Tag: American Music

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.

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?

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.