Mind the Gap

There are some great, innovative ideas out there when it comes to the musical education of our nation’s children, but sadly not every American kid is going to have the opportunity to participate in a kick-ass program like El Sistema USA or Baltimore’s own OrchKids. So in this time of anxiety about the waning attendance figures for live performances of symphonic music, I wonder about something: how important is quality vs. simple exposure?

Almost to a man when I interview someone in my age bracket about their early experiences with the great masterworks of the classical canon, they name check Looney Tunes but then go right to that “Hooked on Classics” record in their parents’ collection. Seriously, how many billions of copies did that thing sell? In my neighborhood, we wore the tape out, using it as a soundtrack for our awkwardly choreographed backyard dance routines. Sure it’s supremely schlocky, but it sure gets the exposure job done and buries the tunes deep in the ear.

More than any official training program, does this missing piece from the mainstream experience mark the true cause for alarm as we look ahead at the survival of the art form? I can’t see those Reader’s Digest 3-LP collections of great classical music melodies selling very many copies these days, but is there a 2010 equivalent? Fantasia 2, brought to you by Pixar?

Glee spoiler alert (maybe?). Better safe than sorry, I guess, so fair warning but…

Need a boost into your Thursday morning? This throw down between Glee‘s Matthew Morrison and guest star Neil Patrick Harris as they compete for the lead role in a community theater production of Les Misérables is sure to do the trick.

Just before I gave up on the idea of becoming a professional player of notes and committed to becoming a professional typer of letters, I remember taking a college entrance audition at DePaul University in Chicago. At the conclusion, the violin professor made some kind comments concluding with the acknowledgment that I was a “young woman with a very interesting sense of internal rhythm.”

Maybe it’s because of that, um, issue that I am so enamored with artists who have a bit more control of their groove, and no one I have met rocks that better Shodekeh, (a.k.a. Dominic Earle Shodekeh Talifero) a beatboxer out of Baltimore who I guarantee is a talent you’re going to want to have on your radar. You can read more about him here and here, and get schooled in the art of vocal percussion in the video below. If hip hop battles are outside your comfort zone, you can catch him with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on July 23.

Today the League of American Orchestras opens the doors on its Orchestra R/Evolution site which, in the weeks leading up to their conference in Atlanta in June, will be looking at the classic “How do you solve a problem like the state of the symphony orchestra?” question. The kindly folks over at the League have invited me to kick in a few ideas, so if things get a little slow over here it might be because we’re having too much fun throwing sand around over there.

I actually got in the mood to chat about the orchestra world last week when a couple of pieces of online promotional material floated my way. To start, I want to give props to the folks over at the New York Philharmonic. On Thursday morning I received a mysterious email from “nekrotzar527” that contained a short note and a link to a YouTube video: “SPOTTED: Alan Gilbert with a shady character traversing the Upper West Side: http://www.youtube.com/breughelland”.

The video is short and charming–a little bit awkward, a little bit adorable. I was impressed that such a large, pro organization had embraced the lo-fi format and developed an appropriate idea for it, and that their fearless leader had rolled up his sleeves and was willing to play silly for his audience. While I didn’t feel the need to forward it to all my friends, I did both click through from the email and watch all three related videos on offer immediately, so it was a solid marketing score in my opinion and I look forward to their next production.

Over in Cleveland, they also tried their hand at some online marketing buzz, but this effort I found less successful. To begin with, I’m not sure that an organization that dubs its own video “viral” in the headline without the matching page views understands the medium well enough yet. The video is also more than two minutes long and plays for 10 seconds before it even fades in and gets going. When it does, I feel like the musicians are faking it (in their sentiments, not their playing, obviously). Maybe they really do care about LeBron and the Cavs and want to cheerlead for their home team–that would be awesome–but I don’t buy it in their delivery and so I think this piece backfires.

I know Cleveland is abuzz with LeBron drama and so the underlying concept isn’t a bad one, but for me the execution and expression didn’t rise to the challenge of engagingly communicating it. Cleveland may be a world-class ensemble, but somehow it’s actually this musical love letter to LeBron that gets the job done in a much better, if slightly off pitch, way.

When I saw that Ashton Kutcher had tweeted about Greyson Michael Chance’s amazing cover of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” I wondered what it must be like to go to school dreaming of becoming a famous musician only to come home and discover you’re a phenomenon. Also (betraying my age) I wondered how his mom felt. I mean, picture it: Dinner is on the table, parents ask how school was, and then “Well, um, mom, so I posted this video of myself playing the piano at
that 6th grade assembly last week, and, uh, heh, a funny thing
happened…um, a lot of people liked it, like, a lot, and well, I think I need to miss soccer practice tomorrow
’cause Leno emailed to ask if I can do his show.”

But that was just in my imagination. In real life, turns out it was Ellen who made the call.

I usually get totally 2nd-grade-violin-recital nervous for kids making public performances and can’t watch, but trust me, no need to avert your eyes in this case. That’s sixth grader Greyson Michael Chance at the keyboard.

Cuter than Bieber and giving Gaga a run for it: This is a pop culturally current argument in support of making sure kids have access to instruments and music lessons if I’ve heard a good one lately (and sadly, a look at all the potential we probably let slip through the cracks when those things are not available). Be sure to stick around through 2:55. (Bonus entertainment: Check the girls in the background as they go from bored to swoony.)

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Go ahead and dream without napping for two minutes.

This video is the second place winner (and my favorite) in the Fisher Ensemble’s just-concluded competition to create a film set to a soundtrack excerpted from Garrett Fisher’s The Passion of Saint Sebastian. The complete list of winners and more videos are here.

It wasn’t until the day after I heard the Mousetrap parody of OK Go’s relatively recent Rube Goldberg-esque video that the whole “original work vs parody/remake” devaluation argument started to gain any traction in my thinking. There was a song stuck in my head, and it wasn’t the original. Is imitation still flattery if that’s possible?

This particular matter was already on my mind because just a few weeks earlier there was all that drama over the Downfall parody videos on YouTube. In a nutshell, after much time and the creation of many videos, the film’s owner, Constantin Films, asked YouTube to take them all down. The backlash was fierce, as you might expect from a community that had put hours into creating and enjoying the re-subtitling of a particular four-minute clip lifted from the 2004 German-Austrian epic (178 minutes in the extended cut) about Hitler. Debates over whether these new videos could actually be defined as parody ensued. Several commenters questioned what possible harm the clips could have done, regardless. Was it not much more likely that the clip encouraged people to see the film simply because, without the spoofs, far fewer would have even known of its existence? Anecdotally, others weighed in to say that this was indeed true in their personal experience. Still, was it possible that Constantin Films felt that the parodies were making too light of their very serious film and the publicity wasn’t worth the perceived damage?

I have no real idea what was behind the film owner’s sudden erasure move. However, perhaps because YouTube alerted users that they could protest the takedown and that their videos would be available once again while the claims were investigated, many of the videos appear to be available again. In addition, so powerful was the meme that Hitler himself quickly responded to the takedown in style.

For those who argued that the clip’s use wasn’t true parody because it used the original film rather than creating a “cover” (à la Weird Al), the clip was re-imagined by one super talented (and apparently not-German-fluent) actor.

So much creativity! It warms my heart, regardless of the legal issues in play. Okay, all that is fun and interesting and trendy, but to get back to the OK Go situation, in this case the foundation (same notes, more or less) is given a new (and quite memorable) story to tell. For your entertainment/comparison:

There are those who say music doesn’t have literal communicative meaning (and those who argue that it most certainly does), but both camps and everyone else will probably want to check out Marc Weidenbaum’s compelling response to a recent Atlantic article on the impact of file-sharing on the music industry. Weidenbaum found some fault with the article, written by Megan McArdle, and he penned this reaction to its key points, a post well worth your reading time. However, it also inspired him to reach out to musicians for a musical response to the business and ethical issues broached. The pieces (and the illuminative accompanying notes) are here.

As Weidenbaum points out, a lot of the problems he had with the original article’s arguments stemmed from a disagreement over the loose application of terms. Still, despite the worries expressed by McArdle,  for me and my house, this passage made me think it might be safe to celebrate, whether we agree with the rest of her analysis or not.

This fragmentation has been good news for performers like Jonathan Coulton, who makes a decent living selling quirky songs and related merchandise on his Web site. But the broader music industry, like other entertainment fields, has always worked on a tournament model: a lot of starving artists hoping to be among the few who make it big. What happens to the supply of willing musicians when the prize is an endless slog through medium-size concerts at $25 a head?

Big money may be gone, but it seems that new distribution models mean moderate money is now much more more likely. If you can’t decide where you stand in all this, you might want to take a look at the article’s accompanying illustration, which Weidenbaum suggests might be a “Rorschach test for readers of the article: Does it look beautiful to you, or does it alarm you?” Bonus points to those who can ID the composition used in the illustration, which is reportedly not yet in the public domain.

In contrast to that last post highlighting the “dare you to define it” music I have in heavy rotation this week, Tom Service points to the good in the stuff of blatant genre crossing, awarding an A for effort in an era when the “genres of ‘pop’ and ‘classical’ now demand such different things from singers that the days of meaningful genre-hopping–when Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza ruled the charts, the stage and the screen–may be over.”

Though it doesn’t do it for me–the fact that they went there in the first place seems to me to be too large a part of why anyone would care about the exercises–maybe I’m underselling the experience. The whole thing just makes me cover-my-eyes nervous and squirmy, particularly for the kids. The Aston ensemble, also offering their take on classical filtering pop, notes that “it’s a classical musician’s job to play other people’s music. We have just decided to play someone a little bit different.” Hard to argue with that sentiment, of course, though, this kind of thing lives on a two-way street.

I personally have my own weakness for a certain style of creative cover song, though I’m not sure where in the contemporary compendium of such work you’d shelve it. “Studied disaffected split-screen crossover”? It’s been a tough week technology-wise here for the AJ crew, so I thought we’d just go light on the analysis and finish up with a little fun. If your heart doesn’t melt a little when he sets up his portable theremin, well, we should probably not listen to records together anymore.

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