Author: Mark Berry

Don’t Stop the Christmas Music

Christmas is over, but there’s no reason to stop listening to music for the season. Here are some suggestions of things that haven’t yet become holiday classics, but which deserve hearing while you’re still in the mood.

Written in 1927, A Carol Symphony by British composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson is an honest-to-goodness four-movement symphony based on traditional holiday tunes. It’s entertaining as all get-out, and deserves to be played more often this time of year. Of course, Naxos has a recording of A Carol Symphony available.

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Though not strictly a Christmas piece, David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion reminds us that this is a time of year to remember the neediest. Lang’s 30-minute meditation on Hans Christian Andersen’s short story about a poor girl who dies alone in the cold on New Year’s Eve received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2007.


Another contemporary American work, John Adams’s El Nino (available on CD from Nonesuch and on DVD from Arthaus Musik), uses sacred and secular texts in both English and Spanish to tell the story of the Nativity. 

And then there’s A Toolbox Christmas.

Charlotte Arts City?

Something’s going on in Charlotte. On Saturday, only a few months after the city’s orchestra was bailed out by former Bank of America head Hugh McColl and the C. D. Spangler Foundation, a new performance space, the Knight Theater, hosted an open house.

The 1,150-seat hall is part of the so-called Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, a two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street that includes new homes for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum, as well the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, set to open in January.

Further uptown, the North Carolina Dance Theatre is building its own headquarters, complete with administrative offices, a costume shop, and, most importantly, six studios for rehearsals and teaching. There are also plans to open a black box theater within the 34,000-square-foot space, which sits beside the ten-year-old McColl Center for Visual Art.

This mini-boom shows that there’s definitely philanthropic interest in beautifying the Queen City, but it remains to be seen whether there will be a sustained commitment to the organizations that curate the exhibitions, play the music, and dance the dances in the new buildings. The Charlotte Symphony plays in a good-looking, relatively new concert hall built in the mid-1990s, but struggles financially and nearly folded over the summer.

It also remains to be seen whether the public will show sufficient interest to keep funders engaged. For most non-profit arts organizations, ticket sales aren’t a significant revenue source, but nobody–not big-money donors, not the government–wants to give money to groups that appear irrelevant to the community at large.

Gilbert Smartens Up the Phil

Recent New Yorker and New York articles have depicted Alan Gilbert as leading the New York Philharmonic away from old-world stuffiness and toward a more laid-back intellectualism.

For Alex Ross, Gilbert’s first season marks a great awakening after “two drowsy decades,” a return to programming that puts his orchestra’s “virtuosity in the service of ideas,” part of a tradition that dates back to Mitropoulos and includes Bernstein’s championing of new American music, Boulez’s Rug Concerts, and Zubin Mehta’s Horizons festivals.
Similarly, Justin Davidson describes a concert with Gilbert as “a little less drafty temple and more of a campus coffee house,” where audiences can “hear and think about music in an atmosphere of animated informality.”
It wasn’t quite that casual, but the September 30 concert certainly felt more friendly, rewarding, and entertaining than any show I’ve been to in a while.
Most conductors, in fact most classical-music “experts,” who talk about music rely on ten-dollar words that sound fancy but don’t really say much; like a sermon, or Chinese food, they leave you feeling overwhelmed yet unsustained. Gilbert, on the other hand, introduced Magnus Lindberg, whose EXPO opened the night, to the audience with a straight-talking ten-minute interview session. Using the orchestra to demonstrate, the two discussed the thinking behind EXPO, and Lindberg talked thoughtfully about his approach to writing music.
This talk primed people for the piece; the woman to my left noted that she “liked it … I thought I wouldn’t, but I did. More than I thought I would.”
It’s been a while since I’ve had any real interaction with other audience members at concerts, but Gilbert finds a way to get people talking. After Ives’s Symphony No. 2, another concertgoer commented on how different the piece was from her assumptions about Ives. The performance certainly made a case for this piece as part of the mainstream symphonic canon, and I ended up spending the entire intermission locked in an absorbing discussion. Usually, I don’t even wake up until the second half starts.
Both Ross and Davidson fear that Gilbert is too egg-headed for his own good, that he “lacks heat” or forgets that people “go to concerts to have fun.” I had plenty of fun on September 30 and am happy to give up some glamour (or whatever) for a night that stimulates. If you want spectacle, go to Cirque du Soleil; I’ll be at the coffee house, sitting cross legged on the floor with Alan Gilbert and the New York Phil.

Truro Gets a New Mini-Radio Station

My hometown of Truro, Nova Scotia, is getting a new radio station that will broadcast performances and recordings by local musicians.

Earlier this month, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission approved an application from the Truro Live Performing Arts Association to set up a low-wattage developmental station–operated by volunteers for training purposes–at 106.1 FM.
The Truro Live Performing Arts Association appears to be an equal-opportunity music organization; its website emphasizes that it is committed to promoting all things musical in the Marigold City. This bodes well for the new station, and I look forward to programming that’s truly local, and eclectic.
I’ll have to listen to it in my car, though: the range is only five kilometers, and the transmitter is up on Young Street. My parents live in the exurbs.

If Jazz Is Dying, It’s Killing Itself

Terry Teachout’s article on the decline of jazz generated a lot of buzz. Teachout himself responded to the backlash and appeared on WNYC in New York to discuss.

Robertcostic, who commented on Anne Midgette’s blog entry about the hubbub, hits on one of my beefs with jazz as an institution:
“I thought it was easy trying to find famous jazz artists of the past. But then when it came to looking for local jazz performances to actually attend, I was at a loss … [I had] no way to know whether a performance would be enjoyable or not …”
Like robertcostic, I’ve always found the jazz community to be insular. Most jazzers believe the hype about their music being “art” and feel no need to cultivate fans. Sometimes, I feel that they (performers, but also the connoisseurs) don’t want listeners. They’re happy to while away the time they have left doing things they’re way. Because they’re artists.
Robertcostic’s comment also underscores my point about classical music having at least one advantage over jazz in creating demand. The canonical works of jazz are on record, while classical works are on paper. Beethoven’s Fifth only comes alive when an orchestra performs it.

Responses to Blow’s Music Industry Death Watch

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a note questioning Charles Blow’s assertion in The New York Times that the recording industry is on its last legs. Responses from Times readers to Blow were mixed.

Of course, letters from industry muckety-mucks such as Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, found Blow to be “unduly pessimistic” and spoke euphemistically about “transformation” (this from Rich Bengloff of the American Association of Independent Music).
Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps raised a good point that the “business-to-business side” of the music industry is booming, with streaming services providing constant and growing revenues. As I said in my original post, these streaming companies are customers.
Those without supply-side skin in the game were much less enthusiastic, and cited their own reasons for the decline of the industry. One reader bemoaned “the growing unavailability of music we might like to buy”; another blamed the inferior sound quality of digital downloads.
Sheila Johnson was a little more hopeful, noting that, as a classical music fan, she prefers listening to CDs, and reminded readers that it’s not just “the 13-to-17 demographic” that buys music.
Age aside, there are fans of particular artists in any genre that will buy their albums, either as CDs or as downloads. Imogen Heap has developed a huge online fan base in advance of her album release later this month (thanks to Taylor at Naxos for pointing this out), and we’ve seen the success that Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and AC/DC have had, in their own ways, over the last couple of years hocking their wares.
If you really want to read more about this, there are more responses online at the Times website.

Hard Times for Jazz Music

A recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that jazz audiences have been getting smaller and older, and Terry Teachout pondered the reasons for these stats in a Wall Street Journal article this weekend.

Jazz is now considered a serious art form, but this new status has come at a cost according to Teachout, alienating popular-music audiences that skew young. Once a part of everyday cultural life for the hip, jazz is now a stuffy museum piece, one that shares the problems facing orchestras, museums, and other high-culture emporiums.
Comparing jazz to classical music, I’d say that jazz faces a distinct problem: most of its major art works are recordings. Although there are umpteen-thousand excellent recordings of all major classical pieces, orchestras can always pitch the live performance as the most authentic experience possible of the score. (Whether they do this well or not is another story.)
Jazz presenters, on the other hand, can’t present a performance of Kind of Blue; the recording itself is the classic. A similar problem, of course, faces rock music. When recordings are the art works, the live performance simply becomes a celebrity sighting or a nostalgia trip, and new releases never seem to match up to their esteemed precursors.
Teachout doesn’t pose any suggestions on how to reverse the trend, but he does note that jazz needs to start from scratch, presenting it anew to intelligent, young people. I would suggest that part of this process should be to make a case for their music as a fresh, live event, distinct from the imaginary museum of recorded jazz masterworks.