Category: Music

The Future of the Orchestra: Part Two

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Finding a place for classical music in a new social and technological era.

Part One.

Before I begin, I want to point out that I am not an authority on this subject. I have never run an arts organization or worked as an orchestra administrator. All I am is a student and a young person that feels like classical music is his vocation. If I didn’t think that the music was worthwhile and that there is unexplored territory within it, I wouldn’t be studying it. On the other hand, I’m still trying to figure out what I think. These are my thoughts now.

One thing that I hear a lot when I talk about the future audience of classical music (classical in the vernacular sense) is the idea that the classical music audience will always refresh itself because as people mature, they look for music with more “substance.” I don’t know if that has been ever true (I suspect that there is some truth in that, as the median age of classical audiences has been old for longer than it should be if it were a single population), but I do know that if people are looking for serious art music that builds on tradition and rewards experience, there are plenty of other avenues available to them apart from classical.

This has to do with an idea that I’ve been puzzling over for a while: the idea that music falls in a spectrum between functional and art music. There is clearly some music that is purely functional: think dance music. This is completely independent of musical idiom or style; a Donna Summer extended mix might be in the disco style with disco form conventions, but musical decisions are made to make people’s bodies move. A great dance mix is one that facilitates a good time. On the other hand, there is a lot of music that is purely non-functional (“art” for lack of a better term). It’s not trying to make its audience move, or happy, or even entertained. Perhaps it’s an intellectual experience. Perhaps it’s exploring a spiritual theme. The best part about music is that there is everything in between those two extremes (in fact, probably all music is).

There’s a couple of strategies that we can extrapolate from looking at music this way. The first is: any argument about the relative merits of art and functional music is a waste of time. If I’m looking for people to have a good time at my party, I’m not going to put on Mahler. Conversely, if I feel like exploring new musical ideas, or hear a new musical perspective, I’m going to listen to an artist or composer that operates more on the art music side of the spectrum. This is what I mean on a practical level: laptop created music, death metal and hip-hop are not going to kill music, just as swing and rock and roll did not kill music. I am not trying to strawman here; I don’t know any prominent cultural critic or music critic that will claim that, but I have heard that kind of thing from devotees of classical music, the exact people who might reinforce negative stereotypes about the closed nature of classical music audiences. If you badmouth a whole style of music, you reinforce an antagonistic relationship between the audiences, and makes them feel like they are not welcome to listen an explore your music. That is not the way to grow your audience.

The second thing that we should realize about this spectrum between functional and art musics is that you can find it in many types of musical idioms. Jazz may have started as a street music, a functional music, but spend five minutes with a devoted fan and you’ll encounter music as experimental as any modernist composition. I think the indie explosion of the 2000’s is a sign of rock’s transition into an idiom with a substantial experimental branch. There’s a discussion going on right now at PostBourgie about the parallels between Jazz’s trajectory and hip-hop. As time goes on a musical idiom amasses a substantial body of work, and a new generation explores it and reinterprets it, changes it, and often takes it into a more arty direction.

I think that anyone who doubts me should look at some of the different forms within classical music itself: mazurkas, sarabandes, minuets, waltzes were all dances that actual people actually danced. Over time, these forms became more stylized, and the masterpieces that bear those names might be far removed from the music that people danced to.

The point that I’m trying to make here is that if people want experimental, or spiritual, or “substantial” music, they have options other than classical music. If classical music administrators and marketers assume that mature or curious listeners will inevitably make their way to classical music, they are sorely mistaken.

I’ve been talking about what orchestras and classical audiences shouldn’t do, now let me talk about what they should do. One of the ideas that I most agree with Greg Sandow about is that orchestras need to be more deliberate about their programming. If classical music is going to align itself towards a musically and intellectually curious audience, then they need to make sure that every concert tells a story or explores an idea. Much like a good playlist, an imaginative program can amplify the pieces within it. If you can sell your concerts as an evening long musical and intellectual journey, you can tap into a whole new audience.

In my next post, I’m going to discuss why orchestras need to start expanding their arts programs now to have a prayer at being viable in 15 years.

Hall Overton and the Jazz Loft Project

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I don’t know very much about Jazz. Or rather, I know enough about Jazz to understand the immensity of what I don’t know. Nevertheless, one of the best things that I have found on the internet in the last year is Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus‘ blog, Do The Math! Iverson, in addition to being a fine pianist, has a scholar’s knowledge of Jazz and a fine critic’s writing style. Something that has been particularly helpful to me has been his long-form interviews with musicians from across the musical spectrum (my favorites have been with Wynton Marsalis and Marc-André Hamelin). I find it interesting and useful to hear any musician talking about their creative processes and, in particular, the way that they listen to music. A side benefit has been that Iverson has pointed me towards a lot of interesting music (even if I don’t understand it all!).

One of his recent posts focused on Hall Overton, a Jazz arranger and Modernist composer active in the 1950’s and 60’s. The post was prompted by an NPR story in their series about the Jazz Loft Project (which I had been meaning to blog about anyway). Overton was an extremely interesting guy. He was both a Juliard composition professor and a jazz orchestra arranger most famous for notating Thelonious Monk scores. It’s well worth your time to surf over and listen to the 10 minute radio segment.

The audio tapes from that segment comes from the thousands of feet of tape amassed by photographer W. Eugene Smith. From the Jazz Loft Project homepage.

From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan’s wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith’s work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history.

Again, I won’t pretend that I’m the worlds biggest Jazz fan (because I don’t have a ton of experience with it, not because I don’t like it), but I’ve been reading the articles that have resulted from this research, and I think it’s pretty cool that we have these documents.

The Future of the Orchestra: Part One

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

I’ve been reading a ton of articles from the web archives of classical music critic and orchestra guru Greg Sandow. There is a lot that he writes about, especially about the orchestra’s place in education, but in other respects I think he is extremely off base. One of the things that he writes about is the aging of the classical music audience, and the different ways that orchestras and classical music organizations can attract new (and younger) audiences. I think Sandow is absolutely right about the need for music organizations to literally grow their audience by being active participants in public education, however sometimes he seems preoccupied with the appearances and superficialities of the business. A small disclaimer: almost all of the articles I have been reading were published between ten and fifteen years ago, so his views might have changed since then. He runs a blog at ArtsJournal.com, but I haven’t had a chance to read that yet.

One of the ideas that Sandow repeats is the idea that if orchestras coopt and mimic the language and advertising style of pop or jazz, that audiences will be more open to attending. Another is that the very use of concert halls and concert dress (tuxedos, etc.) is outdated. I think these fixations are completely wrongheaded. I do think that there is a lot of room to experiment with advertising, and I think that ambiance and presentation are important, but I think focusing on them misses more fundemental problems.

I think the two biggest “problems” that classical music institutions must find a solution to are:

1. Classical music requires engagement by the listener. Education and experience allow greater appreciation from the music, and, in the case of Modern/New or pre-Classical music, requires the listener to allow for musical languages different from that of the dominant culture.

2. The majority of people in this country don’t think that classical music belongs to them. This is independent of race, ethnicity and class.

In forthcoming posts, I’ll propose solutions to these problems.

Terry Riley – In C

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I was talking with one of my music instructors about my classes this semester, and I brought up the Minimalism class that I am taking. He kind of half smiled and said that he wasn’t familiar with much minimalist music, “…except, of course, In C. Everyone does that because it’s so easy to play.” I winced inside and politely nodded. He’s not exactly wrong, In C is about as transparent as it gets (the whole score fits on a single sheet of letter-sized paper), and yet looking at it like that completely misses the point.

In C revolves around “the Pulse,” a steady eighth note ostinato in the high register of the piano. For the other musicians (the ideal ensemble is somewhere between 20-35 players), there are 53 melodic cells. The performers are instructed to play them in sequence (and only in sequence), but they are free to decide how many times to repeat the cell, or to play the cell at all. They are instructed to never be more than four cells ahead or behind the rest of the ensemble, but everything else is left to the musician’s discretion.

In that sense the piece is simple. All of the information necessary to perform the work is found on that page. Yet it is a virtue of this work that looking at the score will tell you nothing about how the work sounds. By giving the musicians choice, collective and individual decisions completely change the character of the work. To give a couple of examples: players choosing to drop out for a few repetitions or cells completely change what would be the orchestration in a conventional work. If all your brass instruments drop out, that changes the character. If the musicians decide to play softly, that opens up the soundscape for an instrument to take a “solo.” Musician’s decisions can complely change the harmony and rhythm as well. There are different levels of syncopation in the cells. If the ensemble is spread out, those rhythmic changes come slowly and subtly, leaving the audience unable to distinguish where one rhythmic idea ends and another begins. If the ensemble is fairly close together, those shifts can be dramatic.

I had the opportunity to run through this with my college’s orchestra at the beginning of the semester, and was really surprised by things that I didn’t expect to be difficult. First, my instructor didn’t give enough credit to the difficulty of the cells. They are extremely fast, and occasionally are quite rhytmically complex. Not virtuoso music, certainly, but not easy either. It also requires a tremendous amount of self-confidence, as it can be very disorienting to try and keep to a pattern when you don’t quite know where everyone else is and there is no dominant beat except the Pulse. It would require a lot of rehearsal for any group to get to the point where they could begin exploring the possiblities I mentioned above.

In C had a great impact when it premiered in 1964. Steve Reich was a member of that ensemble (he was actually the person who suggested a Pulse when the ensemble had trouble keeping a steady beat) and his Music for 18 Musicians is clearly a descendent of In C. My Minimalism professor claims that everything that has ever been explored in minimalist music (I’ll have some thoughts on that later), and there is an argument to be made there. All minimalist composers who folowed Riley owe him a debt for his work in controlling harmony in the context of a musical process.

Terry Riley (b. 1935) is an American composer who studied with LaMonte Young (who I might write about). He also did some crazy cool work with early synthesizer music (see A Rainbow in Curved Air) and was one of the namesakes of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”

The National

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Another album that I listened to in my quest to listen to the critical picks of the ’00’s was The National’s Alligator. Boxer, the album that followed has become my go-to record for listening straight through. I won’t bore you with superlatives, but I will share something interesting that I’ve been mulling over.

It took a while for Boxer to permeate my musical conciousness. I had been a fan of “Fake Empires,” but most of the songs are so low key that all of the careful, subtle details went into the backdoor of my ears without every making themselves obvious. As I began to really hear more of it, I had a hard time figuring out what intangible thing made the production sound so fresh to me. Then it hit me; I was trying to project too much on the music. The reason that it sounded unique is that it is completely transparent, musically honest.

There are no production “tricks,” with the exception of some reverb and limited distortion on the guitars, everything is clean. While it’s not acoustic, there’s nothing that you couldn’t reproduce live. Matt Berninger sounds like he’s singing to you because his voice is not hidden behind layers of post-production. There is nowhere to hide

There is also nothing new in the structures of the songs; we’ve heard them a thousand times in other rock songs. They are so perfectly executed however, that this becomes an asset rather than a liability. This is one of the things that I like most about the album. Recording and musical technology is evolving so fast that it’s refreshing to hear a band that does everything with thoughtful orchestrations, solid songwriting, and supremely perfect execution.

A note on those orchestrations: music technology has lowered the price of recording and releasing music greatly, but has also made big, lush music with large numbers of session players obsolete and economically illogical. One of the great pleasures of the movie Ray were the scenes of big recording sessions (especially “Georgia On My Mind,” with full gospel choir and studio orchestra). I don’t have any information about the cost of this record, but I like that they went after that full, rich sound. Every time I listen to it I hear something new, some instrumental motif or riff that I never picked up on before.

If I had to pick something to single out for praise, I would have to choose Bryan Devendorf’s drumming and their recording engineer’s technique. Throughout the record, the drums sound beautiful. I’ve embedded “Mistaken for Strangers,” but the YouTube compression has killed it. Listen to it from a good quality file, or the CD. You can hear the rattles in the snare drum, the tom toms sound full, and the bass drum has not been overproduced to abstraction; in short, the drums sound like an instrument. It is also a credit to how tight the band is that Devendorf is free to drum interesting, syncopated patterns and not just be a metronome.

“Mistaken For Strangers” isn’t my favorite track on the album, but my heart jumps a little every time I hear the drums come in.