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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.

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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