Category: Commentary

The Role Of College Teaching In The Life of A Creative Musician

Posted on September 10, 2014 by macdonaldp - Articles, Commentary

Photo by Scot Woodman on Flickr

“There’s no way I could come to your university and perform with your students. Academic institutions suck all the creative life out of me. I hate them. I try to avoid them as much as possible.”
“But William Paterson University is a creative place,” I responded. “We have a great New Music Series and an amazing jazz program and we do a lot of commissioning and improvising out there. I think you’d like the vibe.”
“Nope,” he said. “I appreciate your offer, but my experience with schools is that they are creativity killers. They’re just so conservative and backwards thinking. Thanks but no thanks.”

Sigh. Once again I found myself trying in vain to defend the profession of teaching music at the university level and the academic institutions that support it. I had offered this prominent New York City composer/performer a good fee, a nice sushi dinner, and the opportunity to have his piece performed by a dedicated group of students and faculty who would put months of preparation into it, but I was getting nowhere. I let it go and we talked about other things.

This musician’s attitude was particularly intense, but it wasn’t the first time I had encountered such resistance to academic institutions. Over the years, many of my friends and colleagues across the U.S. who are freelance musicians and specialize in contemporary music have told me that they dislike schools of any sort and they want nothing to do with them. They’ve either implied or stated outright that if I were really good at what I do then I would be able to make it as a freelancer and I wouldn’t need to teach. They believe the old adage of “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.”

At first I just shrugged this off as arrogant first-world thinking. I thought that in the interest of enhancing their street credibility, they could afford to discredit the system that helped them develop their skills, because in the end there was still plenty of money and work to go around. But after considering it more carefully I came to the conclusion that the issue is more complicated and subtle and deserves exploration. I’ll explain, but first, some background.

WHY I CHOSE COLLEGE TEACHING

I’ve been teaching at the tenure-track college level for thirteen years. Even before I had my DMA from the Eastman School of Music in hand at twenty-six years old, I had landed a tenure-track job at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. I taught ethnomusicology and percussion there for three years (2001–2004) and then landed my current position at William Paterson University (WP) in Wayne, New Jersey, twenty miles west of New York City. At WP I teach percussion, contemporary music, Indian classical music, and improvisation. I was tenured in 2009 and am currently at the rank of Associate Professor.
I set my sights on a college teaching job when I was a freshman during my undergraduate years at the University of Michigan. I knew by then that my options were fairly limited in terms of making a living in the U.S. as a composer and percussionist. Most of my colleagues in the percussion area were trying to land jobs with orchestras. I’ve never found orchestral percussion playing particularly interesting, so I scratched that option off the list right away. The other possibility was a job playing percussion with a military band, but it was still basically an orchestral gig, so I scratched that one off the list too.

That basically left freelance work or college teaching. For me, college teaching was a better choice. To start, I’ve always enjoyed teaching. Secondly, I knew that it would take some time to find the right job and that I would have to jump through some hoops to tailor the job to what I wanted, but I also knew that when I got things where I wanted them I would have a stable income, good health insurance, and a solid retirement package. But here’s the salient point: those things really only mattered to me because they would give me the freedom to perform and compose the music I wanted.

Freelancing as a composer/performer never appealed to me for one simple reason: I’ve never wanted to play or write music that I don’t believe in. I knew that as a freelance percussionist I would need to play any and all gigs to survive—especially for the first decade or so I was in a city—which would likely include playing in bands for corporate gigs and bars, musical theatre shows, commercial recording sessions, and orchestral percussion gigs. As a composer I would likely need to write commercial music. I did all those things in the first few years I was working, but I did them knowing that it was just to round out my musical experience to make me a better teacher. I didn’t want to be doing them in the later part of my life.

Of course, I would never criticize anyone who has taken that path. Many of my colleagues have an agnostic attitude towards music. So long as they’re playing drums (or violin or whatever), they are happy, no matter what the style or situation. The same goes for many of my composer friends. I respect them greatly. After all, it’s very difficult to survive as a freelancer anywhere in the world. But I’ve always felt that it wasn’t the right path for me, and many others feel the same. My burning passion has always been experimental music and world music. [1] What I needed was complete freedom to pursue any musical direction I want, no matter the commercial value.

Of course, there are other ways to go about this. America has a long history of composers and performers working jobs unrelated to the music field in order to pay the bills. Charles Ives working in the insurance business, Philip Glass driving a taxi and working as a plumber in the early part of his career, and John Cage working a variety of jobs until he was nearly fifty years old are but a few famous examples. I also considered that option, but I couldn’t get the math to work out, both in terms of finances and time. If I worked just a few hours a day at Starbucks or another entry-level job I’d have the time and mental space I needed to pursue my artistic vision, but not the money. Everything I earned would get sucked into paying bills and I’d have nothing left over to invest in hiring good players to perform my music, make recordings, buy equipment, build press materials, etc.—the basic things you need to form a career. This is especially true in big cities like New York where the basic minimum wage has fallen far behind the cost of living over the last forty years. Steve Reich could drive a cab in the early 1970s and rent an apartment for $50 a month and save a bit of money to pay his ensemble members and release recordings, but that’s much more difficult now.
If I got involved with a more serious career like selling insurance or working as a lawyer I would have the money I needed, but not the time. I’m an incredibly energetic guy, but even I have my limits. Fifty hours a week at the office wouldn’t leave much mental space or physical energy for composing sessions, long rehearsals, and touring.

College teaching seemed like the perfect answer because the hours are generally much lower but the pay is reasonable. Most weeks I’m up at the University about three to four days. One of those days is quite long, from about 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., but the other days are shorter. On average I’d say my time teaching and attending to various administrative duties is about twenty to thirty hours a week, for about eight months a year.

There are two things about those hours that make them special, however. First, they are flexible. I tour many weeks each semester and it’s very easy for me to rearrange rehearsals, classes, and lessons. Second, I’m immersed in fascinating, quality music during those hours and I have the freedom to choose good repertoire. I pick the pieces I’ll conduct, I organize my classes how I like, and when working with students one on one in percussion or composition lessons I help them select the repertoire. I also have a laboratory at my fingertips to help develop my own music. That all gives me a lot of job satisfaction because I have some degree of creative control; I’m not just taking orders from someone.

However, lest you might be getting ready to write a letter to the Governor of New Jersey expressing your anger at lazy professors who only work twenty to thirty hours a week and enjoy a fat salary, let me put those hours in perspective. Those are only the hours I spend at the university. When you add in my composing time each day, my practicing, and several hours a day on email and the phone for hustling the various business aspects of my career outside the university (as well as the university administrative work), the hours top out closer to sixty or seventy, sometimes more.

Of course, college teaching jobs are hard to get. When my freelance musician friends make disparaging statements to me about college teachers being second-rate players or composers, I gently remind them that based on one’s performance recital and interview, getting a job usually means someone has beat out well over 100 applicants for a position—most of whom are freelancers. And being a successful university professor requires more than just teaching and playing skills. One must know how to interact with Deans and Presidents, apply for grants, and navigate the various administrative and political aspects of working in a large organization. Maintaining this balance is more difficult than it may seem and many people don’t have the knack for it.
There is something else many freelancers don’t know: being successful at a university gig and climbing the academic ladder has more to do with what you do outside the university than what you do inside. Once in a great while someone will be denied tenure because his or her teaching is bad, but usually someone is fired at the university because he or she didn’t have the ambition and vision to build a successful career outside the confines of the academic institution. This is a great boon to serious musicians who teach, as it justifies spending time away from the university while on tour or making plenty of room in one’s schedule for composing.

There are three basic criteria that promotion and tenure committees look at when evaluating a candidate. First, the quality of their teaching as measured through student and faculty peer evaluations. Second, the quality and quantity of a candidate’s professional life outside the university, and third is service to the university (committees, panels, etc). There are a few universities who bill themselves as “teaching” universities in which the teaching is the most important criteria and professional work doesn’t matter, but in general there is no question that one’s professional activity is what guarantees employment. “Publish or perish.” That is why most college professors are excellent players and composers. They have to be or they’ll lose their jobs.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONFORMITY AND DISCIPLINE

But what about what that prominent NYC composer/performer said? Are university music programs conservative places that have little use for truly creative thinking?
Yes, sometimes they are!

I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life sitting through faculty meetings and serving on various committees and in my experience university music departments are often risk-adverse. There are two reasons for this.
First, frequently updating curriculum (or simply letting students design their own with guidance from a professor, which is what I advocate) requires flexibility from the faculty. One must be willing to teach something different every semester and take on the role of adviser and collaborator rather than top-down mentor. However, many faculty are unwilling to do this, mostly out of ennui. Once many professors have become comfortable teaching something, they are unwilling to investigate new ways to apply their knowledge to a rapidly-changing art form. Unfortunately the classic image of the professor wearing the dandruff-covered sweater jacket, peering over reading glasses at ancient notes that he or she made decades ago (on paper no doubt) is all too alive and well.

There is little the students or other faculty can do about this. Unless a tenured professor does something illegal, the unions hold so much power it is nearly impossible to fire him or her. Indeed, this is the primary criticism people have leveled against the tenure system: that it fosters stagnation and only serves the professors. This is a fair criticism and one I’ve expressed many times (and I’m a tenured professor). But getting rid of tenure entirely would be very dangerous. That would put the employment of the faculty at the whims of higher administrators, most of who know virtually nothing about the field of music and are often quick to fire and hire people to serve their own career interests.

The solution is to keep the tenure system, but never guarantee life-long employment. Rather, one should be able to earn increasingly longer sentences of job security. So, for example, one could come up for review after one year, then two years, then four years, then perhaps every six or eight years for the rest of one’s career at a given institution. The reviews should have teeth and no matter how long someone has been at an institution he or she should sweat at the conclusion of each block, even if they’ve been there thirty years. This would force faculty to stay professionally active and keep refining their teaching and answering the challenge of working in a dynamic musical culture. This structure would be fairer to the students—who deserve professors who are professionally active—and it’s fairer to the majority of the faculty at any given institution who are burning the candle at both ends.

The other reason most university music departments are so risk adverse is because the canon takes on too much weight over time. The great composers of the past wrote so much great music and it takes so much time to get through even a fraction of it that it can be difficult for professors to figure out ways to balance a thorough education in the old masterpieces with more modern skill sets (e.g., music software literacy or world music awareness). Some schools have responded to this challenge by throwing out the old masterpieces all together and letting the students study whatever they want, which usually means pop music. This often falls under the guise of postmodernism. “Down with The Man!” “No more letting dead males dictate our aesthetics!”

However, those dead males wrote a lot of great music. Although I’d like to see more flexibility in curriculums, there is no question that working through the standard repertoire develops one’s technique better than anything else, and technique is important. One thing I’ve noticed after thirteen years of professional work with the best contemporary classical and jazz musicians in America is that without exception, the most creative players have a thorough grounding in the classics. A handful of them got it outside of school, but almost all of them procured it during their high school and university years. Indeed, I frequently hear “new music” by young composers who have eschewed the classic studies of counterpoint, orchestration, and harmony because it’s too “conformist” or some other such response. The results are dreadful and predictable: poorly orchestrated tunes that lack coherence. Even worse is the performer who has refused to grapple with the standard repertoire and has developed their “own thing.” Sloppy tuning, bad rhythm, and lousy tone are the primary results.

A basic working knowledge of the canon also gives one a key into a fraternity of professional musicians. It is basic musical literacy. For example, if you are a classical musician and you don’t know anything about the music of Palestrina or Stravinsky and you don’t know who Yo-Yo Ma is you won’t be able to communicate effectively with the best classical musicians working today. (And more importantly, you’ll have deprived yourself of some of the greatest music ever written and performed.)
One must be careful not to confuse conformity with discipline. Even though university music programs need to find more creative and dynamic ways to balance the study of the canon with the diverse skill sets needed to negotiate the modern musical landscape, studying the canon and developing a highly refined technique are still paramount. You can’t escape it. Studying the classical masterpieces of the past only fosters conformity if the professor insists that his or her students blindly imitate that music or interpretations of that music. (In the case of jazz this would take the form of stopping with the Abersold method. That is, getting to a point where you can imitate the great jazz musicians of the past, but can’t go any further.)

However, good teachers do much more than that. They open students’ ears and souls to the creative spirit underlying all great music and thus enable the transference of that creativity from one generation to another. What that New York City composer/performer that I quoted at the beginning of this article failed to understand is that at William Paterson University (and other quality music schools) we focus on the classics because that is the best framework for a young musician to gain the skills needed to perform all manner of modern music. That doesn’t make our institution uncreative or conformist. Quite the opposite: our dedication to creative music requires us to focus on the canon. Indeed, what we want for our students is for them to become the most creative musicians of their generation, but first they need some chops.

What music schools and departments need is balance, and I think art departments do it better than we do. Art majors start creating art from their very first day, in different mediums, while simultaneously studying the great classics through their art history courses. There’s no reason we can’t do this in music departments. Every music student in America should be composing, improvising, and learning music software as part of their university education, all the while studying Beethoven symphonies and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. As I said at the beginning of this section, this can be done in a way that maximizes each student’s individual interests and talents by letting them design their own curriculum under the guidance of a supportive mentor. It might take a bit more effort on the part of the professors, but the result would be a much more dynamic and relevant experience for everyone.

TEACHING MUSIC IS MORE THAN TEACHING TECHNIQUE

The big point that critics of college teaching fail to understand is that teaching music is more than just teaching music. Yes, of course a teacher has to teach a student how to hold a bow, or how to realize second-species counterpoint, or how to play a double-stroke roll, but it’s more than that. A good teacher connects the great musicians and musical works of the past with the present, while paving the road for the future. This doesn’t just mean technique, rather, it means connecting with the wildly creative spirits that flowed through each and every great musician of the past. This is one of the things I love about teaching: I regularly come into contact with wonderful music and by figuring out how to help other people plumb the depths of these sonic wonders I am refreshed. My passion for creative music is renewed time and again.

I also see people change. Over the course of four or five years my students become more sensitive, intelligent, and creative because of their contact with great music. Ultimately, it is these deeply spiritual experiences that motivate my teaching, not financial stability.

Each of us is a link in a chain that extends outwards to infinity in either direction. None of us were hatched from eggs yesterday (to borrow a phrase from J.M. Coetzee). We all owe a huge debt to those people who spent the extra hours with us to make our performing and composing that much better, and opened our ears and hearts and minds to the masterpieces of the past. Our teachers didn’t just give us employable skills, they deeply enriched our lives. We can repay this debt in many ways, but one of the most powerful is by doing the same for others. It’s a massive challenge, but ultimately a musical one.
Undoubtedly my attitude in this regard comes partly from my deep involvement with North Indian Hindustani classical music. In India teaching is held in high regard and even the most commercially successful performers (e.g., Zakir Hussain) make time in their lives for teaching. My gurus, the renowned Dhrupad masters the Gundecha Brothers, regularly bring their top students on tour with them. The students join them on stage and play the tanpura (the drone instrument) and often sing backup vocals. Teaching actually happens on stage, even for major concerts. When the show is over it is common for the teachers to quiz the students on what they just heard and for the students to ask questions about the performance, even very specific technical ones. Thus the teaching and the performing are seamlessly intertwined. The past, present, and future connected as one.
Of course, some people have no talent for teaching or interest in it. But their deficiencies or attitudes shouldn’t be twisted into virtues. As with most things in life, the reality is highly contextual and subtle, much more than the crude distinctions many people make between “teachers” and “freelancers.” Yes, there are some bad teachers out there, but there are also many wonderful teachers who are highly accomplished performers and composers outside of the academy. And yes, many college music programs are procrustean and need improvement, but they still serve an important basic function to give our future generations the basic skills they need to participate in creative music making at the highest levels.

There is nothing more important to the future of creative music than passionate and talented teachers. Let us all reevaluate the role of teaching in the realm of creative contemporary music, and let us be glad that many of us college professors are working tirelessly to inspire creative music-making in future generations.

*
1. I realize that I’m drawing somewhat of a line here between “commercial” music and “experimental” music, and I admit that that line is quite fuzzy and often doesn’t exist clearly at all. All music has both elements to it, but it is a matter of degree. There is quite a difference in intent—and I would say artistic effect—between the music of, say, Justin Bieber and Charles Wuorinen. No matter how clever one is in trying to erase that line and intellectualize the supposed similarities between Mr. Bieber and Mr. Wuorinen, the fact is that the audiences are different, the venues are different, composing and learning and performing the music is different, and the emotional experience of hearing the music is quite different. No disrespect to Mr. Bieber, but I much prefer Mr. Wuorinen’s music, or Mr. Cage’s music, or Mr. Reich’s music, or Ravi Shankar’s music, and it is that music and music that is created in that spirit to which I have devoted my life.

***

Payton MacDonald is a composer/percussionist/singer/improviser/administrator/educator. He has created a unique body of work that draws upon his extensive experience with East Indian tabla drumming and Dhrupad singing, Jazz, European classical music, and the American experimental tradition. MacDonald was educated at the University of Michigan and Eastman School of music. He has toured the world as a performer and composed music for many different ensembles.

The Dangers of Secondhand Music

Posted on July 16, 2014 by MikelRouse - Articles, Commentary

Like secondhand smoke, the consistent exposure to music everywhere has resulted in a slow poisoning: the invalidation of music as a uniquely singular event. If there’s one topic of conversation that dominates my circle of composers, recording artists, and musicians, it’s the new ways people listen—or don’t listen, as often turns out to be the case—to music today.

There’s a lot of blame to spread around for our music appreciation downgrade: illegal downloads, corporate record companies missing the digital curve, overly compressed music resulting in fatigue and “digititus,” and the low-res quality of mp3 files, to name only a few factors. All of these things contribute to the devaluing of music as a distinct primary experience. But I think there’s a single phenomenon that’s working harder than all the others: The constant bombardment of music functioning as an aspect of an environment, in spaces from restaurants to government offices to bars to shopping malls, reducing music to just so much sonic wallpaper.

This in turn gives rise to a kind of environmental tinnitus, where all sound—including music—becomes a background to be ignored. Having the familiar (baby boomer hits and their inevitable offspring) almost constantly served up in an over exposed context (mostly radio) was a great way to grow up in 1950s and ‘60s, but now, a half a century later, the notion of “all music, all the time” is complete. And if—as Helen Caldicott, the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, observed—it takes a generation or two to fully manifest and absorb the ramifications of the introduction of a new paradigm into a system, it seems to me the results are in. And the verdict isn’t good.

It’s arguable that over-saturation has been with us always, and that the only question is of degree. But degrees count, as does context. Back in the ‘60s, according to the ostensibly with-it zeitgeist of the counterculture, advertising was lame and phony, and the rock of the ‘60s was a direct affront to it, considered by its makers to be unassimilable to the needs of consumerism. What we got as aural environment in its stead was Muzak.

Who remembers Muzak (also known as piped music, weather music and/or lift music)? Founded in 1934, the Muzak Holdings Corporation distributed background music to retail stores and was the predominant playlist in elevators and public spaces. Meant to be unoffending and innocuous, it was deemed an assault to the senses and sensibilities of ostensibly serious music lovers. But it had its place, as they say.

While Erik Satie’s concept of “furniture music” (musique d’ameublement—or, more precisely, background music) gave both the composer and the music lover something to ponder in terms of rethinking ambient music sources, I’m not sure anyone could have envisioned that, as Muzak was phased out and pop, New Age, and ostensibly “light” classical were increasingly fed into the places where Muzak once reigned, that all music might be transformed into background music. Since 1997, the Muzak Holding Corporation has used original artists for its music sources, except on its Environmental channel. This may have rid the world of bland and boring arrangements of current popular tunes (which was the effect of Muzak’s generic orchestrations), but it also sped up the process of making the original source music itself into background chatter.

Of course, there’s advertising. There’s always advertising. And as hipster corporate gurus like Malcolm Gladwell (“I like advertising. I think it’s cool.”) realigned our relationship to advertising, the floodgates opened. Once advertisers got wise to the potentially positive effect of a licensed pop song rather than a bland underscore, record companies, managers, and indie bands were all trying to place their songs in the next car commercial. This may have created a licensing boon in the short term, but as new web media outlets like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix began to displace primetime TV’s market share, the revenues for song and music placements started to dwindle. But not before they contributed to the overall saturation effect.

Copyright and fair use have become hot catchwords with the advent of new technologies. And many pundits wonder if the Copyright Act of 1976 should be amended or completely scrapped given the new media landscape. But I would argue once again that it’s not just the march of technology that’s creating this new look at copyright. Could it also be that the dissemination of music everywhere makes it harder for bar owners, restaurant managers, and club owners to understand the importance and complexity of copyright law? In other words, the complete and successful infiltration of music everywhere has created its own parallel universe: Music is everywhere. Why should I have to pay for it?

The forced incorporation of music into every conceivable context is taking turns into the realm of the absurd. Even the ancient practice of yoga isn’t safe, with “power yoga” classes (which could only have arisen in Power America) pumping out playlists to match increasingly aggressive yoga postures. And it begs the question: are people uncomfortable with, or just plain unaccustomed to, being alone with their thoughts?

Although there are as many variants in yoga techniques as there are American Idol contestants, the original purpose of yoga or tao yin, in the classic Indian hatha and Taoist traditions, is to prepare the mind for meditation. It’s hard to imagine one person’s playlist would fit all needs of meditation and contemplation. And indeed, on some such playlists I’ve heard, the connotation of “meaning” never seems to have occurred to the compiler. While Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” is certainly an innovative jam, relaxing and meditative it is not, and indeed it might yield bad connotations to folks averse to a beat, pop music, or—quite possibly—even gold diggers. (Get down girl, go ahead, get down.)

And that’s the whole point. It’s the arrogant corporate presumption that we’re all interested in hearing the same thing, not to mention that we’re desirous of hearing anything at all in that given space and point in time. Of course, one can compare this onslaught of sound to the general media diffusion we face every day. I would make a similar argument about media dispersion affecting our relationship with movies and other modern forms of entertainment. There are some bright spots in the acknowledgement of this media juggernaut, like the billboard ban in São Paulo and the bans on advertising to children on cell phones in France.

I would be disingenuous if I didn’t admit I’d found some inspiration in this new noise floor. As most folks utilize iPods and mp3 players to “tune out” their environment, I’ve been viewing these mobile devices as collaboration between the public and the private. Inspired by my work with Merce Cunningham and iPods (in 2006 I realized a score for Cunningham, International Cloud Atlas, that incorporated iPods set to shuffle so that each audience member had a unique version of the score), I recorded Recess, a collection of field recordings, and then orchestrated those sounds with multiple voices and instruments. The field recordings reflect every imaginable sound, from a couple’s quarrel in a New York City park to cicadas in my native Missouri. Recordings of random conversations are vocally doubled and harmonized to enhance and heighten their meaning. The experience of listening to Recess on a mobile device while walking through a city environment is a new kind of 3D mobile listening experience, so much so that I almost put a warning label on the CD.

But as I read over this article, I realize that much of what I wrote here sounds like I’m an advocate for a change in our collective behavior. Ultimately there’s little to be accomplished by railing against the march of history and I’m not sure I would or even could offer a solution to this social version of natural selection. Most folks view evolution as an upward progression. However, evolution is just that: evolving into different forms regardless of consequence. Maybe I just miss silence or maybe just the memory that at one time, recorded music held a grip on our social and political psyche.

I like to take dinner out with a good read. This has become all but impossible in New York City. When I ask patrons about the constant dining soundtrack, they often say they didn’t even notice the music. This is also evident when observing people in these environments. This din of sound has become the new level of silence. And speaking of dining out, I was thinking the other day about how much I used to love Thai food. Now there are ten Thai restaurants within a three-block radius of my Hell’s Kitchen studio. I haven’t had Thai food since 2011.

Music Criticism is Broken and It’s All Your Fault

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Isaac Schankler - Articles, Commentary

One of my first composition teachers, Evan Chambers, made it a point to tell his students that learning how to talk about music was almost as important—and in some ways as important—as learning how to write music. At the time he said it, I believe he meant that verbalizing was a valuable compositional aid that gave shape and purpose to amorphous ideas. But in the intervening years, that thought has grown and taken on new and broader meanings for me. When composers and musicians don’t speak, we allow others to direct the discourse and determine the ways our music is contextualized and appreciated.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; music’s protean ability to accumulate new meanings is a large part of its enduring fascination and vitality. But it’s worth looking at just who is speaking and exactly what they’re saying. Historically, it’s generally established music critics doing this work, and the relationship between artists and critics is often fraught.

Most of the time this is background radiation, but it becomes painfully apparent whenever a critic does something especially cringeworthy, as when Norman Lebrecht expresses his disdain for “Afro-American” music, or when Rupert Christiansen makes nasty comments about soprano Tara Erraught’s weight, or when Mark Swed ruminates on the length of pianist Yuja Wang’s dress, to name a few instances. Some of these are worse than others (I feel a little bad for lumping Swed’s thoughtful essay in with the other two), but I bring them up to show that these aren’t isolated incidents; they are part of a continuing trend.

The flip side is that these comments tend to generate a lot of discussion that crystallizes public attention around these issues. This is a fairly new thing, with the pace of the back-and-forth greatly accelerated by the internet and where more voices can participate. I find this kind of metacriticism—writing about writing!—to be immensely valuable, with the potential to actually shift attitudes in the long term.

But what does it say about the current state of criticism when the discussion of reviews is arguably more vital than the reviews themselves? It points to something deeply broken and dysfunctional about the current model.

Fundamentally, while the individual gaffes are easy to point out, I believe these problems are systemic. Between the decline in newspaper readership and shifts in culture, the number of classical music critics has undoubtedly dwindled in recent years, but as their ranks have shrunk, their perceived power within the community has remained constant, or even increased. Arguably, the internet is now more relevant than print media, but because new music banks on prestige instead of mass popularity, it still relies on old media to endorse and legitimize it. A good review from a major publication is still a rare and coveted thing, not just for the publicity it provides, but for the cachet it confers. Reviews are capable of canonizing or anointing artists in a way that is difficult if not impossible to achieve through other means.

Photo courtesy of Miguel Pires da Rosa via Flickr.

This places far, far too much responsibility on the vanishingly small number of active critics working today, and it can create an atmosphere of mutual resentment. The easy answer to this, which is maybe a facile answer, is that more people should be writing about new music, including and especially practitioners of new music. This idea has its share of detractors. A great number of words have been spilled on the virtues and drawbacks of the composer as critic, with the objectivity of composers often coming under fire. Interestingly, this is something Christiansen also invoked when called out for his invective. His comments about Tara Erraught’s appearance were made in the name of “disinterested criticism,” or so he claims—never mind that similar verbiage about male singers had never graced his column. The lesson is clear: objectivity doesn’t matter as much as having a veneer of plausible deniability.

Speaking from experience as a double agent of sorts, this impression of objectivity can be quite challenging for a writer-composer to maintain. I’ll give one example. I recently went to a concert that featured some works by friends and colleagues, and a few works by composers unknown to me. I thoroughly enjoyed all the works by the composers I knew, and disliked everything else on the program. I was reasonably certain that I would have made the same exact aesthetic judgement if everyone was a stranger to me, but I knew on the drive home that I could not possibly write about the concert. If I did so honestly, it would look terribly partisan, and dishonesty was of course out of the question.

Perhaps this is why critics so often employ the idea of “disinterested criticism” as a shield when they are accused of being unnecessarily vindictive, petty, or cruel. Like Fox News’s “fair and balanced” slogan, it doesn’t really denote a commitment to objectivity, but it offers a disingenuous way to continue to be partisan while pretending not to be. Things would be better, maybe, if we were open about our inevitable allegiances. Or as Kyle Gann puts it: “Critics have agendas, or any interesting critic does, and given enough column inches, those agendas emerge.”

All of this indicates to me that concert reviews and album reviews, traditionally the bread and butter of music criticism, should play a much, much smaller role than they currently do. I will stop short of calling them obsolete, since they seem to still be obligatory. But I look forward to a hypothetical future where they are just a tiny part of a vast landscape of compelling music writing.

A fair and obvious follow-up question would be: okay, smartypants, if not reviews then what? Short answer: I don’t know. Long answer: Anything at all. I don’t know what can or should replace or supplement reviews, but this should be an era of experimentation in writing about new music, at least until we figure out what sticks. Traditional media outlets typically have style guidelines and space limitations that are not ideally suited for putting new music in context. (Swed’s reviews for the LA Times are often preceded by lengthy history lectures, leaving little room for discussion of the actual concerts themselves.) But blogs and most online publications are not bound by these same conventions.

Ted Gioia has complained that pop music journalism has degenerated into “lifestyle reporting,” divorced from musical content and musical knowledge, but I honestly think that new music journalism could use a little more lifestyle reporting. I don’t mean that we should be more sensationalist, but we should be better about conveying the fact that new music is the product of individuals with a wide range of personalities and quirks and challenges, and most of these people are not dead. I’m thinking of something like video game journalist Cara Ellison’s EMBED WITH GAMES series of articles. For each article, she travels to stay with “a different important game auteur of our times [to] write about their life, the culture that influences their games’ work, and look at how their immediate environment affects their outlook and design philosophy.” The result is intensely personal and illuminating, and unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in writing about new music, which is often dry and impersonal.

At the same time I think Gioia is a little bit right, and we could do with more substantive writing about musical content as well. Written in response to Gioia’s call to arms, Owen Pallett’s semi-satirical pop music theory articles weren’t perfect, but they were interesting, and generated surprising enthusiasm for music theory outside of the typical audience for such things. Clearly, there’s a great hunger for musical insight out there, but outside of academic journals written for a specialist audience, there isn’t much writing about new music that actually satisfies this craving.

A final pertinent question might be: okay then, who will write these fancy hypothetical things? If you’ve read this far then the answer is you. I’m serious about this. Whether you’re a composer or a musician or an enthusiast, I know you’re probably pressed for time and that you are being asked to take on an increasingly overwhelming number of duties. But chances are your perspective is not being represented, and if you don’t share it, who will? Sure, talking about music, like dancing about architecture, is patently absurd. But at least for now, it seems to be a necessity.

Let’s Get American About Our Music

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Zoe Kemmerling - Articles, Commentary

Back in April, an assortment of Cleveland-area composers banded together to register their outrage (via an open letter in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer) over the pronounced lack of American composers on the Cleveland Orchestra’s upcoming season programming. Following that, there was a detailed and articulate discussion on New York’s WQXR in which Naomi Lewin hosted headlining letter writer Keith Fitch along with New Music USA President Ed Harsh and forward-thinking Seattle Symphony Executive Director Simon Woods. There are multiple overlapping issues at stake here (now that American concert music can officially claim more than one century to its credit, all American music isn’t new music), but at the heart of this latest chapter of classical music brow-furrowing is the now familiar specter of the floundering major symphony orchestra that has long shadowed our culture pages and news feeds. Painting a picture of the precariously preserved edifice of the symphony à laDorian Gray has served its purposes, stirring up the perpetual debate over society, art, and relevance. But I would suggest that new music proponents are uniquely qualified to stop worrying about the Major Symphony Orchestra in favor of much more productive—and yes, more American—channels.

An easily made but generalized across-the-pond comparison casts us in an unfavorable light. European orchestras take a marked pride in their national tradition (e.g.: Sibelius in Finland; Britten, Tippett, and Vaughan Williams in the U.K.) that is notably absent in America. Are we being unpatriotic? We’re a comparatively adolescent country, and the American intelligentsia has been known to sustain a certain cultural inferiority complex. Yet we acknowledge that America is a place with possibilities that can’t be found in the old world. And what could be more old world than rigid hierarchies? The Cleveland Orchestra makes the news, in part, because it’s one of the original “Big Five.” (To the best of my ascertainment, the jury is currently out on the number of qualifying orchestras in today’s Big club, but Cleveland still holds a place of seniority.) The financial health and adaptability of our major orchestras are convenient barometers of the health of the classical music scene in this country because these institutions are our most observably active ties to the Western music tradition. Similarly, the attainment of major orchestra jobs can function as that rare quantifiable yardstick of professional success in a statistically slippery biz, the outcome of which spells number-crunched woe for music degree earners.

A brief detour into the territory of full disclosure: I gave up my vague conservatory-period goal of winning an orchestra audition pretty fast, after a number of audition failures compounded the frustratingly passive on-the-job experience of a section violist. Why obsess over how your Don Juan will be judged when there is so much more music to discover and create? So now I find myself—among other things—preparing for projects such as an alto trumpet and viola duo (my duo partner, the trumpeter/composer Jason Huffman, being the only person I know who embraces such a gloriously unwieldy combination) with the equally unwieldy organization I helped to shape, Boston’s Equilibrium Concert Series, as well as serving as writer/editor/marketing associate/all-around helper for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and attempting to explain all sorts of music in my own freelance program notes. Incidentally, I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading NewMusicBox Regional Editor Matthew Guerrieri’s take on Equilibrium and also his account of January’s BMOP concert. (The opening of the latter contains an especially witty commentary on the moldering-symphony-orchestra debate.)

So what’s an “orchestra project”? I’m not 100% sure myself, but I think I’m justified in asserting that the name accurately implies a sort of perpetual question mark, and definitely describes the open-ended repertoire list that is the group’s mission. “Orchestra Project” sounds strange because orchestras aren’t supposed to be works in progress—they’re supposed to be edifices, anchors, rooted in distinguished tradition and endowed in perpetuity. All this, while being simultaneously adventurous and discerning enough to select the finest candidates to continue the genre with equal respect to its European origins and current polyglot context. Add to this the responsibility of wooing the skeptical, culturally endangered modern masses, and no wonder we’re seeing the orchestral psyche’s equivalent of a mental breakdown all over the country.

Clearly, these are far-flung demands that no major orchestra would realistically hold itself to. Consider the risks that an established, pedigreed orchestra would undergo in pursuing a substantial palette of new music programming: It might captivate some yet bore other camps of audience members with diverse programming choices (and scare some off entirely with the uncertainty). It might go without the honor of occupying a front-and-center position in its home city, since new music isn’t hugely popular with the mainstream concertgoing public. It might give up the security that would allow it the luxury of drawing candidates from far and wide for an opening and then rejecting all of them. That’s a lot of uncertainty to try to mix into a basically predictable tradition.

But you don’t have to shift your gaze very far to get away from the “what ifs” and watch these kinds of uncertainties play themselves out elsewhere. BMOP programs a ton of music that’s either new, American, or both, and still rakes in accolades. Yes, the orchestra is untenured and the programming is erratic, but it gives very little cause to grouch about staying inside the box, from any perspective. As it happens, BMOP’s most recent concert was not a dashing statement of the avant-garde; it was about as infused with Americana as it gets, with three fairly conservative mid-century composers with admirable chops and legacies. For those interested in pedagogical family trees, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Berger are three of our own Bostonian branches. They wrote music that managed to be erudite, rigorous, whimsical (Fine mined Alice in Wonderland decades before David Del Tredici), and joyfully heady in a way that only an orchestra can deliver. It’s demonstratively different fare from the premieres that comprised January’s concert and that generally pepper BMOP’s seasons, but that’s the thing about the new music/American music call to arms: a whole orchestra and years of programming are needed to offer anything even beginning to resemble a full picture. And a riotous body of repertoire can perhaps only be done justice through equally intrepid judgment calls; here’s where someone like Gil Rose can achieve the sort of self-motivated passionate leadership made possible through exhaustive knowledge of every aspect of the organization—how many conductors can claim that kind of commitment? If major orchestras are quite possibly not the best equipped to handle this unruly and momentous task, why not consider them as accessories to the act of new music-making rather than responsible parties?

OK, so I just held up one kooky orchestra zealously devoted to a far-flung repertoire. What else is in the American orchestral rep diet? Here’s something from a different sphere of my local orchestral life: a couple weeks ago I had a wonderful time hearing my colleagues’ wildly (and deservedly) buzzed-about chamber orchestra A Far Cry in the Gardner Museum’s sleek new Calderwood Hall in a program that—although conceived around an entirely different concept—was four-fifths American music: Charles Ives and Ingram Marshall, plus two commissions—from toy piano maven Phyllis Chen and local mad genius Ethan Wood. (Mendelssohn popped up too, not entirely incongruously.) AFC is young, idealistically cooperative, comparatively broke, and ambitious, sustaining itself in large part upon its popularity; yet this sort of programming is a key part of their hipness. What could be more American than a democratic orchestra with the popular vote, playing American music? But let’s get back to the traditional symphony orchestra. So how about another local group (established 1976), the New England Philharmonic? Their last concert, a pretty par-for-the-course program, featured Gunther Schuller, David Rakowski, and Roy Harris along with a Prokofiev symphony. NEP is a non-professional group so, no, you won’t see their passionate contract negotiations in the news. But “community orchestra” is more than a euphemism for “unpaid.” NEP literally maintains quite a large community of composers who interact with the orchestra to bring their music to the stage, along with not only audience members who want to hear the music, but musicians who choose to devote their limited hours of music-making to its execution.

Yes, I seem to be proving that I live in a bubble of culture blessed with a saturation of musical adventurers. But while there are piles of ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award plaques sitting around the BMOP office, a survey of ASCAP’s past and current awardees presents a wealth of competitors from cities large and small from every corner of the country. BMOP shares John S. Edwards laureate status with the American Composers Orchestra as well as Alabama, Albany, Cabrillo, Minnesota, South Dakota…the lists go on to include orchestras of lofty and lowly stature, student orchestras and regional orchestras, as well as the occasional heavy hitter. And going back to my own circle of acquaintanceship: if I also follow my colleagues’ entrepreneurial exploits in Chicago, Atlanta, and the San Francisco Bay Area, it seems facile to place too much credence in my own bubble.
Oh, yes, I haven’t mentioned my city’s own bona-fide prestigious Symphony Orchestra. I could talk about how the performances of work by Marc Neikrug, Osvaldo Golijov, and Bernard Rands I’ve seen this season at the BSO were received with sincere ovations, or about how I’m looking forward to Tanglewood’s 2014 Festival of Contemporary Music (for which I’ll be contributing some program annotations). I think the BSO is totally great. But my musical life is far-reaching enough that I’d really rather talk about other things. Do we really have to worry about whether symphony orchestras are doing their job as the headlining ambassadors of music and culture? The ambassadoring act isn’t what it used to be. We’re not going to go back to the days of Leonard Bernstein broadcasts (that’s why they’re being marketed as “historic broadcasts”), but there are more people than ever out there committed to getting new music into the world.

I’d love to direct anyone seeking any closing samples of composerly wisdom back a few decades, to this 1988 interview with Harold Shapero. Much of it still seems pretty timely (and being a wise-ass never goes out of style). One of the things he says is, “That’s one of the advantages of wonderful America. You have unequalled opportunity, but it’s just curious.” We might just still live in a place of curious opportunity, or at least opportunity for the curious.

Without a doubt, major orchestras have a cultural job to do, and there will be more soul-searching, reinvention, and growing pains in that corner as the 21st century marches on. But it’s time for new music advocates to stop standing on the sidelines and wringing their hands. Please, let’s be Americans and ditch the elitism and figure out how to make our music happen wherever it’s welcome.

***

Zoe Kemmerling. Photo by Kait Moreno.

Zoe Kemmerling is a native Californian who is pursuing an eclectic musical career as a violist, Baroque violinist, writer, and administrator in Boston. She is an enthusiastic performer of contemporary chamber music, violist in the period-instrument Emergence Quartet, and freelance provider of witty and insightful program notes, as well as past Executive Director of Equilibrium Concert Series and present Publications Associate at the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Profiling the Jazz Police

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Eugene Holley, Jr. - Articles, Commentary

From Old Skool Hooligans’ Jazz Police t-shirt; image used with permission.

The scene: Sweet Basil, New York City, 1994. The occasion: a swanky CD-release party for a young lion that burst on the scene a few years before. The remark: a Brooklyn-by-way-of-the-Midwest jazz singer introduces me to her friend. “Hey, I’d like you to meet Eugene Holley, Jr. He writes for Down Beat and JazzTimes,” she says. But after I shake her hand and turn away momentarily toward my table, I hear my vocalist friend say to her friend in a hushed voice, “Yeah, he’s one of the jazz police, but he’s cool.”

That’s when I first heard the term “jazz police.” At first, I paid it no mind. I thought it was one of the many linguistic inventions and dimensions spawned by musicians – one of many verbal turns of fancy that have weaved in and out of the jazz lingua franca from New Orleans to Manhattan.

But as the years moved on, I started hearing that phrase “jazz police” in more ominous terms. It usually refers to a belief among musicians that there is a cabal of jazz writers, reporters, and critics who influence, undermine, and control jazz musicians. They stifle the true expressions of the music by deciding who gets five-star reviews and who doesn’t, who gets the big recording contract and who’s forced to stay at the indie label, who wins the Grammy award and who gets the big non-profit grant, and who ends up playing their hearts out in the subway for next to nothing.

Really?

As someone who has had the tremendous privilege of working as a jazz writer, reporter, radio station music/program director, documentarian, and essayist for 25 years, I can honestly say that no such cabal of jazz police exists.
After all, policemen have salaries, vacations, and unions.

But, notwithstanding that admittedly feeble attempt at humor, the belief in a jazz police has become very toxic these days. So I’d like to offer the perspective of one who has been lumped in with that sordid circle. I want to add some harmony to the discord that exists between musicians and writers. I strongly feel that we need to deal with this myth of the jazz police; otherwise the future of our music will continue to dwindle in the coming years.

Now, just because I say that there is no jazz police doesn’t mean that writers haven’t exercised power to make or break careers. Of course that’s true. Jazz history is replete with writers whose whims, tastes, likes, and dislikes—for good or ill—have determined who is a star and who is not—as evidenced by the critic Martin Williams’s dismissal of the great Ahmad Jamal as a “cocktail pianist,” which other critics echoed for a very long time.

But I have some good news for musicians. While yes, a critic with an influential newspaper or magazine column might have been able to sway the public to like or dislike a jazz musician of his or her choosing back in the day, today no writer or critic has that kind of power. In the 21st century, the explosion of social media, blogs, and online listening services have irrevocably reduced the once-powerful pronouncements of writers and critics to, at best, well-informed observations and opinions.

A critic could write that a musician’s new CD is not his or her best work, but a few clicks and you can hear for yourself whether you agree with the writer’s opinion. A consumer can also share his or her opinions about any musician with other like-minded listeners in an instant. This type of democratized discourse did not exist thirty years ago, and I suspect it’s here to stay. And while sites like Facebook and Soundcloud feature fan reviews and accessible sound files, respectively, the democratic accessibility of that data does not guarantee that opinions offered by fans are any less biased than the professional critics. We are still in the Wild West stages of this phenomenon. And while writers and record companies have been taken down a notch, their digital demotion may be a pyrrhic victory, because it still rings with the spirit of “us” versus “them.”

And nobody wins that contest these days.

This digital age has also changed the power relationships between the jazz musician and the record industry to a large degree. If musicians have access to the internet, they can become their own record company. Artists can create their own websites, complete with gig updates, biographical information, audio samples, tour dates, and videos.

But for all of the aforementioned advances available to jazz in this era, there are still a significant number of musicians who speak of a jazz police.

As someone who knows and is in awe of the power and artistry of jazz musicians, I understand the frustrations, outrage, and disappointment they must feel when they have put their hearts and souls into a gig, a record, the road, and a career, only to see their careers marginalized by shrinking media coverage, unless they die and/or are featured in a PBS documentary. I particularly marvel at the young people, who become jazz musicians knowing what may befall them.

But let me get a little personal here. While I don’t claim to have met every major jazz writer in the years I’ve been on the scene, I have had the profound privilege of knowing quite a few of them: Stanley Crouch, Gary Giddins, Gene Seymour, John Murph, Willard Jenkins, Kelvin Williams, Jackie Modeste, Guthrie Ramsey, Robert G. O’Meally, Greg Thomas, A.B. Spellman, and two giants who left us recently—Albert Murray and Amiri Baraka. I have never seen them huddle to block anyone’s career. Musicians may not have liked everything they wrote, but I will go on record to insist that, at least with the people I mentioned, I saw no evidence of the jazz police some musicians talk about.

Yes, it is true that negative reviews—however crude, ill-informed, and distasteful they may be—do sell magazines and, in many cases, help establish the writer’s voice. Terry Teachout’s acerbic and condescending biography of Duke Ellington is one recent example. However, the notion of a jazz police that profits off of the misfortunes of musicians is downright unsupportable. I know a few known and unknown bards who are the antithesis of a jazz police; individuals who, without notoriety or fanfare, made great sacrifices for this music.

William A. “Bill” Brower of Washington, D.C., is a writer, concert producer, and former stage manager for the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival and Classic Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The late Bobby Jackson was the former program director of WCLK-FM in Atlanta and jazz programmer of Cleveland’s WCPN-FM.

Skip Norris is an intrepid Detroit entrepreneur who produces swinging gigs in the Motor City.

Zoe Anglesey and Tom Terrell, who both left us far too soon, and Arnold J. Smith are three Brooklyn-based, all-around guardian angels whose writings and work in the record industry have illuminated the scene.

If musicians want to search for a jazz police, they need look no further than themselves. The same digital revolution that has diminished the power of music critics and heavy-handed record producers has also exposed how some jazz musicians undermine and sabotage each other. Without naming names, writers have heard horror stories over the years: A musician sends someone to the wrong gig for an audition for a major jazz group. A group of sidemen on a recording session don’t like one person they’re playing with, and they purposely play badly to ruin the session. And most recently, a jazz pianist won a MacArthur grant and some musicians actually posted on his Facebook page the reasons why they didn’t feel he deserved the award.

My purpose is relating these examples, is not to hurt or embarrass musicians. But, as corny as it sounds, it’s to encourage musicians to treat each other better; and to emphasize that today, in an age where all jazz artists in America are underrated, musicians should know that, in my opinion, the overwhelming majority of jazz scribes and other individuals in the jazz infrastructure are there to help them, and, more importantly, the music.
We’re all trying to swing.

***

Eugene Holley, Jr. contributes to: Publisher’s Weekly, Purejazz magazine, Philadelphia Weekly and NPR: A Blog Supreme.

Lapsed Composer and Curmudgeonly Critic Reveals All About the Reviewing Racket!

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Grant Chu Covell - Articles, Commentary

I’m a lapsed composer hovering at the fringes of new music. I don’t compose much, but I review and critique CDs of new music. It’s easier to find time for critical listening than for pencil pushing. It is slightly vicarious, but I get to keep an ear on what’s going on, even though commercial releases are different than the concert hall scene.

By day I earn my living working in high tech for a global technology company. New music listening is squeezed in at every opportunity. My co-workers think my stacks of discs are quaint and wonder why I don’t invest in an mp3 player, but they don’t realize that each week I devour fresh content. It’s not worth the time to create lossless CD conversions.

Everything the mailbag brings is spun at least twice. However, I can’t and therefore don’t review everything. I sort and prioritize. If it makes a good first impression or it aligns with my interests, it will likely be covered. Something poorly executed or recorded will fall to the bottom of the pile. I try not to be subjective on the initial pass. I crave new discoveries, and very often something set aside one day becomes compelling a few weeks later.

While I have no formal tutelage in “How to review new music CDs,” there are a few guiding principles I follow. Someone wiser than me shared them back when I began to spend more time in Word than Finale:
1)      Always be factually accurate
2)      Whenever possible, gently attempt to educate an unfamiliar reader
3)      Whenever possible, gently attempt to inform the composer/performer
Having the luxury of being a principal at my own shop, lafolia.com, I don’t work under deadlines and can babble about any topic that interests me, not just new releases but old recordings, obscure composers, stuff heard on the radio, or pictures from a recent trip. I’ve built up solid relationships with a diverse group of labels, publicists, performers, and ensembles over the years. I like to think this quirkiness is what sustains our readers.

There will always be some new music I will never cover and sometimes I feel conflicted about this. I always wish I could cover more releases, but there is only so much time. And even if I were able to produce words for everything that passes my way, there would then be a fair amount of neutral or negative criticism, which I think would do a disservice. I believe I’m not alone in working like this—in fact, I see it as a duty to be predominantly positive, especially when covering the obscure.

It’s not uncommon for reviewers to be handed assignments. Staffers might cover a genre or composer they know nothing about. Here’s where you might notice a reviewer sticking to rule #1, offering irrelevant trivia about the restaurant across the street from where the recording was made or regurgitating program notes. You want your post-downtown minimalist piano suite critiqued by someone who’s heard of La Monte Young, not a medieval chorister. Of course there are wonderful write-ups from reviewers who have stepped outside of their comfort zones and made discoveries, but such instances are becoming rarer in the everything-is-on-YouTube era.
Let me share some examples of what might fall to the bottom of my personal well:

Orchestral pieces which were clearly written on a synthesizer and scored using a paint-by-numbers technique
Noisy or dimly recorded live performances (unless they have historical merit)
Pieces where the composer doesn’t recognize the limits of their material (perhaps doesn’t develop it enough, or conversely doesn’t know when to let it alone)

I don’t sort the mail by likes and dislikes. I don’t have categories I detest or composers I hate. (Would I admit it, if I did?) I am actually more inclined to listen to someone’s second release especially if I didn’t click with their first. Of course my tastes can probably be inferred by reading what I’ve written (especially now that I’ve divulged the prioritizing aspect). A release titled Lachenmann pours Sciarrino coffee while Xenakis and Ferrari look on will probably migrate towards the top of the pile.
Because I don’t cover everything and I subjectively prioritize what I do, someone might suggest I should get out of the way. There’s a tacit understanding that I ought to say something about everything which I’m handed. Whether I inquire after a release or receive it unsolicited, there is always the assumption that it is for “consideration.” It’s not come up explicitly that the press release bandwagon would evaporate if I were overtly sour, but I have had some sources dry up when I wasn’t timely, whether or not I was eventually enthusiastic.

Nowadays, I don’t think speedy verdicts are necessary, except to create buzz for an initial launch. On the internet, things stick. Anyone doing a web search can find critical information, whether it coincided with the street date or was penned months, even years later. Widely spaced mentions in the press are often good indicators of music’s endurance.

New music, as diverse and percolating as it is, maintains a thin niche. Every day we’re told classical music, our close cousin, is on the wane, or that it died just last week. We want to attract new ears, be appealing to new audiences, and not alienate potential fans. Publicity hounds prefer positive and timely tweets. We’re drowning under an avalanche of good press. We’re a supportive and encouraging community.

But is too much positivism bad? I remember a professor at college who could be relied upon for the same peppy post-concert verdict. He loved everything, to the point that his consistent post-performance adulation became disingenuous, and some of us reused his catchphrase as a snide greeting. It was clear his opinion had minimal value. We don’t want empty voices in our community, yet we walk a fine line between supporting one another and ensuring that we’re raising the bar.

I would like to write more negative reviews (and employ rules #2 and #3 above). There’s the myth that they are fun to write, but I am simply not that clever. In my experience, a pan takes as much effort as gushing words, but the writing isn’t as satisfying. I could take pains to be fair, to draw upon experience, and wherever possible, educate. But I really don’t want to spend time on something which simply isn’t worth the trouble. It’s rewarding to write about good and interesting things. It wastes effort to be neutral or negative.

If I were to craft a scathing review, would it have any effect? I don’t think I have that power. I would honestly feel bad if I hurt someone’s chances for funding or derailed future opportunities. But then again, the true creators among us always pick themselves up and start again. Do negative reviews matter as much given how easy it is to set up one’s own soapbox? Do we expect a more critical stance from established journalism? Do you expect the Gray Lady to err on the side of meanness?
If you start to think about it, there really ought to be more negative press out there. We have all attended poorly prepared performances and have heard completely forgettable pieces. To compensate for the major labels’ disinterest in new music, countless vanity projects have sprung up. There are fewer barriers to self-publication and so it follows that the standard of quality would slip. Proportionally we ought to see more negativity, but in the interest of time and sanity, I think the critical legion is trying just to keep up with the good stuff.

Now and again, I have let neutral or negative reviews leave the house. I’m sure there’s a reader out there who thinks everything I’ve posted is evasive or dismissive, just as I worry that I’ve offended everyone at least once. Subjectivity is always a consideration, but if I think a piece or release is miscued, and the composer or performer is established enough to withstand some needle marks, then I’m more inclined to express negativity.

I frequently forage through Fanfare and American Record Guide and might find a non-stellar review of a contemporary release. I can often tell whether I might actually enjoy a disc because someone else disliked it. I have sought out and covered at least one Xenakis release because of this. Perhaps it was a misguided attempt to restore the balance of the universe, but mostly it’s about countering a review where it’s evident that the critic has no clue about the composer and his music, very likely the result of an ill-fitting assignment.

Admittedly, no one actually bestowed upon me the ability to be a new music critic. Such is the greatness of the internet: anyone can hang out a shingle. I believe I am putting my experience to good and objective use. I’ve put forth some of the thoughts I think all critics wrestle with but don’t openly discuss, and invite your comments. For now, I need to get back to my listening. I really do want to review more CDs.

***

Grant Chu Covell

Grant Chu Covell is the Managing Editor for LaFolia.com and tweets at @lafoliaed. He works in the Boston area for a global technology company that made hardware which Xenakis and Babbitt both used. Covell is also a composer of electroacoustic and instrumental music that has been performed in the U.S. and abroad; some of his electronic works have been commercially released on the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s Presence III, The Door Project from the International Computer Music Association, and a 2012 disc also featuring music by Kazumi Umeda.

The Artist’s Dictionary: Redefining Success

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Sara Sitzer - Articles, Commentary

Around Christmas last year, I received the music for an upcoming concert I was going to be playing with Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente. Being my usual neurotic self, I looked at the parts and immediately commenced freaking out by practicing furiously, even though I was technically on vacation. A few days later, my brother-in-law relayed to me a conversation that he’d had with his six-year-old daughter:

“Daddy, why does Auntie Sara play cello so much?”
“Because it’s her job. That’s what she does to earn money.”
“Daddy, that’s silly! Cello isn’t a job!!”

You know how sometimes a six-year old can say something that instantly shatters your self-esteem? Well, suddenly I found myself defending my career choices to a kindergartener. I literally began to recite my resume to her, at which point I realized that, well, I was reciting my resume to a kindergartener.

This whole episode reminded me of similar stories I’ve heard from friends and colleagues. Together we’ve rolled our eyes at the people in our lives who just don’t get what we do. What we often don’t admit out loud, though, is how hard we take it. So I started wondering: Why are musicians so on edge about the validity of what we do? What does it take to make us feel like we are successful? And how do we even begin to define success?

What it seems to come down to, in many cases, is that musicians are hardwired to base our sense of success on how our career is perceived by others. If you think about it, it makes sense: when others approve of our playing, we get good reviews, big audiences, standing ovations, fame, fortune, etc. Throughout school, auditions, and gigs, we’ve relied on the judgement of others to gauge our own talent, so it’s all too easy to allow their perceptions to determine how our professional career is going, too.
The root of the problem might be that the 21st-century classical musician doesn’t seem to have an updated guide to gauging success. Think about what you were taught in school about how to become “successful,” and where you would be now if you had followed that path. If you had truly succeeded, you would have either landed a full-time job in a major symphony orchestra or ensemble, accepted a tenure track faculty position at a prestigious university, or won first prize in a major international competition. No biggie. But seriously, is this model of success even valid anymore? Why are these still the only clear markers we have to “prove ourselves” in our field?

Because our views on success are so often skewed towards these milestones, musicians who take alternative paths are often unfairly looked upon as less successful. Our traditional ways of defining success are suddenly inapplicable, and this leads us to feel dubious about the legitimacy of someone who is forging their own entrepreneurial path, or who feels satisfied with their work, though it may be unconventional. If what you’re doing isn’t easy to slap a label on, then you must be failing…unless, of course, someone influential notices you and publicly declares your success. This is the sense I sometimes get, both from the outside world and even among musicians.

One emerging musician whom I know has done a lot of thinking on this subject is Meerenai Shim, a flautist who specializes in new and experimental music. When I asked her to define success, she laid out five separate definitions, from how she used to think of success to how she defines it now. She began with her view when she was a student that achieving success meant becoming famous or winning a big orchestra job (sound familiar?), went on to her real-world post-college impression that success meant being able to pay the bills as a full-time musician, to then land at her current definition: “Success to me is making meaningful art.” She has approached her career from all types of angles: gigging and teaching to make ends meet, getting a day job to allow herself the financial freedom to pursue her new music projects, and, ultimately, ditching both the teaching and the day job so she could focus solely on the music that is most important to her, which is turning out to be the key to achieving that last definition of success she came up with. Taking this approach certainly comes with its financial risks, of course (check out Meerenai’s blog post on “making it work”), but often the confidence that comes with taking those risks is what can lead to hard-earned successes, both musically and financially.

More and more musicians these days seem to be following the same line of thought as Meerenai. When I posed the question of how to define success on Twitter, many of the responses I got were along these lines:

The new music community is clearly thinking about success in new ways–ways that free us from external judgement and allow us to base our success on the achievement of personal goals, artistic fulfillment, and driving vision. But while it’s great that so many professional musicians are coming to these conclusions, I couldn’t help wondering whether the old model of success, the one that’s based on fame and fortune, is still what students and young professionals are clinging to. So on a recent trip to Miami, I spent an afternoon chatting on this topic with Howard Herring, the president of the New World Symphony.

As a New World alum myself, I know all too well the organization’s reputation for churning out young hotshot musicians who head straight from their NWS fellowships to the top symphony jobs around the country. And fifteen years ago at NWS, you might say that winning a symphony job was the official definition of success. However, orchestras aren’t as stable as they once were, and word has gotten out that the euphoria you might feel after winning an audition may not necessarily stick with you for the next 40 years on the job. What Howard pointed out at the very beginning of our talk was that there’s a big difference between a “job” and a “career.” A job is something that you get, a career is something that you build. When I asked him what definition of success he hopes to imprint on the NWS fellows, he explained that achieving success in one’s career comes from embodying these three principles:

Independence. Independent thinking allows us to think outside the box and be proactive about our passions.
Inclusiveness. When we engage our communities, great things are possible.
Responsibility. Taking responsibility for our art form ensures its continued relevance in society.

“When you are true to those concepts,” Howard told me, “you can manage the potential and the problems, and the success is all yours.” And those concepts, according to Howard, are constantly morphing to fit in with each new era. Take inclusiveness, for instance. In the not-so-distant past, that may have meant playing an outreach concert in a nursing home or giving spoken program notes before a performance. But now–and this was when he started really getting excited–we’ve reached a new digital era that is changing the way we think and igniting our imaginations. No longer is our community limited to the audience in front of us or the city we live in. In the digital era, our community is truly global, and that makes the potential for inclusiveness, and therefore success, all the greater.

Howard admitted that, for a large number of the current NWS fellows, winning an orchestra job is still the most important measure of success. For now. “Far more musicians are cut out for this [alternative] type of career than they acknowledge,” he told me. He is giving young professionals the knowledge and the resources to eventually make their way to redefining success for themselves, while at the same time aware and accepting of the fact that those young professionals might not be ready to do so right away.
My biggest takeaway from the various responses that I heard from Howard, Meerenai, and others was that in this new and somewhat turbulent era for classical music, our own personal success isn’t just about us anymore. The old model is no longer relevant because simply having a job or being a superstar doesn’t necessarily contribute to our communities or to our art. Music is bigger than ourselves, and how we shape our careers affects the role that classical music will play in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

I had to chuckle as I thought back to that comment from my six-year-old niece. “Cello isn’t a job!” she protested. She was completely right. Success cannot be defined by how we make a living. What truly defines success is the way in which we incorporate independence, inclusiveness, and responsibility into our careers. When we focus on these principles, we succeed not only in satisfying our own artistic needs, but by also making a difference in the communities we live in and sustaining the art that we are passionate about.

Sara Sitzer
Photo by Julisa Fusté

Sara Sitzer is a cellist based in Chicago. A member of Chicago Q Ensemble and the Elgin Symphony, she has also been heard performing with the Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Dal Niente, Anaphora, New Millennium Orchestra, and the Firebird Chamber Orchestra in Miami. Sitzer is founding artistic director of the Gesher Music Festival of Emerging Artists in St. Louis. She holds performance degrees from the University of Wisconsin and Boston University, and completed a three-year fellowship with the New World Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas.

Is Contemporary Music Ready for a Baby Boom?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Ellen McSweeney - Articles, Commentary

My string trio—a group of three women—has long talked about what will happen, how our professional lives together will change, once we start having children. Half joking, half deadly serious, we’ve considered trying to conceive in the same month. We’ve wondered if we could save money by sharing a rehearsal babysitter. We’ve looked on happily as the Chiara Quartet toured with their babies, and nervously as other chamber musicians left their ensembles shortly after giving birth.

“No need to worry til 2014,” Sara always said, reassuring us with a date that seemed blissfully far away. “Not until Obamacare in 2014.”

She was right. Back in 2012, regardless of how married or unmarried we were, or how emotionally ready or unready we felt, none of us were considering having a child anytime soon—because we couldn’t afford to. Since we were all self-employed freelance musicians, we purchased our insurance on the individual market rather than through group plans (as an ever-shrinking number of people in the US do). Occasionally, out of curiosity, I had looked at ehealthinsurance.com to see how much a self-employed person like me would have to spend for maternity coverage. Although I was paying $250 a month for mediocre insurance for myself, at one point my search revealed that I would need to spend more than $800 a month in order to access maternity care. Even more daunting was the fact that I would have to pay this amount for a year before the insurance company would approve any related claims. In other words, I would need to spend $9600 in premiums alone before I was even allowed to get knocked up. In the early stages of developing my career as a violinist and writer, this represented about half of what I earned in a year.
It wasn’t a very good deal, and as it turns out, women’s health advocates around the country had noticed. The National Women’s Law Center reported similarly outrageous “maternity riders” around the country: in Kansas, where a best-selling plan cost around $220 a month, a maternity rider would run you $1600 a month.

The Affordable Care Act made some of its most sweeping reforms in the arenas of health care for women and health care for the self-employed. This means that female freelance musicians are among the Americans whose lives have been most deeply affected by this policy. Women can no longer be charged more than men for their policies, maternity care can no longer be excluded, and it’s easier and more affordable for self-employed artists to obtain coverage. The year that we have long anticipated has finally arrived, and one of our biggest roadblocks to procreation has been removed. You heard it here first: I predict a creative-professionals baby boom in the coming year.

Although reports vary as to whether the contemporary music audience is withering or widening, a few more small, wiggly butts in the seats won’t hurt. We could raise an army of babes who love Boustead, toddlers who love Thomas, kids who love Kirsten, adolescents who love Abrams. But is contemporary music—its career arcs, social scenes, traditions, and infrastructure—ready for a baby boom?

Just as new parents need to babyproof their homes before the precious bundle arrives, the contemporary music community needs to take a look around and see how prepared we are. Are we a family-friendly field, or are there some sharp edges that will alienate new parents? Are there any proverbial marbles we should pick up before somebody chokes? I’ve poked around in the closets and looked closely along the baseboards, and I found some areas for improvement.

Composition’s high premium on youth: The dominance of the “young composer” competition, like many of our society’s career trajectory expectations, is unfriendly to anyone who chooses to prioritize family during what is supposed to be their professional prime. If you’re busy raising children from about 29 to 39—the years when, fertility-wise, women are most likely to do just that—the “under 40” competitions are gone by the time you’re ready to refocus.

No-kids-allowed artist residencies: Retreating into creative solitude is considered an essential step for working composers, but for parents of young children, it can be hard to find an environment that allows both creative space and continued commitment to, for instance, breastfeeding. One San Francisco-based organization, recognizing this particular challenge, offers grant support exclusively to writers and visual artists who have a child under 18. I’m not aware of any musical organizations offering something similar.

The importance of being hip: In this great article about how the “having it all” debate relates (or doesn’t) to visual artists, author Katherine Gressel notes that becoming a parent can result in an unfortunate downgrade of your personal brand. Our culture doesn’t tend to perceive parenthood—and motherhood in particular—as “hip, cool and fascinatingly eccentric.” That can be a problem in a field that values both the practice and the appearance of edgy risk-taking.

The prevalence of low-paying work: It’s one thing to play a show for fifty bucks when it’s just yourself you have to feed. Once kids come into the mix, it’s hard to weigh artistic gain against the quality time, precious sleep, or childcare dollars lost. This, of course, is why so many musicians try desperately to become as established, well-known, and in-demand as they can before starting their families.

The increasing importance of late-night shows in bars: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Baby bedtime is 7 p.m.
Have your ovaries frozen yet? Don’t worry; it’s not all gloom and doom for our boom.
Babies haven’t been alive long enough to be cultural reactionaries. In Chicago, city cultural planners are already banking on the artistic adventurousness of toddlers with their experimental art series, Juicebox. In New York, the Brooklyn stroller set enjoys the innovatively programmed “Baby Got Bach” series. Having some seriously impressionable little ears in our posse will be great.

In our field, we know about banding together—and that means childcare co-ops. “The hardest thing about parenting kids of any age is finding affordable, flexible, reliable child care,” said Erica Burtner Anderson, oboist with Quintet Attacca. “Every week in a musician’s life is full of unpredictable scheduling challenges.” Is this a problem that artists could band together to help solve? Community-building organizations like New Music Chicago and the New Music Bake Sale show that we can pool our resources for the betterment of the entire community. So whether we’re straight or gay, breeding or adopting, let’s help each other get our kids in good hands. And for the infant years, purchase an extra-large rehearsal crib.
Although unpredictable schedules can be tough, in some ways they’re ideal for new parents.” Since most musicians have time during the day, it’s great to be the parent of babies and young children,” Anderson said. “We get to see them when they are alert and then we go to work during dinner and bedtime. Unfortunately, this changes when the kids are school age, since the only time they are home is when we work.”

The costs won’t bankrupt us like they might’ve before. When I asked my friend Sara—the one from the beginning of this story—how the Affordable Care Act had changed her perspective, she was optimistic. “Raising a family will still be difficult and costly, but it is no longer impossible or unrealistic, and that gives me hope,” she said.

Parenthood is extremely cool. It’s not hard to call to mind a long, exciting list of accomplished musicians who are also parents: composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and Steven Mackey, composer/performer Shara Worden, pianist Sarah Cahill, all the Bang on a Can co-founders, and Chicago luminaries Joann Cho and Jonathon Kirk, Amy Wurtz, Connie Schoepflin Volk, Michael Hall, and Seth Brodksy. Here’s a fun list of musical moms in rock music that might inspire you. See? So many of your colleagues are rocking their careers and parenthood simultaneously, you’d be silly to lose any sleep over not being “hip” anymore. You’ll have plenty else to lose sleep over instead.

You’re Doing Targeted Marketing Wrong

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Andy Doe - Articles, Commentary

Photo courtesy of timlewisnm on Flickr.

You want to grow your audience, but you have limited resources, so you target your marketing efforts at the groups most likely to respond to it.

Sounds familiar? Sensible?

It is. But almost everybody does it wrong, often alienating core customers and defining their offering by the needs of a completely imaginary group of people instead of the community around them.

Generally, we begin screwing up by turning demographic research into inaccurate stereotypes. We find out how our audience differs from the general population, define it by those differences, and then aim our outbound communication at an imaginary person who embodies every one of those differences.

You might discover that, compared with the general population, people at your concerts are more likely to be old, rich, smart, and male. You might then devise a marketing campaign to target smart old rich men. If you asked for a show of hands, though, you might also find that while the old, the smart, the rich, and the male are all overrepresented in your crowd, there isn’t a single smart rich old man among them.

This sort of thing isn’t sensible targeted marketing. It’s desperately clinging to any piece of information that comes along. When you’re adrift in a sea of ignorance, almost anything looks good to hold onto, but crude generalizations can be anchors instead of life rafts.

In that case, what is demographic data for?

Institutions love demographics. It’s easy to collect this type of data (you ask a sample of people at a concert), and sponsors/advertisers often ask to see it. As a result, the marketing department generally has a very good idea of the typical ages, incomes, occupations, and educational backgrounds of their customer base.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you’re not selling music. If you have an unrelated mass-market product to promote and you’re considering sponsoring a single event, then demographic data provides useful information. You’re being offered access to a room full of people united by an interest in something that isn’t your product. You don’t know anything (else) about what they like and there’s no easy way to ask, so you look at gender or social class to determine a rough fit.

It’s a blunt tool, and while it’s better than nothing, the results are underwhelming unless both groups significantly deviate from the general population. If the customers for your product are split 60:40 male to female, then advertising to a 60:40 male to female population split should result in a 4% greater response than advertising to a population split 50:50.

With results like this, targeting groups that are moderately overrepresented in your audience is not going to change the world.
If the question we really want to answer is “how can we sell more tickets?” then demographic research seems like it would help, but what we’re really doing is substituting the answer to a different question because that’s the information we have on hand.

The average concert audience member might be a little older, richer, and smarter than the average American. This is something to tell advertisers who are bad at statistics and want to reach old rich smart people. You know something substantially more valuable about this crowd: every one of them came to your concert.

So what do you ask?

The question to ask them is: why did you come to this concert?

You’ll find people who came because they wanted to see something at the venue, and this was what was on. Others will tell you they’ve always wanted to hear this repertoire. Another group have been following the artists for some time, and this was their chance to hear them live. Some people were dragged there by a date who is doing your marketing for you.

These are the reasons people left their homes on a cold night and paid money to hear some music, and they have everything to do with human motivation and almost nothing to do with income, gender, or education.

It’s the same with record sales: people are loyal to artists, composers, and sometimes even labels. They’ll buy records out of curiosity and they’ll buy them for who or what was on them. They’ll buy them because they’re beautiful, because they’re ugly, because they’re expensive, or because they’re cheap. They’ll buy them as souvenirs, they’ll buy them on impulse, and they’ll buy them as a culmination of a lot of research.

This is not the same as, “How did you find out about this concert/album?” The vast majority of the people who find out about your CD or your concert don’t go on to buy a disc or a ticket. It’s widely accepted in the world of marketing (indeed, it’s common sense) that people often make a purchasing decision only after hearing about a product many times. The thing you need to know is what sealed the deal. Why did they pick your event out of everything on the website? Why did they buy your album out of all the others on iTunes?

Knowing what motivates your customers is the way to improve the story you tell them. Knowing where they found out about you might tell you where to get the message across, but it doesn’t help you to figure out what that message should be.

That’s it?

Of course not. If you target based on motivation instead of demographics, there are still plenty of opportunities to screw up. Perhaps the most prevalent of these is making the mistake of preaching exclusively to the choir.

The people who come to your concerts, buy your CDs, or visit your website are a self-selected subset of the public—a tiny fraction—on whom your marketing efforts have worked thus far. They are not representative of the general public and they are not representative of the group of people who would come to your concerts if you did marketing differently.

Worse, any assumption based purely on your existing audience is likely to lead you round in circles, ultimately becoming self-fulfilling. Pick the largest group in your audience and market primarily to them, and your audience becomes smaller and, crucially, less diverse. Repeat this process a few times, and you have the audience of a modern major symphony orchestra.
For individual artists with a tribal following, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to ignore a whole section of society. For an ensemble, festival, or venue that purports to be a part of its broader community, though, this is a fatal error. If you want what you’re doing to be perceived as suitable for and relevant to the whole community, you have to speak to them all, and be seen to speak to them all. Otherwise, you become the Abercrombie & Fitch of music, scaring off those outside your target groups with an environment that is openly hostile to them.

Then again, maybe there’s something to be said for defining an audience by the people who aren’t in it.

Unadventurous thick people? This music isn’t for you.

The Shame Of Poverty And Investing In The Future

Posted on January 22, 2014 by JosephHallman - Articles, Commentary

Philadelphia skyline, by Flodigrip on Flickr.

I grew up in a very poor, single-parent household, but I was a music geek even then. I had selected the trumpet in a school band program in sixth grade, and later swapped it for the flute. I went through the instrument lockers in the band room, trying out most of them. I got hooked on a weird one: the bassoon.

Despite her best efforts, my mother could not afford lessons or instruments for me. She didn’t understand music or the “music world,” but she supported me wholeheartedly. Somehow she was able to scrape together just enough to get by, and fortunately the boarding school I attended for several years provided my necessities (clothes, food, etc.). To be clear, this school was not Hogwarts or Exeter, but a school in North Philadelphia for orphans, including “functional orphans” like myself. I worked hard and sought opportunities that allowed me to study music. I received some scholarships and instrument loans and even, in some cases, gifts of financial support or even instruments.

In the Philadelphia neighborhood of my childhood, I took risks every time I walked to my local “El” station, which was home to drug addicts, drug dealers, and prostitutes. I was afraid of being jumped by any of the numerous gangs in the neighborhood. I was an outsider both in that world and in the world of the youth orchestra I belonged to. Most of the other kids came from homes with two working parents, many quite financially comfortable. Perhaps understandably, I felt bitterness toward those who had been born into what I thought were rich families. I never took that bitterness out on the musicians, but I was deeply frustrated that I could not access the tools their parents’ money had allowed them—instruments in good repair, sheet music, youth orchestra membership fees, travel fees for music groups, summer festivals, and lesson fees. I carried that anger for many years.
For a very long time, I felt shame: Ashamed of being poor. Ashamed of being ashamed of being poor. Ashamed of not being able to take a “traditional” route through the music world—one that required money. I couldn’t participate in many established and prestigious programs because of lack of financial resources.

My mother died when I was 20, and I was still carrying this shame. I never let people know how poor I actually was. I had managed to get scholarship money for some elements of a conservatory education, but I was constantly struggling. Before her death, my mother’s financial support of my education was minimal. Though she lived on a tiny disability check, she set aside roughly $100 a month for me. One beautiful memory I have of this time is a gift from the receptionist/switchboard operator at my school (Brenda Watson at the Cleveland Institute of Music), who brought in a bag of groceries for me after she learned of my mother’s passing. Of course, Brenda was not the only person who helped me. I was lucky enough to be included pretty frequently in my best friend’s family events.

Today, I still feel like an outsider in many ways. One thing has changed, however: I have let the shame go. My poverty then, or now, is not something I ever need—or needed—to feel ashamed of. This shame made my life much more difficult, perhaps sometimes more difficult than the poverty itself.

It is my hope, first of all, that no one—especially young musicians—should ever face the shame and the self-questioning that poverty could force on them. Young, poor musicians: take heart! Music, and more importantly access to music and music education, is vital to all communities, not just the wealthy. Second, it is my intention that each of us should understand the difficulties faced by impoverished music students. I urge all who are capable to invest in the future via young musicians. There is no reason to expound here on the virtues of music and music education. (That would be preaching to the choir, I know!) But without the support of the many folks who gave me a helping hand, either via donations to local music programs or directly to me for music fees, I would likely not be in the position I am in today. We must come to understand as a field the responsibility each of us bears to determine the best way to support young musicians of diverse socio-economic classes—it need not even be monetary!— and to then make it happen. And thanks to each and every one of you beautiful people who have supported and continue to support young musicians.

***

Joseph Hallman

Joseph Hallman is a prolific young composer based in Philadelphia who has worked with some of today’s most talented musicians and artists. He has composed multiple concerti, chamber, and solo works for the internationally acclaimed cellist Alisa Weilerstein, winner of a 2011 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and has collaborated with numerous other artists. His composition Three Poems of Jessica Hornik for voice and chamber ensemble appears on the Inscape Chamber Orchestra’s 2014 Grammy-nominated album Sprung Rhythm. Hallman is the Composer-in-Residence of the Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival and has served in similar roles at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, The Traverse Arts Project, Strings Music Festival, as well as other universities and colleges both domestically and internationally.

JosephHallman

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