Category: Columns

PBS, Pop Concerts, and an Ethical Dilemma

A few moments ago, I received a PR email with the suspicious subject line “Pop Concert Line-up On PBS—Begins December 3.” Inside, some guy named Tim wrote enthusiastically:

PBS PRESENTS AN ALL-STAR PERFORMANCE LINE-UP IN DECEMBER. New Music Specials Feature CARLY SIMON, BENISE, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, PAUL ANKA, JIM BRICKMAN, TOM JONES, RICKY NELSON, BARBRA STREISAND, MICHAEL BUBLÉ and A DOO WOP CALVACADE.

Now, for as much as I love Babs and the Boss, I found myself getting a little irritated that PBS was presenting these concerts, each of which arguably carries enough commercial appeal (which is to say advertising dollar attraction) to profitably appear on commercial T.V. Also, if this were Britain and we had several public, government-support television stations, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so stingy. But this is America, and PBS is viewer supported! And I want to see Dr. Atomic not the Doo Wop Calvacade!

I was just about to write “the angry letter,” when I recalled a shameful little fact. When PBS or NPR conducts a funding drive, they ask some hard questions. Do I benefit from the programming presented? I do. Do I depend on them to continue to provide quality programming? I do. Do I make an annual pledge reflecting this? I do not.

This leaves me in an odd predicament. Do I, like a non-voter bitching about the POTUS, complain anyway? Just forget the whole thing? Or should I write my letter and enclose a donation to back it up?

How Far Would You Go To Hear New Music?

In recent posts here I wrote about trekking to San Francisco to hear Doctor Atomic and the opening night concerts scheduled in two new concerts halls currently being built in Nashville and Orange County, California, that have also piqued my travel bug. Since then, Randy has written an elegant polemic against recordings in favor of live performances. But if you limit yourself to only hearing music live, your choices are pretty…well…limited, even in New York City where opportunities to hear live music by a New York-based composer such as Elliott Carter or Philip Glass, to play the range game, are fewer than a Leipzig citizen’s opportunity to hear J.S. Bach was in the first half of the 18th century.

I bring up Bach because he was rumored to have walked 200 miles to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ. Last Friday night, at a pre-concert talk between Louis Andriessen and Evan Ziporyn, in advance of the opening concert of BMOP’s season which featured premieres by both of these composers, Andriessen talked about how taxing it is to travel even in the era of planes, trains, and automobiles. His words rang all the more true to me as I waited a seeming eternity for the Boston Deluxe bus in both directions, but I was still very happy I made the trip there (plus I got to listen to the entire amazing Julius Eastman boxed set along the way).

Ultimately I made the trip because I’m a fan of both of these composers as well as BMOP, could afford the $30 Boston Deluxe roundtrip, could get free tickets to the concert, and was also able to crash with friends. Would I have gone if any item in the above recipe were missing? Not as certainly, by any means. Boston is a lot closer than San Francisco, but it’s not next door by a long shot.

So how close is close? Even in New York City, it is sometimes difficult to commit to a concert that’s far away, and there are only so many things you can do that begin around 8 p.m. Later gigs are tricky if you have to get up the next morning for a job. I’d probably be in the Issue Project Room at least once a week if it weren’t deep in Brooklyn and I didn’t live at the tip of Manhattan, which means a 2 hour trek home since my subway line runs local after 10:30 p.m. I’ve learned that folks in Boston and the Bay Area are worse off than me; their subways don’t even run all night. What about places without adequate public transportation? If you go to an improv gig at a club and drive there, you run the risk of a DUI for the sake of new music!

Meanwhile, I’ve been an obsessive record collector all my life. And the more than 10,000 hours of music I have amassed up to this point has not slowed me down in the least. Being in Boston last weekend also gave me an excuse to revisit Looney Tunes, a favorite used LP shop, and walk off with eight more opera recordings and a bag of other goodies in many other genres. So, for less than it would have cost me to go Amtrak and zero travel time, I can hear music that no one is playing live anywhere—from Rossini’s opera seria Maometto Secondo and Earl Kim’s Violin Concerto played by Itzhak Perlman (who won’t go near repertoire like that anymore) to some of Randy Weston’s best solo piano performances and the debut of the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, whose leader Michael Kamen died two years ago this month (no hope of a reunion here).

Next weekend, I’ll be heading to Washington, D.C., to hear Leonard Slatkin conduct the National Symphony in the world premiere of a new work by David Del Tredici. There’s no way I can hear that on a recording, so I’m there! But, I’m probably insane. How far would you go?

The Friday Informer: New Music Stuff, Gratis

  • The Yale School of Music just snagged a pledge for a $100 million anonymous donation, effectively eliminating the need for students to pay tuition to attend. Extra faculty and new fun toys also promised. Recent Yalie grads still chained to student loans emit collective sigh. [NY Times]
  • Remember the big building at the center of town with all the books, records, and funny microfilm readers? You might want to reacquaint yourself. Leave it to the librarians to wax enthusiastic about new music without prejudice.
  • Too bad this guy lives across the pond. He’d probably be pretty enthused. [Telegraph via ArtsJournal]
  • Steve Smith, the guy who heads up the classical section over at Time Out New York, hears a lot of music in your average 24-hour cycle. He’s now letting us live vicariously at Night After Night, offering 100 percent unjaded and non-bitchy writing about music. I’m not sure if the industry can handle this much open-mindedness. David Ocker, music engraver to the stars, has also started blogging over at Mixed Meters.
  • Best Frank-ism of the week: “I don’t think music is ephemeral. A score might be like a recipe but music is not like chocolate cake. You can have it and eat it too!”

At Least They Make Great Coasters

My most profound experiences with music have been live, not Memorex. In fact, I don’t really consider listening to a recording as a comprehensive musical experience, unless of course the piece happens to be specifically created for recorded media. In which case, Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rein n° 1 and bernhard günter’s lowercase masterpiece détails agrandis certainly qualify as complete experiences in and of themselves. But in my mind, unless you’ve been to a live performance, you haven’t fully experienced a piece. I find this to be particularly true of chamber music.

From Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima and Stockhausen’s Mantra to Phil Kline’s Zippo Songs, there’s just something that clicks during a live performance which, as a result, reveals invisible forms, structural elements, or just plain emotion. Somehow the physical gestures performed in front of my eyes trigger countless connections within the music, something that the audio documentation inside my CD player fails to portray.

Seeing that this happens to me a lot, maybe I have some form of ADD when it comes to recordings. But isn’t music supposed to be a communal activity? Sure, you can put on a record for a bunch of friends, but if it doesn’t quickly shift into the background, supporting an absorbing conversation, then I’d rather hangout somewhere else. While recordings disseminate music to a large number of people, they also misrepresent the ephemeral present-ness at the core of music’s nature. The lifeblood doesn’t exist on the page—well, maybe some of it. In any case, you certainly won’t find a detectable pulse on one of those polycarbonate slabs.

If They Build Them, Someone Will Come, Right?

Last Thursday afternoon, I was wined and dined at The Modern, the new very upscale restaurant next door to the recently renovated Museum of Modern Art. For a Kafka-esque moment or two I thought I’d changed careers and was now a successful investment banker or a lawyer, but soon I saw some familiar classical music industry types in the crowd (freelance critics, PR handlers, reps from sister service organizations, etc.).

Why the incredible largesse, especially at a time when so many major music critics have been proclaiming the death of classical music? Turns out, they’re building a brand new concert hall in Orange County, California. Already more than 70 percent complete, the new 2,000-seat Renée & Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, ostensibly the new home for Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, will open on September 15, 2006, with even more fanfare than a really fancy New York City lunch: the world premiere of a newly commissioned song-cycle by William Bolcom sung by Placido Domingo. The following night there’ll be the world premiere of another commission, this one from Philip Glass.

Wait a second, I thought that symphony orchestras were folding up right and left and there was never going to be another major opera recording and on and on. Turns out that philanthropist Henry T. Segerstrom, whose donations of land and funds have made both this and the Pacific Symphony’s previous concert hall—Segerstrom Hall—possible, realizes that culture is not only more alive now than ever but is one of the best ways to market a community. A remark he made on the Public Television station KCET pretty much explains where he’s coming from:

“I have informed my friends in Los Angeles that I think, now that we have four great halls in Southern California, it’s time for us to start marketing our joint assets world-wide in cultural tourism much as New York does. Mayor Bloomberg of New York said that cultural tourism was the second largest industry in New York after finance and Southern California can reap the benefits of this as well as share our facilities with the world.”

He’s right of course, even though culture rarely makes the headlines. He’s also not alone. Turns out that Nashville is building a comparable new concert hall (1,900 seats) for its symphony orchestra too and it is scheduled to open its doors in September 2006 as well. They even have a series of live webcams of the construction site!

The new Schermerhorn Symphony Center, named in honor of the orchestra’s recently deceased music director, seems much more a community project than the crusade of an enlightened funder. The city of Nashville donated the land and the entire construction was funded by tax-exempt revenue bonds.

So far, the Nashville Symphony hasn’t announced any top shelf commissions for the opening next year. Let’s hope they do. This year’s season opener was Leonard Nimoy narrating a performance of Gustav Holst’s The Planets. A premiere of a new American work would be much more exciting than that!

The Friday Informer: Living the Music Life

  • Zac Bond (23 and a Sagittarius living in Blacksburg, Virginia) is listening to John Cage’s entire recorded catalog. The wonders of the Internet mean we can all follow along. [Glenn Freeman]
  • The gentlemen of the London Phil have been giving specially designed suits made of a sportsware fabric known as Coolmax a trial run. Though I wouldn’t mind dumping the dinner jacket dress code altogether, sounds like it might be the perfect gift for new music saxophonist/bike racer Brian Sacawa. [ArtsJournal]
  • About $1 million worth of cocaine was found on trucks carrying La Traviata sets and costumes en route from Germany to Dublin. Predictably, Opera Ireland CEO David Collopy told Reuters, “We don’t know how the drugs got in there.” Thus, another blow to the prim and proper image of classical life. Just wait until Jerry Springer The Opera tries to squeak through customs. [Reuters via Musical America]
  • Thursday’s NYT reports a “little-noted provision in the tax relief package to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina” which “allows donors who make cash gifts to almost any charity by the end of this year to deduct an amount equal to virtually 100 percent of their adjusted gross incomes, double the normal limit of 50 percent of income.” For readers in a position to be so generous, our operators are standing by.
  • In the spirit of the quickly approaching tricks and treats, what scary piece of music will you be listening to this weekend while downing handfuls of candy corn?

Post-Anti-Antiestablishment

In the race to keep new music sounding, well, new, somehow things just end up stagnating. A recent blog post by Kyle Gann suggests that young composers are to blame, partly for fetishizing the wrong set of elders—namely Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, and Boulez, rather than Adams, Lentz, and Meredith Monk—as well as lacking a good ol’ sense of rebellion. But haven’t we heard what rebellion sounds like already, say, ad nauseum over the past 60 years?

Although I don’t really consider myself all that young, I certainly do pass for what’s being called a young composer these days. As such, I can honestly report that most of my colleagues tend to lump the previously mentioned composers into one simple category: the past. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about Uptown, Downtown, academic, non-academic, blah, blah, blah. Yes, clearly there is an historical lineage to all this, but it doesn’t weigh too heavily on this generation’s shoulders—thanks in part to folks like Kyle Gann.

Our generation seems to be listening from within while developing our voice. We go to each other’s concerts not only for moral support, but to listen and learn. Certainly we’re influenced by the philosophies of our mentors, but more often than not, our work extends well outside any level of encroachment. A rebellion against an assumed establishment (which in actuality may only really consist of several already-frayed sub-factions) feels like an affectation at this point. Or perhaps we’ve reached the point of affirmative nihilism—you know, with a positive spin.

Admittedly, there is an establishment. But if you’re looking for the “Under 30” crowd of new music fans in New York, don’t even bother to look at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. You’ll have to venture a little bit off the beaten path to places like the Cake Shop, Issue Project Room, Barbes, Zebulon, The Lucky Cat, Monkey Town, Deitch Projects… need I go on? (And no, I didn’t accidentally forget to list The Stone.) Maybe our elders’ idea of where the establishment really lies is mistaken.

As always, revolution starts underground. Here, the music is usually accompanied by the hissing of beer cans opening and any blue hair you see in the crowd is, in fact, on purpose. But now, even this seems like a bit of a cliché. Especially considering all the desperate, failed attempts by musicians in the classical music camp at attaining thy holy hipness. That’s just not cool. Yesaroun’ Duo blasting their Crom-Tech transcriptions at Merkin is. New Human’s cock-punk-minimalism at P.S. 1 is. And Zs’ Lachenmann-inspired rock (old guy, sorry Kyle) that’s gigging all around town certainly is. But like they used to say around 30 years ago, don’t trust anyone over 30.

Jumping the Ring of Fire: The Impact of Genre on Judgment

It’s fantastic how quickly the buzz for the Fiery Furnaces’ new disc, Rehearsing My Choir, is shooting its way through the music community. If you’re unfamiliar, Rehearsing is sort of a non-linear CD opera for which sibs Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger built a whole album around selected moments from their grandmother Olga Sarantos’s lifetime worth of memories. Sarantos herself put in some hours in the studio alongside her granddaughter, and her 83-year-old voice is featured prominently. The total effect is like looking through a stranger’s family photo album at a thrift shop. Just glaze it over with lots of creative electronic timbres and a record collection-worth of influences; then mix.

The album, which only dropped on Oct. 25, caught my eye during a regular scan of record reviews on Pitchfork (think NewMusicBox for the indie-rock set). No surprise, since it was put out by the indie-label Rough Trade and music these days tends to stick close to the boxes and categories where it is known. The shock came this a.m. when I logged onto Sequenza21 and Jerry Bowles was gushing. New music fans may crossover into the alternative side of the record store, and alternative artists visit the Lucier bin, but bizarrely, neither side ever really talks about it publicly. Both sides take a loss there.

Whether or not Rehearsing My Choir is a great album (critic Amanda Petrusich only offered it a 4.0 out of a possible 10 in the Pitchfork rating game, though Sequenza21’s Bowles called it “darn brilliant stuff”), my hope is that this marks a true “sledgehammer between the genres” moment. After reading Petrusich review to get at why she scored the disc so low, I think it’s a development that would be good for all of us.

Here’s why… Switching back and forth between the indie side and the new music side of my brain while listening to the album itself, I found the last graph of her review especially eye-opening. She writes:

…No matter how open your mind, how welcome to art-without-directions you may be, it’s difficult to consume Rehearsing My Choir without taking some kind of quasi-academic, cultural studies stance, reachable only after hours of careful, dedicated, uninterrupted listening: The emotional components are in place, but willfully (and successfully) obscured behind obtuse instrumentation and overdone wordplay. You can pick it apart, but can you dance to it, roll around on the floor with it, weep to it under your favorite blanket? This is not to say that art should be easy or instant or utilitarian–but it should be penetrable, purposeful. And somewhere along the way, the Friedbergers got all chewed up and swallowed by their own experiment.

Fair enough. Didn’t inspire me to dancing or crying either. But I did find it both penetrable and purposeful, and the obtuse instrumentation and overdone wordplay could be seen as part of the record’s charm. Getting chewed up by your own experiment may be overkill for Petrusich, but for Bowles that’s very likely what sparked the glimmer of brilliance. It’s a philosophy ingrained much deeper in the fan culture on both sides than there is room to fully explore here, but strikes to the heart of what ultimately divides the two—and it’s a moving target on a the continuum of what music means and should accomplish.

So maybe Rehearsing My Choir fails as a pop record. But for the very same reasons it’s quite possible that, if you rip the label off, it succeeds rather brilliantly as new music.

Just Get Up and Go!

As many of you know, NewMusicBox used to offer a national calendar of concerts featuring new American music. Due to the sheer scope of such a project and the inevitable limited resources of something staffed by a part-time person based in one geographical locale and funded by a non-profit organization, it was always woefully incomplete. It was also woefully underutilized both by site visitors and by the people involved with such concerts. (Composers, performers, and presenters were all given ample opportunities to submit listings to it, but few ever did.) So, with more than a tinge of regret, we put the whole thing on hiatus over a year and a half ago.

Yet the discussion about having such a national calendar still rages on. What would it take to make it work? Who would it ultimately serve? If concert calendars are, for the most part, local endeavors designed to get people who live in city X excited enough about a concert in city X to attend it, what would be the use of telling people in city X about a concert in city Y halfway across the country? Would people in Atlanta ever read about something happening next week in L.A. and decide to book a flight and go? Or does the significance of such a calendar reside in a more abstract realm where people in city X really want to know about what’s going on in cities Y and Z since all they ever get from their local media is information about city X?

While we all have come around to basically agree on the potential value of the latter, more abstract paradigm, which was the modus operandi of the calendar we once had on NewMusicBox, for the sake of argument I’d like to ponder a world in which the former jetsetting option were also a reality.

Attending a New York press conference back in August for John Adams’s new opera Doctor Atomic made me feel like I should go to its premiere at the San Francisco Opera on October 1, but alas I couldn’t. As the reviews kept trickling in, both the positive and the negative from published sources and people I knew, the need to go felt greater and greater. I knew I could get in to see it (power of the press and all that) and could crash with a friend. All I needed were the plane tickets which nowadays thanks to sites like Orbitz don’t require you to sell your most collectible LPs on eBay, so last weekend I did it. I won’t have much pocket change for a while, but I’m glad I went. Plus, while flying in Thursday night for that final Saturday night performance was a surefire remedy against jetlag during a long opera, I even managed to catch other concerts during the rest of my time there.

As wonderful as each of those events leading up to Saturday had been, everything was a prologue for Dr. A. No secondhand commentary from anyone can replace having been there. So I won’t even pretend to give it a review here except to say don’t believe the folks who say that the second act isn’t as strong as the first. But the fact of the matter is I never would have known that had I not gone. Getting firsthand knowledge of one of the most talked about premieres in recent memory reminded me once again how important it is to take what others write or say only at face value. As I’ve said so many times in the past I sound like a broken record already, an opinion usually informs a reader more about the person making the opinion than about the object of the opinion. But it is ultimately through those opinions that people around the world find out about what actually happened, unless they are somehow able to get up and go themselves.

I know (and my credit card bill will remind me later this month if I happen to forget) that jumping on a plane from New York City to catch a performance in San Francisco is somewhat extravagant, but how hard would it be for someone from Chicago to get to Milwaukee, or make a trek from Cleveland to Pittsburgh from time to time. Over the last few months, I’ll be trying to catch performances in Philly, D.C., and Boston (thank you Julia Werntz). Despite the rants of a few bloggers, those Chinatown buses are actually pretty good. In an era when it’s so hard to get folks to go to stuff in their own backyards, maybe it’s time to cast the net even further. Maybe needing to travel for a while to get to a concert might somehow make that concert the important destination that it should always be. Thoughts?

The Friday Informer: Music by the Numbers

  • 17 Days: Length of time new music fans had to wait between the September 17, 2005 premiere of Roberto Sierra’s Third Symphony (“La Salsa”) by the Milwaukee Symphony and its release on iTunes on October 4. You can download it now for $3.96.
  • 75,000 Tracks: Selections from the Naxos catalog to be made available via the digital music service eMusic. Naxos also maintains a subscription-based, multi-label digital library (130,000 tracks on 7,715 CDs) and a 60-channel web radio service.
  • 2000 Guitarists: Number of volunteers Hard Rock Cafe Melbourne is attempting to assemble for a charity event on Oct. 29 to break the Guinness World Record for a “Guitar-A-Thon.” They’re slated to pound through Deep Purple’s very dated classic “Smoke on the Water.” Blah. Someone page Glenn Branca, stat.
  • £44,000 (which is to say, $77,922): Portion of their paycheck “music enthusiasts” are likely to drop on concert tickets, recordings, and related gear over a lifetime to feed their habit. The average person is likely to restrain himself to a more conservative $37,174. [BBC News]
  • 20 Percent: Amount music can positively impact athletic performance, according to new research. Band kids and the football team share a group hug. [London Times via huffingtonpost.com]

    I’m seeing wild new commission possibilities here, sponsored by Nike. Discuss.