A Title & Unexpected Consequences

An example of an obsequious music administrator mixing awkwardly with politics:

Kodálys The Peacock Variations was removed from a program opening a new center dedicated to the composer by Pannon Philharmonic manager Zsolt Horváth "because the piece could insult the Mayor of Pécs (Hungary)", whose last name is Páva, Hungarian for peacock.

The Chief Conductor of the Pannon Philharmonic Zoltán Peskó has now resigned because he cannot have his artistic freedom restricted in this way. Mayor Páva himself is reported to have said that he "had absolutely no objection" to the piece and that he didn't know what Horváth was thinking with banning the piece from the program. (Source: here; hat tip: Pusztaranger.)

Step one: merge. Step two: downsize. Step three: export production.

Sounds like some music administrators are ready to repeat some of the business practices that have made the past two decade just so peachy: American Music Center and Meet The Composer, Two of America’s Leading New Music Organizations, Announce Merger Plans. While there may be some organizational synergies to be had, it's always healthier to have some diversity and competition among those connected to commissioning, awards, publicity, and any other brownie buttons to be handed out.

The one bit of good news in this comes in the subtitle — American Composers Forum Will Assume Membership and Professional Development Services From American Music Center — it was never a very good idea to organize a "national" music information office as a membership organization and it's an even better idea, in terms of both costs and focus, to have the national professional services organization somewhere out in the middle of the country.

What Samuel Says

Composer and poet Samuel Vriezen  writes about the struggle of art and its relationship to the public space.  (Scroll down for the English version.) The immediate cause is the new Dutch minority government's plans to radically cut cultural spending,  but the principles are universal and timely, indeed urgent.  

I've long insisted here that the function of [culture, art, music] is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, and that insuring quality, diversity, and liveliness in our lives — our musical lives in particular — is a serious business demanding that we call out any petty abuses of musical-partisan micro-politics as a distraction from our common cause.   In any case, Samuel puts it far better than I can. 

Follow the money

This thread at The Rambler is well worth reading and ought to be fuel for some long-overdue discussion.*

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 * The degree to which "commercial recordings" of new music are actually commercially viable has, for the most part, always been small.  The exceptions are all exceptional — Harry Partch did earn some money from his own Gate Five label (taking advantage of having no middle man and minimal overhead), I assume that Phillip Glass's recordings have generally been income generating, and sometimes there's actually the odd hit that makes a speculative investment in musical obscura pay off: the Nonesuch Subotnick recordings, that Gorecki Symphony or such. 

Even in the days in which only a handful of labels existed with any interest in the vanguard, unless the label had deep enough pockets and an inventory-friendly tax code to risk a long amortization periods it was a common expectation that a composer would front the costs of the recording, either out of his/her own pocket or with grant money or the largess of the few patrons we've had.  There was really no great problem with this — indeed it put music out there in the world in a useful form that the market participants were not otherwise rushing to produce — so long as the simple existence of a recording was not viewed as anything more that it was, for example as C.V. filler for academic hiring and tenure decisions or for the awarding of grants and prizes and residencies. In the big world of commercial music making, the medium may be the message, but in our little niche, any question of substance has got to turn on the music itself, not on the arbitrary fact of whether it got captured as a vinyl, plastic or downloadable commodity.   

Nowadays, actually getting a high quality recording made and pressed, burned or uploaded is cheaper and easier than ever. (A good comparison is to my high school years, in the late '70s, when vinyl was produced by a small cartel of factories owned by multinational firms and in increasingly bad quality, often little more than cardboard sandwiches prone to falling apart.)  It has become clear that a prime function of cd recordings now is that of calling cards for composers and performers, as advertisement for the real action: getting gigs. (AFAIC, not an entirely bad state of affairs.)  (A friend recently told me that it has become a custom in circles of the well-recorded to inspect the shelves of those who have received their calling cards — to see if the plastic wrap has actually been removed from the jewel cases! No, in the privacy of their own living room, even your best friend may not be your most loyal listener...)  Yes, there will always be a small number of "serious" composers for whom a purchasing audience for their recordings exist, sometimes even approaching the conditions of a market, but let's try to be up-front about this, so we fall neither into the trap of over-estimating the prestige value of a recording nor into viewing every recording firm as a vanity press. 

The advantages of making music under the radar

The current dramatic cuts in cultural funding — whether due to market or political forces, and whether done in slow steps (as in Germany, where the rapidly rising costs of the rights for soccer broadcasts, for example, are gradually eating up state broadcasting budgets whose fee-supported funding would otherwise be stable or growing) or in sudden cuts (as in the Netherlands, where a nationalist/populist political coalition has found common cause in attacking "elitist" arts organizations, even when some of these organizations are best evidence of what that nation can be) — have been well-described and commented upon elsewhere.  All I can usefully add is a firm expression of solidarity with the protests, as these reductions are being made to institutions which are a essential part of lives led together, if those lives together are to be lived with any purpose more than simple survival, entertainment-fed passivity, and assent to a status quo.

My realistic assessment of times to come, however, is that we will probably have to get used to the largest cultural institutions, if they are able to survive the current rounds, functioning only with dramatically reduced resources and forced to cut back their activities to minima.  That usually means very little for the most adventurous programming, even when such programming ought to be seen and heard, at the very least, as an investment in the future vitality of the institutions. It's a vicious downward spiral, but I take some heart in the fact that no institution can or should be viewed as immortal, and this mortality is actually a good thing in the long term. So long as resources and interest remain or are found for the invention and support of new institutions, there is potential for the creative renewal and reinvigoration of institutional art making.

In the meanwhile, it is useful and heartening  to recognize that most of the work done in experimental and innovative forms and idioms takes place well outside of large institutions. Most new and experimental music does not require the resources of orchestras, state radio stations or opera houses, but is made for soloists (often composer-performers), small ensembles (often composed of collaborating composers-performers sharing resources) and can now include a technical sophistication that is no less that formerly monopolized by the large institutions.  Every composer can now carry the equivalent of a Kontakte-era WDR Studio, RCA Synthesizer and the complete apparatus of Repons in their own laptop.  Most new and experimental music can be performed and heard away from the formality and expensive of large concert halls, can be recorded on equipment and media that one owns at home, and no longer requires a licensed radio station for its broadcasting, nor is that broadcasting limited to the reach of a single broadcast antenna. (It can, however, be limited by the censorship of the PRC or North Korea, or perhaps by an end to net neutrality in the US.)

Perhaps more importantly, in these times, the fact that new and experimental music is essentially invisible/inaudible to the state and corporate apparatus can be very useful.  (James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State is a superb introduction to the limits of the legibility of real, existing traditional structures to the modern state and the disasters that the best of wills have led to because of that inflexibility.)  States and corporations alike prefer and tend to respond only to structures which follow radically reduced schemes and orders.  States and corporations draw straight lines and grids and group things according to least common denominators, losing detail, texture, tone, the nature of which is often more essential than crude, uniform measures. Recognition of this may not make states and corporations pay for our rent or lunch (that's what day jobs are for, buckaroos), but it does suggest a considerable artistic advantage of going under the radar.  

In recent protests against funding cuts in the Netherlands, the police were apparently able to control crowds of protesters because the protesters moved together, with a recognizable front line, and the police are said to have used the protester's own concerted music-making as a cue for their own actions.  How much more effective it would have been had the protesters moved, not as a coordinated mass, but as individuals roughly flocking in a general, but not manageable motion?  And however could the police have taken a cue from the music had it been, instead, sung quietly but independently by hundreds of individuals moving at the own time and trajectories through public spaces?  There's an interesting invitation to compose!  

How many composers do you know within three zip codes of your home?

A friend in the US recently made this suggestion:

Many people appreciate the beneficial presence of art galleries in small communities, but these businesses struggle. Art dollars flow towards urban centers on grounds of prestige. How about making local art purchases, say within three zip codes of the buyer's residence, tax deductible?

Republicans and Democrats could get together on this: a tax cut through which the government funds the arts by encouraging private spending. And the government would lose little revenue -- some of the tax burden the collectors avoid would pass through the dealers and artists.

I think this is a splendid idea, especially when it is extended to artists working in non-visual arts. Yep, tax breaks for new music commissions.  It seems even a politically plausible idea, given the preference of Democrats for stimulus and arts funding and Republicans for tax cuts of almost any sort.  (The scale of this proposal would probably be dwarfed by the massively state-subsidized sports stadiums which have been widely supported by Republicans; see, for example, George W. Bush and the Texas Rangers baseball team.)  

An essential part of a more lively future for new music has got to be giving more emphasis to locally made music as a complement and contrast to music representing super-regional centers of funding or prestige and the consensus of large institutional programmers.  A local element necessarily introduces more diversity into the mix, which is healthy for the development of music itself and for performer and audience attention as well as helps to create a better bond between composer and community, which seems like a necessary element in increasing engagement in the music as well as commitment to live performance opportunities.  

In many ways, the contemporary music environment is more like the Baroque era than the late romantic with its quasi-heroic composers striving for international careers.  In the Baroque, there were clearly musicians and elements of music itself which transcended the local, and even the more obscure small-town composer was networked into this, particularly with regard to style, but the bulk of actual music making, for example all of the huge bodies of liturgical music written by a J.S. Bach or a Telemann, was intended for local consumption and was frequently made with the specific resources — be they strengths or limitations — of their communities.

Another useful aspect of a tax break for commissions is that it could help with the imbalance given to the large commissions — operas and orchestral works — over pieces for soloists and small ensembles.  All galleries love the big sales of works of substantial scale by better-known artists, often to large institutional collectors, but the bread and butter business is the sale of smaller pieces to individual collectors.  The same should be true for commissioned compositions.  

 

More Thanatophiles

Tim Rutherford-Johnson points to another one of those classical-music-is-dead-or-dying articles, this time a "manifesto for the future of classical music." It begins with the phrase:

The classical music industry is in decline,

and goes downhill from there.  Just listen to the way that word "industry" clunks up against the word "music":  does such a phrase give you any confidence that the writer actually likes the subject for which he claims to be advocating?   I mean, if you dislike music so much that you can — without any apparent sense of irony, sarcasm, or grotesque —  describe the live production of music in terms of industry, then you certainly cannot expect readers to take your proposals seriously.  

Classical music is not dying, it's changing, and it's changing as it always has changed.  It's changing in terms of the repertoire included by the term, the way in which it is played and presented, and how it is received.   Moreover the change is not monocultural, defined by the movement of a single mainstream of prestige and highly concentrated economic power but increasingly diversified. If anything, this movement is away from any semblance of an industry and towards a resurgence of value in artisanship and craftsmanship.  The most highly commodified form of music, the big label commercial recording, has been completely eclipsed, both by technological possibilities, economic realities, and the aesthetic advantages of having more alternatives available in recorded form and a coterminal restoration of the centrality and prestige of the live public performance.  The format and venue of that live performance may well change, but it has always been changing. Some people and some institutions will lose out in this process, but that's okay as long as the real bottom line of making sure more music gets played and heard live is met.  

Not New and Not a Substitute for New

I don't understand the degree of praise that has accumulated around Newmusiconlineistan over the New York Phil's recent concert performances of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (30-some years after its premier) and now in advance of a Varese fest in NYC (almost 45 years after the composer's death).  Yes, there should be congratulations for good programming, but none whatsoever is due in these cases for programming new music.  

Yes, it might be embarassing that the [East Coast  of the] US has not yet seem a fully-staged performance of the Ligeti opera, let alone have it enter a house's repertoire.  [Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for correcting me here: there was a full production in San Francisco!]  The piece is entertaining (if stripped, by the composer, of almost all the authentic mystery, cruelty and guignol/grotesque of Michel de Ghelderode's extraordinary play, La Balade du grand macabre, replaced with a silly text and all too many adolescent musician in-jokes*) and has had a significant stage life in European houses, and the performance in New York seems to have been very well-received, but it is reception due a tested work of the last century, not the reception of an unknown — and thus, risky — new work.

And then Varese.  I am deeply attached to the works of Varese, but there are no more brownie points given for novelty when performing his works.  The bulk of the tiny Varese catalog was written before the Great Depression (and Varese's own personal great depression)  and the catalog, as wonderful as most of it is, has been discovered and (supposedly) forgotten ever since with a wave motion, the regularity of which would have provided Kondratiev with a textbook example.  The most recent waves have come with the Frank Zappa seal of approval, probably increasing the audience size by an order of magnitude or more with the addition of a healthy number of lonely young weird-music-obsessed men to the crowd.  But the cycle has been more of spiral, with performances of Varese's music increasingly familiar program points, as established repertoire but not as new music.   (The recorded works have been steadily in print;  Ameriques has become a regular showpiece for conductors and orchestras, Density 22.5 is standard rep for flautists, Ionization for college or conservatory percussion ensembles; I've even heard Equatorial four times live, and that's a piece with a particularly hard-to-cover instrumentation, including a pair of Ondes Martenots)  For, fresh — indeed, renewable, as one says around here — as Varese's music can be, it is not modern music, it is not contemporary music, it is no longer new or experimental but it is — as Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn put it more than a generation ago —  a "look back at the future", at the ultra-modern (cum ultra-primitive) future imagined a very long time ago.  

There have now been several intervening generations of composers whose work shares Varesian concerns but turned into very different directions (including those who knew Varese, like Dlugoszewski or Tenney) .  And there are plenty of young composers today with interesting and alternative looks at a very different future.  The Philharmonic's new music advisor, Magnus Lindberg, certainly has an exuberant orchestration style that owes a lot to Varese, but just as certainly has an urgency that is of our moment.    

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* Ligeti's fundamental lack of understanding for the Ghelderode makes me somewhat relieved that he abandoned his two later operatic projects, a version of The Tempest and an Alice in Wonderland. 

 

Live and Local

Let me out myself once more: I like live music, played by warm bodies, for warm bodies, in real rooms.   I prefer live performances of music made for live performance to recordings.  I like the spontaneity and variation a live performance necessarily brings to a work and I like the way the music dissipates in a real room or out-of-doors space, as the sound waves are absorbed and reflected into both air, architecture, ear, and memory.  A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.  I prefer even a clumsy live performance by an amateur but spirited group of local musicians to the best-engineered recording by the most prestigious big city orchestra.  Recordings do have definite virtues, as tangible, portable, divisible comodifications and records of a part of that experience (and, though I harbor serious doubts, I don't discount the potential of such media to have some positive economic effects), but I find them most valuable as a medium for music made specifically for a recorded format.* 

This article, by Terry Teachout, proposes a "thought experiment" (the quotation marks are Teachout's own) in which, essentially, all but the upper tier of big-city professional orchestras are abandoned and those of us in localities without big orchestras are to be satisfied with recordings. Teachout sees the minor leagues in the orchestral world as no longer performing a function they filled in the days before recordings.  This is historically wrong, as the local orchestral life in the US developed in parallel with recordings and, in the early part of the 20th century, was closely connected to immigration from Europe.  (Before that, the US had largely been a wind band country with orchestral and operatic music largely restricted to the biggest cities.)  Further, Teachout sees other locally-produced art forms as more diverse, innovative and higher in quality in offerings and the orchestra standing in a zero-sum competition for resources with those other organizations.  I believe that this is missing something important about the nature of orchestral music-making — what other archaic performance form, aside from sport regularly puts the better part of a 100 people on stage? —  with its unique relationship to a community.  

Not all concerts are perfect environments for either those bodies or the music they make or hear — far from it — but there is always opportunity to optimize the experience and, if history is any indication, the experience will change.  There are indeed survival-level-serious questions about local orchestras, but thinking about these problems from the top-down, from the vantage point of big-league orchestras is exactly wrong and in many cases, the greatest contributor to these problems has been a fixation on commuting conductors and big music management.  Local orchestras, if they are to survive, will have to recognize and capitalize on their advantages of locality, flexibility, accessibility, cost, and diversity.  They can only profit from emphasizing that they can do things that the major orchestras don't and that their recordings cannot.   The range of living composers played by the majors, for example, has been seriously restricted to coteries of "approved" composers** and the only possible solution to this cartelization of orchestral opportunities lies in the locals.  By doing business in a town like Pasadena, or Teachout's "Podunk", you have the absolute luxury not to parrot what is being done in the big town.  And this is where I agree substantially with Teachout:  the solution is not in "schlock" (Teachout's word) entertainment concerts, no Wookies-on-ice-with-lasers-meet-Benvenuto Cellini, but in an authentic extension of what they actually can do best.   I do not wish to suggest that local orchestras are doing a particularly good job of this now, but finding common cause with local musical innovators is a real part of the solution.  If serious music is to do more than survive, if it is to thrive, then it has got to be an active presence both deep and wide, from children to seniors, from amateurs to professionals, from the living room to the school auditorium or church  to the fancy endowed concert halls on campuses and in big cities.

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* Recordings have become so cheap and ubiquitous that their main function among new musicians is not as an object of commerce but as an advertisement for concert music, for the gigs where money is actually made.  We used to hand out calling cards, now we hand out cds. 

**The worst part of this is that the effect is self-sustaining: a small group gets all of the opportunities to compose for orchestra, and the ensuing lack of experience with composing for orchestra gets used against programming or commissioning composers who are outside of the group.  This is in best (worst) evidence with the present regime at the Cabrillo Festival, which is now basically a summer satellite activity of east coast conservatory composers at the expense of Cabrillo's traditional commitment to west coast experimentalism. 

An age of repertoire, not of works too big to fail

I'll risk some historical over-generalization and make the claim that music moves between periods of rapid innovation, marked by singular works exemplifying the particular innovations, and periods of consolidation, in which the technical gains of the innovative era are refined and developed as elements, conventions even, of musical repertoires.   The extreme experimentation of the late 14th century, for example, was followed by the consolidation of the 15th; the radical innovations of early opera were soon enough followed by the establishment of a fairly strict regiment of conventions. 

I will further claim that we are now well into a period or consolidation, one in which both the most apparently traditional and radical strains of repertoire are better characterized by features broadly shared rather than by striking individual stylistic or technical traits.   

Which brings me 'round to the new music-political news of the day: the New York Philharmonic announcing a $10 million gift from Henry R. Kravis to support composers-in-residence and a biannual commission of some 250 grand.   This is clearly good news, and the selection of Magnus Lindberg as the first comp-in-rez under the gift is a solid choice.   However, the decision to award a single very very very large commission for a single work of new music is not so good.  

As a commenter to Lisa Hirsch's fine blog , Iron Tongue of Midnight, complains, it would have been much better to slice that commission in, say, ten parts, which would have had a more significant impact across the new music community and forced the orchestra to put at least that many premieres on their calendar.  Instead of putting all of their money on a single composer, there would be a greater field of opportunity for innovative work.  As it is, a commission of this size — basically unheard of in the new music world, in which, let's face it, 25K is a large commission — puts incredible stress on the success of a single piece by a single composer.  It literally becomes a piece that is too big to fail.  

Unfortunately, pieces which have been built up as too big to fail have a pretty lousy track record of near misses (Repons) and total failures (Montezuma, anyone?), and when expectations are so high and so much money and prestige is at stake, commissioners will feel obliged to make safe, familiar choices among composers and composers selected will feel obliged to play it safe with their works.  But in an alternative environment in which newly-commissioned works of music would be more frequently encountered, the whole calculation of risk falls another way and, while there will certainly continue to be room for commissioning composers who are already known quantities on the circuit, there will be room for some unconventional choices as well.  Moreover, it seems to me that this approach would also be a better fit for our current age of repertoire, as both the diversity and commonalities of the various strains of new musical production cannot be represented by singular examples;  the old, institutionally-nourished masterwork ethic is no longer operative.

     

The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play the Game

Lesson one for young composers: Not everyone will love your music, and some people will decide that you, too, are unloveable, because of your music. 

Lesson two for young composers: Get over lesson one and get on with your own work.

Lesson three for young composers: Should people in positions of real economic or political power within the musical community use their dislike for your music and/or person as a basis for exercising their power, then feel free to call them on it, even if the stakes are modest.  Keep cool, speak clearly and loudly about this, but do not expect lasting change and make concrete plans for the independent material and moral support of your work.

Lesson four for young composers: Having wrestled with the authorities, get back on with your own work. 

*****

The most rewarding part of this blogging experience has been the exchange and conversation with musicians and people who like music who happen to inhabit very different corners of New(andnotsonew)musicland.  I'm continually surprised by the amount of fruitful practical, technical, and aesthetic exchange I can have with someone who writes tonal music for windband or modal music for church choirs or who specializes in big bands or rock or computers or hardware hacking or is a serious student of film music or even hard-core opera fans or barbershop quartet singers. The only lasting conflicts I've encountered online have actually come from people with musical repertoire interests closest to my own.  I guess that this is sometimes just a matter of strongly territorial competition, or fear of too much oxygen been consumed in a very small space, but it's mostly just a side effect of caring so much about the music and the ideas behind it: one can come to identify with some music or have the feeling that they own it, with all the exclusive rights associated with ownership. This often leads, to my ears,  to a dangerous intolerance for a diversity of viewpoints, which is hardly the most useful viewpoint for an experimental musician.  I have myself been guilty of this, and if you find me at it again, please call me on it!

*****

If you write tonal or modal music, there will be partisans of music which is not tonal or modal who are unhappy with your work.  If you write music that is not tonal or modal, there will be those who do who are unhappy with your work.  If you write tonal music, there will be other tonal composers who are unhappy with your particular technique or syle of tonality.  If you write music which is not tonal, there will be other not-tonal composers who are unhappy with your particular technique or style of not being tonal.

If you write music, there will always be someone who is unhappy with your music for being too complex and there will be someone else who is unhappy with your music for being not complex enough.   If you use a system or method, some people will be unhappy; others are unhappy if you don't use a system or method, and still other are unhappy if you use the "wrong" system or method. There will be people unhappy if you write music with catchy tunes and rhythms or refer to any other repertoire, classical, popular, or outside of the immediate historical and cultural context.  There will also be people who are unhappy if you write music that doesn't do any or all of these things.  There are people who are unhappy with music that is not active enough or diverse enough in content or character and there are people who are unhappy if they find music to be too active or too diverse.  There are people who are only happy when music is neatly packaged while there are other people who are most unhappy when they find music to be too neatly packaged.  There are people who are only happy when music contains some intellectual, cultural, and/ or emotional depth and there are people for whom happiness only comes with music that entertains and goes away without disturbing the soul.   

If you write music for instruments there will be those who are only happy with music for voices, and the same goes in reverse.   If you use "extended" techniques with voices or instruments, some people will be unhappy; if you don't use "extended" techniques, other people will be unhappy.  If you write music using electronics, there will be souls who become unhappy anytime they see a power cable or even a dry cell in a concert hall, while there are others who are unhappy anytime they don't see an electric power source.  If you bend circuits there will be people who are unhappy because you're not using a computer, the big computer people have always been unhappy with the small computer people, and there are some people who are unhappy when you do not use the same Mac laptop model.

There are some people who are unhappy if you use an alternative tuning, while there are others who are unhappy if you do not. There are people who are only happy when they hear an accordion or a vibraphone and there are people who are unhappy when they hear a cowbell or a vibraslap.  Some people are only happy in the presence of vibrato, others are happy only in the absence of vibrato.  There are people who are only happy with live music and there are people who are only happy with a broadcast or recording.  There are some people who are only happy when music is played a certain way or by certain musicians.   There are some people who simply are not ever happy with music.

It is difficult, very difficult, when the music one makes and loves does not make others happy. But when you are in a position to recognize there are some people who will never be made happy by music and others for whom their musical happiness is predetermined by a categorical preference for this or dislike for that, isn't this an opportunity to recognize that these people are lost causes, and it's better to treasure and cultivate people who still have their ears open than to worry about, let alone make music for, lost causes?   

 

 

The Orchestra, Reformed

Somehow, in these scattered postings about orchestration, I have neglected to mention a pair of musicians doing important work on the music-technical and economic/social/political problems of making music with large ensembles.

The first is composer Daniel Goode, who has a long working relationship to the Gamelan Son of Lion (see this posting on Our Other Orchestra) and additionally has, in recent years, worked with both the concept and concrete examples of a "Flexible Orchestra", a mixed ensemble including at least one instrument in multiple instances (in a recent concert, the orchestra was composed of eleven flutes, tuba, harpsichord, trumpet, and contrabass).  Such combinations have the potential to provide very striking environments for music-making, in this case including timbral and registral variety but also allowing for at least one example of the symphonic qualities or chorus-effect made available by a single timbre in mass, an efficient and even elegant distilling of some of the most characteristic features of traditional orchestral ensembles. Mr Goode's homepage includes several articles exploring these topics (see especially the "Letter from Vienna" and "How can the orchestra be more like the gamelan?".)

The second example is composer Andrew Culver's proposals for an "anarchic philharmonic".  The first concern is obviously the institution of the "obligato conductor", but the standard composition, organization, rehearsal method, and concert structure are all rich areas for exploring alternatives. Needless to say — and precisely because I'm familiar with the pitfalls of previous experiments in this direction (Cage's orchestral version of Cheap Imitation being the central case in point, and Etcetera and some of the Number Pieces indicating some possible paths out) — I'm in complete agreement with Culver.  I can't wait to see a black flag flying oover Disney Hall or the Concertgebouw.

Concentration of Cultural Capital

This brief article, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital, is well worth a read.  It is precisely the same sort of social concentration in the mainstream new music world which concerns me; the fact that the kinds of composers who are invited to the Cabrillo Festival these days, for example, overlaps so much with those who study at, say, Juilliard or already get play in the major orchestra circuit probably also means that the range of ideas exchanged is necessarily going to be limited, and that kind of limitation does not readily lend itself to the outside-the-box thinking that can often lead to the musically exciting.  

The Routine

"Pulitzer Prize in Music?  Passport to oblivion."  — Richard K. Winslow

Let's get over the Steve-Reich's-Pulitzer-Is-Well-Deserved-But-30-Years-Too-Late trope, okay?  If you go through a list of the music composition awards* (or the poetry or editorial cartooning awards, for that matter), it's pretty clear that they stick to a pattern of handing it out for several years in a row to mid-career musical quietists (mainstream conservatives, and yes, I mean quietist, even when the music is loud)  and then tossing in a neglected senior figure from time to time, either someone really unavoidably significant, but never within the acceptable middleroad (Ives, Brant, Coleman) or someone very much a part of the establishment but not actually having produced a great piece (Sessions, Powell, Gould).    

Ron Silliman, from whom I cheerfully steal the E.A. Poe term "quietist", has a great post this week (here), in which he notes that in US poetry, it has only been new formalists who have made an attempt at stealing the brass ring from the quietists.  East coast 12-toners seem to have once made a serious attempt along these lines in the Music Pulitzer's, with Wuorinen and Martino each getting through, as place holders, perhaps, for Babbitt, who was eventually settled with an honorary "lifetime" award,  but the awards themselves quickly returned to the routine of less obstreperous selections.  While it may well be possible that Ben Johnston, for example, a figure who has does some bridging between the experimental and academic worlds might yet see an award, and an award for Glass  is probably only a matter of time, major American composers — all composers, in fact, whose work is understood now, in terms of concert performances and recordings, to be essential American repertoire — for whom the ring was simply never available have included Harrison, Cage, Feldman, Brown, Nancarrow, and Erickson and probably will continue to include Riley, Young, Lucier, Ashley, Oliveros.  

The bigger story about the Pulitzers is, of course, the continued slighting of online journalism.  I suspect, for better or worse, that the first such award will come in criticism, given the continuing reductions in critic positions by print journals. Fortunately, there are some blogging critics out there who have already demonstrated the perceptiveness and writing chops required as well as a command of the medium's unique possibilities to do the job imaginatively.  

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*Here's my list with estimated ages of the recipients at the time of the award:

1943: William Schuman (32), Secular Cantata No. 2: A Free Song
1944: Howard Hanson (47), Symphony No. 4
1945: Aaron Copland (44), Appalachian Spring, ballet
1946: Leo Sowerby (50), The Canticle of the Sun
1947: Charles Ives (72), Symphony No. 3
1948: Walter Piston (56), Symphony No. 3
1949: Virgil Thomson (53), Louisiana Story, film score
1950: Gian Carlo Menotti (38), The Consul, opera
1951: Douglas Stuart Moore (57), Giants in the Earth, opera
1952: Gail Kubik (37), Symphony Concertante
1953: no prize awarded
1954: Quincy Porter (57), Concerto Concertante for two pianos and orchestra
1955: Gian Carlo Menotti (43), The Saint of Bleecker Street, opera
1956: Ernst Toch (68), Symphony No. 3
1957: Norman Dello Joio (44), Meditations on Ecclesiastes
1958: Samuel Barber (48), Vanessa, opera
1959: John La Montaine (41), Piano Concerto
1960: Elliott Carter (51), String Quartet No. 2
1961: Walter Piston (67), Symphony No. 7
1962: Robert Ward (44), The Crucible, opera
1963: Samuel Barber (53), Piano Concerto
1964: no prize awarded
1965: no prize awarded (See Duke Ellington)
1966: Leslie Bassett (43), Variations for Orchestra
1967: Leon Kirchner (48), Quartet No. 3 for strings and electronic tape
1968: George Crumb (38), Echoes of Time and the River
1969: Karel Husa (47), String Quartet No. 3
1970: Charles Wuorinen (31), Time's Encomium
1971: Mario Davidovsky (37), Synchronisms No. 6
1972: Jacob Druckman (43), Windows
1973: Elliott Carter (64), String Quartet No. 3
1974: Donald Martino (42), Notturno
1975: Dominick Argento (47), From the Diary of Virginia Woolf
1976: Ned Rorem (52), Air Music
1977: Richard Wernick (43), Visions of Terror and Wonder
1978: Michael Colgrass (46), Deja Vu for percussion and orchestra
1979: Joseph Schwantner (36), Aftertones of Infinity
1980: David Del Tredici (43), In Memory of a Summer Day
1981: no prize awarded
1982: Roger Sessions (85), Concerto for Orchestra
1983: Ellen Zwilich (44), Three Movements for Orchestra (Symphony No. 1)
1984: Bernard Rands (50), Canti del Sole
1985: Stephen Albert (44), Symphony RiverRun
1986: George Perle (70), Wind Quintet No. 4, for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon
1987: John Harbison (48), The Flight into Egypt
1988: William Bolcom (49), 12 New Etudes for Piano
1989: Roger Reynolds (54), Whispers Out of Time
1990: Mel D. Powell (77), Duplicates: A Concerto
1991: Shulamit Ran (41), Symphony
1992: Wayne Peterson (65), The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark
1993: Christopher Rouse (44), Trombone Concerto
1994: Gunther Schuller (69), Of Reminiscences and Reflections
1995: Morton Gould (81), Stringmusic
1996: George Walker (73), Lilacs, for soprano and orchestra
1997: Wynton Marsalis (35), Blood on the Fields, oratorio
1998: Aaron Jay Kernis (38), String Quartet No. 2, Musica Instrumentalis
1999: Melinda Wagner (42), Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion
2000: Lewis Spratlan (60), Life is a Dream, opera (awarded for concert version of Act II)
2001: John Corigliano (63), Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra
2002: Henry Brant (88), Ice Field
2003: John Adams (56), On the Transmigration of Souls
2004: Paul Moravec (46), Tempest Fantasy
2005: Steven Stucky (55), Second Concerto for Orchestra
2006: Yehudi Wyner (76), Chiavi in Mano, (piano concerto)
2007: Ornette Coleman (77), Sound Grammar
2008: David Lang (51), The Little Match Girl Passion
2009: Steve Reich (72), Double Sextet

More on competitions etc.

Jessica Duchen is on the trail of the (corrupt) music competition system.   The career stakes for performers in these affairs are generally higher than those for composers, for whom the main problem is that entrants are too often being asked to fund the competition prize through entry fees without clear-cut aesthetic criteria for the judging offered up-front, but the nepotism and abuses of the jury system indicated here are alarming.  

Music is not a sport and simply doesn't operate by the kinds of rules that lend themselves to fair judging, so maybe the best solution is to simply recognize that competitions — unless very carefully, ethically, and openly organized, like the "Iron Composer" competition, for one — are by nature  prone to abuse.  Given that recognition, we can then either ignore them altogether or take them in a much lighter spirit, as a none-too-serious form of entertainment. 

The best way for a young musician to establish a reputation for playing is through playing, especially with other musicians, not competing against them.  Play lots of different music in informal settings, as a soloist or chamber musician, and cultivate your "works well with other skills" as well as the purely musical chops.  Playing for free in such events is far more useful than trying to finance your way into the competition circuit.  Organize your own soirees and concerts.  The finest musicians I know have established careers in just this way and their independence from the conservatory/competition/agent system has meant that they can play a greater number of concerts with a greater variety of music and have more interpretive freedom than their colleagues who are locked into narrower repertoires with lower levels of interpretive tolerance.  The per-concert fee of a good new music pianist, for example, may be lower than that of a good Chopin player, but the new music pianist is going to play more music more often and can more readily establish a niche that looks like a real career than the mainstream player who is always subject to the whims of the current market.  

Bake Sale

This story makes me very happy:  Newspeak and Ensemble de Sade are holding their "1st Annual New Music Bake Sale".  It's not quite the pancake breakfast suggested here, but it'll certainly do.  In order to thrive, New Music has to go wide and deep, not only concentrating on the elite institutional life of opera houses, major orchestras, university music departments and a handful of venues in Manhattan, but reaching and integrating our music-making into homes, schools, and communities, a task not made any easier by the increasingly disconnected patterns of contemporary life.   I can't make it on the 17th — I'll be with the family in Nepal — but if you do, have a slice of banana bread and think of me.

Misfired Canons

An initiative for the promotion of new music based in Cologne, ON, has released a "key works list of new music."  The organizers have not been shy of the word "canon" and the list is presented as "Cologne's Guide to New Music."  The whole thing is here.  The hat tip goes to MusikTexte, the current issue of which has a fascinating review of the list and the process of arriving at it.  Gisela Gronemeyer, MusikTexte editor notes that the creation of the list was dependent upon voluntary nominations, reflects the institutional biases of the jury, includes nothing by composers outside Europe and the US  (interestingly enough, the US-Americans included are overwhelmingly experimentalists, not the major institutional figures) and, shockingly, includes no women.

Now, making lists can be useful in examining one's experiences and biases, or at the very least, fun, in the fashion of a parlor game or meme.  (I hope that my own on-going and entirely personal series of "landmarks" is understood in this way; it's not a "best of" list, but a list of works intimately tied to my own musical biography, works that changed the way in which I listen.)   List-making, in an attempt to describe a canon is, however, an inherently troublesome business, bound to reflect, on the one hand, the inevitable biases of the canon-makers's own personal experiences or professional interests, and equally bound to create complaints — many of them completely justified — at exclusions or over-emphases.  While most lists of the kind are harmless, a serious problem can ensue when a list aquires some official status, and with it, power to affect programming or commissions or other assignments of favor or material goods.  Were ON's list only an historical record of the preferences and predelictions of a single community of musicians at one point in time, it would be useful and unobjectionable as historical or ethnographic data.  But the attachment of ON's list to a program for the promotion of new music with more than personal or local ambitions is highly problematic. 

 

Antitrust

Some news travels slowly. I just learned today, from the new issue of MusikTexte, that the European Commission announced in July of last year that it had lifted two monopolies which had been exercised by European collecting societies: the membership clause, in which members of one organization were prevented from choosing or moving to another, and the territorial restrictions, which prevented individual societies from issuing royalties outside their domestic territories. The collection of licenses for music is in serious transition and it is difficult to guess how this particular decision will play out. On the one hand, I like the idea that an organization with muscle, like Germany's GEMA, will be able, in priciple at least, to start collecting license fees in those countries in which the local collecting society is ineffective (some societies are notoriously ineffective at collecting and forwarding royalties for members of foreign societies, despite cooperation agreeements to the contrary). On the other hand, the experience of the United States, which has three competing collecting societies (ASCAP, BMI and SESAC) but is still unable to provide blanket coverage or collect fees at the level of Germany's GEMA, is not particularly encouraging.

Feed & Fuel

It's reasonable to suppose that, beyond the wars and the financial crisis, the abiding contribution of the Bush years will be the total coupling of food and energy prices.  In the abstract, this makes sense, as proteins, grains and fat are just fuel for animals and the production and delivery of foodstuffs necessarily includes the expenditure of other forms of energy, so the volatility of one will have to track that of the other.  But the logic of the equation doesn't make it any less painful to economically weaker parties, whether as consumers or producers.   Here in Europe, for example, the butter price has moved in similar motion with the oil price,  with consumers hurt both at the peak prices of last summer and the reduced pocketbook of the moment while small farmers who geared up for the high export demand for China and India are now faced with surpluses and trying to stem increasing loss margins.  If you add in the connection between the nature of our food supply and the resultant medical costs directly associated with food content and quality, it starts to become clear that getting energy policy right means getting food and health policy right as well.  It's a not a matter of fixing something, but fixing everything.

An activity like new music (or dance or poetry)  isn't significant to the markets described above, although the people who make this music are irretrievably stuck inside them, so we tend to do what the system orders rather than actively resist.  But wouldn't it be more useful, to ourselves, our work, and possibly the larger system itself, to find better ways of working in the margins, the statistical insignificant underground?  Often times, the smallest irritation (like a grain of sand in the wrong place in your left shoe) can become an agent of real change.  Yes, this is the case for a vanguard or an elite, if you will, but when the whole is not functioning well, it's high time for experimentation in the parts, even the smallest parts.  

The slow, seasonal & local food movement may well be the best model for us.  In my recent trip to California, I was struck simultaneously by the huge number of fast-food restaurants, the ever-larger size of American bodies and the still-large auto sizes (people are stuck with big cars cause they can't sell them or get financing on new, smaller, ones) on one hand and the near-absence of home fruit and vegetable gardens and reduced produce sections in groceries (not to mention home solar heating or energy generation;  even worse is the news that the series of food contamination scares have driven people towards more consumption of processed foods rather than frech) on the other.  The phenomena are directly related to one another.  More garden production is not going to feed the masses more healthily and economically, but it is an irritant, a positive one, that can lead to mass producers improving both the quality and variety of their foods.  

I believe that the same goes for music.  If more new, local, and live music were introduced into life at the local level, starting from homes, schools, churches, and in community and civic functions, this would lead to a net increase in variety and quality as well as break the hold that large institutional publishers (and institutional censors, like UIL described in a recent post) and their house composers exercise over repertoire.  Moreover, the creation of bonds between creative artists and their communities can be part of a community's identity, an a more interesting part of the identity than, say, the architectural variety of local strip malls. 

See also this old post about composers and localities.

 

Prescribed

The power of the Texas Board of Education over the content in school textbooks is well-known.  Given the large size of the Texan schoolbook market, publishers go out of their way to modify their books in order to satisfy the criteria of the censors there, which maked the Texan standards effective in much of the rest of the country.  Periodically, this errupts into controversies over Texan Board of Ed. members cutting something out of, or getting something else stuck into, textbooks, sometimes leading to serious reductions in the quality of those books.

Now, I'm a bit shocked to learn that the University Insterscholastic League in Texas — which, although "voluntary" in membership, effectively controls athletic, academic, and musical competitions among public schools throughout the state — maintains a list of "Prescribed Music" for in-state competitions by bands, orchestras, solo vocalists and choirs.  Sheet music publishers take listing by the UIL seriously as without it, sheet music sales to schools in Texas, one of the largest markets in the US, will be limited.  

Above and beyond the issue of whether musical competition organized along the lines of sporting events is a good idea,  a list like this is really problematic.  It's one thing to provide the service to school music teachers of grading pieces according to difficulty or of assessing the physical qualities of the performance materials or even for an organization of music teachers to share recommendations, but to make a "Prescribed" list for competitions, with exceptions allowed only under strict limitations (the work must be approved in advance, can only be a single item on the program, and cannot be the first in a school's program) , is controlling students' access to information, which is nothing other than censorship.  Yes, I think it's a problem if a choir director has to apply for exceptional permission to have his choir sing the Machaut Messe, (Texas-born) Pauline Oliveros's Sound Patterns, or any Monteverdi madrigal other than the four which publishers happened to have submitted to the list.

Musical works composed for school ensembles are not likely to be libelous, obscene, incite to violence, treat currently controversial topics in education (like maybe I should write an Evolution March or a Fantasy on Intelligent Design?) , or otherwise corrupt the nation's youth. So one has to wonder what the rationale for censorship here must be.  One appears to be to keep the competition repertoire well-within the "classical" or "serious" music domain, particularly against the great pressure to perform more popular, "entertainment" repertoire.   I understand this problem and I recognize the difficulty of precisely defining the aesthetic, technical, and stylistic qualities one wants to hear, but the difficulty of making that definition is not an excuse for making a list like this, for there is really no educationally or musically valid reason to exclude (or contribute to the exclusion) of work which would meet those qualities, so one should be obliged to do the heavy lifting and try to make definitions rather than simply point at works (in the Potter Stewart manner of identifying pornography).  Otherwise, one has to suppose that the basic function of the list is the preservation of market position for those in the know about UIL, a trade secret held tightly by publishers and a handful composers more tightly connected to school music networks.  Indeed, the criteria listed in the application for the substitution of an unlisted work for band (read it here) is strongly biases towards composers and publishers with established relationships to the UIL system.