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June 19, 2007

The change

by Greg Sandow

Doug's right about me. I think fundamental change is afoot. Well, actually I think the change has already happened, in the world outside the arts, otherwise known as the real world. Now the arts have -- rather late in the game -- discovered the changes, and are trying to figure out how to adapt. Isn't that what we're doing here?

I love the posts I've been reading, whether I agree with them or not. Thanks, everyone. Post more, Molly! As I'm reading everyone, I realize something about myself. For better or worse, my loyalty increasingly isn't to the arts, but to the world outside, which is just so much more thoughtful and engaging. I don't mean I don't love art. That's where much of my heart lives. But the arts just don't represent art any more, since so much terrific art happens outside their boundaries. That makes the arts (as opposed to art) seem increasingly stale.

So when I hope for dramatic changes -- orchestras playing like rock bands (if, following Robert, we want to put it that way) -- that's not just because I think this will bring more people to classical music. It's the kind of performance I myself want to see. It would bring me to classical music! (And I've been a classical music professional for more than 30 years.)

This is especially true for me, since I know that pop music performers aren't always overtly demonstrative. They can be full of rapt attention, playing music with depth and subtlety. Just watch Neil Young's band in Heart of Gold, the inspiring film of a Young concert that Jonathan Demme made a year or two ago. (It's on DVD, and I recommend it lavishly, in part because it's a terrific demonstration of how to film music. If Jonathan Demme filmed an orchestra, something would happen onscreen even if the orchestra didn't change at all.)

But the main lesson should be that in the real world, it's now the norm (and has been for how many decades?) for musicians to reflect their music in their faces and their bodies. Nobody now says this means they aren't serious. So it's now what most people -- including most educated people -- now take for granted. Classical music therefore looks very blank, because classical musicians (not even people in string quartets, to my ear and my eye) don't reflect the music in their movement. If there were a string quartet whose members looked as rapt -- as focused in their stillness -- as the people in Neil Young's band, I'd love to see them. (Maybe there's a principle here. If musicians don't let themselves move, when their bodies feel like it, then they won't be able to be still convincingly either.)

So what the arts have to do, to regain their foothold in the real world, is to lose their artness, their air of special sanctity. That just doesn't fly any more, even for the most serious artistic expression. This change has already happened, and the arts have been left behind.

So here's a useful question. When did the change occur?

In some ways, it's still going on, though I'd guess it's in its final stages. Just over two months ago, Alessandra Stanley, TV critic of the New York Times, wrote a preview piece about the final episodes of The Sopranos, and said:

"The Sopranos" is often praised as the series that definitively bridged pop culture and art....It was certainly a gateway drug to television for the elitists who just said no. Some of the same people who used to say they have no time for television can now be heard complaining that they don't have time to watch everything they recorded on DVR.

She knows people, in other words, who've only recently crossed one big boundary between high and popular culture.

Another change that's happened in this decade, though I imagine it began in the 1990s: cities (or, at any rate, many people working in urban management) no longer think that the arts will attract the young, smart workforce that in turn will attract corporations. You can read this, very strongly stated, in Richard Florida's famous (though also controversial) 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida -- who's worked as a consultant for major cities -- says outright that an orchestra, opera company, and ballet company no longer attract young, smart, lively, educated people. Instead, he says, they want cultural diversity (which I'm afraid orchestras and opera and ballet companies don't exactly represent), and active street culture, especially a vibrant local band scene.

This was echoed in a piece in the Times during the past year, which showed mayors and other managers in various cities talking about how to attract this young workforce. Forget the arts. These people talked about things like a healthy network of bikepaths.

So then here's another view. The pivotal year was 1990. That's what John Seabrook says in his book Nobrow, which I think is essential reading for anyone pondering these questions:

By the 1990s the notion that high culture constituted some sort of superior reality, and that the people who made it were superior beings, was pretty much in the toilet. The old meaning of the word culture--something orthodox, dominant, and singular, had yielded to the more anthropological, LeviStraussian sense of culture: the characteristic practices of any group....

[T]here was also an ever-multiplying grid of small niche markets for artists to support themselves--a condition that was good for the arts if not necessarily good for the artists. As the mainstream had become ever more homogenous, the fringe had become ever richer in cultural offerings. There were off-off-Broadway one-acts, cutting-edge zines, genre-busting bands, small films that fell between genres and cut across categories, rappers who had an original flava and a true story to tell. There were good small films playing next to the blockbusters at the megaplex, cable channels that showed edgy dramas from England, Web sites where you could spend hours reading poetry that no publishing house would publish. When one could say with confidence that the marketplace choked the avant-garde artists, who were by definition beyond popular appreciation, then one could wholeheartedly give one's support to artists who seemed to be working outside the mainstream. But when, thanks to outlets like MTV, the mainstream broadened to the extent that formerly avant-garde artists could be a part of it, the situation changed. As the Web and related technology and media continued to shrink the distance between artists and potential audiences, the once-valid rationale for protecting the arts from the ravages of the mainstream marketplace lost ever more logic...

There's a lot more. I'm tempted to post lengthy excepts from this book. Seabrook also sees problems with the new situation, which is one of the reasons his work is so essential.

I think 1990 is a good benchmark year, by the way. It was in the 1980s, for instance, that classical music reviews began to disappear from prominent mainstream media. In 1980, Time magazine had a fulltime classical music critic, and, by my count, ran about two classical music articles for each one about pop music. By 1990, the proportions had reversed, and the fulltime music critic had moved to Europe. Nobody succeeded him.

But I'd say that the change really began (no surprise, really) in the 1960s. I'd measure it in two ways. First, by the arrival of artists who weren't in any way involved with high culture. For me, the iconic figure would be Bob Dylan. Here was someone who'd be classified as pop music, but almost never had pop hits, and in fact from his first appearance to the present day has stood aloof from the pop music world. And yet he became one of the most important voices of his generation. This not like Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, or Elvis, in the 1950s, or the Beatles. These were pop figures who topped the charts in their respective eras, and represented their generations -- illustrated something dramatic that was going on -- without doing any thinking for the people who got so excited by them. (Well, that's true of the early Beatles, not the later Beatles.)

But look at the contrast with Dylan. He almost never topped the pop charts, and it was his thinking -- not just his music and his image -- that made him such a powerful icon. Or rather it was the fusion of his thinking, music, and image. He was hardly a pop star, hardly a rock singer, hardly even a folk singer, once he started using electric instruments, and outraged the folk world. He was an artist, responsible only to himself, no matter what was going on in the pop music world.

Once someone like that could exist -- someone who in every way was an artist, but was completely outside any kind of high culture -- the arts game was, in some deep sense, over. We didn't need the arts to reflect seriously on the largest issues in our world, in our human condition. That kind of artistic work could now go on anywhere.

And as the decades passed, it increasingly spread to all parts of popular culture.

The second development was in how people behaved. Over Christmas, I was browsing in the wonderful library my in-laws have in their home in New Mexico. Thousands of books, many of them either literary or popular novels bought during the '50s and early '60s. I got fascinated by novelists whose names I'd seen on the bestseller charts when I was a teen in the '50s, but whom I'd never read. James Gould Cozzens proved pretty much unreadable, but John P. Marquand (incidentally the author of the once wildly popular Mr. Moto books, which then became movies) was quite gripping. His subject (I read two of his novels, Sincerely, Willis Wayde and Point of No Return) was the social and business life of upper-class and upper middle-class WASPS.

And the business life was eye-opening. There weren't any escapes. People working for manufacturing companies or finance firms didn't think of leaving to go into business for themselves, to start organic farms, to become rock musicians, to make films. There were, in that milieu, no acceptable alternatives to straightahead business life -- or as social critics called it in the '50s, conformity. Yes, there was quite an underground developing -- the beats, abstract expressionism, off-Broadway (some of it quite avant-garde, like the Living Theater), Lenny Bruce, European art films, the jazz of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, even rock & roll (though that was still stigmatized as music only for teenagers). But none of this seemed to resonate with Marquand's characters, the way the fringes John Seabrook writes about would be home turf for any younger person in corporate life today.

And -- to judge from jokes that Lenny Bruce was making at the time -- everyone in business wore white shirts, no other color allowed.

So where do the arts fit in all this? They had their place. The canonical arts have been hierarchical. You were taught about them, taught what to think, which artists to admire. You couldn't make art yourselves without extensive training. Imposing institutions -- orchestras, museums -- purveyed these arts to you. And the art they purveyed didn't really penetrate your everyday life. It dealt with higher things, and you went outside your normal life to find it, Just as you might go to church on Sunday.

That exactly fit 1950s mainstream culture, which also was hierarchical: You knew your place. So when the '60s brought underground alternatives into the light of mainstream day, even the position of the arts began to change. An artist like Bob Dylan went right into your everyday life -- and was one of many signs that told you that you now could make decisions for yourself, and live your life outside what used to be the normal channels. It took a long time for that idea to enter into art; it came more quickly into everyday life. But when it did come into art -- back to Vanessa's chapter in the book -- then the change is gigantic, and the canonical arts, along with the institutions that house them, begin to seem very old.

Big questions, sketchily addressed!

Posted by gsandow at June 19, 2007 9:10 AM

COMMENTS

The more I read these posts and forums and symposia, it strikes me
ever more forcefully that the solutions to these problems are local.
What works in Chicago will fall flat in Pittsburgh, and vice versa. Audience priorities, levels of experience and engagement, and flat-out dedication are all different from city to city, market to market. At any rate, Messiaen will get a different crowd here than he will in Pittsburgh. What this means is that attempting to find solutions that will work across the board, across the nation is like trying to navigate Chicago's El with a New York subway map: Sure, they both use trains and travel on tracks and have color-coded signage, but the similarities end there.

This extends to the presentation of the artforms and the choices made in extending invitations to artists. Pierre-Laurent Aimard may sell out Zankel Hall, but
he won't sell out 300 seats in Indianapolis, I guarantee it, and I say that as someone who went to college there and continues to admire that city and its citizens.

The Hewlett Foundation study Sandow ecstatically cites about arts
organizations engaging young people to work for them and to serve on their boards is naivete in written form. It acknowledges that most arts organizations
don't have money for the extra training a young staff requires, yet
says they'd better do it, anyway.

The mot juste/nail in the coffin
that kept me from taking the study at all seriously was when they said that environmental groups have done an outstanding job w/ bringing in young workers, and arts organizations should try to model themselves on them and follow their success. I'm struggling to find the connection between Save the Whales and Save the New York Philharmonic.

Posted by: Marc Geelhoed at June 19, 2007 12:41 PM

Posted by: Marc Geelhoed at June 19, 2007 12:42 PM

Your "real world" is no more or less real than the world of classical music. Whatever portion of the culture you're holding up as an example--I don't care if it's pop, or jazz, or steampunk, or politics, or investment banking, or haute cuisine, or motocross enthusiasts--is its own construct, the rules, codes, and boundaries fashined over time by its participants. Dylan's great stuff, but saying that it's somehow more "real" than a Beckett play, or a Beethoven quartet, or even a Jerry Bruckheimer movie is merely a statement that you subjectively find whatever stylistic trappings or semiotic signals associated with that particular subculture to effectively communicate a sense of "authenticity" that's personally satisfying.

If that's what's most "real" to you, that's fine. But trying to impose that particular cultural construct onto classical music, is, ultimately, an admission that you don't trust classical music anymore. I've played back every classical concert I've been to in the past year in my mind--new music, early music, warhorses, obscurities, orchestras, quartets, soloists--and I can't think of one where the performers weren't physically engaged with the music, and where that engagement wasn't apparent to the audience. But it's subtle--they're not telegraphing a theatrical physicality like it's a stadium concert. Their movements, their physical demeanor, is in service of the music, because they believe that's what ultimately matters.

That may not be the way it's always been, but that's the way it's been for the past two centuries. Pointing to the 18th-century Classical era relationship between music and listener ignores the fact that the revolution in thought brought about by the 19th-century romanticists completely changed the way we expect to interact with art, the way we think about our individuality, the way we construct that individuality within our experience of the world. People may have listened to Mozart differently in his own time, but they were listening for different things; Mozart's music persists because, underneath its 18th-century surface, he was fashioning structures that resonated with the ubiquity of being alive. The crucial point is not that Mozart is still being played today, but that less sublime composers aren't. (No such thing as a Mostly Dittersdorf festival.) The Western classical tradition still matters to some of us not because of the prevailing conditions at the time of its creation, but because the condition of living in the 21st-century world is made more comprehensible by the universality that great composers embed in their creations in spite of their distance in time and culture.

That doesn't mean that I walk around wishing that rock music was more like classical music. If it was, it wouldn't be rock music, and vice versa. I don't expect anybody to love classical music just because it's classical music; while I'm convinced that its importance in my own life is something that could conceivably be shared by more people than there are now, I don't begrudge rock fans their own taste--we all choose what's most important to us. But I do get suspicious when people who claim to love classical music as much as I do insist that the way I experience it is all wrong.

Posted by: Matthew at June 19, 2007 1:17 PM

Matthew, I buy your point that just because certain conventions of performance and audience behavior were true back in Mozart's days, it doesn't mean that we have to try to emulate those practices in performances today. (But try telling that to 'authentic' and 'period' performance specialists...apparently authentic performance means only 'authenticity' from the performers. Some day I'm gonna get dressed up in 18th century European garb and start imitating the actions of 18th century audiences...)

What I'm find problematic about your (and some other posters) is the somewhat hypocritical message that you guys are sending. You acknowledge that 'classical music' (little 'c' classical) has essentially changed from the 18th century version with new ideas from 19th century Romantics and certainly with 20th century Modernists and 21st-century Post-Modernists etc.

You write: "Pointing to the 18th-century Classical era relationship between music and listener ignores the fact that the revolution in thought brought about by the 19th-century romanticists completely changed the way we expect to interact with art, the way we think about our individuality, the way we construct that individuality within our experience of the world."

So, when Greg and others remind us that the performer/listener relationship in 'classical music' used to different, people balk and say that it's changed for the better: performances and no longer noisy and we can finally hear the music! Why revert back to the old ways?

Herein lies the hypocrisy of the position: Why does Classical music have to stay the way it is now? Did we really approach and reach the 'best and final' stage for classical music? Is introspective listening REALLY the best format? Perhaps Greg and others (and I myself) simply hope for another revolution; another change in the way we approach the performing arts. If the Romantics were allowed to do it, I'm sure we can too.

Now, am I advocating that introspective and attentive listening (for all the wonderful modulations and thematic and motivic transformations or what not) is bad? No! Surely a late Beethoven String Quartet or Bach's Passions deserves that sort of attentive listening. But what about the third movement of Ades' Asyla? What about Bolero? What about a Strauss waltz? Surely, this music 'wants' the listener to be visceral. By G-d, listening to music originally meant for movement, (or evokes dance music) in the dead stillness of a huge concert hall doesn't always make me too comfortable. I'm not advocating that we shouldn't listen to Bolero in rapt silence anymore--but, is that the ONLY way to listen?
nce specialists...apparently authentic performance means only 'authenticity' from the performers. Some day I'm gonna get dressed up in 18th century European garb and start imitating the actions of 18th century audiences...)

Herein lies the hypocrisy of the position: Why does Classical music have to stay the way it is now? Did we really approach and reach the 'best and final' stage for classical music? Is introspective listening REALLY the best? Perhaps Greg and others (and I myself) simply hope for another revolution; another change in the way in the approach to the performing arts. If the Romantics were allowed to do it, I'm sure we can too.

Now, am I advocating that introspective and atentative listening (for all the wonderful modulations and thematic and motivic transformations or what not) is bad? No! Surely a late Beethoven String Quartet deserves that sort of listening. But what about the third movement of Ades' Asyla? What about Bolero? What about a Strauss waltz? Surely, this music 'wants' the listener to be visceral. By G-d, listening to music originally meant for movement, (or evokes dance music) in the dead stillness of a huge concert hall doesn't make me all too comfortable. I'm not advocating that we can't listen to Bolero in rapt silence--but, is that the ONLY way to listen?

Posted by: Eric Lin at June 19, 2007 5:58 PM

I think it's crucial for these arguements to separate the music business from the music, or the arts from "the arts." I mean, if "the arts" are behind, removed from the real world, who's in it? Hollywood? Bloggers? The smart people at HBO? I wonder. We all, whatever we do (unless we make guns or bombs) live in something of a shadow world, time we admitted it.

Seabrook's book makes your point in an oblique way: that once something like a Dylan (or, in the book, Star Wars) exists, zillions of capitalists (not artists, but "the arts") seek to replicate it for profit. This changes the climate, making the thing they are seeking to replicate impossible in its subsequent iteration. The world changes, gets more expensive, tires of things quicker.

Why, I wonder, is an orchestra playing more like a rock band so appealing? Because more people see rock bands? Rock is as dead as anything--the whole "music business" is in massive trouble, with a lucky few CEO's wealthily scraping by while middle people suffer, and new artists with something interesting to say are often shunted away for easier fixes. Same problems, different timbres. So a classical concert aping that is something like an Elvis impersonator, and who qualifies that as art, more "the arts."

I think the important distinction to draw is when one is speaking of the business and of the visionaries who care to carry on the tradition. Mr. Sandow, you are a pessimist, and the world needs pessimists, but I wonder how effective this sort of thinking is in fixing the problems. After all, anyone can say the sky is falling.

Posted by: Music Lover at June 19, 2007 10:55 PM

Marc: I agree with you--more and more, the action is on the local level, and the engagement isn't going to come from broad one-size-fits-all initiatives, but from the efforts of enthusiasts and performers within the community.

Eric: the point isn't that classical music shouldn't change, it changes all the time. But if the change you're advocating is going to fundamentally interfere with the ability of listeners to hear the aspects of the repertoire that distinguish it from other forms of music--the long forms, the frequently gentle sound-world, the striving on the part of the composer for a universal, sublime (in the 19th-century definition) experience--then maybe the rewards of classical music aren't what you're looking for. (And let me be absolutely clear: I'm not implying that those rewards are superior to the rewards of pop, rock, or jazz.) Concert presentations evolve over time to best suit the needs of each genre's audience--imposing a large-scale change imported from another genre is just borad-brush prescriptivism that ignores the expectations inherent in each style. It's one thing for classical music to generate new methods of presentation that grow up alongside new forms of musical discourse. (Bang On a Can, etc.) It's very much another to panic at attendance figures and insist that orchestras should be like rock bands, which is a bad marriage even if you consider that concept in a non-facile way.

If society changes to the point that there's no longer a need for the sort of experience that the classical repertoire of the past 200 years provides, then I would rather society move on to a repertoire that does meet their needs instead of trying to package up classical in a way that trivializes it. I don't believe that society is changing in that direction, though. Nor do I believe that it should--one of the things that seems to be lost in this conversation is the notion that art should point towards an ideal, not follow the population around pandering to their immediate wants. I still need to experience the classical repertoire, not as a nostalgia trip, but as a vital source of the sorts of virtues--reflection, universality, an appreciation of the complexity of the human condition--that are going to guide the only way forward for humanity that doesn't involve widescale conflict and fear.

So I don't object to the sort of rock-style change that's being suggested simply because it's change, but because it's fundamentally a craven apology from people who don't believe the repertoire has the power to inspire in the 21st-century. Look over here, it says, you like rock music. Well, now we're just like rock music, too! The rock music experience evolved to serve rock music. Any other genre just dumped into another mold without a pre-existing coherent engagement with its ideals and goals only reduces the visitor to a facile, surface-level version of itself. (Think about rock music played by an orchestra, for example.) You think I'm hypocritical--I think you're cynical.

By the way, "Bolero" is plenty visceral in a concert hall. Isn't that the point?

Posted by: Matthew at June 20, 2007 6:55 AM

I agree with Eric that it is difficult to get a visceral experience for certain pieces when you are concentrating on sitting absolutely perfectly serenely still. "Bolero" wants you to feel the rhythm, and you feel it with your body. (Or I do, and Eric apparently does, and I know a whole bunch of other people do also.) The way classical music is currently presented asserts that listening is entirely an experience of the mind, that the body is merely a container for the brain and the perceptive organs. I just don't see it. I'm not asking for a concert hall experience in which I am allowed to replicated my home listening experience (to jump around like a four-year-old on a sugar high, as I do to parts of the last movement of "Scheherazade," or to pound on the nearest piece of furniture for emphasis, as I often do in the final pages of the "Death and the Maiden" quartet), but the current concert hall ethos allows for absolutely no reaction in the body, which is just silly.

To put this another way: Are Dvorak's "Slavonic Dances," or Haydn's symphonic minuets, classical music? Not if we use Matthew's criteria: "the long forms, the frequently gentle sound-world, the striving on the part of the composer for a universal, sublime (in the 19th-century definition) experience." But they do get played in concert halls. Is the current concert hall ethos suited for appreciating this music? My gut (and my butt) tell me no.

Posted by: Lindemann at June 20, 2007 7:27 AM

Hey Matthew,

Thanks for the response. Ok, I agree with the notion that some of the panicky, 'we're cool too!--we're like rock!' attitudes are neither helpful, nor does it make classical music look cool. (In a way, it kind of reminds me of the awkward kid that can never get the girl, and the more desperate he gets, the less attractive he is to the girl)

This sort of attitude is fundamentally useless and worse of all, misrepresents what classical music is.

Yet, you must admit there are a good portion of folks to still believe in a 'Classical Music is great! It's the best music because it has complexity that no other music has!' model. I'm not going to argue whether I think 'Western Classical Music' is inherently better or not compared to other music; my opinion on the issue is beside the point.

I think this model is fundamentally unhealthy--I have many literature savvy friends and they have debates about the merit of Joyce and Faulkner all the time. Thus, even aknoledged classics and 'masterpieces' can be open to discussion. I love it when every so often, some guy denounces a landmark album like Sargent Peppers and says its really not as great an album as everyone says--it's a provocative act and it opens up discussion about the merit of art.

Yet, our current approach to Classical Music is that the Masterpieces are perfect: that is what's taught in music appreciation courses (at least most of them--and these are the bad ones). There is an aspect of untouchable reverence to say a Beethoven Symphony. God forbid if one day I said the Fifth Symphony is not really that great! (I don't really think that by the way...)

I certainly don't believe in 'dumbing down' classical music to make it look more like rock music (it sure as hell doesn't SOUND like it). That certainly won't do any long term good--but, I must say, condescending 'educational programs' started by orchestras in recent years don't do much either. They're fundamentally boring and function with a complete misunderstand our culture today. I find the titles of programs such as these laughable: "What makes it Great?" Maybe I am nitpicking, but doesn't this presume that a piece is 'great' and without fault?

Perhaps its not that audience education is bad, but rather the METHOD in which we educate or encourage involvement.

Ok, I know I'm starting to go off on a tangent, but here's the deal, I just want to say that I'm not disagreeing with anything that you've written, Matthew. In fact, I find most if not all of your reasoning valid.

Further, if you read my earlier post, I never did advocate for a rock music like presentation for Classical Music.

Ugg, I feel like I need to collect my thoughts in a more organized format--an essay or something. Comments of a blog aren't ideal.

P.S. Greg, Thanks for reposting my comments in this discussion! I'm glad you found it interesting enough for a wider audience.

Posted by: Anonymous at June 20, 2007 8:03 AM

Re: Marc Geelhoed's gratuitous trashing of a study I authored for the Hewlett Foundation on Youth Involvement in the Arts, the point of the project was to acknowledge the obstacles arts organizations have in trying to compete for an ever scarcer pool of new, younger talent - be it as future arts leaders, administrators, board members, volunteers, patrons, advocates, audiences or artists - and to try to determine which organizations were addressing those barriers and still succeeding in recruiting and retaining the involvement of younger people so that the rest of the field might replicate some of those strategies that were working. We purposefully focused on strategies that were not expensive to duplicate; did not require extensive staff oversight.

If indeed there are going to be 27 million qualified young people to fill the jobs of the next decade, but 30 million jobs that need filling - obviously some jobs will go unfilled - or filled with not necessarily the best qualified people. How many of those jobs will be in the arts field? Talk about naivete, of course the arts have to make an attempt at involving young people despite the fact they lack the money to do it in some optimum manner. Every business -'for profit' or nonprofit has to do that. You work with what you have.

The purpose of comparing and contrasting what the arts sector has done / is doing with another sector of the nonprofit universe - in this case the environmental movement (chosen because of their success in involving young people)- was so that the arts sector might replicate some / any of those strategies to improve its own attempt when engaging young people. The fact is the environmental groups are more successful in recruiting and involving young people in their organizations. They have some advantages over the arts and lag behind the arts in other ways. They too don't have as much money as they would like in addressing the problem - but unlike many in the arts - including apparently Mr. Geelhoed -they appreciate that they have no choice and look for ways to deal with the situation as it is. They have more successfully embraced use of the internet in communicating with young people; they have more successfully delegated authority in decision making to young people they recruit; they have gotten young people to act as their grassroots advocates and lobbyists; they have begun to tap into young people as financial donors -- all things the arts have yet to do, and would be wise to emulate. You play the cards you were dealt. Or, I guess, some people's attitude is to just not play at all. Good plan.

Indeed the study also points out that the solution to the problems arts organizations face in trying to involve more young people are likely to be "local" - and what will work in Chicago may not work in Pittsburgh.

Those who work to save the whales Mr. Geelhoed -can teach some valuable lessons to those who want to save the philharmonic. Fortunately, there are many in the arts who don't have to struggle with that concept.

Posted by: Barry Hessenius at June 20, 2007 9:13 AM

Oops. The Anonymous comment is mine.

Posted by: Eric Lin at June 20, 2007 10:16 AM

Unlike Mr. Hessenius, I didn't mean my comments to be personally insulting.

Posted by: Marc Geelhoed at June 20, 2007 11:51 AM

Eric: you raise a good point about masterpieces and superiority. I think more than a couple of classical warhorses are overrated, and I hate when they keep turning up as the benchmarks of the genre; but I do think there's a danger of shortchanging the ambition of classical music, particularly Romantic and post-Romantic (in chronology, not necessarily style) music. Of course, the problem is, if you believe that those pieces have worth beyond their own time, you have to keep reintroducing them to subsequent generations. A vicious cycle.

Lindemann: good point about the shorter works (although--and this is just my preference--I'm always loath to separate out Haydn symphony movements). I remember a young Joshua Bell releasing a full-fledged music video for one of the Brahms Hungarian Dances back in the day--dramatic lighting, closeups of the technique, some vaguely gypsy-like lady dancing around, the whole megillah. Didn't get much traction, but it didn't hurt him, either.

As for moving about during an orchestral concert: that's a sticky wicket. Personally--and this is not a joke--I can see concert venues experimenting with the sort of thing movie theaters have been trying: big, comfy chairs/sofas, waiter service, etc. (Of course, Boulez, always on the cutting edge, was trying this with those Rug Concerts way back when.)

Posted by: Matthew at June 20, 2007 1:24 PM

June 19, 2007

The change

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