Tag: class

The T.A.R.D.I.S. of Opulence

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - Columns

Lincoln Center

Every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom / Blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room. We don’t care; we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams.—Lorde, “Royals“

Lorde gets that, despite our most vivid imaginative efforts, most of us “will never be royals.” Her 2013 hit anthem (written by the artist and Joel Little) speaks to a public whose music represents a distant life of luxury and apathy, a public that uses its cultural products as a way to envision economic escape.

I’d like to ask to what degree those of us who participate as audience members in other registers of American culture are encouraged to use our musical experiences to imagine ourselves as royalty of a different era.
Unlike Lorde, I’m less concerned with how “every song” conjures this imaginative exercise and more concerned with the role of venues in this conjuring. While we hear music in a variety of contexts, live presentation continues to affect our experience of music and—even more so—of communities and their collective culture. When we listen together, the space in which we convene affects our impression not only of the sound but of ourselves.

I suspect that readers experience musical liveness most often by purchasing tickets to events wherein they sit or stand as a group for two to three hours focused on a sonic focal point.(Don’t worry: I will address other contexts for listening in later posts.)
This kind of event has its roots in court spectacle. The earliest public concerts were presented in spaces which were themselves established as cosmopolitan translations of royal theaters—in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Boston, and the rest. One of Liszt’s notable early concerts in 1838, for instance, was at La Scala in Milan, a place built to accommodate its royal patrons and originally called “Regio Ducal Teatro alla Scala” (The Royal Ducal Theater [at the site of the former church, Sancta Maria della] Scala), and whose red and gold sparkling interior is now a yardstick for modern nostalgic opulence. Going back further, Paris’s first concert series, the Concert spirituel (1725-1790), was presented at the Opéra, a court-turned-public space originally built for lavish royal entertainment in the city. Though it burnt down later in the century, we can presume that its shimmering decor and lush furnishings rivaled the best of Versailles. According to one contemporary observer, it was “one of the most royal and commodious” venues in France.

The list (and a more complex history) could go on. Nearly every European and American city of note in the 19th century built such a theater. Why? Many reasons: inter-city competition, demonstration of wealth and prosperity, investment in municipal and cultural infrastructure, a desire to capitalize on the affluence generated by new industries, and a push to support the booming noisily-wrapped-candy industry. (Almost) all of these can be boiled down to this: in the same way that court concerts and theatrical events served a dual purpose of entertainment and self-aggrandizement, reflecting the wealth and grandeur of the sponsor back to her and out to her peers and rivals,these new spaces for public concerts provided a space for music while simultaneously connecting their audiences to the imagined luxury of the past. They were designed to augment their public’s sense of self-worth, historically and financially.

Recall the crystal chandeliers, lush carpets, and enormous Chagalls of Lincoln Center. Its fountain seems lifted from Versailles. Or picture the Kennedy Center’s mid-century monumental marriage of marble modernism with the ceilings of an airplane hanger. I know that these iconic places are merely one type—one extreme type—of venue for musical entertainment. But these are the public icons for the arts, places we have all been (or at least can recognize)—places that, no matter whether we believe in their viability and worth or not, we hope to attend at least once in our lives as a kind of rite of passage into a community of listeners and patrons.
Add to that experience of wealth and grandeur the fact that most music we hear in these venues is old—beyond ancient, in the parlance of 18th-century citizens, for whom music from a previous a generation had the stink of Camembert gone bad—and you’ve got quite a potent cocktail: music that transports us to the past in a vessel that communicates how rich we should like to be when we get there.

Taken as a whole, these kinds of events are to music what the big white wedding is to love and commitment: whether you participate or not, the dress, décor, and behavior of that kind of event are the standards for public expression in our cultural imagination. For merely the price of a concert ticket, you can spend two hours feeling like you really are that prosperous and enlightened. Instead of driving a Cadillac in your dreams, you’re sponsoring your own orchestra.

What is gained and lost in each of these kinds of spaces? What kinds of musics are designed for an experience outside of the T.A.R.D.I.S. of opulence? Is there even a way to listen to this music collectively without being transported to a different time and place—and class? In the next posts, I’ll explore a wider variety of spaces, some at the opposite end of the spectrum—think CCR’s “Down on the Corner” rather than Lorde’s “Royals”—the music of those spaces, and their effect on our economic self-conception as audience members. Some musical experiences are presented as fleeting, others as permanent, some as intimate, others as grandiose. The underlying goal is to take as many contexts for listening as seriously as possible, including those not designed for serious listening.

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Emily H. Green

Emily H. Green is an assistant professor of musicology at George Mason University. Her thoughts on the social function of music and its print culture appear in a number of places, including most recently as a short story here. She is also active as a performer on historical and modern keyboards.

Of New Music and the 99%

Posted on July 7, 2014 by - Columns

Carr making music at Occupy Wall Street

Photo by Stacy Lanyon


When I was asked to be a NewMusicBox columnist, I understood that one of the many points of the project is to facilitate conversation, and that “debate was welcome.” I’ve decided to embrace the idea and spend a month writing about conflict, specifically the ways in which music makers are agitating for better pay and working conditions in various parts of the industry.
Because this is NewMusicBox, I want to steer towards issues and case studies that speak to new music and its community. That said, I also want to state a belief that I plan to explore this month: that questions about funding, sponsorship, contracts, and payments are generically similar across many musical and creative domains and also across many “precarious work” contexts. Also, that these areas mostly land us in the working and middle classes in the neo-liberal West. I say this because I suspect that most people working in new music have working class or middle class economic situations, regardless of upbringing, education level, or identity. Perhaps I will be wrong in my hypothesis, and I would be more than happy to be wrong if the reality is that most music makers are actually making enough from music to be considered upper class, but I somehow doubt we are all living as “rock stars.” That is what I want to deal with in a more serious and empirical way this month.
Although I was always generically interested in music as labor, it was really my involvement with Occupy Wall Street that showed me what the contemporary struggles were in this field. The rest of this column is a short tour of how I got to the place I am now and why I consider Occupy the foundation of my current attitudes about musical labor.
When OWS sprung up in downtown Manhattan, I showed up to lend support and to hear what was on people’s minds. I was a music journalist who had played in new music and indie contexts for a decade, but I had wandered from performance when grad school took over my life. Within a few days of the occupation’s beginning, I signed an online pledge of support via the site Occupy Writers, led by Jeff Sharlet. I began editing and writing for the website, and visiting the park more often.
After my friend Will Hermes sent us a piece about Jeff Magnum’s Zuccotti performance—

—I was both inspired and frustrated by my own work for the movement. I was a writer, but I wanted there to be something like Occupy Writers for musicians, because music is what I loved and music is what I knew about. I lay in bed one night about two weeks after the occupation started, worrying because no one had launched a campaign for musicians.
That night I had a sensation that was new to me. I knew that I wasn’t qualified to do this thing, I wasn’t a “real” musician and felt I thus didn’t deserve to step into the space of organizing a musician’s solidarity campaign, but I decided I was going to try to do it anyway. I had a little of the Occupy spirit in my veins when I popped over to my computer at three a.m. and bought the URL for occupymusicians.net, finding out in the morning that another New Yorker had bought the dot com only a day or two before me. “Why not join forces?” Sharlet wrote, and gave me the guy’s email. And so I met Judd Greenstein, an entrepreneurial young composer who also wanted to show solidarity, and together we launched occupymusicians.com.
When we launched we didn’t know what the site would do, other than that we wanted to show the world that many—indeed tens of thousands—of musicians felt kinship with or were part of the 900+ occupations held around the world that fall. To me it meant that the musicians not only supported the direct action tactic of occupying public space, but also that they had a consciousness about where they fit in the economic space. Most musicians, even the wealthiest among our list—such as Tom Morello or members of Sonic Youth—were the 99 percent. We decided that the list was just a list–a public statement. What musicians and activists did after that step was up to them.
We launched the website, got a lot of media attention, and began collecting a lot of great music and documentation of music (check out this Occupy-dedicated piece “Occupy Air” by Pauline Oliveros, for instance). The site was a global thing, but quickly after its launch I got involved in the New York OWS music working group. This meant coming off the computer and really doing the occupy thing, in the streets. I had to become a street conductor, performer, manager, wrangler, MC, and peacekeeper. I found myself in improvisational action contexts that challenged my comfort and creativity. (For instance: helping opera goers scale police barricades to get on the people’s mic at Lincoln Center, part of an action Alex Ross also wrote about. [I’m the girl in an orange hoodie shouting in front of Alex].) I had to sit in meetings and help hash out what our group’s values were when it came to recording, licensing, sponsorship, and other forms of money and prestige exchange at a moment when big media and corporations really wanted to be part of the Occupy space. I was pretty shy so all this street stuff scared me, but really it was the meetings that were the hardest part. I was at a loss when it came to how to behave, having spent a half-decade in the apolitical, totalitarian miasma of a Ph.D. program—a place where I learned I shouldn’t speak at all (literally, I was told to stay quiet in meetings until tenure), yet alone speak up for my values.

In the music working group, we had no road map except the strict use of consensus process, and with vastly different world views and the stakes seeming so high, we had huge arguments. We were from the worlds of classical, jazz, folk, hip hop, electronic, indie, Latin, Jewish traditional, street music. We were old hippies, anarchists, socialists, libertarians, liberals, feminists, and curiosity seekers. It was like the first day of college, only where 1,000 cameras were pointed at all the sophomoric choices and inarticulations. While it brought out the grandstander or bully in some, in me the process kept me quiet, observing others for about six months. I had no idea what to say, which as a journalist and wannabe academic, was terrifying. My whole world was shifting. In that time I stopped seeing musicians in terms of genre, stopped seeing people in terms of their class or education level, and gradually began to stop only thinking of how each life decision could support my career. Then, and this is still very much in process, I began to see what I wanted to do.
By the time I figured out what I wanted to do in the movement at least, it was six months in and the official story was that “Occupy was dead.” The mainstream media said it had failed aside from planting a meme of class consciousness in the minds of Americans. Even as I read this pronouncement, I would look around and see that my own world had changed, and that all these new people in my life were changed, too.
It was around that time that I began to see quite a few music-oriented action groups popping up with organizing and agitation plans surrounding issues old (fair contracts) and new (online streaming).
Carr working with Occupy musicians

Photo by Stacy Lanyon


In the three years since the movement began, I’ve seen a definite shift in the tactics used by musicians, organizers, and other people working in the music industry as they attempt to build power and push for fair pay and conditions in the vast and strange landscape of contemporary composition, performance, and recording. As a NewMusicBox columnnist this month, my plan is to write about some of these projects and some of the issues these struggles raise for musicians and music in general.
I certainly am not any kind of expert on the topic, but merely as one who is deeply interested in helping folks in the music industry earn a decent living and have opportunities to present their work. I hope that the brilliant and deep NewMusicBox commenting community will join in on this conversation, so we can get an even greater sense of where these struggles for fairness and dignity are happening, and what we can do as a community to support them.
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Carr headhsot

Photo by Stacy Lanyon


 
 
 
 
Daphne Carr is a New York-based writer, activist, and educator. She is working on a memoir about contemporary music and activism, using Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night as inspiration.
 
 
 
 
 

Soul of the Nation

Posted on February 3, 2014 by - Columns

CD pie diagram
The artist Boris Schatz once famously said that “art is the soul of a nation.” Working as a composer and presenter of new music in Washington, D.C., where our business is the nation, I tend to think of this phrase a lot.
It may be redundant to say so at this point, but it bears repeating that new “classical” [1] music isn’t exactly a highly visible part of American culture at large (not to mention a tough way to make a living). Given the air of crisis around American classical music in general (a crisis that I, personally, find exaggerated, but that is a topic for another discussion), it seems idealistic at best, foolish at worst, to insist as I do that new music can not only play a vital role in the life of the nation, but that its role is key to the survival of classical music in the American (and, indeed, in the world’s) consciousness.

A musical life is a political life. Undertaking a life in the arts in the USA—and particularly a life in contemporary classical music—is, I would venture, an inherently political act. Ours is not to be solely purveyors of entertainment (though that is, indeed, one of our roles) but to challenge, threaten, uplift, inspire, and provide an aural experience beyond the disposably commonplace. I am not suggesting that new music [2] will or should be able to achieve the same levels of cultural hegemony (nor that it is somehow better, simply because of what it is) that more commercial forms of music are able to achieve (should we even want it to?), but it can certainly reach newer levels of cultural saturation (as it seems to be doing in a number of areas). Thankfully, there no longer seems to be much need to “apologize” for what we do, justifying it as either necessary castor oil or as no longer the uninviting quasi-noise of generations past, at least in our major metropolitan areas. (I can’t speak for the situation in smaller cities and towns away from the major new music scenes in the country.) But there is still a need for those of us who love and make this music to be increasingly proactive apologists (not apologizers, mind you) for our art and to develop radical new ways of reaching an audience that too often still feels unreachable, even while the avenues for reaching them have multiplied.

I am writing this in January 2014, having just gone through the obligatory period of begging (I’m sorry: fundraising) that occurs at the end of every calendar year. This never fails to drum up criticism and concern from various corners of our culture, criticisms that have become increasingly pervasive, especially since 2008 (just ask Bill Maher!): that the arts are not charity. We are expected to survive in the marketplace of ideas and make our money the same way that Justin Bieber, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Adele make their money. To a degree, these critics are right: charity should concern itself with feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and other, more immediately humanitarian endeavors. The fine arts should compete at the same level as popular music, Hollywood films, and mass-market teen fiction. The reality is, however, that in a society where education is valued only to the degree that it can provide quantifiable vocational skills that lead to some form of gainful employment, where citizens are unable to learn the value of knowledge for its own sake, where skills not immediately useful to industry are scorned, then not only the arts, but science and the humanities become disposable commodities to be ignored in the name of cold, hard profits. What, then, does such disposability say about the state of our nation’s soul?

Music and the other arts may not be able to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, irrigate deserts, or end oppression. They may not be particularly valuable other than as a background noise to revelry or as a source of advertising revenue. They may not even be able to keep their practitioners particularly well fed or housed, but they are as important to us–as a people, as a nation, as human beings–as the box office from the latest blockbuster film, the sale of natural gas, or the very air we breathe. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, art may not have particular survival value, but it gives particular value to survival.

I may be becoming something of a walking cliché, a kind of “radical chic” musician who, despite appearances of open mindedness, will come off as oddly dogmatic by saying this, but I find that I have less and less use lately for people who do not value the arts as a necessary, political, socially engaged activity. If we, as composers, as musicians, as artists, want to stay clothed, fed, and housed, we must engage–radically, vociferously, loudly, uncomfortably–with the culture at large by actively playing a role in the management of our arts organizations. In this way, we might be able to free them from the constraints imposed upon them by corporate powers through strings attached to philanthropic programs, or boards of directors eager to exert disproportionate managerial power based on monetary contributions. Rather, by actively participating in governance and developing close relationships with our boards and supporters, we will be able to impose democratic values on institutions that have–like our government increasingly seems to have done–forgotten what these are. A number of ensembles in contemporary music have notably led the charge for some time, becoming their own managers and administrators, merging the concert stage with the front office.

The musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble, eighth blackbird, Alarm Will Sound, and many others (including my own, Great Noise Ensemble) have, for some time, taken the reins of their organizations and controlled their own destiny with only a modicum of outside help. Following this model poses many challenges, chief among them striking the right balance between administrative and creative work, which itself can be complicated when you also have a day job. It is a very tricky, seemingly untenable situation that can be almost impossible to navigate until your organization is well funded enough to adequately support you and your work. If, as musicians, we see ourselves as members not only of a performing organization but as socially engaged members of a political organization, we can hopefully effect changes that will grant our art greater visibility among a wider public. We musicians cannot afford to expect our work to consist entirely of musical work. Being socially engaged begins, as it were, at home. This means taking over responsibilities that would have been the purview of an independent administrative staff in the past. When musicians take control of their business, the issues that can too often lead to fights between labor and management begin to disappear simply because labor is management.

It is telling that most of the organizations embracing this business model are in contemporary music. Much like avant-garde composers, these institutions are in the vanguard of arts management and more traditional organizations will have (and may be starting) to take notice. Until they do, they will continue to face the all-too-common lockouts, work stoppages, and endless, season-hobbling strikes. Meanwhile, those of us in the vanguard must remain strong. We must learn, like the musicians of eighth blackbird, to be our own administrators while honing our skills as performers. We must, like the soprano Megan Ihnen or Great Noise Ensemble’s own clarinetist, Katherine Kellert, develop formidable social media and publicity skills to enhance our musical work’s impact. And, like the amazing and inspiring Claire Chase and the International Contemporary Ensemble, engage in work that is greater than ourselves and our immediate social circles, developing projects to help other musicians achieve greatness. And we must see, as the founders of the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington saw, the potential for arts organizations to serve as anchors in the economic and social transformation of our neighborhoods, our cities, and our country. Granted, the organizations I’m citing as examples began as grass roots efforts and their members were able to institute these changes from the ground up. Things become far more challenging and difficult to implement within institutions that have been around for decades with their own, highly developed corporate cultures. Indeed, many of the crises we’ve witnessed in American orchestras of late may very well be growing pains in the transition to the new administrative model, in which musicians and management share more democratically in their organizations’ governance. Time will tell if this is the case, but I remain optimistic that we will weather this storm and come out stronger for it.

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1. Part of the problem is the very label “classical music,” a label with which we’ve been saddled for about a century and which just conjures musty, dusty age to me.

2. Labeling is a persistent problem. “New Music” isn’t very useful as a genre when it can refer to any music not previously heard, regardless of genre.

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Armando Bayolo

Armando Bayolo is artistic director of Great Noise Ensemble and curator of the New Music at the Atlas series, both in Washington, D.C., as well as a composer with an international reputation whose works have been performed in Europe, the Caribbean, and across the United States.