Category: Columns

Like father, like son? Hardly.

• Meet Ezra Reich. Influenced more by ’80s pop than dad, his band includes a guy named Elliot Glass, and it just gets weirder from there.
• Like politics and religion, you’ll probably never persuade composers to change their minds about the merits of academic training. Still, if your boss isn’t looking over your shoulder this afternoon, I dare you to resist wading into the Sequenza21 “teaching composition is a waste of time” debate.
• On the tech front, someone needs to tell La Monte Young about this little gizmo and Phil Kline might be moved to leave the boombox behind now that he can do this with an iPod. And while we’re at it, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have figured out how to transcribe typing based on the sounds of fingers hitting keys. What might the spacialists in the crowd find to do with that?
• Billed by the NYTimes as a classical version of “a digital and high-toned version of the calendars often found in auto repair shops,” this site really just highlights women who work in the classical field. Don’t get too excited. No one is wearing a mesh bikini here, folks.
• Get that bass clarinet out from under the bed. The World Bass Clarinet Convention meets in Rotterdam Oct. 21-23. Attempting a Guinness Book of World Records-worthy event, planned activities include a performance by what is hoped will be the world’s largest bass clarinet choir (100+) playing a new composition by Brit Paul Harvey.

A few fun items before you turn off that computer and slip into weekend picnic mode:

• The 99-cents iTunes price point is under threat by a more complex structure that would price songs by popularity. Under this model, the average new music track would sell for how much?
• I’ve never been one for arithmetic, but Mary Jane Leach is awash in pieces for multiples—four or more of one instrument. She’s up to 355 works and still counting, earning an “A” in my grade book. Drop her a line if she’s missed any.
• Halim El-Dabh is holding court at UNYAZI festival of electronic music in South Africa. Heralded as the father of electronic music on the continent, El-Dabh will be treating Johannesburg to a concert of his work and, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, will get a taste via live-feed broadcast on the side of a building in their Public Square tonight.
• Corey Dargel, our favorite postmodern love song composer, has launched a new valentine—a special “Composers and the People Who Love Them” interview series. The first installment, available as a podcast, invites Eve Beglarian into the composer isolation chamber.
• This month, Kyle Gann is toasting the ladies in the house at Postclassic Radio. Annea Lockwood, Annie Gosfield, Bernadette Speach, Elizabeth Brown, Elodie Lauten, Janice Giteck, Jewlia Eisenberg, and Julia Wolfe…to name a few. If you ask me, this just begs the question: Can you hear estrogen? [AJ-Gann]
• Composer Scott Johnson gets name-checked on famed intellectual-slacker blog The Major Fall, The Minor Lift. Sunlight shines down from a new direction. [TMFTML]

There’s been a bit of well-deserved brouhaha here over Newsweek‘s coverage of the Arts as of late. But this negative take on the media has a positive parallel as well. Last month when I was in Lithuania for my own premiere, I was interviewed on Lithuanian National Television. When’s the last time a little-known composer got onto TV to talk about a new piece of music in America? I remember being so excited when John Adams got on CNN for both Nixon in China and Klinghoffer, but these were isolated events triggered by hot-button (and name recognizable) events that the American media understood and could respond to.

The fact is that fame is manufactured. The media claims to respond to events rather than make events, but in this era of Realpolitik we all know that’s a bit disingenuous. The same week I got onto TV for a minute to talk about a big piece in a small country, Madonna got her own segment on all the international networks (CNN, BBC, you name it) for falling off a horse on her birthday. All the reports mentioned that she had a new album coming out in a couple of months. Wonderful free advertising.

When I was in Los Angeles for the Critics Conference a few months back, we were all given tote bags from the L.A. Phil which had the face of Esa-Pekka Salonen emblazoned on them. Suddenly hundreds of people were walking around downtown L.A. with a bag bearing the face of a contemporary composer (and conductor, of course).

This is precisely what we need to do. Rather than complaining about the lack of attention the music we care about is getting in the media, we need to create media ourselves. In the 500-channel plus world of TV and the infinity-plus world of URLs, there is no longer a mainstream. When’s the last time you read Newsweek anyway?

Though several of our new music pals have hung out the ol’ end-of-August “gone fishing” signs (do send us a postcard, Alex, Jeff, and Greg), The Ramble has delivered a 4,381 word tour of the world’s music information centers to divert us while they’re gone.

Kronos has set up house at Myspace.com and they want to be your friend. Drop on by and offer a welcome to the neighborhood.

Apparently Lindsay Lohan is the new Beethoven

In response to the release of a doll made in the image of pop princess Lindsay Lohan, Mattel VP of entertainment development Rob Hudnut explains that the company is trying to pick up the intellectual slack in the public schools. “We’re trying to fill a void in the education system in teaching kids about the arts.” As if we needed more proof that America’s cultural Armageddon is nigh…

For the early planners in the crowd, SYMPHONY magazine’s annual roundup of season premieres has been released. Looks like Jennifer Higdon and John Harbison will be having an especially busy orchestral year, though composer Michael Schelle has to come up with five pieces for the Albuquerque Youth Symphony alone. Hope he’s gotten started on that.

And since Copland is like a father to us over here at the AMC, I would be remiss not to direct you to the wrap-up coverage of the 16th Annual Bard Music Festival: “Copland and His World.”
Jeremy Eichler reviews the proceedings. [NYT]
If you weren’t there, you’re not the only one kicking yourself. [IOA]

Need answers? Ask the Internet

Well, ok, not everything we need to know is available via that nifty chord in the wall, but this morning my blog and ArtsJournal.com reading made me wonder. To start, I was led to this Cassandra of a statement on America’s love affair with the strip mall, which got me thinking about my old hometown in Ohio and the general Wal-Mart-ing and Clear Channel-ing of American culture that accompanies such commercial changes in a city or town. What can we, the new music community, do to stop the beast? I, for one, don’t want to play distressed damsel and wait in the tower—though, as a writer, it will also be a sharp uphill trudge, as the outlets that have traditionally made the case for alternative art and politics are deep into similar battles of their own.

When it comes to orchestras, Mike Greenberg in San Antonio suggests that what we do, and the importance of why we do it, is so self-evident to us that we have a hard time making a case for it to the 99 percent of the country standing outside the concert hall. These folks aren’t even occasionally glancing in through the window. Greg Sandow offers a few pointers for those who want to try and do a better job of pushing the field in a new direction.

Getting attention, if you haven’t had drastic plastic surgery or done something stupid on tape, is hard in America. There have been lots of gimmicks suggested in our own and in other fields to help overcome this predicament. Some of us have tried things like this, and we might try something like this, but if getting people in the door is our aim, we probably want to think carefully before trying this in order to balance the books.

Clearly, some creativity is needed, and quickly. Sure, we’re a minority up against stereotypes, so maybe we need to gather a group of composers and performers and start cultural dialogue on par with this Swedish library. Who better to make the case than us? There’s no time to waste, unless you’re perfectly comfortable leaving your neighbors alone in their houses with nothing but endless recasts of Law & Order and CSI lighting their faces.

Yesterday at a press conference for Dr. Atomic, its outspoken and sometimes provocative director and librettist Peter Sellars suggested that perhaps there are some places that art should not go. Despite art’s social significance as a medium to convey complex and often controversial issues, there are tragedies such as the Holocaust, or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that defy appropriate artistic expression. (Dr. Atomic explores the events leading up to this event, but not the actual event.) Composer John Adams also talked about his extreme emotional difficulties coming to terms with the composition of his Septmeber 11th memorial On the Transmigration of Souls.

So, do you feel there should be limits to where a musical composition can go? Why? And what are the artistic ramifications of having such limits?

• If it’s too hot to go outside where you are, crank up the AC and build your own Dreamhouse. Composer Walter Cianciusi has created versions of La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations in Max/MSP which you can download and manipulate as you like. [Thanks, Kyle].
• “There is nothing like hearing a new work by a living composer that is so intriguing and impressive that in the moment you could not care less how history will someday rank it.”—So sayeth the NYTimes. Clap your hands say yay!
• Nothin’ like some good old-fashioned name calling in the high arts. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in LA has called on audiences to boycott the British stage premiere of John Adams’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Mr Cooper tells the London Guardian, “I would hope the people of Edinburgh would respond appropriately by allowing these moral midgets to do their opera to an empty house.” [Guardian]
• It’s Medal Day at MacDowell this Sunday. The artists currently in residence will open their studios to guests and Steve Reich will drop in to pick up the 46th Edward MacDowell Medal.
• William Bolcom is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer AND was popular in high school. Something doesn’t seem fair about that. [Seattle Times via Sequenza 21]

• What if everyone’s favorite child sorcerer was studying composition? Check out this amazing Harry Potter recast from Scott Spiegelberg, assistant professor of music at DePaw University. It’s the ninth installment in John Lanius’s Carnival of Music.
• Musicformaniacs.blogspot.com, curated by Mr Fab since October 2004, is a virtual Wal-Mart of ” ‘outsider’ recordings and utterly unique sounds.” A great lunchtime playground for audiophile adults, recent highlights include a feature on Toydeath, a band that creates music out of an “arsenal of toys to make any kindergarten green with envy”, and the gangsta rap of Philip Glass.
• Talk about service journalism…Ionarts blogger Charles T. Downey gives us the down and dirty recap of the Santa Fe premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s one-act opera Ainadamar.
• Note to those seeking the youth market: it’s not a short attention span you must deal with, it’s a demand for complexity. Bring on the Ferneyhough.
• Mediabistro.com gives Alex Ross a pop quiz. Come back from vacation, Alex. We miss you!!!

Despite a series of extremely hot music stories that seemed ubiquitous in the final heat-filled days of July—Marin Alsop’s contested ascendancy to Baltimore Symphony Music Director, the million downloads of Beethoven, the latest Payola bust (so much for public opinion ever being on the side of the record industry), etc.—the news item that continues to capture my attention was actually about British art.

Several publications published accounts of how London’s venerable Tate Museum turned down a donation of a significant collection of paintings by a group of artists collectively known as the Stuckists, many of which were featured in an extremely popular exhibition mounted in Liverpool last year. So, I did a little surfing and visited the Stuckist site to see the paintings myself. While I was not particularly moved by any of them, I found the Stuckists’ various artistic statements rather appealing, especially the following credo at the very end of their original 1999 Manifesto:

Stuckism embraces all that it denounces. We only denounce that which stops at the starting point — Stuckism starts at the stopping point!

These simpatico sentiments have been enough for me in good tasteless fashion to actually question my initial dismissal of the paintings. While subsequent viewings (albeit in the compromised digitally pixilated format available on my computer from their website) have still not won me over aesthetically, I am even more eager to see these works in person and even more inclined to be favorably disposed to their cause if not their content.

What clinched it for me is what I believed to be unforgiveable arrogance emanating from Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director, who was quoted in the London Times as saying:

We do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection.

Now, imagine if someone said that about your music. Well, in fact quite a few already have. Those who attempted to proscribe what music should be either for political ends (the Nazi dismissal of “degenerate art,” Stalin’s purge of “formalistic” tendencies, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Taliban, etc.), or for aesthetic ones whether progressive or regressive (Boulez’s infamous “Schoenberg is Dead” essay which claimed any contemporary music that is not 12-tone is useless or many classical radio stations who, after fetishizing market research, will not play any modernist-sounding music).

I have long thought that the only way to be a receptive listener to music in a world where the Schoenberg/Cage emancipation of dissonance was a fait accompli is to engage in a similar emancipation involving judgment and taste. Such a stance not only liberates dissonance but also re-embraces consonance, any kind of timbre, rhythm or lack thereof, duration, you name it. “But,” you say, “there are only so many hours in the day. How do we separate out the good from the bad? There’s no time to waste on bad music.” However, once we set up paradigms of good and bad, worthwhile and worthless, cool and uncool, we doom ourselves at best to being tomorrow’s Horatio Parker and, at worst, to being a mirror image of the very thing we claim not to let into our aesthetic purview. Perhaps that’s why in the wake of all the modernism bashing like Terry Teachout’s most recent paean to neo-romaticism in Commentary—most eye-straining line: “the twelve-tone method…is no longer practiced by any important composer anywhere in the world”—I have found myself compulsively drawn to composing serial music for the first time in my life.

But, ever trying to refrain from closing the door of possibility by rushing to judgment, maybe I’m over-reacting here by equating the Tate—a museum whose Turners and Rothkos floor me—with Joseph Goebbels or WCRB-FM in Boston. At least it’s been the source of some provocative discussions here in the Box…

From Randy:

I don’t have any problem that the Tate decided not to accept the Stuckists paintings. Housing and conserving artwork is an expensive endeavor, and yes, sometimes museums just have to go with their gut as to whether or not it’s worth it. I still don’t see the problem with actually having taste—or the fact that curators and other people in a position to make evaluative judgment calls about art also have taste. In fact, they should develop their opinions and learn to trust their instincts. It’s their job. One doesn’t just stumble into these positions, they dedicate themselves wholeheartedly. They spend time with artists, go into their studios, travel to exhibitions…not to mention the years of studying. Yeah, it’s fine to take their choices with a grain of salt, but maybe curators make a good filter for those of us who don’t have as strong of a commitment to the arts.

From Ian:

I actually like the idea of having human arbiters to decide highly subjective issues, if the arbitration process is taken extremely seriously by all parties involved, including the people affected by the arbitration. In my opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court, recent developments notwithstanding, is one of the great examples of how this kind of subjective assessment can work. The danger with arts institutions and our world in general is when the people who are charged with the responsibility of being “tastemakers” are (a) allowed to act on their own, opening up the possibility of personal eccentricities tainting the process, (b) not fully aware of the true ramifications of the decisions that they make, and/or (c) chosen haphazardly based on personal connections rather than an open process which involves the artists whose work will be judged. Personal bias may not be so harmful when we are talking about small ensembles or local music series, but when one gets to national institutions and budgets in the seven-figure range, it becomes ever more important to keep the process as clean as possible. At these levels, I feel that curating should be an honor of the highest order, treated with all the seriousness of a judge taking an oath of office. There should be procedures for censure in cases of abuses of power, and the community should have an active role in choosing the people who will decide the fate of their artistic endeavors.

What do you think? Who and what factors should determine what gets hung in a museum, what music gets funded and performed, what body of creative work makes it into the greater public awareness and ultimately into history?

The BBC offered it—a free download of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies—and the people came. When the stats came back that more than a million electronic copies had been snagged during the month, Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3, declared in a rhapsodic PR statement, “The response has been incredible and much bigger that we expected…we hope this will encourage new audiences to explore online classical music.”

Bloggers picked up the news of the free downloads and spread the word throughout Internetland. On message boards, people discussed the impact the project was having and, in at least one case I found, how the BBC Beethoven season in general had inspired a listener to pull an old copy of the “Emperor” Concerto out of the piano bench and start practicing again.

Just when I though the classical industry was about to call for a tickertape parade and burn copies of Lebrecht’s Who Killed Classical Music? in the streets, word came over the transom that the classical record companies were pissed off. They countered that by offering free downloads of Beethoven (quite legally, just to be clear), the BBC was effectively “devaluing the perceived value of music” and “that any further offers would be unfair competition” (as reported by the Independent, July 10, 2005).

There’s a lot of talk (and I mean a lot) at industry conferences about the imperative need to “broaden the audience” if we hope to have a healthy, economically solvent future. I’m a big believer in the “it’s not the music, it’s the packaging” theory of classical decline, and think a major problem is our insistence on clinging to models and expectations from the culture boom days that are gone. With the Beethoven Experience project, the BBC took a big step forward towards delivering the music to the audience on their terms rather than waiting for them to hurdle our velvet rope. The importance of this can’t be underestimated in an area where the discussion historically turns rather quickly to how to “fix” the audience so that they will wake up and understand how important our orchestras and new concert halls are to a community. Plus, if time is money, one million downloads, free of charge or not, still count for something. If it was offered for free and no one downloaded it, that would prove a serious societal devaluation.

I grasp the labels’ fear that sales of Beethoven symphony discs will be hit by the glut of free product available (though I leave the door open to the thought that the stats on this may prove quite the opposite). Maybe they also want to head off what could become a public radio trend. But with dozens of versions of the standard rep to choose from in the record bins, I wonder how this is at all that different from the business model they operate under already. Maybe this will inadvertently force the record industry to save itself by diverting their focus to new work no one has recorded so as to be the only kid on the block with such a product on offer. (Hey, a new music gal can dream, can’t she?) Such recordings will be out of the financial reach of the BBC.

But back to Beethoven. In an industry with just a 3 percent share in the music sales market (according to a 2003 RIAA profile), a million downloads in a month represents a dramatic increase in public interest in your product. It’s an oddly schizophrenic message to be upset by a whole new group of music fans with a newly whetted appetite for orchestra music. Rather than chastise them (via publicly wrist-slapping the BBC), sell them more! Did you like Beethoven? Then how about Joan Tower? (When you think about it, it might not be so far fetched a marketing strategy.)

Ever get handed a free sample on the street, and then find yourself reaching for the product at the supermarket? Even though CDs are not 100 percent consumable, might we not evaluate this experiment in terms of a wine tasting? Not everyone will keep buying more bottles of their new discoveries, but a percentage will. And a group of those will likely start frequenting your store and trying other bottles on the shelves, even some who before were maybe strictly PBR guys.

Every week, the iTunes store offers a free “Single of the Week.” I’m in the habit of downloading the track, which has never been by an artist I’ve ever heard of, just to see if I like it. That’s all that it’s there for—a friendly invite to music fans to drop on by and see what a particular band is all about. If it nets the artist new fans (a.k.a. potential paying downloaders), it’s done its job. I don’t think anyone argues with the fact that classical music, new and old, has some PR to do with modern society. The BBC model seems like a campaign with real potential.

Let’s put it in real terms, though. If the BBC or iTunes was willing to feature a piece of yours next week as a free download, can I see a show of hands from the composers who would say “No, thanks!”?