Author: Mark Berry

Biography of William Schuman

To my surprise, I found the biography of William Schuman at Borders today. John Clare interviewed the author, Juilliard president Joseph Polisi, last year.

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There’s more–including clips of lots of Schuman’s music–at the website to promote the book, schuman-americanmuse.com.

Happy Birthday William Schuman

Yes, it’s Barack Obama’s birthday, but it’s also William Schuman’s, and there was a time when that would have been a pretty big deal.

As John Clare reminded us on his blog, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic celebrated Schuman’s 50th birthday in 1960, opening their October 13-16 shows with his Symphony No. 3.

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Two years later, as Schuman began his tenure as president of Lincoln Center (he was previously president of the Juilliard School), he appeared on What’s My Line?

So Many Haters: Another Music Industry Death Report

In a New York Times op-ed piece Saturday, Charles Blow declared that the music industry (by which he means the recording part of the music business) will cease to exist “before Madonna’s 60th birthday.”

According to Blow, people are going to stop buying music because they can stream it for free online. But the music streaming companies aren’t the killers here: they’re new customers. They have to get their content somewhere; if labels stop recording, streaming services will have nothing new to play.
Also, people are still buying music. They still like their iPods. And they still like having control over their playlists. They may not buy as much in the future, and may not buy for the same reasons as before (for example, they may not be willing to shell out $20 for an entire CD of junk just to get the one hit song), but they will buy.
So don’t stick a fork in the recording industry yet. It’s far from done.

Mad Men and American Music

One of the things that makes the show Mad Men so intriguing is its detailed depiction of early-1960s New York. In a post on his blog Classically Hip, John Clare dug through the New York Philharmonic’s website to find the programs of concerts by the Phil in 1960 and 1961, the years that the first two seasons of Mad Men are set in. It’s fun to imagine Don Draper and his pals out with clients, or mistresses, in a first-tier company box at Carnegie Hall, waiting for Bernstein to take the stage.

The New York Philharmonic seems to have really gotten into the Mad Men spirit: over the last couple of seasons, they’ve been programming almost the exact same music as they did nearly 50 years ago. Back in March 1961, Bernstein brought Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon pli, written only a few years before, to the US for the first time, and opened the season with his own overture to Candide and Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 3 (composed in 1939 by a composer still very much active in 1960).

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A few weeks later, the conductor and company celebrated the 50th birthdays of both William Schuman and Samuel Barber.

Last September, Avery Fisher audiences heard the second “improvisation” from Boulez’s avant-garde meditation on Mallarme,

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and more music by Bernstein as part of Carnegie Hall’s Bernstein festival. This season in the fall, the Phil makes Charles Ives the focus of a concert, but he died in 1954 and stopped composing almost 100 years ago.

Comparing what’s happening now to the 1960-’61 season, three things jump out at me: one, that the concert-music scene in the early ’60s was exciting; two, that Bernstein really was a true champion of American music; and three, that we’re still too chicken to follow the example Bernstein set.
Where are the American symphonists that Bernstein tried to wedge into the canon? I get that Ives is really important, but he’s not the only great American orchestral composer. A lot of composers in the 20th century wagered a lot of time writing interesting, breathtaking music in the belief that the orchestra could be a truly American institution. Letting people enjoy their work will go a long way to showing everyone that they weren’t mad to do so.

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Holst’s Planets

If classical music is dead, how can it so spectacularly capture the magnificence that is the mixture of peanut butter and chocolate?  

And if we can have a chocolate bar named after an entire galaxy, why can’t we also compare one to the largest planet in our solar system?  
The music that accompanies this quick-and-painless Reese’s ad is “Jupiter” from British composer Gustav Holst’s orchestral work The Planets, another cheesy piece of classical music that everyone really should know.   
Holst wrote The Planets  in 1916.  A collection of seven short musical character studies meant to depict the personalities of the gods each planet in the solar system is named after, it’s by far the composer’s most popular work, and lives on through references in (commercials, of course, as well as) the soundtracks to such movies as The Right Stuff and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, as well as on The Simpsons and other TV shows. 
So grab some candy and enjoy a trip through space.  All hail, the Jupiter Cup!  

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Mark Learns About a Label: Rounder Records

I always thought of Rounder Records as a sleepy folk-music label, a place to go for Woody Guthrie re-releases and the like.  Then, late last year, I came across the rollicking album Ode to Sunshine on Rounder by roots-rock band Delta Spirit.  And then their Alison Krauss collaboration with Robert Plant, Raising Sand, won five Grammys.   Clearly, I have not been paying attention to what this Massachusetts-based imprint has been doing. 

Rounder has its share of releases that appear to be an attempt to make a quick buck on nostalgia (a new Dennis DeYoung album is one, sad example).  With their major artists, however, Rounder has built up a roster of talent that stays true to its identity as a home for Americana while reaching out to listeners who have no particular interest in the genre.  Records such as Ode to Sunshine and Raising Sand, both clearly rooted in traditional American music, are good rock records that anyone can love. 
Founded in 1970 by Cambridge folkies Ken Irwin and Bill Nowlin, Rounder’s first release in 1971 was a recording by 76-year-old banjo player George Pegram.  In the late 1970s, they started putting out albums by George Thorogood, raising their profile and earning them some cash.  In addition to Alison Krauss, which began recording for them in 1987, and Delta Spirit, Rounder is home to jazz singer Madeline Peyroux and Bela Fleck, whose Christmas album Jingle All the Way also won a Grammy this year. 
Personal injury lawyer and amateur music scholar Michael Scully recently published a book on Rounder and you can check out the Rounder Records website for more information. 

Jock Honors Amoeba, Explains Death of Music Industry

One-time journeyman basketballer Paul Shirley recently posted a tribute to Amoeba music on his ESPN.com blog. A nostalgic ode to record-buying by a guy who’s clearly a huge music fan, Shirley’s piece inadvertently addresses two important reasons for the downfall of major labels and the CD format they held onto for so long.  

For Shirley, shopping in Amoeba took him back to a time in his life when a record store was about discovery, a visceral experience that brought him closer to the world of music.  

I remembered why I like to do my music shopping like a bipedal organism.  It’s fun to be at record stores.  I like the posters.  I like the clacking sound the CDs make as people bang them together.  I like watching the nerdy girl’s eyes light up when she finds an old PJ Harvey album.  It’s all tangible; it’s real reality, as opposed to the virtual kind offered up by a computer, a mouse and a credit card. 

We hear and read a lot about how the music industry alienated hardcore music buyers like Shirley and, in doing so, practically killed themselves.  As Steve Knopper points out in his new book, Appetite for Self-Destruction, by letting the musical homes of Shirley and other loyal fans shut down, they turned away the very people who were willing to keep the CD–and its tasty profit margins–alive. 
Another one of “big music’s big mistakes,” as Knopper calls them, has been keeping the price of music too high.  Shirley’s trip to Ameoba reminded him that, as a youth, he “could rarely justify paying $12 for a new album.” People like Shirley love to explore and to share their discoveries, but with discs priced at $12–typically more–and with their stores shuttered, they’ll save their money and go online, where they’ll quickly find trying out music at home for free isn’t so bad. 

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto

As a kid, I first came across classical music in a commercial that ran on TV for one of those compilations that promised to send you on a journey to an enchanted land filled with enduring musical wonders.  Most of the music came off to me as pretty well all the same, but there was one piece that stuck out from the rest.  

The opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, with the pianist pounding out the beat behind the thick syrup-pour of strings, seemed at once completely out of place with the other “relaxing classics” and their epitome.  While other pieces whispered apologetically, Tchaikovsky’s concerto yelled, You are going to listen to some beautiful classical music now!  It was unashamedly, flamboyantly, cheesy music. 
It’s a staple of the repertoire today–a favorite piece of classical-music cheese–but when Tchaikovsky’s concerto premiered in Boston back in 1875, reviewers were, at their most forgiving, skeptical of its staying power and, at their most aggressive, outright dismissive.  A Russian critic panned the piece as “like the first pancake … a flop”; one Beantown writer described it as “difficult” and “strange,” asking “can we ever learn to love such music?”  
Since its ignominious premiere, many have acquired a taste for this stinky piece of musical lindberger, and during the Cold War the piece became a source of national pride–ironically, for Americans.   
In 1958, a young Texan named Van Cliburn shocked Moscow’s musical cognoscenti–and the Soviet party bigwigs–by winning the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition with a program that included Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.  
Coming after the launch of Sputnik and at the dawn of the Space Race, Van Cliburn’s win made him an unlikely hero at home: he was welcomed back with a ticker-tape parade in New York City and was hailed on the cover of Time as “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.”  His recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto won a Grammy and went on to become the first platinum-selling classical album.  
Almost 40 years later, in 1987, Van Cliburn stepped into the Cold War spotlight again, emerging from retirement to entertain Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan at the White House.  
  

Classical Online CD Retailer Offers Downloads

The popular online classical-music CD retailer Arkivmusic.com announced last week that it is now offering music downloads in MP3 format, beginning with five new releases from the budget-price label Naxos.  The company promises to expand its offerings in the future.  

Arkivmusic.com, founded in 2002, has built a loyal following of classical-music aficianados who see the site as an independent, well-stocked alternative to Amazon.com and other online retailers.  In particular, the site has earned kudos from the hard-core for offering on-demand CD reissues of out-of-print material from major labels, a program that has been active since March 2005. 
For years, people within classical music have held that the internet–and music downloading in particular–is an energizing force for their part of the music industry.  Alex Ross, in a New Yorker article from October 2007, sees interest in the genre growing as listeners sample new classical music through iTunes and as a classical music culture of bloggers, independent retailers, and music services galvanize the faithful.  
Most on the supply side, though, see the internet as a cheap and easy way to get their material out into the market.  In October 2005, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra became the first orchestra to sell their live recordings online, and, at around the same time, Universal Classics began selling download-only albums from the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  
Klaus Heymann, founder of Naxos, once claimed that he only began seeing a return on his investment in the company when downloading came along, and claims that “we could live comfortable if from tomorrow we never sold another CD.”

How to Sell CDs–or Not

Most people think that the CD is finished (my office mate won’t shut up about it), but there are still some who hold out hope that the format will endure. Instead of blaming the steady drop in sales of hard-copy music on digital downloading, these true believers have set their sights on retailers.

Peter Kafka’s argument is simple and to the point: the big-box stores, which sell the most CDs of any retail category, don’t give recordings enough space. If people can’t find music, Kafka argues, they can’t buy it.
Coolfer blogger Glenn Peoples provides a more nuanced view, writing that retailers aren’t properly using the space they do devote to music. For Peoples, stores need to adapt to the changing behavior of most consumers, who have come to see music as an impulse buy. At the same time, labels need to provide retailers with high-end product to satisfy the small but steady demand of hardcore music fans, and retailers need to put the effort into properly merchandising it.

The success that Wal-Mart had with their exclusive sale of AC/DC’s Black Ice—according to the Wall Street Journal, the CD sold well over a million copies in its first two weeks of release–shows just what a properly set up record can do in big box stores. The failure of Chinese Democracy, on the other hand, will surely make the mass merchants reluctant to dive headlong into exclusivity deals in the future.

Independent stores also may provide a place for the CD. A couple of years ago, after Tower Records fell, shops such as Silver Platters in Seattle and Other Music in New York were poised to take advantage. But today these retailers are realizing that there was a reason Tower went broke, and are diversifying, offering used CDs (as is Silver Platters) and going so far as selling downloads through their websites (as is Other Music).