Archives for 2007

I was going to write about Michael Brecker, the great jazz saxophonist who died last Saturday, but his colleague Randy Sandke said it all for me, and for the rest of us. Mr. Rifftides has posted Sandke’s heartfelt tribute, plus links to other Brecker-related postings elsewhere in the blogosphere. Go here and start scrolling.

ArtsJournal blogger Greg Sandow has been writing a very important series of posts on the future of classical music. Three have appeared so far. (They are here, here, and here.) He’s been taking a hard look at demographic trends and attendance numbers for major classical-music institutions in the U.S., and has arrived at the following conclusions:

– “The classical music audience is now, on the average, more than 50 years old. There’s a common belief that it’s always been this old, but I’ve uncovered data that shows this isn’t true….If the audience has been getting older for 50 years, then clearly younger people aren’t coming into it.”

– “A trend that’s been established for that long has to reflect some kind of deep-rooted cultural change–and the change it represents, I’d guess, is that our culture, over a long span of time, has lost interest in classical music.”

– “In the 1960s, the biggest orchestras were selling all their tickets. Now they’re suffering from a long-term decline in ticket sales. On top of that, classical music is far less central in our society than it was in the ’60s, which makes it harder to attract both audience and funding.”

Therefore:

– “This makes me think that the era of classical music is going to end. Not this year, not next year, maybe not in 10 years (though surely by then we’ll see decisive signs of where we’re going). But sometime reasonably soon, the era of classical music will be over….organized classical concerts, as we know them now, won’t be very numerous, or at least won’t be as numerous as they are now. Though they may well be replaced by other kinds of concerts–more informal, or also offering other kinds of music–in which classical music might be played. To be as precise as I can, I might say that the apparatus of classical music, as we know it now, will very likely fade away.”

I agree. In fact, I’ve been saying much the same thing for a very long time now, and I’ve also been thinking about what the post-classical era might look like. In “Life Without Records,” a 2002 essay on the collapse of the classical recording industry reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, I speculated about the likely effects of the end of the international “superstar system” that was made possible by recording:

What would classical music look like without superstars? A possible answer can be found by looking at classical ballet. Few ballet companies tour regularly, and some of the most important, like New York City Ballet, are rarely seen outside their home towns; videocassettes are a notoriously inadequate substitute for live performances, and thus sell poorly. For these reasons, the major media devote little space to ballet, meaning that there are never more than one or two international superstars at any given moment. Most balletgoers spend the bulk of their time attending performances by the resident companies of the cities in which they live, and the dances, not the dancers, are the draw. (It is The Nutcracker that fills seats, not the Sugar Plum Fairy.)

In the United States, regional opera works in much the same way. Only a half-dozen major American companies can afford to import superstars; everyone else hires solid second-tier singers with little or no name recognition, often using local artists to fill out their casts. Audiences are attracted not by the stars, but by the show–that is, by dramatically compelling productions of musically interesting operas. If the larger culture of classical music were to be reorganized along similar lines, then concert presenters, instead of presenting a small roster of international celebrity virtuosos, might be forced to engage a wider range of lower-priced soloists, possibly including local artists and ensembles with a carefully cultivated base of loyal fans. Similarly, regional symphony orchestras would have to adopt more imaginative programming strategies in order to attract listeners who now buy tickets mainly to hear superstar soloists play popular concertos in person. It is possible, too, that with the breakup of the single worldwide market created by the superstar system, we might see a similar disintegration of the blandly eclectic “international” style of performance that came to dominate classical music in the Seventies. Performers who play for the moment, rather than for the microphones of an international record company primarily interested in its bottom line, are less likely to play it safe–and more likely to play interesting music.

In the midst of these seemingly endless uncertainties, one aspect of life without records is not only possible but probable: henceforth, nobody in his right mind will look to classical music as a means of making very large sums of money. Of all the ways in which the invention of the phonograph changed the culture of classical music, perhaps the most fateful was that it turned a local craft into an international trade, thereby attracting the attention of entrepreneurs who were more interested in money than art. Needless to say, there can be no art without money, but the recording industry, by creating a mass market for music, sucked unprecedentedly large amounts of money into the classical-music culture, thereby insidiously and inexorably altering its artistic priorities….

But enough about me. Go read Greg’s posts, and start following his blog. Nobody is writing more intelligently–or convincingly–about the grim prospects facing classical musicians and classical-music institutions in the coming century.

A nice, expansive four-day weekend just came to a close, and I’m utterly exhausted. I spent the holiday weekend, and then some, doing something completely novel: competing in the MIT Mystery Hunt. Fellow blogger and ALN blogroll mainstay Eric Berlin was one of the veteran players on my team and has related his experience of the weekend in typically eloquent and entertaining fashion here. The MIT student paper covered the event here.

So how did I end up spending my weekend in an MIT classroom with 46 bigger brains, taking on approximately 150 elegantly constructed, thematically interwoven puzzles? It’s not exactly a situation one just sort of stumbles into, as you might guess. As frequent readers know, I’m a regular at the National Puzzlers League convention held each summer–in Indianapolis, Cambridge, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and, about six months from now, Ann Arbor. Every year I return from the Con exhilarated, happy, and with a few new friends. The NPL and the Mystery Hunt have significantly overlapping constituencies, and it was the wish to see some of these far-flung friends that landed me at the Mystery Hunt this year. For some reason, puzzlers, and especially the ones I’m closest to, tend to concentrate on either coast. Vanishingly few make their homes in the middle of the country, a fact regarding which I’ve been known to get a mite peevish on occasion and an excellent reason to travel to Cambridge last weekend and find out what the mystery is all about. And now I have some idea. As a thing, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a magnum opus of its kind, an elaborate, smoothly running machine whose enormity would seem to belie its elegance but astonishingly doesn’t, and vice versa. As an experience, it’s a more intense, more claustrophobic, grubbier NPL Con, from which I’ve returned…utterly exhausted.

That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time, because I did–thanks to the quality of the puzzles and especially the quality of the company. It surely wasn’t the scenery: most of the weekend was spent in an MIT classroom whose notable features were approximately 20 fully wired, furiously worked laptop computers and three walls of blackboard that progressively filled with chalk marks as we solved puzzles and recorded the answers there (in a puzzle hunt of this magnitude, almost no answer is sufficient unto itself; it nearly always has an afterlife as a clue in another, second-order puzzle). An adjacent classroom was reserved for less critical activities such as eating and sleeping, though some of the other than perfectly dedicated among us opted for alternative quarters (mine in nearby Somerville were friendly and comfortable).

And we won! On the backs of a couple of brilliant teammates who were the first in the entire Hunt to crack the diabolical meta-puzzle (involving the answer words from ten other puzzles, as well as additional clues gathered from a video we’d been given) that had had us and several other teams stumped and stalled near the finish line for hours, we triumphed around 2 o’clock Sunday morning (would it have occurred to you immediately to use the U.S. Senate seating chart as a grid for a double-crostic?). Not a moment too soon, mind you, since the gargantuan task of running next year’s Hunt now falls on us. Personally, I’ve never constructed a puzzle in my life, so my role is likely to be that of test-solver. Even from that humble perch, I’ll be fascinated to see from the inside how one of these marvels comes together.

For the curious, the complete set of 2007 Mystery Hunt puzzles (and solutions) can be accessed here. One that might particularly divert readers of this blog is “Writing Nerds,” here.

UPDATE: Edited to fix broken links. Sorry!!

“In Washington, success is just a training course for failure.”

Simon Hoggart, America: A User’s Guide

– A reader writes, inspired by yesterday’s list of the best Hollywood films of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties:

Strong list. I agree that Robin Hood trumps Casablanca as Michael Curtiz’s great contribution, though I imagine you’ll get arguments. I’d put Big Sleep over To Have and Have Not for Howard Hawks. You really ought to consider a Disney picture in that pantheon: Pinocchio, probably.

In fact, I thought about Disney, though I would have been more inclined to include Dumbo. What I really regret, though, is not having had room to include one of the short cartoons that rank as a genre high among the greatest achievements of Hollywood’s Golden Age–but which one? Chuck Jones’ “Bully for Bugs”? Tex Avery’s “King Size Canary”? I feel another list coming on.

(Incidentally, OGIC, I wouldn’t mind hearing from you about my little list.)

– I took the train to Washington, D.C., yesterday afternoon, dropped my bags off at the hotel where I’ll be spending the week, had dinner with Laura Lippman at the excellent Caf

And not a moment too soon! Rachel Ries, the Chicago singer-songwriter about whom I have been going on these last months–and whose work Terry admires as much as I do, Terryphiles–will be interviewed on XM Radio this morning by former “Morning Edition” host Bob Edwards. The details as dispatched to Rachel’s mailing list late last night:

I’ve received a fair amount of mail stirred up by the first sentence of my most recent essay
in Commentary: “Hollywood rarely makes artistically serious movies, save by inadvertence.” No need to supply details–you can imagine most of it for yourself–but one reader caught my attention by pointing to this paragraph:

“Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.”