtime faithful friend, it's thinking sadly emblematic of our postmodern era.

O tempora! O mores!

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Bless You!, Martin Bernheimer

The venerable and almost always right Martin Bernheimer on Bernstein's Mass:

On Friday, Marin Alsop led a cast of hundreds in a noble, possibly futile, attempt at aesthetic resuscitation. The object of her loving labour was Bernstein’s Mass. Profoundly showbizzy, pompously pious and pretentiously trendy, it was a mess when it inaugurated the Kennedy Center in 1971, and it still is a mess.

Word!

RTWT here.

Sound Of The Times

I had a revealing but fairly depressing experience recently; one that should have been neither revealing nor a surprise, but oddly — and somewhat interestingly — was.

A young, casual acquaintance of mine, an enthusiastic aficionado of classical music, knowing of my past history as a card-carrying audiophile, invited me to his home to audition his newly purchased and set up stereo system for which, he assured me, he had spared no expense in assembling the very best components available. Knowing how attached most audiophiles are to their equipment, and how sensitive they are on the subject, I tried firmly but gently to decline the invitation, but in the end my curiosity got the better of me, and I accepted.

Bad decision.

This young man (a late twentysomething) proved to be a true child of his era as I suppose are we all, for what he had assembled was, to not put too fine a point on it, a sonic horror; an exemplar of the MP3/iPod sensibility writ large and loud.

Although a concertgoer of some if not extensive experience, this young man seemed to have a total mental disconnect between the sound of live music in an acoustically first-rate concert hall and its reproduction via recording. What seemed most important to him, and what he was most excited about, in his newly set up stereo system was its ability to effortlessly achieve undistorted SPL levels on a par with those achieved in live performance in a concert hall, especially where it concerns frequencies below 125Hz, no matter how grotesque such SPL levels sound within the acoustic space of a home listening room. Overall accuracy of reproduction, including that elusive but all-important back-to-front transparent layering of acoustic perspective, was of little or no concern to him. While such unconcern makes no nevermind if what one is listening to is a reproduction of a performance by some rock-and-roll band, it simply won't do when a reproduction of a performance by even a small chamber group, much less a full symphony orchestra, is under consideration.

Within the first three minutes or so, I understood what I was dealing with, knew there was nothing for it, and decided my best and most prudent tactic was simply to affect to listen attentively and vaguely admiringly, and then make my exit as quickly as was politely practicable.

Given all in the world today one has to be depressed about, surely the deadening or absence of refined acoustic sensibilities where reproduced classical music is concerned ranks, or ought to rank, somewhere near the very bottom on the scale of importance.

But, somehow, it doesn't.

A Brief Note On Music Composed For Film

In a post on the Classical Music & Opera Forums, a member wrote:

Regarding film scores: if they garner less respect (in general) [as music], it's because the external constraints are so much more severe, so that purely musical considerations -- especially considerations of structure -- have to take the back seat (if they're even allowed on the bus at all). To begin with, the composer has to fit the music to a scene precisely x.y seconds long, and if the music is to illustrate the action, then the emphases (beats, accents, phrase climaxes) have to fall precisely in time with visual cues within those x.y seconds. Not much room for sonata form here!

We elaborated a bit on that by pointing out that it's not so much a question of structure or form, but rather a question of narrative.

Every piece of stand-alone music traces out, from beginning to end, it's own perceptible, coherent musical narrative absent which what's written is gibberish, not music. But unless a composer has a collaborative arrangement with the filmmaker such as that between Eisenstein and Prokofiev, in Nevsky most especially, where the film, from its very inception — shot by shot, even frame-second by frame-second — was created at the same time the music was being written and vice versa, a film composer simply cannot think in those terms. The controlling narrative is the film's narrative always, and the film composer, who typically doesn't enter the creative process until the film is in its finished, final-cut form, must work his music to precisely fit that film narrative which leaves him all but powerless to create music with its own, stand-alone musical narrative. In fact, to the extent the film composer writes music with its own, stand-alone musical narrative, to that same extent will that music fail as music for the film for which it's being written.

The hallmark of a first-rate film composer is that his film music is never experienced as a thing in itself unless one consciously turns one's ear to hear it in that way, but instead is experienced as an inseparable and organic part of the very fabric of the film itself. Bernard Herrmann had a particular genius for this, and his film scores have never been equaled much less surpassed by any other film composer of our experience. (Kubrick's brilliant use of already written, stand-alone music in his films is a prominent exception to this rule. But only a Kubrick could pull off that little trick so effectively and make that stand-alone music seem an inseparable, organic part of the very fabric of the film itself.)

The Straw Man Cometh — Yet Once Again

Depending on one's mood at the moment, it's either annoying or comical to encounter one or both of the current favorite straw men set up by certain champions of pop culture in the so-called "Culture Wars" as it concerns so-called high and pop culture in the arts generally, and music in particular.

The first of these is the Graying Audience For Classical Music straw man (for a neat trashing of this straw man, see here); the second, the straw man of the flawed and ill-considered attempts by out-of-touch, old-fogey, snobbish high-culture types to "convert" younger people to their way of thinking about music. As one of the usual suspects, an indefatigable champion of pop culture, lately put this last:

Younger people (which by now means people 40 or younger...) don't make distinctions between high and popular culture, or at least not distinctions of value. That includes what used to be thought of as high culture values, like being thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, or (more simply) serious.

People in the older culture can ignore this, or try to fight it, but that's dangerous for them. They simply cut themselves off, not just from contemporary life, but from a lot of thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, and serious art. And if they're trying to make converts for high culture, than they lose bigtime, because their case won't seem plausible to the people they're trying to reach. It's a very bad strategy — obviously! — to go to smart, educated people, and say, "Listen to our music, because yours is trash."

The very notion that "people in the older culture" give so much as a rat's ass about "mak[ing] converts for high culture" among the "40 or younger" crowd (the "smart," "educated" young crowd referred to above, not the primary- and secondary-school young) is nothing short of risible. Other than misguided champions of pop culture, the only people who concern themselves with attempts at such purblind, circle-squaring exercises are well-paid marketing suits and the commercial and managerial high-culture interests who pay them to find ways to put more butts in seats.

Misguided champions of pop culture have the curious notion that it's somehow a bad thing to "make distinctions between high and popular culture" even though it's blazingly clear that not only are there clear distinctions between the two, but a vast gulf that, in one direction — from pop to high — is all but unbridgeable for the overwhelming majority of those who've not been specially schooled when very young to prepare them to be able to understand and appreciate the complexities of things high cultural, music in particular; complexities almost by definition all but totally absent from things inhabiting the pop cultural domain, again, music in particular.

One is sorely tempted to assign or speculate on the tendentious motives behind that perverse sort of thinking on the part of these misguided champions of pop culture. But identifying those motives would, ultimately, serve no useful purpose. It's more than sufficient to simply recognize the perversity and wrongheadedness of that thinking, and accordingly dismiss it from consideration entirely.

Heads-Up

In conjunction with the release of the paperback edition of his award-winning book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has announced a new expansion of the book's companion blog, The Rest Is Noise, to include a newly compiled audio-illustrated Glossary and a newly expanded Audio Guide to help sharpen readers' appreciation of what's discussed in the text.

Neato supplements to a neato book.

A Heads-Up

We would like to call your attention to a blog wherein can regularly be found some of the best and most enjoyable writing in the classical blogosphere, but which blog for some strange and puzzling reason has never placed on our past but now (at least temporarily) suspended S&F Top 50 classical music blog rankings. We speak of This Blog Will Change the World written by "Canadian organist, Anglican, aspiring polymath, McLuhan disciple, and radical positivist," Osbert Parsley (also the name of "An English Renaissance composer (1511-1585) associated with Norwich Cathedral and known almost entirely for his church music").

Click over and read. Your time will be amply repaid.

Dancing About Architecture?

Most of you have, we're sure, heard the old saw that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It neatly and succinctly expresses the futility of attempting to convey the essence of one artform in the language of another, for if that were indeed possible, one or the other would be largely superfluous. Yet writers about music have never actually bought that notion, and some have even managed to disprove it — if not entirely, to a fairly convincing degree. The widely acknowledged modern-day master of this neat little trick is The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross; a trick he manages to pull off in just about all his writings on music, and now perhaps most famously in his award-winning first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. But there are others as well. Witness this by New York Magazine's Justin Davidson:

Is it possible that after decades of adulation, (Leonard) Bernstein could still be underappreciated? Perhaps all that love has done him a disservice. The Establishment is so thickly populated by Bernstein’s apprentices that they make it difficult to hear his music for what it is. I don’t mean his adrenalized interpretations of other people’s scores, delivered in storm-tossed style, or the evergreen Broadway shows; those remain vivid and ever present. I mean, rather, his application essays to the pantheon of Western genius. Those big concert-hall scores with the Judeo-Christian titles — Jeremiah, Kaddish, Mass, Chichester Psalms — are still touched by the pall of disappointment that shrouded his career as a composer. His critics accused him of committing derivative mush; his champions lobbed back a fusillade of hyperbole. Bernstein’s symphonic works are, like their maker, grandly imperfect. They go on too long, they wail, they trudge, they grow murky, and they cry out for an editor who could tell Bernstein no. But they also do something miraculous: They grow fresher with age. Maybe now that he’s been gone for a while, we can sit down and listen.

Not so fast. The opening-night party at Carnegie Hall, which chief Bernstein apostle Michael Tilson Thomas emceed with his usual charm, practically embalmed the legend in snappy respect. The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story trotted neatly along, tossing confetti of brass. Yo-Yo Ma showed up for an intense “Meditation No. 1” from Mass, Dawn Upshaw hop-skipped jauntily through “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti, and a pleasant time was had by all. In an era dominated by a lugubrious avant-garde, Bernstein was a wizard of joy. But that suite of polite performances made me want to run home and listen to the final two minutes of Fiesta, a sensational CD of Latin music detonated by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. The disc ends with the West Side Story “Mambo,” which erupted from my speakers in a raucous tumble of rhythms. The performance taps a subversive wildness that runs through even the most beloved numbers.

RTWT here.

More On The Plain Dealer-Rosenberg Affair

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, adds his voice to the virtual flood of critical commentary on the squalid Plain Dealer-Rosenberg affair, and it's the most trenchant commentary yet. Begins Mr. Kosman:

Newspaper writers know a lot of ways to lose our jobs. We can cut ethical corners by taking money or gifts from people we write about. We can plagiarize, invent sources, file stories from places we haven't been — the list goes on.

A couple of weeks ago Donald Rosenberg, the longtime and deeply respected classical music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, found a new one. He attended concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra and wrote what he thought about them.

Now, you might suppose that that was more or less the job description, but you'd be wrong. Rosenberg's task, as his editors conceived it, was to attend concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra and write complimentary things about them — and particularly about the orchestra's music director, Franz Welser-Möst.

RTWT here.

(Our previous posts on this matter can be read here and here.)

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Ted Diadiun, ombudsman for Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, defends the decision by the newspaper's editor, Susan Goldberg, to remove classical music critic Donald Rosenberg from his 16-year post as the newspaper's principal classical music critic due Mr. Rosenberg's persistent criticism of Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Writes Mr. Diadiun:

Welser-Möst's contract extends to 2018. Rosenberg has made it clear, over and over, that he believes the conductor routinely fails to get the most out of the orchestra, a view he seems unlikely to change or mute. It is fair to wonder, then, whose interests would be served by 10 more years of unrelenting criticism on the same point. Just as we would not assign a book review to a critic who is already on the record as loathing a certain author's style or genre, is it reasonable to continue assigning a music critic to review performances by a conductor whose leadership he is unlikely ever to approve?

Critics are paid to criticize — and to praise when appropriate — the performance of the musicians, actors, cooks, authors, architects, linebackers and point guards they cover. Plain Dealer journalists have written critically about the Cleveland Clinic, the major sports teams, leaders in business and government, prosecutors and police chiefs and advertisers who annually spend millions of dollars with the newspaper. The objects of these critiques are not always pleased, and have often demanded that the writer be removed from the beat or fired.

Editor Goldberg, like Doug Clifton before her, always gives these people a hearing, as she should. Complaints about our coverage can and should cause editors to look more closely at what we're doing — but while such complaints are taken seriously, not one time did either of these editors ever take someone off a beat because of outside pressure.

Should we believe that, after standing up to angry industry leaders, county commissioners, advertisers and others on issues of journalistic principle, Goldberg would wither in front of some orchestra patrons?

I don't.

[italicized emphases ours]

You don't, do you?

We wonder if it's just possible that the reason that "not one time did either of [those] editors ever take someone off a beat because of outside pressure" in the cases cited had anything at all to do with the fact that had those editors dared to do so, they would never have gotten away with it with their general readership, not to even speak of earning the censure of their professional journalistic colleagues nationwide, once the word got out, but that firing a mere classical music critic from his post for expressing opinions unpopular with the powers that be at a prominent local arts institution is quite a different matter altogether.

Just wondering, is all.

RTWT here.

(For our earlier comments on Mr. Rosenberg's firing, see this post.)

Sounds Right To Us

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:08 PM Eastern on 23 Sep. See below.]

He may have just missed winning a well-deserved Pulitzer for his work, but the clearly more discerning MacArthur Foundation was not about to let him slip through its fingers.

[This year's] recipients [of the MacArthur Foundation's so-called "genius award"], who must be citizens or residents of the United States, join 756 who have been named fellows since 1981. Each gets $100,000 a year for five years, with no strings attached....

Most of the winners, who are singled out for their creativity and their potential for making important future contributions, are familiar primarily to experts in their own fields, although a few in the arts have reached larger audiences: for example, Alex Ross, 40, a music critic for The New Yorker and the author of a cultural history of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise....

Our warmest congratulations to Alex on his award of the fellowship.

RTWT here.

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Update (1:08 PM Eastern on 23 Sep): Alex Ross answers four questions vis-à-vis his award of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

(Our thanks to Mysteries Abysmal for the link.)

Beyond Outrageous

[Note: This post has been updated (4) as of 1:24 AM Eastern on 30 Sep. See below.]

This is outrageous. No, beyond outrageous — way beyond.

Don Rosenberg, music critic at the Cleveland Plain Dealer for 16 years, was told yesterday by the paper's editor that he will no longer be covering the famed Cleveland Orchestra. He has been given the option of reviewing other musical events in town, as well as dance. Another writer at the paper, Zack Lewis, was told he will now be orchestra's reviewer.

[...]

Don's musical background is as good as it gets, his evaluations reasoned and sensitive. He has covered the Cleveland Orchestra for nearly three decades (including a stint with another area paper), and he's the author of the definitive book about that orchestra. So what did he do wrong? He has questioned, more than once, the sanctity of the Cleveland Orchestra's music director, Franz Welser-Möst, who started in 2002 and has had his contract renewed a couple times, the last extension taking him all the way to 2018. Don has judged that Welser-Möst is lacking in certain abilities in certain repertoire, that he doesn't necessarily get the best out of music or the eminent ensemble.

[...]

[A]pparently, some Cleveland Orchestra boosters can't accept any negative words about the music director. I imagine they dismiss as irrelevant the fact that the orchestra, while on tour, has been known to generate reviews by other critics expressing reservations about Welser-Möst. Of course, there's nothing that can be done about out-of-town naysayers, but there's always good old-fashioned lobbying that can be tried at home. That, it seems, has now been successful. The Plain Dealer has clearly caved into pressure from a faction representing the orchestra and the man on its podium.

If all true, both the publisher and the editor of the Plain Dealer, "Ohio's largest newspaper", ought to be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. That sort of craven, editorial kowtowing to influential interests ought to be absolute anathema to any news publication, large or small, with any pretense to quality, integrity, and authority.

Bloody pimps!

RTWT here.

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Update (1:56 AM Eastern on 24 Sep): We qualified our above closing comment by prefacing it with, "If all true...." Well, it now appears it's decidedly all true.

When the [Cleveland] orchestra announced in June that it had contracted the Austrian conductor [Welser-Möst] through the year 2018 — giving him 16 years on the Cleveland podium — The New York Times commented that the news might “surprise” some observers who feel that the conductor “has not lived up to his potential.”

Actually, the news surprised quite a few observers.... Rosenberg, too, was surprised, but he was told by his bosses that he could not express an opinion or write a column on the appointment; he could only report the facts.[!!]

Susan Goldberg, the newspaper’s editor since June of 2007, would not comment on her decision to reassign Rosenberg, calling it “an internal personnel move…we never talk about this kind of thing.” She also would neither confirm nor deny that she had been pressured by the orchestra to make the move; the newspaper’s current and immediate past publishers — Terrance E.Z. Egger and Alex Machaskee — both serve on the orchestra’s board of directors.

RTW squalid T here.

Update 2 (5:17 PM Eastern on 24 Sep): This gets more outrageous, seemingly with each passing day.

Rosenberg says the editor [Susan Goldberg, editor of Cleveland's The Plain Dealer since June of 2007] told him the "credibility of the paper is being compromised by [your] views," that he was being "unfair" to the orchestra, that he was "attacking them," and that it was an "untenable situation for the newspaper."

RTWT here.

Update 3 (1:44 PM Eastern on 25 Sep): Here's more on the matter, but nothing really new.

Update 4 (1:24 AM Eastern on 30 Sep): For a defense of this action by the ombudsman for The Plain Dealer and our response to same, see this post.

A Lesson From Hamlet And Macbeth

Blogger Molly Sheridan of Mind The Gap in a post a few days ago posed the question: "[P]utting aside the inter-movement consumptives for a moment, ambient concert noise: welcome sign of life in the hall or performance death knell?", in answer to which we replied in the post's comments section with just a smidge of snark:

Depends on what's being performed. If it's Cage or Stockhausen or stuff written by their acolytes, it could be a welcome sign of life in the hall. If, however, it's genuine music being performed, say Bach or Mozart, or...well, you know the list, then it's most decidedly a performance death knell.

Then, to Ms. Sheridan's follow-up question: "What's the most ridiculous concert noise you've had to endure?", we, with something more than a smidge of snark and with the intent of hammering home our point, replied (here spruced up just a smidge):

Well, it wasn't in a hall but at an outdoor concert at Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell some time ago (1962) with the Philadelphia Orchestra with none other than Leopold Stokowski on the podium (famously its conductor for some 26 years, he hadn't conducted the orchestra since 1939 or so and was making a guest visit to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his assumption of the orchestra’s leadership in 1912). Right in the middle of La Mer, if I remember correctly, a low-flying military helicopter began making its slow way over the Dell. Stokowsky stopped the performance in mid-paragraph, waited until all was silent, then began again — from the top. He had to do that three times during that performance.

And he was right, of course. Helicopters and Debussy just don't work together. Helicopters and Stockhausen, on the other hand....

Looking back on what we'd written, we retired from the comments thread feeling quite pleased with ourself for doing our small bit in making the case for music as distinct from noise — ambient and random, or created by design.

But then our thoughts turned to Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective and the language so often used by those disparaging the New Music of the time which music came to be viewed as great music by later times, and where one of the most frequently voiced charges was that that New Music was "noise, not music," and then thought of the often remarked phenomenon that everything written on the Internet is forever, which set us to wondering if perhaps that should give us pause to be so unequivocal in our judgments concerning certain New Music and of the works of certain icons of the New Music world.

Well, perhaps it ought to give us pause. But, then, as Hamlet remarked of conscience, such thinking doth make cowards of us all, and while we may fairly be accused of several less than stellar human traits, cowardice is not among them. And so we've determined to continue our incautious way in our judgments until either unexpectedly enlightened, proven wrong, or vindicated. For like Macbeth, we can do no better than to do all that becomes a man, secure in the knowledge that he who does more — or less — is none.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

Turn your eyes to any one composition that bears the name of Liszt, if you are unlucky enough to have such a thing on your pianoforte, and answer frankly if it contains one bar of genuine music. Composition indeed! Decomposition is the proper word for such hateful fungi, which choke up and poison the fertile plains of harmony, threatening the world with drought.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

New Audience For Classical Music Redux

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:07 AM Eastern on 5 Sep. See below.]

Musician and blogger David Preiser of Through These Ears tries his hand at addressing the now well-worn issue of attracting new audiences for classical music. Writes Mr. Preiser:

The language of the Standard Repertoire (I don't intend that as a pejorative, I swear) tends to be that of the European harmonies and structures of the late 18th Century through to the middle of the 20th. Yes, this is a gross generalization, but bear with me. When I say "harmonies and structures", I mean the shapes and colors and emotions of the language. These affect different people in different ways, depending on many personal things. In the end it's a personal perspective, and so much of life experience contributes to that.

The personal music experiences of today's younger generations tend to include far more that is over-amplified and distorted or strange-sounding, violent or ugly, or harsh and dissonant than in previous generations. The sounds that some Classical audiences reject are much more readily accepted by people who listen to other kinds of music.

[...]

How many times have we heard that "Classical Music" is boring? Or, "That's too pretty, it's putting me to sleep", or other casual dismissals of 1000 years of music? As often as not, it's because they are only exposed to one of the "prettier" languages, and their own personal experience simply hasn't prepared them to understand it. That should be a familiar argument to anyone who cares about New Music.

Someone who is very into the grungier, more experimental sounds in rock or electronica will find many appealing sounds in contemporary works. But the same person who enjoys the purely electronic sounds coming out of IRCAM can just as easily run screaming from the room at the sound of a harpsichord. The language of one is familiar and enjoyable, the other is Lurch from The Addams Family.

What this means is that there are many more people for whom the language(s) of New Music won't be so alien after all. It's time to reach out to that audience.

Concludes Mr. Preiser:

It's time to give up for good the idea that the old school composers [i.e., composers of the standard concert rep] will lead the way to new school audiences. That doesn't mean that music isn't great, or that it should die out because new audiences dont care for it. Instead, it means that the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep. starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep.

We respectfully but adamantly disagree. Gaining a new and younger audience for classical music is NOT a matter of programming music more appealing to younger audiences. It's entirely a matter of being bluntly honest about the nature of classical music vis-à-vis other musics, and of cultivating a way of listening to music that's thoroughly alien to today's younger audiences; a way of listening that involves focused and close listening to complex music over relatively extended time spans (i.e., complex and extended compared with the relatively simplistic music and minutes-long time spans today's younger audiences are used to and comfortable with); a way of listening that, generally speaking, can be instilled only in the very young, and can be instilled only very rarely later in life.

As we wrote in 2004 in one of Sounds & Fury's inaugural posts, "An Audience For Classical Music":

During the past decade or so, one has read often of attempts made by various classical (or "serious", or "art") music entities — symphony orchestras, chamber groups, recital organizers, even opera companies — to gain a larger audience for their "product", and it's nothing short of depressing to observe that, virtually without exception, they've all, to greater or lesser degree, pursued a model that's not merely wrongheaded, but positively suicidal. That model, in keeping with the rabidly populist and promiscuously equalitarian Zeitgeist of our era, and using promotional techniques employed in the world of mass entertainment, has at its core the concept of reaching out to The People; or using less euphemistic and less generous terminology, prole pandering. While such a concept is perfectly appropriate and spot-on in the world of mass entertainment, it's an ultimate kiss of death in the world of classical music for the simple and should-be (but astonishingly, largely isn't) obvious reason that, much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted. Classical music is, by its very nature, a fundamentally elite enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other.

[...]

The alpha and omega of it is that a hardcore audience for classical music can, in huge part, be created only by targeting the very young. If you fail to get 'em very young, you mostly don't get 'em at all.

And that targeting must begin with the pre-kindergarten young, and continue at least through early adolescence. Schools, both public and private, cannot do the job by themselves although they have their place in the campaign. Neither, strange to tell, can parents although they, too, have their place. In today's world, the single most important — overwhelmingly important — entity in the promotion of classical music is none other than the commercial media, cable and broadcast TV most especially, via its content, not via commercials, public service or paid-for. If classical music is not sold there, it will remain largely unsold no matter what else is done. Classical music must be made a part of the very air children breathe, and only the commercial media can accomplish that.

So, the answer is to give up the ineluctably doomed attempt to "convert" those young but already grown-up persons who presently have little or no understanding of and little or no interest in classical music, and concentrate all efforts on (you should pardon the term) "growing" a new audience for classical music by targeting the very young, and making classical music "part of the very air [they] breathe." As we concluded in our above linked 2004 post,

[It's] a long, hard road to travel, but an on-the-right-track — the only right track — beginning. Without a long-term commitment to the education of the very young, the classical music concert as we know it today (that is, neither adjusted, watered- nor dumbed-down in either content or presentation to accommodate the ignorant) will be doomed to the trash bin of history.

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Update (1:07 AM Eastern on 5 Sep): Mr. Preiser responds in an update to his above linked post.

While we share Mr. Preiser's desire for a quick-fix solution to the problem of building a new and younger audience for classical music, we've never been able to come up with or discover one, and we cannot agree that Mr. Preiser's proposal constitutes such a solution either as a quick-fix or for the long term. Neither can we agree with Mr. Preiser's notion that for today's younger audiences, "the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep." The enjoyment of the new rep with its "grungier, more experimental sounds" that echo the "over-amplified and distorted ... violent or ugly ... harsh and dissonant" sounds of the "personal experience" of that younger audience will almost never lead to an enjoyment of the music of, say, Monteverdi, or Purcell, or Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or Brahms, or Prokofiev, but will, at very best, lead only to a desire to hear more of the same for no reason other than that it's an extension of the already familiar, "grungier" sounds of "their own personal experience." And that, we suggest, is no way to build an audience for classical music, quick-fix or long term.

Stuff White People Like: Classical Music

Though white people do not actually listen to classical music, they like to believe that they are the type of people who would enjoy it. You can witness this first hand by going to any classical performance at your local symphony where you will see literally dozens of white couples who have paid upwards of $80 for the right to dress up and sit in a chair for hours reading every word in the program.

After leaving the concert hall, white people will immediately begin telling everyone they know about how much they loved the performance and how they plan to “go more often.” This is because white people see little to no value enjoying classical music without recognition from other white people. This can be seen first hand by looking at the plaques and bricks around all opera houses: they are covered in white person names.

If a white person starts talking to you about classical music, it’s essential that you tread very lightly. This is because white people are all petrified that they will be exposed as someone who has only a moderate understanding of classical music.

[...]

Therefore it is essential that even if you possess a massive amount of knowledge about classical music, do not share it with a white person regardless of how much they profess to love it. It’s a recipe for disaster and shame.

—From the blog, Stuff White People Like

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to Life's a Pitch for the link.)

Podcast: Beaux Arts Trio's Final American Concert

This PR release just received from American Public Media:

(St. Paul, Minn.) August 27, 2008—Capping a 53-year career, one of the world’s best-loved chamber ensembles, the renowned Beaux Arts Trio, played its final American concert on Thursday, August 21. American Public Media’s Performance Today is offering an exclusive podcast of this historic concert. Beginning on Wednesday, August 27, the concert at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood Music Festival will be available in its entirety, in two segments, by visiting www.performancetoday.org.

Led for more than half a century by pianist Menahem Pressler, the legendary Beaux Arts Trio will disband after a series of European concerts in September. With the concert at Tanglewood, the ensemble returned to its place of origin — it played its first concerts there in 1955. The occasion also marked a return to repertoire it made American audiences familiar with over the decades: Franz Schubert’s magisterial Opus 99 and Opus 100 piano trios. The group’s three encores will also be included in the podcast.

Fred Child, host of Performance Today, served as host for an exclusive live Webcast of the August 21 concert, and he’ll provide commentary, features and interviews with the members of the trio: pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Daniel Hope and cellist Antonio Meneses.

Midgette On Muhly

Anne Midgette, The Washington Post's recently appointed chief classical music critic, has up an article on the road show promoting "Mothertongue", the newest album of the music of "hot," 27-year-old composer Nico Muhly, "the [media's current] flavor of the month," as Ms. Midgette put it.

Muhly, 27, is difficult to write about. Certainly he has already caused a lot of ink to be spilled, including a long profile in the New Yorker in February, at an age when many composers are still in graduate school. It is easy to see why the press likes him. He is smart, verbal, ingenuous, direct. Talking faster than the kinetic rhythms of some of his music, he embeds pointed observations in an agar of "likes" and "you knows," not unlike the sweet fragments of sound that rise out of the many layers of his likable, involved, yet wholesome music.

But he is difficult to write about because in describing what he does, you come up against the traditional division between "classical" and "pop." (In June, the Sunday Times of London named "Mothertongue" its pop CD of the week.) And this distinction is, to Muhly, irrelevant. Explaining it, therefore, is already taking a step away from the spirit of his work and back toward the Dark Ages when musical choices and tastes were linked, implicitly or not, to ideologies. For many, of course, they still are. But those "many" are more than 27 years old.

We're afraid we number ourself among those "many," and from what little we know of Mr. Muhly's work (provided to us by Mr. Muhly himself subsequent to a brief eMail exchange last year) it's of the sort that's, shall we say, not to our tastes. Had we been asked to write a review of it, however, we confess we wouldn't quite know what to say as from our brief correspondence Mr. Muhly appeared to us to be so open, intelligent, ingenuous, non-doctrinaire, and so thoroughly unpretentious and gentlemanly we'd be loath to say anything negative about it. Ms. Midgette, on the other hand, handles the whole business about as adroitly as we can imagine it being handled.

An article well worth your time reading.

Karaoke Conductor Put To The Test

How hard can it be?" asks music journalist Neil Fisher in a recent piece for the London Times concerning his trial as a conductor contestant in the BBC's latest reality show, Maestro, in which "a motley crew of celebrities, including the actress Jane Asher, the DJ Goldie, comedienne Sue Perkins and former Blur bassist Alex James compete to become the best conductor in time for a public vote next month," where the winner will get a 15-minute stint with the BBC Concert Orchestra at a Proms in the Park concert.

For Mr. Fisher, pretty damn hard, apparently.

A 70-piece ensemble is waiting expectantly for my downbeat for the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. What kind of a maestro should I be? The conductor is, after all, not the karaoke conduit I have been play-acting for years. He is mentor, scholar, motivator, interpreter, leader, follower, idol. He is all of those and none, a cryptic figurehead who can mean everything or nothing depending on what he brings to the performance.

And now he is a prize ass. I step up to the podium exuding what I think is a fatherly authority; I leave a chastened schoolboy, the kindly giggles of a viola player ringing in my ears (violas are the bullied pond scum of the orchestra, so this is doubly humiliating). My beat is feeble, my body language weaker yet. If the iconic opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth are supposed to depict “fate knocking at the gate”, then my paltry wrist action makes it sound as if the gate has just managed to punch fate in the face. Eventually it all falls apart completely: when I fall slightly behind, I make the elementary error of galloping ahead and manage to turn a smudgy mess into a sonic catastrophe.

Beethoven's Fifth crackles along with just one beat per bar. I did spend 15 minutes with the series consultant, Peter Stark, in which I was taught the rudimentary gestures and told how to adapt to match the time signature and rhythm. But it means setting a distinct, vigorous and regular pace from the start that doesn't flatten one of the most dramatically charged pieces in the history of classical music. I just haven't got the pulse of it at all.

RTWT here.

And So It Goes

The successful pseudo-intellectual types that flourished in profusion from the Quattrocento through the mid-20th-century have today fallen on hard times. They've lost their clout and their ability to strike fear and a deep sense of inferiority into the hearts of pseudo-intellectual wannabes and hopelessly ignorant proles because they've not kept pace with the times.

[T]here have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

[...]

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. ... [T]he means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

RTW sad T here.