Tag: economics

Chicago: The deafening silence of the Beethoven Festival musicians

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

I was recently hired to play a daylong ensemble engagement. In my reply, I gladly accepted, and asked what the compensation would be, since the initial email had not included that information. The contractor, an admired mentor with whom I have a frank rapport, told me the number, but also offered that I might want to refrain from such questions in the future. Asking about pay, he suggested, could make me look like money was all I cared about. In his mind, I’d violated a norm. It was almost as if he were surprised I didn’t trust him. And sure enough, when I arrived at the gig—which was well-paid—the check was on my music stand.
When it comes to money and music, it seems we aren’t in agreement about what the norms are. How much is enough? What questions are we allowed to ask? And what do we do when the check never comes? That discomfort has reared its head in a particularly dramatic way this month in Chicago. The Beethoven Festival recently announced its fourth annual event, happening this September. But for local musicians, the announcement was stunning: the festival has not yet finished paying the people who played for them last year. I personally am owed in the neighborhood of $1,000. This is, of course, the complete opposite of having the check on your music stand when you arrive.

Given the number of musicians owed money—and the number of musician who know someone owed money—one would think that the festival’s 2014 announcement would’ve been a lit match in a dry barn. But it wasn’t, quite. A single Facebook post from violinist Austin Wulliman yielded fifty comments from prominent local musicians, including members of eighth blackbird and professors at the University of Chicago. A post on Slipped Disc—which, depending on whom you ask, is widely perceived as either essential rabble-rousing or venomous clickbait—broke the story publicly, but comments from named musicians are scarce. Media stories followed from Chicagoist (where writer Drew Baker had difficulty getting anyone to go on the record) and even the Chicago Reader. But these stories weren’t as widely shared on social media as you might imagine, given the profound violation of norms that the story represents for the Chicago freelance community.

Why were the wronged musicians and their friends still so quiet? And, come to think of it, why did we maintain silence for nine months as we awaited sums of money that, to us, make or break our ability to pay the rent?

For me, the story of the Beethoven Festival is a story of vulnerability: my own individual vulnerability, that of my colleagues, and that of our entire musical community. Much of the most artistically adventurous work in Chicago isn’t unionized, and we take a leap of faith every time we work for each other. Usually, that trust is rewarded, and professional and collaborative bonds are formed that allow us all to thrive. Horn player Matt Oliphant’s blog post on this matter is aptly titled “Beethoven Festival and Respect.” The community is indeed held together by trust, respect, and not much else. If circumstances like these are kept secret, it threatens the security and well-being of every musician in our city.

The unpaid musicians began receiving apologetic emails from Beethoven Festival Artistic Director George Lepauw in early October. As the festival’s dire financial circumstances became clear, a tacit agreement quickly developed that we would not take to social media or the press. We were never asked to remain silent, but we did. I suspect that the other unpaid musicians were, like me, nervous that any public complaint might have resulted in an even longer delay of their payment. After all, for many months it was unclear what logic had been used to determine who would be paid first. (Lepauw described the payments as happening “on a rolling basis.”) At a Christmas background music gig three months after the festival, I had an awkward encounter with a friend.
“Too bad about that Beethoven Festival money, huh?” I said to him as we set up.

“Oh…uh…yeah,” he said, looking at the ground. It took me a moment, but I realized that he’d been paid. We laughed about the bizarre situation. But the truth was, he was personally closer to the festival’s organizers, and his insistence on being paid had helped. (Lepauw told the Reader that 15 of the 60 orchestra members have been paid in full, but there’s been no discussion of how they were selected.)

When the festival sent out small checks to everyone in February—around 30% of what we were owed—one colleague posted a cryptic Facebook status about receiving a fraction of his pay, six months late. A few musicians left grumbling comments, but the offending employer was never named. It makes sense that so many musicians opted to preserve the festival’s reputation and quietly wait for their checks. Musicians were not only concerned that public complaint might have monetary consequences, but also about their own reputations. To complain about the missing funds could be construed as unkind or malicious towards a beleaguered, near-bankrupt organization that was reportedly working hard to right the situation.

Perhaps that’s the biggest reason we kept quiet about the unpaid bills: Compassion. Sympathy. Love, even. We hoped things would get better. No one wanted the Beethoven Festival to fail. No one wanted fewer performance opportunities for Chicago musicians. No one wanted to see a musician’s reputation destroyed, nor an ambitious and idealistic venture go down in flames. I would not wish such a spectacular public relations disaster on any arts organization.

But was it the correct choice for us to remain silent, ostensibly to help the festival right itself? In his official response to Slipped Disc, George Lepauw said, “I have always been, and still am, a musician’s advocate, and am extremely grateful to all the musicians who have been patiently waiting for their dues, and who have been supportive of us throughout this difficult period and have not complained on social media about it.” Lepauw posits that this silence was the noble thing to do—unlike, of course, musicians such as Wulliman, whose lone post Lepauw described as “a campaign of misinformation and blurring of facts that is counterproductive to the intent of repaying musicians.” The implication I perceive in his statement is that silence will be rewarded, and speaking out will only result in further delays of payment. And yet Wulliman had the freedom to voice his dismay expressly because his ensemble, Spektral Quartet, was paid in advance for their performance. Wulliman could speak out, in other words, because he had less to lose.

And it’s a good thing he did. The consequences of our silence go beyond when, or whether, we ever get paid. While we were being nice and patient and quiet, a whole new roster of musicians from throughout the U.S. agreed to play for the 2014 festival. At the very least, the national community should have known that these debts remained unpaid, so that they could have made an informed decision about whether to participate. These individuals, met with the uproar of the past weeks, now face the difficult decision of whether to withdraw. While it is uncomfortable to call our fellow musicians to task here, they have unfortunately agreed to perform for an employer who, in a story about this debacle, actually described the festival’s skyrocketing budget as “an incredible story of success.”

It’s not fun to publicly admit how much a $900 check might matter to us, but the truth is that our position is precarious. This fall, I placed a nervous phone call to an employer about a check that hadn’t yet arrived. It was only two days late, but things were tight for me and it mattered. “I understand,” the woman on the phone said, “I used to live hand-to-mouth.” I cringed and just hoped she could help me.

As tax time approached this year, I owed $2,500 on my $25,000 income. That’s another aspect of the vulnerability of self-employed artists: our social safety net isn’t very strong. Without the security of a full-time employer, we must be particularly diligent in setting aside money for taxes, retirement, and emergencies. Around March 1, I received an email from George Lepauw:

It is likely that within the next week, we will…be able to start issuing checks. However, we may not reach the total needed to pay everyone at once, so we have decided to issue what we can to each of you as we receive funds. After much internal discussion, we feel that this would be a better system than paying some of you but not others. You will therefore get several checks in the course of the next weeks until we are back in the black.

I felt hopeful. Perhaps the check would arrive by April 15; perhaps it would enough money to help with the taxes. But as it turned out, I received only one check for about $300. The other promised payments never came. When tax day rolled around, I couldn’t send an email to the IRS explaining my lack of funds and the noble work of being a musician. I simply wrote a big check and hoped the next month would be better.

Dave Malloy: Singing for His Soul (Not His Supper)

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Cover

At the composer’s Brooklyn apartment
March 26, 2014—11 a.m.
Interview and video presentation edited and condensed by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

Under the gaze of Broadway’s bright lights and imposing marquees, musical theater seems an especially tough game to play in New York City. Yet it also made the elaborate canvas tent erected in an empty lot on 45th Street to house the Off-Broadway production of Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 all the more magical. Here was a show that had beaten the odds without following the rules.

This was actually the show’s third location after a premiere run at Ars Nova and a transfer to the Meatpacking district. Inside, the audience got cozy around communal tables while gawking at the staged Russian cabaret setting, ordered drinks and food, and then sat center stage as the action of the show unfurled all around them. Its composer (who also played Pierre through much of the run) carried us through this story, a sliver of the weighty War and Peace, on rowdy ensemble numbers and heart-breaking sung soliloquies. The borscht was complimentary, but the critics were in love.

I actually first met Malloy not in this fantasy slice of 18th-century Russia, but in a small Ohio town sometime in the late ’90s, both of us financing our summers by playing in the pit orchestra for a production of West Side Story. It made the success he was now enjoying—including a 2013 OBIE Award, a 2013 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, and numerous “Best of” listings—personally exciting to see. But I was also curious to find out how the Dave Malloy I had known then, who was composing complicated chamber music for small university audiences, had grown into the performer before me. Dave, still as warm and open as I remembered, told me to come on over.

Molly Sheridan: Even though you took NYC musical theater by storm with Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, you didn’t actually start out as a composer with Broadway dreams, right? I get the impression that your back story is a little more convoluted.
Dave Malloy: I definitely grew up loving musical theater and watching the old films. I remember PBS would show The Music Man twice a year during their pledge drive, so my family would all huddle in front of the TV and watch that. I even did a couple in high school, but I was in the pit orchestra being a jazz pianist. Then, when I went to college, I was a composer, so I was writing serious, academic, classical, avant-garde music. I didn’t touch theater writing in college at all—I did summer stock, but that was just a gig. But looking back on it, I now realize that some of the pieces I was doing had theatrical elements. I was writing chamber pieces that had, like, a live chess game on stage. George Crumb was a big influence for me. A lot of his pieces have these theatrical elements. I did his Voice of the Whale—the performers are all masked and there’s the blue lighting. So I was definitely writing music with theatrical things in mind, but still not thinking about musicals at all.
I didn’t really get involved in theater until I moved to San Francisco and I was working at Amoeba Music, the giant, independent music store there. A colleague had heard that I played keyboard and he needed a keyboard player for some show he was doing at a small black box theater called the Exit Theater. So he asked me to do it, I said sure. I had just moved to San Francisco, so it seemed like a good way to meet some people. And basically through that one show, I made every connection that has brought me to where I am now. From there, I met the artistic directors of Banana Bag & Bodice, who I went on to write Beowulf with. And then Beowulf was seen by the people at Ars Nova and so then Ars Nova commissioned Great Comet. So the lineage all goes back to there.
MS: I was going to ask you about that move to the West Coast and its impact on your career, because the theater you did out there felt very relationship based, almost like a family. If you had come to New York versus going to San Francisco, things might have turned out quite differently.
DM: For sure. The theater scene in New York is so much more compartmentalized in one aspect and institutionalized in another way. I hear about young musical theater composers going through these lab programs and workshop programs and going to school for it. That just wasn’t my career path at all. In San Francisco, it was basically all centered around the San Francisco Fringe Festival, which we really don’t have an equivalent of in New York. The New York Fringe is very scattered, and there’s not really a community that builds around it. The San Francisco Fringe is a very tight-knit community. Or at least it was when I was there. You would do a show, and then people would come see your show, and then they would say, “Oh, I like you. Will you do our next show?” And I would say, “Sure.” When I was starting out in theater, I basically said yes to everything—every show that was offered to me, I said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” And even though some of the shows weren’t quite in line with my aesthetic vision, I was meeting people through that and just making those kind of networking connections. But in a very informal, casual, San Francisco way.
MS: Was there a defining moment when you realized, okay, this is where I’m going to focus as a composer?
DM: There were two of those. When I started out doing theater, I started out doing mostly sound design, and I was writing music for pretty experimental theater pieces. So it was mostly soundscape, electronic stuff, or stuff on piano. Then, little by little, I would write a song. In college when I was composing music, I didn’t really write songs at all. I wrote very much, you know, serious concert music. So I just started writing more and more songs.
The first watershed moment: I was with this theater company called Ten Red Hen, and our first show together was {The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon. We had done this literally zero budget version of Miss Saigon, but very non-ironically—embracing the material and telling the story, but we had a GI Joe [toy] helicopter [for the set]. Then for our next show, the artistic director wanted to do Bible stories through clowns. We started talking more and more that I should write more songs for this, and that was kind of the first time that I said out loud, “Oh, maybe I’ll write a musical.”

Malloy as Job in Clown Bible.

So Clown Bible was my first proper musical. There had been a couple other shows which could be called musicals, but in a very downtown, experimental theater way. But this was a really proper musical. There was a big first song, and everyone had a showstopper—all that kind of stuff. Then from that, I think that led to getting commissioned to do Beowulf with Shotgun Players. And that was the first big, big show for me. So that was the watershed moment, I would say, from Clown Bible to Beowulf.
MS: You are kind of a jack of all trades: composer, performer, sound designer. I would not be at all surprised to learn you ran the copies of the program at Kinkos right before curtain.
DM: I’ve definitely done that.
MS: That might be the nature of the type of theater that you are doing—when the budget is tight, all skills are on deck. But at this point, are you ready to give some of that multi-tasking away or is it hard to let go of having a hand in so many areas?
DM: It’s been harder and harder to hold onto that. As you start working with larger institutions, the work does get more doled out. One thing I’ve been trying really hard to hold onto is just doing all my own orchestrations, because that is something that is not at all commonplace in musical theater. Pretty much everyone farms out the orchestrations, which to me as a classically trained composer is mind-boggling. I completely object to that because I grew up studying Stravinsky and Bartók, where orchestration is half the battle—that’s where all the juice is. But I think in general, I am very hands on. I run my own website, and I’m constantly talking to the PR people about copy editing things in the blurbs. It’s just my nature. A lot of it is from starting out doing really low budget theater, where yeah, everyone does pitch in. I mean, the very first shows I did, we didn’t even have designers. There were five of us who did the show, and we ran all the lighting design, and all the sound design, and the costume design—we just created it all ourselves. So even that was a shift. There’s a lighting designer. I’m like, “So you just do the lights? Oh, that’s interesting.” When I was first doing theater, I didn’t realize that that was a separate person.
MS: Have you been in a situation where you have had to fight to hold onto the orchestration yet, either because of time or who you were working with, or does the nature of the shows you’re doing mean you can still call the shots?
DM: I haven’t really had to fight, but I have had to justify it. With new commissions when people ask about orchestrations, I’ve had to explain, no, this is something I feel very strongly about. I should be doing this. I think again, because I started out doing really low budget black box theater, I’ve always thought very economically. What is the smallest number of people that I can make this amazing with? So I tend not to think about big, 40-person orchestras, just because I feel like if you can do it with 20 people, that’s more economical, and therefore, better.
MS: Speaking of economy, as you were going through that list of shows, there was Beowulf, Clown Bible, and then we have plotlines about Rasputin and taken from War and Peace. It seems like you’re really attracted to these incredibly complex plotlines.
DM: I can trace that directly to Les Miz, which I totally grew up on and to this day absolutely love and adore. That’s a pretty complicated story—multiple threads, multiple characters. Also, when I was in school, I was a composition major and an English lit major, so I was studying literature and fell in love with Russian novels early on. I do love that complexity in weaving different stories together. I also love classics, things written 200-plus years ago. There’s always that really surprising moment in reading stuff and thinking, “Oh, my god. That’s exactly a thought that I had yesterday!” Just recognizing that the classics are modern in a way.
MS: Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is actually based on just a small section of War and Peace, so you could develop other chapters and make it kind of your Ring cycle, but actually you’re now on to Moby Dick. You just can’t seem to let these epics go.
DM: I think Great Comet will be a part of two separate trilogies. So one is the Russian trilogy, which will be Beardo, which was a show about Rasputin, and then Comet, and then I’m doing a show about Rachmaninoff coming up in the spring. Rachmaninoff and hypnosis and how he wrote his second piano concerto under hypnosis. So that’s the first, the Russian trilogy. But then there’s also the great, impossible uber-long novels trilogy, which will be War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Ulysses. Ulysses is way, way down the road. But I’m working on Moby Dick now. I just really love the challenge of taking some mammoth piece of literature that has a bit of a reputation for being something that’s very difficult and that a lot of people are afraid to read, or people lie about reading.
MS: How do you approach a project of such scope? Do you have a “process” or is each project somewhat unique?
DM: In adapting War and Peace, or now I’m adapting Moby Dick, I start with the original text. So starting with Tolstoy, Melville. In both cases I found the complete text online and transferred that all into a Word document and then the writing of the text becomes this gigantic editing process down to an hour or two-hour long musical.

Malloy as Pierre in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.
Photo by Chad Batka

Then I tend to just think a lot while walking. I take walks in the park and listen to music and just think a lot about theatrical things—what would be a cool theatrical thing to do with this section? I’m definitely thinking of the musicality and the theatricality at the same time. With Comet, it was very clear to me from the beginning that Pierre should be playing accordion, that’s the way that we’re going to know that Pierre is kind of in charge of the evening, and that ultimately it’s going to become his story because he’s the band leader and is kind of welcoming people in as the host. That’s a good example of something being both musical and theatrical. Then I’ll go to either the piano or the laptop. I tend to trade off; if I get stuck, then I move. I’m on the laptop programming beats and improvising on top of those beats, and at the piano, it’s a more traditional, looking for interesting chord changes and melodies and things like that.
MS: How do you deliver the scores to performers? Since you’re probably accommodating a variety of backgrounds and levels of training, are you giving them scores? Handing out recordings?
DM: I typically do both, and the demo always comes first, so if there’s time pressure or if I’m working with people who don’t read music then I know the demo is going be the more important thing to them. So I give a demo to them, and then eventually I’ll start writing out the music.
I definitely find writing out the music to be a bit of a tedious task because I write so improvisationally. A lot of times I’ll sing melodic lines, and then I have the hour of trying to figure out the rhythm of this one two-bar phrase. I’m finding out that I tend to actually write in a lot of polyrhythms, so I tend to write like three against two, and five against two, and seven against four, and that just like naturally comes out when I sing. But then, when I have to actually notate it, it’s quite irritating.
MS: As I was going through the tracks on your website, I definitely noticed that you’re often dancing the audience through much of these shows, to a certain extent.
DM: That kind of came about right after I moved from college to San Francisco. In college I was really absorbed in classical music and jazz and, like, ‘60s pop. And that was it. I actually didn’t know anything that was coming out at that time, so I had no idea what was going on in modern music. Then when I moved to San Francisco, I started working at this record store and just started hearing things that people were playing. That was when I finally started listening to drum and bass music, and that was the first time I heard Radiohead and things like that.
It reawakened in me that I love pop music. I love rock and roll. I love dance music. I love soul. That’s something that’s kind of missing from a lot of classical, avant-garde music—there’s no sense of beat. It’s often very sound scape-y. Here’s some orchestral colors and interesting harmonies, but there’s not that driving sense of something that you can groove to underneath it all. And so that’s when I started to get interested in ideas like, “What if you did take the harmonic language of Schoenberg, but made it dance a little?” So yeah, that’s definitely been a driving force in my music, to keep that dance beat going on.
MS: Your shows have been categorized with labels such as “rock opera” or reviewers make comments about the mayhem and the manic action. Point being, there is a lot of in-your-face energy to these productions.
DM: I think a lot of that comes from just loving the vibe of being at a rock show. And I think San Francisco has a lot to do with it because when I was in my early 20s, I was going to a lot of performances that were kind of coming out of Burning Man—these very communal performances in shitty loft spaces in the Mission, and so people were crammed together and there was very little division between performer and audience. That was something that was always very exciting to me. And I do love that sense of spectacle and the feeling of having some drinks with friends and breaking out into song. All that stuff is very important to me. I hate the experience of going to the theater and being very proper and being quiet and being in the dark. That wall that goes up is not so interesting to me. Sometimes it’s fine, but in terms of what I make, it’s not as interesting.

The audience for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is seated in the middle of the action. Photo by Chad Batka

The audience for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is seated in the middle of the action surrounding Lucas Steele.
Photo by Chad Batka

MS: You seem to devote a lot of time to sitting in the position of the hypothetical audience member. Ars Nova’s artistic director, Jason Eagan, told the Times that’s why he let you run a little wild while developing Comet, because he knew you were carefully considering that at each step.
DM: Right. That’s another theory, that you don’t worry about the audience and that the audience will come to you if it’s honest. Yeah, I totally don’t believe in that. I definitely believe I am there to entertain people. I am creating these shows so that people have a good time when they go out at night. I mean, hopefully they’re also thinking and feeling—so you’re talking about big issues and having cathartic moments. But I feel if something is just purely an intellectual exercise, to me, that’s something I listen to at home on headphones by myself. If I’m going out, I want to have a more communal experience. I’m going out into public for a reason, so I want to be engaging with those people, and that means both the performers and the rest of the audience. So I want to have experiences where I can be smiling at my neighbor and maybe clapping my hands and singing along with them in non-cheesy ways.
MS: There’s a lot of alcohol in your works, both consumed in the shows and present in the lyrics. But also sometimes the audience is served as well.
DM: The alcohol I think just goes back to that communal experience and wanting to have an experience with both the performers and the audience. Alcohol is a social lubricant; it’s why people meet in bars and go to parties and have drinks. I just love breaking that stuffy convention of what the theater is and instead making it more like a bar room, more like a beer hall. I’ve joked, too, that I need to do a show for every alcohol, so Beowulf was a mead and beer show, and then Three Pianos was red wine and Comet was vodka. So actually in the fall, I’m doing a show about bourbon, called Ghost Quartet at the Bushwick Starr, which will be kind of a ghost story involving moonshine and whisky. But yeah, then I’ll have to write a tequila show and a gin show, etcetera, etcetera.

Sharing a drink during Three Pianos. Photo by Ryan Jensen

Sharing a drink during Three Pianos, Malloy with Alec Duffy.
Photo by Ryan Jensen

MS: It’s an awesome show sponsorship opportunity, as well!
DM: Right. We hope so.
MS: Do you have a core group that you always go to when you set to work on a new show at this point—a think tank of sorts? Theater is so complicated, like opera, in that there are so many creative people at the table and those relationships can be complex and challenging, but also really inspirational.
DM: Over the years, I’ve definitely amassed a kind of collective of people that I love working with, the strongest being my director Rachel Chavkin. We are now developing four new shows together. So, she was the director on Comet and also on Three Pianos, and she and I just see so eye to eye on all of these things. And then performers, so many people came through Comet and so many of them were so amazing. So this Ghost show is all with people who are from Comet; they’re like old friends. There’s definitely a community that’s been developing, but it’s a pretty broad range of people that come in and out.
MS: Does it develop a sort of family dynamic then, and you have to go to group therapy with your disagreements?
DM: (laughs) No. I mean, honestly one of the great things about Comet, and I think this is one of the great things about Rachel, as a director, is that Comet was such a loving family. There was such an amazing vibe backstage, and there was not a lot of, or really any drama amongst the cast or amongst the crew. Rachel definitely fosters that—she thinks of her role as director as: I’m in charge of the vibe of this room. I’m in charge of how these people feel towards each other. And so making it a comfortable place for people to work and to be able to be open to each other is her mentality, which I love because I’ve worked with directors who don’t think that way. I’ve worked with directors who really just think about what’s going on on stage, and that’s all they really care about. Then you do get weirdness backstage, and you don’t get that communal sense.
MS: What are the pros and cons of you being the author of the show, but then also one of the principal performers? That seems like it might set up some challenges, a little like the boss being at the party. You’re one of the team, but you’re also running the show.
DM: I definitely try to keep a sense of humor about it. I really do value everyone’s input and feedback at all times. Because I’m not acting like a dictator, I think it tends to work. It’s difficult. If I’m in performer mode, then it’s harder for me to hear what the strings are doing. One thing that was really useful in Comet was we actually had understudies, so during rehearsal I could sit out and listen to things and put my composer hat back on and think, “Oh yeah, I really need to fix that oboe line,” which I wouldn’t necessarily have heard if I was singing at the same time. So that can be a tricky thing to balance for sure.

I think it actually drives my directors crazy, too, because it takes me a while to actually become a performer. In rehearsal, I’m typically acting more as the composer and orchestrator and co-music director in ways, so its takes me a while before I actually start acting. Acting does not really come to me naturally, so Rachel’s really good about pushing me to put all that to rest and to just become the character and do all those acting things that people talk about.
MS: I love the honesty of the resume on your website where you lay out what each show has taught you. And then the blog you kept through the early days while forming your music theater ideas—it was really insightful.
DM: So you read all of that? Or some of it? Shit. I do have this very old blog, as a part of my website. There are more contemporary posts as well, but there are definitely posts from 2004, 2005, when I was very much a young artist being very scrappy and starting out in San Francisco. I’ve looked back on some of those blog entries and some of them are quite embarrassing, and some of them are very much about being so poor and just having wild, romantic artistic visions, but not actually being able to execute them. There’s part of me that’s thought, “Oh, I should take that down. Now I’m more professional.” But then another part of me thinks, “Oh, this is actually like very honest. This was who I was and where I came from,” and I feel like that might be helpful to someone else.
There’s one particular post in there, which I remember I got a phone call from my parents about because it was about running out of money. I literally was so poor I had negative money in my bank account, and I was trying to submit a grant application and I was at the post office and I didn’t have enough money for stamps, and—yeah, it was just a fiasco. But I decided to keep it all up.
MS: Oh, I think you should! That particular post says so much.
In another post you mention getting theater critics out to your shows, but wishing music critics would come hear these pieces. Is there music that you’re not writing because of the path that you’re on now?
DM: I’m curiously not all that interested in music that exists without theater for myself. Obviously I listen to tons of music that is not theatrical at all, but when I’m writing things, I don’t have a lot of interest in just writing a stand-alone song or a symphony or something. It just isn’t where my mind goes. I feel like anything that I want to do musically, I can do it in the context of a theater piece and it will be even that much more exciting, because there’s all this other stuff going on with it.
Every now and then, I like to sit down at the piano and try to write just a love song or something, and those exercises are pretty futile. It doesn’t really work because I feel like I need to have the bigger picture in my head to make something compelling. The larger theatrical vision is what makes this exciting to watch, not just to listen to.
MS: Do those scraps of things end up in your other pieces, or do you really need the big, over-arching vision before you can begin?
DM: Sometimes interesting chord progressions or something that started out as just me fiddling around on the piano will work their way into bigger things. But I’ve never thought of a string quartet and then turned it into a piece. It’s always been the other way around. It’s very much always coming at it from the theater first.

MS: So I want to ask this question with a caveat that I read the post you wrote about making theater and making money, so don’t throw any rocks or anything. But as you well know, these questions about making experimental work while keeping the lights on in the hall are of course ongoing and worrying people in the field. Since you’ve had success in this area, how do you find that room and that confidence to be experimental inside the challenges of current economics?
DM: I guess a lot of what helps is that I’m not coming at it from an economic point at all. I’ve never written anything thinking this is how I’m going to make money; I’ve always just written things that I’ve wanted to write. Fortunately, some of those things have ended up having some kind of monetizable qualities and some of those things have turned out to be commercial in some ways. But some of them definitely have not. There are shows that I’ve written that will never transfer to an Off Broadway or Broadway run. I feel like if you’re going into it thinking, “I’m going to write a Broadway musical,” then, yeah, you might feel a lot of weight, that “it has to be this, this, and this. And it can’t be this, this, and this. If I’m going to write a Broadway musical, I’m going to make a lot of money off of it, so I need to do something that’s going to make a lot of money.” I just never think about it like that. That just happens, and has happened on a couple of pieces, fortunately, but it wasn’t the intent for writing them.
MS: Is that harder now, though, since you’ve had the success with Comet? Do you find yourself answering creative questions certain ways because of what you know now and what you’ve experienced?
DM: Whether subconsciously or not, I think all the pieces I’m working on right now, none of them could possibly be Broadway musicals. I’ve very deliberately chosen a bunch of new shows that are way more experimental and way stranger than what Comet was—probably in some senses to protect myself from attempting to write another Comet and failing. Instead, I’m attempting to write things that are the polar opposites of Comet. If I fail at those, it won’t be as bad.
MS: So you set yourself up intentionally?
DM: Well, I think I’ve not set myself up, intentionally.
MS: Well put. But you’ve removed that pressure then a little bit?
DM: Exactly. If I started adapting Anna Karenina next, that would be just such a colossal mistake, you know, because it would be too similar. So instead, I’m doing this chamber ghost story piece with just four people—that’s going to be super weird, and probably mostly in the dark.
I feel that the success of Comet has allowed me the room to be more experimental, and the room to try out things that I’ve always wanted to do because people have more trust in me now—I guess because I have a reputation from this one show. So that’s been nice. But I’ve definitely gotten calls from shows that were looking at Broadway runs and shows with big producers behind them, but none of them have been things that I’ve been very interested in. So I’ve said no to a bunch of things which could have gone on to be Broadway things, but it just felt artistically dishonest to say yes to them.
MS: That’s interesting because we began this conversation chatting about how you used to say yes to everything in order to build your career. So there’s a certain point where that switches over to actually learning to say no?
DM: Absolutely. That was a hard lesson to hear. It was only in the last few years that I have started saying no to things, just because now there are enough opportunities that I can only say yes to the things that I really, really want to do, or I can make up the things myself, instead of doing what other people are asking me to do. So that’s been a really nice shift.
MS: Are you still doing the GMAT teaching on the side?
DM: Sure am. I’m teaching this Saturday.
MS: Do they know about your double life?
DM: I try not to tell the students. Some of the other teachers have seen my shows. But yeah, I think it’s important to keep one foot in that door, you know. In case all this does fall apart, then at least I’ve got this teaching thing. I can still pay the rent.
MS: We touched on your published resume before and how you list some of the individual lessons of the productions you’ve been in, which I found really insightful, so what have some of the more formative lessons been for you as you went from saying “yes” to saying “no”?
DM: The first big thing I learned from Beowulf is always have a bass. At first I wrote Beowulf, and there was no bass. I thought the trombones would cover it, and that didn’t work at all. So we had to add a bass at the last minute.

But I have thought more about the forms of the traditional musical. That has been interesting to actually analyze that stuff and realize really good musicals typically do start with a certain kind of song that sets up where and when we are. The prologue song of Comet originally wasn’t in the show. The first song was just Pierre’s first song. Then we did two workshops with that version, and the constant piece of feedback was, “It took me awhile to figure out who everyone was.” I got so sick of that comment that I wrote the prologue out of spite. Like, fuck you, here’s everything laid out as basically as I can.

It ended up being a big hit. So that was a lesson—that these conventional Broadway musicals actually do have lessons to teach. There really is a lot of wisdom in those pieces. You can look at those structures and you can play with those forms, of course, but at the end of the day, probably Act I does want to end with everyone in a moment of jeopardy, so people are excited to come back after intermission.
MS: You once said that {The 99-cent} Miss Saigon was your favorite thing you’ve ever done. That may no longer be true, but what was it about that piece that meant so much to you at the time?
DM: What was fun about doing {The 99-cent} Miss Saigon—and I think this is a theme that’s come up through a lot of my work—is we were simultaneously completely embodying the story, and at the same time, ironically commenting on it. We are walking that really delicate balance of actually telling the story, and in some ways, slightly making fun of it, but really actually loving the story and really wanting to tell the story. That was a really important discovery. I feel like that happens in Beowulf, and that happens in Three Pianos, that happens in Great Comet—we’re loving this thing that we’re talking about, but at the same time, we’re viewing it from a contemporary point of view. It’s a little ridiculous that Sonya bursts into tears every five pages in War and Peace. That’s funny, and so we can comment on that, but at the same time, still love and treasure her as a character and treat her as a human being and not a caricature.

{The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon

MS: I think what was fun about reading through a lot of those blog posts was that look back to when you were first getting started. You followed your own path, and you’ve produced great stories as a result of that. We’ve already established that cash and a Broadway dream are not the driving motivator for you, so what is?
DM: I think for me, creating musical theater is the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice. I think that when I’m performing something live, or even when I’m rehearsing something, or developing something, or even just sitting in the audience watching something that I’ve had a hand in, that’s the moment in my life when I experience the sublime. I experience transcending beyond worrying about rent checks and health insurance and dry cleaners and all that. I love those sublime, transcendent moments, and I find that they come to me through music and theater. They definitely come through the community, through performing with other people. Sitting at the piano by myself is nice, but it doesn’t give me the same kind of spiritual satisfaction of really communing with other people and bonding with them. That’s the thing I guess that drives me.
And it’s nice if money comes out of that, because then it allows me to live and do more of it. But at the same time, working a day job is a completely viable thing as well. It’s fine to have the two separate things: I’m going to make my money this way, and I’m going to have spiritual enlightenment this way. If they happen to end up coinciding, that’s amazing, but I don’t think that it has to.

Performing Quality

Posted on April 21, 2014 by MarekPoliks - Columns

Last week, I talked about how new music shares its business structure with the academy. This economy runs by accumulating social capital; it builds complicated networks of people and distributes privileges among them. To keep growing, its economic body must churn out unsustainable heaps of new works and performances. This system compels constant productivity; its rhythm of overproduction overpowers any expression of quality. These overproduced goods, though, don’t arrive at concerts for sale – instead, they filter through concerts and emerge as recordings. In this form, musical products re-enter new music’s stock exchange of grants, residencies and other academic resources. Instead of an artistic end in themselves, concerts represent just one stage of a complicated, circular production line. Unlike in popular music, for example, new music sets aside an entire class of artists for the exclusive task of public presentation. Since concerts cost listeners time, money, and space, performing musicians alone are left to account for an audience’s investment. To me, the weird division of labor between composing works and playing concerts puts musicians in a difficult position. Performers have become new music’s coerced mouthpiece of accountability.
The student summer festival provides the clearest case study for this skewed power dynamic. I admit to gratefully experiencing many of the most profound musical moments of my life at such events. However, broadly speaking, student festivals exist to mill social capital. Applying and attending costs a significant sum, matching or exceeding what most undergraduate and graduate students might earn in a month. Students such as myself exchange money for futures – once I accumulate enough social capital, I have the opportunity to invest in better and better festivals.

Emerging composers buy into their own exploitation. Most festivals involve an anti-commission: composers pay to write a piece. From my experience, I’ve been assigned an average of two to three months between acceptance and arrival to write a work that I myself have financed. At the festival, these pieces receive their premieres under stressed and compressed conditions. One works with little rehearsal time and overtaxed performers to populate sprawling end-of-the-week concerts. Composers don’t care too much about these concerts, though. Instead, they invest their money and labor for something more economically substantial.
The student summer festival produces recordings, the commodities exchanged between festival trading posts. The live-ness of performance may wink out as soon as a concert ends, but its recorded objectification is hard and exchangeable. Student composers distribute these recordings with the hope of ensuring further performances, which get recorded and recirculate. Musicians traffic in recordings too, but because players themselves are the makers of sounds, they assemble recordings with greater autonomy. These commodities form the basis for public conversations with older, established faculty members. A masterclass is a formalized introduction, a site of exchange. Here, and at many other places within this system (with other students, with administrators, and with the name of the festival itself), participants trade in their recordings for social capital.
Festivals differentiate modes of labor: performers labor to play, composers have already labored to write. Both schedules are separated. This division of labor alienates performers from their work. Performers suffer through unsatisfying concerts, knowing that composers only appreciate their effort inasmuch as it can circulate as a standalone, exchangeable entity. Further, musicians undertake such staggering workloads, performing new and unfamiliar works, that they cannot possibly find the time or energy to express themselves as artists. The crammed rehearsal schedules designed by festival administrators prevent real composer-performer interactions. I think of this as an artifact of classical museum culture, treating living composers like long-dead historical figures. In exactly that way, composer and performer workdays tend to only overlap at such a late stage that a composer can’t possibly make any edits. Now, this pattern of behavior doesn’t only apply to the festival scene. The social gulf between composers and performers pervades the entire new music superstructure, from three-day university residencies to the highest order of orchestra commissions. The composer-performer discursive divide is perpetuated, if not caused, by the distributions of labor incurred by compulsory overproduction.

The student festival format affects young creative lives. It inures composers and performers to the rhythm of overproduction; it prepares them for the academic economics I discussed in last week’s article. It trains young composers to build commodities – to create works of similar length and duplicability, written during crammed timelines and with minimal conceptual and notational risk. It teaches young performers that music pre-exists performance and has nothing to do with concerts. One cannot separate festivals from the economy of new music, and I find myself in a similar position to last week, asking – “would new music, as I know it, exist at all without this infrastructure; is it desirable or possible to abandon it?”
If new music stays in the student festival, it ought to rethink its programming. These summer weeks should focus on composer-performer time – for example, they could consist only of lessons and discussions, with no compulsory concerts apart from whatever one might feel moved to do. Perhaps concerts might not be recorded, so that recording might not be performance’s end objective. Recordings can happen elsewhere, in spaces designed for recording, such that the process doesn’t alienate performers from their labor. The idea of the recording-focused, lengthy, and premiere-oriented festival concert needs to change.

The overproduction of pieces and concerts injures performance practice. Because composers need more and more commodities to enter circulation, performers encounter an excess of new music. Many musicians have the discipline and training to keep their heads above water, but how can one think about artistry when performing piles of premieres? Quoting a young new music pianist friend of mine, “If I want to play new music for a living, I have to play all new music, including the music I don’t believe in.” He describes this process as one of desensitization, a feeling echoed by many young performers I interviewed. Performance quality suffers. Last week, I described quality as the immanent necessity of a thing, its ability to supply its own reasons for coming into being. Overproduction hurts quality—it makes one act because one must, not because one needs to. Overproduction makes one ignore quality—another young pianist described her festival experience as one of “train[ing] myself not to think about quality anymore.” I also know many performers who don’t think like this, who don’t have to, or who think around it, but the problem my friends pose is hard to ignore.

Of course, fatigue and desensitization don’t just result from a surplus of new pieces. Contemporary performance has to enter into real markets in ways that composition just can’t. Though it often seems like new music events consist exclusively of one’s peers, concerts provide the few and far between openings of the new music world to the outside. Performers speak to publics much more diverse and often much harder to convince than those found in academia. The performance infrastructure suffers from a more normative type of neoliberal behavior than the academic modality. One must advertise, sometimes with the music itself, in order to survive. Advertising is legitimation, it makes something appear necessary whether or not it is. Performance has the difficult task of dressing commodities made for private markets in the guise of public goods. New music happily accepts – its internal tautology persists.

I’ve outlined a social system as bleak and deterministic as it is ripe with exceptions and faultlines. I do sense that my dystopia of new music is neither exclusively mine nor completely inconceivable, particularly within the United States. However, no such system is absolute or objectively the case. Likewise, no musical score is essentially an instrument of capital, nor is any performance essentially a hopeless act of advocacy for a cold, dead thing. The absoluteness of this disciplinary divide is every bit as abstract and ideal as it is an institutional reality.

Glimmers of necessity inhabit even the most compulsory scores. Some composers exercise their agency in the margins. Many performers tell me that just knowing “where the piece came from” (why it was—not why it had to be—written) helps them sensitize themselves to it, helps them make their performance feel itself necessary. From, during, or after such conversations, a composer’s internal insistences might exceed their subconscious and enter the material of the work itself. Performers, too, should involve themselves – performers are artists! If a musician feels empowered, they should ask composers about quality, “What about this piece is important to you?” Most of all, players should exercise curatorial agency, they should look for and through composers for the reasons one performs. Concerts can be spaces for performers to truly make things of necessity. Concerts can be well-curated and intentional sites for public discussion. Concerts can be compositional ends in themselves. Through a stream of interleaved activity, necessity communicates itself forward, inward, and outward.

Next week I will finally devote an entire article to quality itself. As I write, this concept grows clearer and clearer in my mind. In the past few weeks, I’ve heard hundreds of conversations about musical quality, and I look forward to reporting the plurality of my findings.

New Music is Academic Music

Posted on April 14, 2014 by MarekPoliks - Columns

Though new music’s project isn’t essentially academic, it lives the life of an academic organism. Its funding comes from academic sources or sources built for academics (grants, stipends, fellowships). Even its population looks, by and large, academic (perhaps especially those professors who most prominently bemoan musical academicization). Its housing is academic, its residencies are academic, and it often speaks in academic language. But most of all, new music’s attitude towards matters of quality is distinctly academic.

I was taught (in subtext) that Schoenberg initialized the academic turn. New music strode into the university once its increasingly complex material required a scholarly lens. The same conservatory whispers told me that post-war Darmstadt sealed the deal of new music’s tenureship. Here, composers turned their back on the audience, writing music more akin to jargon than art. Of course, Milton Babbitt’s over-referenced “Who Cares if You Listen” (a product of heavy editorial intervention) evidenced a project characterized by the insularity and elitism born of hyper-specialization.

Let me invert this narrative in economic terms. Essentially, two attitudes towards capitalism divided the 20th century.* The former Fordist regime was typified by considerable state regulation, mass production, a burst in organized labor, and a type of progress-driven modernism (surviving largely on economic racism and sexism). Neoliberalism, the second model, characterizes the last 40+ years—globalization, outsourcing, enormous financial institutions, and above all, privatization and deregulation. As I mentioned last week, neoliberalism still exhorts objectivity—its theoretical underpinnings rely on a hypostatized, ideal market.
Think of the early musical avant-garde in a Fordist light, as part of a social movement oriented towards standardization, progress, and nationalism. New music strode into the academy to serve a political function, to conduct state-sponsored research. In the institution, musical quality meant something very specific and objective—the degree to which the thing in question accomplished scientific or cultural progress.

Fordism’s state and university sponsorships eventually evaporated. Neoliberalism annexed the academy. Academia became a type of behavior, a different way of acting neoliberal, a coping mechanism. New music’s confident stride into academia had turned into a retreat. After all—where else could it go? As far as new music is concerned, especially in America, the state practically doesn’t exist. Similarly, new music has no market; it practices academic economics. When a composer talks about the market, they reference a theoretical market, an aesthetics of the market. Resourceless, new music adopts capitalism and behaves as a university would within it. In place of a market, new music has a facsimile thereof, borrowed from academia—a trading post of social capital.

As I mentioned in my previous article, neoliberalism has a strange attitude towards quality. First, it dismisses it out of hand—I mentioned the techniques of “it’s a matter of taste” and “go about your own business” last week. Further, though, it creates economic conditions threatening to critical conversations. New music’s academics have lost their tenure-track jobs, or are entering a world in which such jobs absolutely do not exist. Job security demands verbal (and oftentimes musical) silence about matters of quality. Further, the constant need to publish pervades every level of academic life—at all costs, the academic composer must produce. Finally, neoliberalism quietly reintroduces objective metrics of quality compatible with academic overproduction. A para-language of quality—quality weighed in terms of social capital, quality as a type of potential energy. Can we organize a conference about this? Will this proposal win grants? Will this piece of music garner social media attention for this institution? Yes or no?

What about the enclave of “stylistically academic” music? Its changing values are not dissociable from neoliberal social norms, despite this genre’s commendably protective outlook. Against our economic introversion, my generation’s music often indulges in compositional self-promotion (our sometimes-insincere collective turn to vector graphics software, or our embrace of impressive electronics arrays). At a higher pay grade, Fordist remnants persist. Much of the older academic-style music does rely on a tacit collective colonialism: “this aesthetic best contributes to the progress of music.” This genre’s tenureships are perhaps the hardest to find—cautious professionalism every bit as requisite for survival. Both listless silence and eager networking cannot help but infiltrate any applicant class of composers, and I certainly can’t begrudge them for it.

If one wants new music to remain in the academy, how does one help to make it hospitable? How do we take its social behavior and make it contrarian, vital? How can we combat the characteristically academic forms of racism, sexism, and other discriminating obstacles to thought and speech? What economic models are permissive to tenure, or propose models of employment less threatening to critical discourse? Within our extant system, how can we re-establish safe spaces to talk about quality? Though this might require a radical change in the economies involved, I think this last stage is somehow the least impossible. If enough people agree that institutional dangers impinge upon the quality of their work, perhaps some momentum can gather. Though clubs and small social organizations have the danger of elitism, they can be great places for composers to share opinions and strategies. I also encourage any of you with composition students to use your studios in this way. I learn the most when I’m empowered to air my thoughts and pressed to explain them.

However, if one wants to find contemporary music a new home, where can it go? I would hate to watch new music proudly immerse itself in the market. (Personally, I hope that art can remain a space in which one can at least pretend to listen or look or learn from something in a way that escapes capitalist modes of entrainment.) Because I believe in human agency, though, I do also believe in margins—the frayed limits of the market, the zones not completely under its control. If new music must find a new home, it needs to do something incredibly extreme.

Personally, I’m conflicted. Though being an academic is the most comfortable way for me to “be capitalist” (a behavior in which I am often completely complicit), I look at my prospects for employment with great anxiety. The tremulous instability looming over my future makes me question the sustainability of my practice. Certainly the structure of new music must change drastically, re-evaluating its kinship with academic-capitalist behavior. Frankly, I think new music ought to remodel itself into art, taking the shape of a social organism whose funding comes in spurts from fringe and diverse places. I value the new music created out of small constellations of people, from long-term and close-knit partnerships, the new music whose instruments and raw materials reflect intimacy and care with their arrangement. New music needs a relevance borne of its own intrinsic, immanent urgency—a social structure powered by the need, not the professional compulsion, to make things. As a friend told me last week, one might even define quality as these conditions of production itself. I propose my definition of quality here: Quality means both a social environment conducive to the expression of immanent musical necessity and the discourse of this immanence itself. Quality judgment means social criticism and the affirmation of its preconditions.

I am building something. In my first post, I presented a dire situation. Here, I’ve drawn a fork in the road. My next two posts will deal exclusively with quality. In the first, I’ll talk about performance, etiquette, and resensitizing oneself to music. In the second, I’ll talk about “making the air heavy,” magic-eye puzzles, “believing that music isn’t an exercise,” and other ways I talk about quality with my friends and peers.

* For more in-depth analysis, check out David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Stanley Fish’s New York Times opinion column “Neoliberalism and Higher Education” relates this specifically to academia. I also can’t recommend anything higher than Elizabeth Grosz’s essay collection Time Travels, alongside the compendium New Materialisms (ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost)—both of which transformed my understanding of agency within a neoliberal world.

Composers, Meet Identity-Protective Cognition

Posted on April 11, 2014 by ethan - Columns

In the recent article “How politics makes us stupid,” Ezra Klein writes about identify-protective cognition. The concept, developed by Yale law professor Dan Kahan, argues that the “most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.” He argues: “[I]ndividuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values,” instead choosing facts that support them.
Kahan uses this theory, Klein writes, to challenge a political concept known as the More Information Hypothesis, or “the belief that many of our most bitter political battles” are based upon one side not having enough information to fully understand the issue. He explains that our inability to agree on some of the most pressing political issues such as climate change is not due to a lack of information, but to an individual’s effort to preserve a “preferred form of social organization.” It was hard to read something like this and not want to examine my beliefs about one of the things most central to my identity and therefore my social organization: music. How might composers and audiences be understood in this context?

Composers

Programmatic music against absolute music! Atonal against polytonal! Identity-protective cognition may be heavily implicated in these compositional ideologies. As most prominently manifested by Wagner against Brahms and Schoenberg against Stravinsky, to be a composer in the late 19th and much of the 20th century consisted of aligning yourself with one of these social circles. To stray from your camp was to jeopardize your social standing—and perhaps your livelihood.

After postmodernism, compositional ideologies, though they exist, are not nearly as fundamental to the existence of a social circle. We seem to have accepted all of the music that came before us as equally valid and deserving of a response. Without going into any quality problems that may have arisen as a result, it is clear that social circles are far less bound by compositional ideology. It follows that one’s ability to make a living as a composer should be less bound by them. If true, this illuminates just how delicate society’s notions of the canon may be if its boundaries are determined not by aesthetics, but through social structures.

Audiences

Classical music programming–which, like all other industries, is more or less dictated by its market (audience)–encourages over-polishing a canon at the expense of creating new work. Is there a way to understand this in the context of identity-protective cognition? Beyond our seeming predisposition to favor repetition over the new, the continued reality of constantly performing the same group of masterworks with very little variation is heavily tied up in the social reality of the concert hall, the physical manifestations of which are literally built as shrines to the supposed creators of its canon. To enjoy newness, then, is to contradict the social foundation of the classical music industry itself. To me, this argument overpowers the More Information Hypothesis, which might suggest that better educated audiences would demand more new music. Either way, this logic forces me to confront an economic reading of music creation and performance. It is the intersection of audience demand with musical supply that creates a working market, and in the case of classical music, a canon.

In a way, however, this gives me hope for new music. It suggests that the acceptance of numerous compositional ideologies signals a shift in demand towards newness, and a social circle less committed to the practices of its parents. In other words, we may be in the early adoption phase for new music.

As Klein mentions in his article, pondering identity-protective cognition “is to stare into a kind of intellectual abyss.” The thought that any and every argument or claim we make should be constantly weighed for its motivating cognition is tiring, and it strikes me as a difficult task to regularly undertake. Nevertheless, it is one that seems particularly worthwhile from time to time if we, as artists, are to truly reflect the—inevitably social—human condition.

Citizenship

Posted on February 10, 2014 by ArmandoBayolo - Columns

Photo courtesy of din bcn on Flickr

Collaboration is a buzz word that’s thrown around a lot these days, quite often referring to the relationship between composers and the performers for whom they write. Adam Sliwinski began his series of posts for NewMusicBox in January by dealing with this very issue and exploring the mutually beneficial ways in which performers and composers can work together. Most astutely, however, Sliwinski pointed out that, rather than discovering this on his own, he and his ensemble, So Percussion, are simply part of a trend that “has been sweeping across the new music world for quite a while.” This trend is, to me, both as a composer and as an advocate, perhaps the most exciting development in contemporary music in the last fifteen years.
When I was in school long ago, the vision I inherited of a composer, while already changing, was still a somewhat romantic one in which we were expected to work in relative isolation, presenting our finished masterpieces to grateful performers who would then work very hard to present definitive performances of our work.

Well, okay, that’s not exactly true. There was a lingering sense of this, and I still occasionally encounter this attitude among composers (and some performers) of a certain generation, but many of my teachers, particularly the younger ones, encouraged my peers and me to get out there and get to know instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. Do you find that you’re having trouble writing a particular violin lick? Go knock on a violinist’s practice room door and ask them to take a look and make suggestions! Need to write a big piece for your dissertation and can’t decide whether you want to tackle the idealistic grand opera you’ve always wanted to write, or a violin concerto for your buddy who’s been hounding you for years to do it, has an orchestra lined up, and can program it as soon as it’s finished? The opera can wait! You decide to write the violin concerto—including some passages that are nearly impossible. Do you say, like Beethoven is said to have, “Do you think I care about your stinking fiddle?” or do you sit down with your friend and look for ways to make a passage more idiomatic? I shouldn’t have to ask the question, yet there is a long-held and awfully pervasive attitude in some circles that the score is king, and I’ve been surprised at the number of performers who are nervous about asking for changes or offering solutions to awkward problems because they think I won’t welcome their feedback. (Although I did have one performer recently who took this too far when, after I suggested that, of course, if some passages need to be reworked, I’d be happy to take a look at suggestions, s/he then went on to essentially rewrite the entire piece to the point that the premiere wasn’t so much a premiere performance as a premiere impression of what I’d written. It was…odd.)

In any case, yes, this is the most obvious and immediate sense in which collaboration comes up in contemporary music, but I suggest that it’s not the only one. Along with the attitudes I expressed in my initial, muckraking post—that a musical life is a political life—we must always remember that, as artists, we are all in this together. In times of economic hardship, art is often first on the chopping block as a luxury item without which we can live and, conversely, is often the last such item to be added to growing budgets in times of plenty. If we do not advocate not just for our own work but for the work of colleagues, partners, and peers, we continue to be the last line item to be added to budgets and the first to be cut.

Ultimately, what we do makes the world a better place. While a performance does not literally put food in anyone’s mouth, the infrastructure that grows around performance venues often has an incredible impact upon a community. I’ve never been much of a numbers person and, therefore, cannot speak to actual statistics, but in my own experience I’ve seen the transformation an arts scene can have on a community.

Three years ago, I was hired by the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington to develop and curate a new music series for them. The Atlas is an old movie house which had burned down—though the facade remained—during the riots that swept the city in 1968. A group of enterprising community members, led by the lawyer and philanthropist Jane Lang, bought the Atlas in the early 2000s with a plan to renovate it as a performing arts venue and anchor the renewal of the depressed H Street North East corridor in D.C. around it. The transformation that has occurred in that neighborhood in the years since Atlas opened has been dramatic and tangible, financially and physically. The city’s musical culture has dramatically changed as well, now that contemporary music has a wider presence in the area thanks to our efforts at Atlas.

To take the helm of a concert series—on top of an ensemble—is a great temptation for a composer. It would be very easy to make the programming of my own work a prerequisite for a performance on my series, for instance, but this would be an obvious betrayal of my duty to my musical community. Managing a concert series and an ensemble is a rare privilege and an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to both my immediate community in Washington and the wider musical community of the United States. Not only are we a part of a vibrant, growing scene in the District, but we are also able to provide work and exposure to some important established and emerging artists and composers.

I believe it’s an important challenge we all must undertake to advocate for one another. The “mutual benefit balance” of which Adam Sliwinski wrote extends well beyond the immediate benefits of multiple performances and the nitty-gritty work of the composer-performer relationship. We must see ourselves as collaborators within a much wider network of musicians and citizens, helping each other as best we can—be it through something as complex as presenting performances or something as simple as sharing each other’s work on social media—regardless of personal payoff. The benefits will ultimately manifest themselves and reach far beyond the immediate gratification of a paycheck (although let’s not forget the importance of that paycheck, lest we get too idealistic and starve ourselves in the process) and into the realm of real, tangible cultural change.

Competition Fees: How Much is Too Much?

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Dale Trumbore - Columns

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through some composition contest applications. One caught my eye; it was a perfect fit for a new piece I’d written this summer. A perfect fit, that is, until I saw the entry fee: $50.
I view that as an exorbitant amount for such an opportunity, and yet my frustration upon seeing this particular contest stemmed not just from the amount, but from how helpless I felt looking at it. How can a composer productively communicate to contest organizers that their fee is unreasonably high?

The issue of contest fees is, granted, a complex one. As I discovered when I turned to Twitter and Facebook to express my frustration with this issue, most composers or administrators fall into one of two camps when it comes to fees. The first: competition fees are a total scam, using the losers’ money to fund the winner’s purse; an organization should not hold a contest if it can’t do so without an entry fee. The other? Competition fees can be a worthwhile, even necessary expense that allow smaller organizations that wouldn’t otherwise be able to do so to promote excellent new music.

NewMusicBox covered both sides of this issue in an in-depth article back in 2004; since then, not much has changed in the way of competition fees. Composer Dennis Tobenski also has a very thorough, six-part blog series decrying the many flaws with composition competitions, and the first of these addresses his problems with entry fees.

As both articles point out, the problems are many. A $30 entry fee for a contest that awards $250 to the winner seems downright dishonest; assuming the contest receives 50 entries, where is all of that money going? If an organization can’t afford the cost of holding a competition on their own, should they be holding a competition in the first place?

Applying to contests is something like gambling, a poker game with 50 players. A composer must ask before entering each contest with an entry fee: Do I believe my piece is a strong enough contender to justify the cost of entering? Is this particular contest worth betting on?

Sometimes, at least for me, the answer is yes. In those cases, I have to feel incredibly confident that my music is a great fit for that particular opportunity, and while I’ve increasingly been limiting the number of opportunities I apply to that charge fees, I will occasionally pay up to $15 or—rarely—up to $25.

In some cases, though, the cost of entering is not only not worth the odds, it’s downright exploitative, taking advantage of the very artists the organizing ensemble is purportedly trying to promote. For some composers, even $25 entry fees can prevent an application; if a composer applies to the majority of opportunities for which he or she is eligible, the entry fees plus printing and mailing costs can add up quickly to hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year.

A composer’s wealth is not an arbiter of talent; why, then, must it function as a barrier? And how might composers encourage contest organizers to lower or eliminate fees?

When I took to Twitter to ask this question, composer Nicholas Omiccioli proposed an interesting solution: A respected, professional music organization such as Chamber Music America or New Music USA (the organization which publishes this magazine) could create a set of standards for composition competitions (including fees), representing composers’ thoughts and concerns through those guidelines.

This potential rubric could be much like New Music USA’s guide to commissioning. While the guide doesn’t necessarily fit every composer or organization’s budget for every project, and every composer is going to have her own personal policy when it comes to putting a price on her music, it does provide a rough set of guidelines that encourage a composer-friendly industry standard. Such a rubric for organizers of composition contests could potentially prevent the current price gouging aspect of several competitions.

What do you think? Where should one draw the line when it comes to application fees? How much is too much? And when it is too much, what is the best way to communicate that to the organizers who determine the fees? I’d love to hear your thoughts and solutions in the comments. Meanwhile, I’ll be steering clear of any contest with a fee over $25.

Dale Trumbore

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