Things I’m thinking about…

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Hope you all had a restful, productive summer!

I got back from vacation just over a week ago. Many trips, to see family, then a retreat for two weeks in a very remote and peaceful spot in England. A lot of traveling not just for us, but of course for Rafa, who’s about to turn three, but he’s a trooper. Pulls his little wheelie suitcase after him in airports, like a seasoned flyer.

Plus, once in England, he walked three miles into town with us. And walked back. Well, got carried in a backpack, sometimes sleeping, for part of it. But he did a lot of walking. Saw at close range tractors baling hay! Big event for him, which he talked about a lot afterwards. Long excited narrations, with gestures, and the words “baling hays” coming prominently out.

During the walk, he said he wanted to stop to smell some flowers, giving all of us a chance to do that. And to take the photo you’re seeing here.

Which taught us a lesson. Why don’t we grownups stop to smell flowers — literal or metaphorical ones — more often?

Big culture

One thing I’ve realized is that I never blog many of the things I do or think about. So here’s what I might call a diary post, catching up on the last few weeks.

First: a huge cultural event, maybe one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, happened in London last month. Had to be the biggest cultural thing in Britain by miles, not just for the summer, but for the entire year.

This was Kate Bush returning to the concert stage for the first time in 35 years. “Only pop music,” someone reading this will surely snipe, perhaps not knowing how deep Bush’s music, lyrics, and videos can go, or how much she’s meant to many people. This is something that people who damn pop music completely miss: How much it’s the soundtrack of our culture’s life. And often in profound ways. Kate Bush has for decades been a touchstone for many people in the UK and elsewhere. As a Guardian writer said, in one of the many Kate Bush pieces that filled this very serious newspaper while I was visiting:

Kate Bush gave my 19-year-old self a strategy for both life and art.…

Every young woman I knew at Oxford was listening to Kate Bush – even the chemistry students. For an English student the fact that a new singer could hit No 1 with a cover version of Emily Brontë was proof that poetry, music, feminism and lo-fi would rescue the world from boy bands and electro-pop, dead white males and money.

Anyone who doesn’t understand that pop music can do these things — and not only for 19 year-olds — doesn’t know enough about the current world to have any idea where classical music might fit.

Bush gave 22 performances in London, in a 3500-seat venue, selling out all 77,000 tickets in 15 minutes. And this is someone whose most-loved work lies in the past, someone with no current pop hits! Well, no hits before the shows. After the shows, 11 of her albums showed up at the same time on the British pop charts.

So, again, the Guardian…hardly a frivolous newspaper. Ran story after Kate Bush story on all this, along with an appreciation of Bush by one of Britain’s top rock critics, Simon Reynolds. For a few days, you might have thought this was the biggest thing happening in Britain, even apart from culture. Someday, just maybe, classical music can have impact like this. And then we’ll know it’s really been reborn.

If you read Reynolds’ appreciation, watch the first (and earliest) video he links, and hate it, try the later ones. Youth!

Leadership from the musicians 

Meanwhile, in the US, of course the biggest classical music news was the Met Opera settlement, which seemed to be — wonder of wonders — a genuine compromise.

And I wonder if the Met musicians didn’t show some leadership here. They prepared a document (which they sent to me, and many others), offering proposals for a settlement. The Met could cut its costs, just as Peter Gelb said had to happen, but with smaller wage loss for unionized employees.

The document maybe lacked some finesse in presentation. But its content was entirely reasonable, a real contribution to discussion.

I have to wonder whether this didn’t help negotiations. As I’m picturing what might have happened, one party comes to the table with — despite ugly public exchanges — a basis for discussion, other than the cuts the Met proposed. So instead of confrontation, maybe a door opened on a chance for serious compromise.

Just a thought. I wonder if I’m right.

No vision, no leadership

And now we have the Atlanta Symphony heading toward the flames. After a lockout two years ago, which led to a settlement in which the musicians accepted 15% pay cuts.

Now there’s renewed negotiation. Idea was now to make up for the pay cuts. Management proposes an increase, musicians think it’s far too small. More confrontation. Another lockout. Management says the orchestra’s costs are unsustainable.

Which they might be. Here — minus the lockouts — we have a parallel with the Met story. Unsustainable costs. Cuts. Musicians protest. Flames.

And there’s something else the two stories share, something really sad. In both cases, management seems to have no vision. Cuts, cuts, cuts. Bludgeon, bludgeon, bludgeon. That’s management. I’ll say more about this in a future post about the Met, but really! Can’t the people running these institutions — which supposedly stand for art and creativity — propose a vision for the future, a plan to meet challenges head-on, a plan for triumphant change, in which musicians (and other unionized stakeholders) are warmly invited to join?

If cuts are really needed, management should put them in the context of something hugely worthwhile. And treat the other side in negotiations as true partners.

That would be vision. That would be good business. And simple human decency.

Before the deluge

In England we have friends who run a fine used bookstore. They say that business for the moment is good. Even though half the used bookstores in Britain have gone out of business.

The shakeout doesn’t seem to bode well for the future, and in fact our friends wouldn’t make rosy long-term predictions. But for the moment — so intriguing — the booksellers who go out of business help the ones that remain. The books they buy are now dirt cheap, because there’s less demand for used-bookstore stock. And, on top of that, much more supply, because the bookstores going out of business put their stock on the market.

So for the moment things look good for well-run bookstores that stay in business. Which made me think of what might be a parallel in classical music. Despite all the troubles in the field — despite the Met and the Atlanta Symphony (and others) saying that their costs are unsustainable — Peter Gelb and others are having great success raising funds.

I wonder — and understand, I’m speculating — whether this, too, isn’t something temporary. like the momentary sweet spot for UK used booksellers. Maybe there are donors roused to generosity precisely because institutions are in crisis.

But of course this is temporary. Most of these donors surely will only make large donations once. And there’s a limited supply of them. How long before the supply of people wiling to give tens of millions in a troubled time — and of course able to do so — runs out?

Age is a factor here. In 2008, the NEA did a study in which 1943 — as it happens, the year I was born — turned out to be a crucial date for classical music. People born that year and earlier still went to classical performances as often as people in their age group had in past decades. People born afterward went less often.

Classical music donors come from the classical music audience. So now we’re talking about a donor pool that’s shrinking. Only donors born 1943 and later — meaning those 71 and earlier — are (if my logic holds) as numerous as donors used to be. Donors younger than 71? There are fewer of them, because in people under 71 there’s less interest in classical music than we would have found in the past.

With each passing year, the pivot age increases. With each passing year (I don’t mean to be ghoulish) there will be fewer donors to bail out large institutions. The donation boom can’t continue forever.

(And this leaves out what people call “donor fatigue,” a phenomenon that speaks for itself, and which — according to reports circulating both in private and in public — afflicts people who give money to orchestras. And get hired of problems that never seem to be resolved. Thus reducing the donor supply still further.)

I like this diary format. Look for more of it.