Yes, we in classical music have a focus, have concerns that the rest of the world might not share. And which might seem odd to people on the outside.
It’s nothing new to say that our focus on the past is one of those odd-seeming things. Art of the past, in all genres? Of course! No problem, whether it’s a Shakespeare play, a Tolstoy novel, a Robert Frost poem, a Joan Crawford mov
Many of us love those things. We just don’t focus on them. Theater companies do just as many new plays as old, serious readers read many new novels. And so on. While we keep loving Beethoven and Brahms. Not that anything’s wrong with them, but enough!
Showing how far out we are
Alyssa Monks – Paddle8
So here’s a demonstration of what outliers we are. We might think that art museums were like us, forever showing the old masters.
But no. In 2016 I read a big newspaper piece, I think in the New York Times, about how contemporary art has taken over the art world. I regret that I can’t find the link — can anyone help me here? I’d be grateful!
So I asked a leading art critic if what the piece said was true, and they said it was. Namely, that
- Contemporary art shows draw the largest crowds at museums
- Art collectors primarily buy contemporary art
- Graduate students in art history — future museum curators, some of them — mainly study contemporary art.
That last point, the piece said (as I recall), is so true that some people in the field worry that in the future there won’t be enough qualified curators to work with old art.
What this means to us
So there we are. Outliers. Sometimes people say, not very pleasantly, that a classical concert can be too much like a museum. But it’s been true for quite a while that this isn’t true, because museums are far more oriented toward the current world than we are.
I don’t think this makes us look good, to the people we’d like to find for our new audience. We’ll look backward to them.
But there is some good news here. Once classical music emerges into contemporary life, our new audience will be there already, waiting for us.
And by the way…the Museum of Modern Art just announced a major expansion of its galleries, due to be built this summer. And whose purpose is to show works by women and artists of color, alongside the established modernist canon.
Which puts MOMA way ahead of just about any big classical music institution we could name. We’d better get moving on diversity. Subject of a future blog post! Not just talking about diversity, but doing something about it. Kicking the percentage, for instance, of orchestra musicians of color up to 10% of those onstage at big orchestras, up from the current 4%. Out in the real world of 2019, we look shamefully out of touch for not doing this.
I have often said, when a discussion of this topic comes up, that CM organizations–orchestras, chamber groups, etc.–need to act at least part of the time as museums, because the Three B’s and other old composers wrote some pretty great masterpieces and other pieces that have to be constantly performed, because music has to be performed. It’s the same thing as museums hanging Rembrandt on their walls and libraries stocking Sophocles and Dante.
It’s a question of balance between old stuff and contemporary things, I think. My home town Phila. Orch. does a pretty good job with this balance in my opinion, though they could get a little more daring. Some Pettersson, maybe?
The trouble, of course, is that people who appreciate contemporary literature and graphic arts can’t figure out contemporary CM as easily. They tend to find this music much more impenetrable than the latest novel or painting. They have to ease into “music appreciation” by just exposing themselves more to it until they get used to how to listen to it. Sort of like dipping your toes into a cold swimming pool. If they got their toes a little wet, they would find that contemporary musicians and composers are presenting plenty of music that is pretty easy to get into.
We worry a lot about how to make “classical” music more like pop music so that its audience will expand. But what about more of the public, the ones who can read contemporary novels, etc., making more of an effort to acclimate themselves to CM? (It’s trivially easy, today, to do that via YouTube and other means.) I don’t think we CM people have to make all of the effort alone.
At least in my experience, art-aware people (so to speak) who don’t listen to classical music have no trouble with new classical stuff when they hear it.
A story I often tell. Back in the ’90s, before I was married, I had a girlfriend who wasn’t into art, and certainly not classical music. Pop culture woman. But, approaching age 40, wondered if she might like classical music.
One day, as we ate breakfast at my place one Sunday morning, she asked me to play some classical music. So I did what a classical radio station might do on Sunday. Played some bright Baroque music, i think it was Handel.
After a little while, she said to me, “Why isn’t classical music more noir?”
So I put on the Lulu Suite. “You mean like this?” I said.
“Yes!” she said. “Like that.” Really happy to hear that definitely noir, 12-tone score by Berg. “Why doesn’t more classical music sound like that?”
About the people you mention taking some initiative on their own to approach classical music…no use blaming them if they don’t do it. It’s a fact of life. We have to deal with it. We’ll have to go to them, since they’re not coming to us. And why they’re not coming to us probably has a lot to do with how we present ourselves in the world, which includes what music we play.
I think a good balance between new and old would be what some years ago I saw regional theaters I Googled were doing — half the plays by dead playwrights, half by living ones. I’d love to see us do the same.
Our “museum” is about to become a morgue if focus doesn’t turn to contemporary music. NOT from the academy (many with cozy relationships with major orchestras). They have shoved serialism up every orifice for so long that the audience righteously flees from most new music. The “diversity” needs to be in programming, NOT in musicians. If a blind transgendered Eskimo plays the oboe better than a white guy, the blind transgendered Eskimo should get the job. But only then.
Things are better now with new music. Atonality and especially serialism are pretty much styles of the past, now, even in the academy. And audiences don’t hate it. I saw a fine Chris Rogerson string quartet, quite dissonant, get cheered by a standard classical audience at an Omer Quartet concert last night in DC. Audience liked the piece so much they cheered Chris again when he went back to his seat after taking his bow.
I can’t agree about diversity, the way you put it. As Susan Feder, who’s in charge of arts funding at the Mellon Foundation, put it recently, the problem with minority musicians in orchestras isn’t talent, it’s access. So reform the access, something that seems drastic with orchestras, but is taken for granted everywhere else.
And anyway the judgment of who’s most talented is fudged by so many things — orchestra players recognizing their students’ playing, even behind a screen, and above all by orthodox notions of how the audition excerpts should be played, which means that imaginative musicians don’t dare show their imagination at an orchestra audition.
Plus, musicians are so good these days that they don’t need to restrict themselves to just the number one rank. You get 150 oboists auditioning, I bet everyone in the top 5% is terrific, maybe the top 10%. Which to me means orchestras could hire musicians and in fact pay attention to diversity. All kinds of diversity! I’d love to see them staff musicians the way a college picks a freshman class — looking for people from many backgrounds, with many skills, and many points of view. Can’t believe the quality of an orchestra would suffer if they did that! Might even get better, since they now might play with more imagination, depth, and individuality.
Yes, Berg is definitely the ticket! I’ve been impressed recently by Rautavaara’s symph0nies, too. He’s another great composer, a successor to Sibelius, that gets far too little attention.
It seems to me that if contemporary music is all that were necessary to get new audiences to subscribe and buy mass tickets to (largely) wordless, instrumental orchestras and chamber music, then those that new music more-or-less full time should be growing rapidly. Perhaps it’s not the case because the long-standing traditional non-profits claim the available grants until the former reach a certain age. Unfortunately, I actually believe this argument compares apples to avocados. Both are different enough that they serve different purposes. The tradition is committed to “preserving” while the new is to “innovating.” Yes, the tradition seems obsessed with the past (although sometimes in slightly new ways), even though the paradox is everyone on-stage and in the audience is actually obsessing about the present moment. And while contempo clam (CM) seems dedicated to living composers, contempo living and the next big breakthrough style, its paradox is that it’s often also haunted by the past traditions.
I’m convinced there can be no panaceas here. We need BOTH; we need a balance, even if it’s between non-profits at polar opposites. But even at best, art music will by definition lose out market dominance to commercial/pop music. So the question was always whether to go for artistic integrity vs popularity. I’ve always been a road-less-traveled person. But that doesn’t mean I only want to matter to blue-hairs the rest of my life, nor that I never play popular concerts. Instead I want younger, darker, newer audiences to understand why I do at times prefer to play the oldstuff and repeatedly. And if the playing alone isn’t enough (it certainly isn’t), then they DESERVE to hear musicians testify; giving a context that is not from Brahms’ or Mozart’s era, but the speakers’. It takes more time and many veterans attendees hate imposing a context that is not the composer’s, but many other veterans do enjoy this. Boston Symphony did/does this monthly or bi-monthly.
PLUS, we’ve got the fact that the old masterpieces don’t belong to dead composers anymore, esp. once the copyrights have expired. What is the public domain FOR if not to let us play with and reset the context of Beethoven’s complete works? We must claim ownership and insist audiences can too. We must make wordless, instrumental music OF PRACTICAL USE (accessible) to persons of little or no experience. It won’t be ideal, but that is hardly practical at this stage. The new audience won’t show up in droves for pre-concert lectures or carefully read the program book. Casual classical, however, has a chance to make the case in small, intimate, close encounters.
Well said, as usual, Rick.
I think there’s an additional factor, one that doesn’t ofter come up in a classical music context, because we just don’t have it much in classical music. This is engagement with contemporary life. I didn’t watch the Grammys yesterday, but I wasn’t surprised to read about them this morning and learn that they were shot through with talk and performances that addressed some of the big issues of the world.
I loved that the big winner, Kacey Musgraves, is a country artist, a singer and songwriter, who has trouble on country radio because she sings sympathetically about LGBT issues. And who mixes electronics with traditional country instruments, which also gets her in trouble with country traditionalists.
I’m wary of the common generalizations about “pop/commercial music.” because I haven’t found them to be true. Two I would make, though, are that right in the heart of the pop mainstream, there’s constant innovation, artistic and technical. And that pop music addresses the life we all live, and that this is one of the biggest reasons so many people get involved with it.
I hate to make such an obvious statement, but: why is pop music called “pop”? Because it’s popular, obviously. And I don’t think “classical” music will ever be as popular as “pop.” But it doesn’t need to be. It just has to survive economically. If we don’t go extinct, that will be success, in some sense.
And why suppose that “classical” music doesn’t address the life we live? I run across many contemporary compositions and concerts that deal with LGBT, climate change, race, you-name-it issues. It’s not that they don’t address these issues; it’s that most people in this country aren’t used to the way “classical” composers and performers do it.
The way most people incorporate music in their lives is the way pop musicians do it: short, 3-minute bursts (which started in the days of 78s, which is all one side of a 78 could hold). Songs, not instrumental only; mostly simple harmonic structures, melodies that people can sing along with, or try to. Rhythms they can dance with. In other words, music that they can incorporate directly into their lives in short doses, which is all most people have time for in these hectic days.
I think that’s why the Three B’s, etc., are in danger of going extinct: a full Beethoven symphony or Brahms quartet just doesn’t appeal to most people, or make sense of. They can’t sit still long enough, and their attention spans are too short. Even radio stations like WQXR are going more and more in the direction of playing single movements of symphonies. Very sad.
Jon, I don’t want to be harsh here. But I read so much about pop music from people attuned to classical music — stuff that really isn’t true, even if it seems self-evident to classical people.
Like the idea that pop music is by definition popular. In practice, not so. Some of it is popular, some of it isn’t. The term, by the way, is a misnomer. And just isn’t used by people in the pop music field (where I worked for a number of years). “Pop music” is a misnomer precisely because not all of it is popular. People in the field refer simply to “music.” Under which heading you find a huge and complex array of genres, styles, and levels of popularity. If I may say so, you might want to acquaint yourself with that, before making any large generalizations.
And about connections with the issues in our world. Of course there are some classical pieces that make the connections. But — and I would think this is obvious — you can go endlessly to classical concerts and only rarely, if ever, encounter these works. Certainly when I go to the National Symphony here in DC I don’t encounter them. Or for that matter anything that brings me into current social issues.
By contrast, it’s impossible to be engaged with “pop” music without also being immersed in these issues. First because the artists bring them up. And second because the music itself embodies them. To give just one way in which this is true, there’s music mainly listened to by white people, and music mainly listened to by African-Americans. Different musical styles. And then within those two areas, all kinds of genres for listeners of different ages, social groups, whatever. If you haven’t worked in the field, haven’t gone to endless numbers of “pop” music events, big and small, you can’t imagine the variety and complexity of the social groupings implied by the musical styles.
Running through the Grammy show, from what I read, was a critique of the show and its producers, saying that their basic point of view was white, and that (to quote Drake’s now-famous acceptance speech) it didn’t much incorporate the lives of a mixed-race person from Canada (Drake speaking for himself there) or a young Latina.
Well, that’s a debate than runs through our world these days. If there were a big classical music awards show, do you think we’d touch on those issues much? Not likely. But, as I said, they’re built into “pop” music, in the end because “pop” music is built into our society. From a “pop” point of view, in fact, classical music is just another “pop” genre, in part defined by its small, elite, older white audience.
I remember years ago someone who emailed me being outraged because her local school district was teaching kids the history of rock, rather than anything about classical music. But one great thing about that choice is that the history of rock — or rather, more broadly, the history of American popular music in the rock era — is inseparable from the social history of America itself. Built, as I said, right into the music itself.
People use the term “pop music” in a number of ways, I guess. The way I use it refers mostly to what I hear coming out of cars at high volume when I walk down the street and when I go to the gym. I’m sorry I don’t know what the proper technical terms for those forms of music are, but that’s the kind of music that most Americans listen to.
I suppose the National Symphony doesn’t play much socially aware music, but perhaps you’re in the wrong city. The Philadelphia Orchestra actually programs a fair amount of it, which is one thing I admire about them. Maybe it’s the Quaker influence around here. (There aren’t that many Friends, to use the technical term, around now, but the historical influence is still strong.)
We certainly have to do a lot to counter the still-prevalent popular association between classical music and wealth. One thing that always strikes me at Phil. Orch. concerts is that the program is jam-packed with ads for investment funds and fancy retirement villas, which I guess reflects the constituency the orchestra administration wants to appeal to. Running this kind of organization burns up a lot of dollars, I realize. But I, and a lot of other classical fans, definitely don’t belong to that stratum of society! I see a lot of fellow concert-goers who don’t seem very wealthy. And when my son used to want me to buy tickets to rock concerts all the time, I noticed that they were about as expensive as classical music tickets.
Jon, suppose you ran into someone from abroad, who told you American food is terrible. And when you asked why they thought that, they said they’d eaten at McDonald’s. What would you think? Would you think they were in a position to really know what food is like here? Judging all of it by Mcdonald’s, when they’d never had barbecue in [fill in the name of the area where you think it’s best], never had a steak at Peter Luger’s in NYC, never eaten at a five-star vegan restaurant, never eaten at any of the artistic and creative places where many cuisines come together in the cooking of a superb young chef.
Sad situation, to make a judgment like that. Aren’t you doing the same thing, when you judge “pop” music by what you hear on the street and at the gym? Have you ever stopped to wonder whether the “pop” universe might be wider, more diverse and varied than that?
I’m really not sure what this whole discussion is about at this point, but what I am trying to understand is what is standing in the way of ordinary people, the kind who drive an ordinary car down the street or hang out at the gym, getting interested in what is conventionally called “classical music.” (Actually, my gym trainer says that he also trains a player in the Philadelphia Orchestra, and introduced me to him one day. So these categories of people are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)
I think it has something to do with what kind of music fits into an individual’s life, what a person grew up with, what is playing on the radio stations they listen to, what they share with their friends — essentially, what is part of their everyday lifestyle. For the great majority of Americans, it’s not sitting down, in a concert hall or in their homes, and listening to an hour-and-a-half Mahler symphony, or the Winterreise. And I think that this is true even of people who are very sophisticated connoisseurs of the highest quality of progressive rock, hip-hop, or whatever.
I don’t have any problem at all with anyone listening to whatever music they want to spend time with. I’m not trying to claim that “serious” music, whatever that is, is “better for them” at all. It’s not that I think that a Schubert Lied would reach something deeper in their souls than whichever song won in the Grammies last night. I just wonder just what it is that makes the former resonate so meaningfully with those few of us whenever we listen to it but makes the vast majority of our fellow citizens completely indifferent to it. That, I think, is what explains why the singers at the Grammies have vastly more fans than Fischer-Dieskau or even Yu-Ja Wang.
Worthy question, Jon.
Many ways to approach answers to it. There are many theories (we need to teach classical music in our schools, for instance). There are some studies (there’s no one like me in the audience; the performance would be exactly the same no matter who was there; classical music organizations don’t, in their PR and marketing, give me any reason to go).
But I’d suggest that one big step toward an answer would have to be to understand the people who aren’t coming. What are they doing instead? And so here you have to get into their culture. Aka the current culture of everyone outside of classical music. And, at least when we’re talking about younger classical musicians, also the culture of some of us inside.
And that means, among other things, really getting to know the music that everyone else listens to. Then the discussion becomes considerably less abstract. We then can really start to list the joys on either side of the fence. I can do that, because I live on both sides. So I can say, for instance, that it really is thrilling that Kacey Musgraves (whom I hadn’t heard before) won best album and three other awards at the Grammys. My immediate reaction, on hearing her music and then seeing one of her videos, was more delight than I’ve gotten from classical music for awhile.
Someone else wouldn’t have to like her as much as I do (or the Grammys did), but if I’m talking to someone who knows her stuff, then we can talk very concretely about why Trifonov playing the Emperor Concerto (which I heard last week at the National Symphony, and loved) might or might not give someone equal delight.
And we could also discuss what kind of person would like either one, since one lesson from the larger music universe is that not everyone likes the same thing. Back when Luther Vandross was a big R&B star, and you’d hardly see a single white person at his shows, nobody bothered to ask why white people didn’t listen to him. That’s just how it was. Normal demographic breakdown. (Even though I, reviewing one of his shows, hearing him arch over a high-lying phrase in a song, found myself on my feet shouting his name. Without planning to do it, or knowing that I was about to! Something that never happened to me at any performance before or since.)
So with some experience of the normal demographic breakdown of audiences for various musical genres, it becomes not surprising that classical music has its own demographic. And not so surprising that people outside that group don’t flock to it. Meaning that the question you asked becomes less mysterious. And that we maybe stop believing so strongly that many more people could like classical music — or at least that they could when it takes the forms it currently does.
Which brings me to one last point. I’ve worked in both pop music and classical music, and one thing that’s always struck me is that pop music is more creative. More people doing surprising, out of the box things. Hard to believe, maybe, at least for people whose musical experience is largely inside classical music, and are used to thinking of pop music as essentially commercial.
So there’s another area where it helps to know something of both sides. I can make an assertion like this — that pop music in my experience is more creative — and someone who doesn’t know pop music can’t really dispute it. Because they haven’t experienced it, can’t judge for themselves whether it’s creative or not.
I made this point to someone I’d just met, at a party, maybe a month ago. We were having a very lively conversation, about many things, and she was clearly a person with wide musical knowledge, of pop as well as classical, though she worked for a classical music organization.
She asked me why I thought pop music was more creative. I didn’t want to embark on a lecture, so in a friendly way I asked her why she might think I had that view. She thought for a moment, and said, “Because pop music is less constrained?”
I agreed with that. In my long experience with classical music, doing so many things in the field, and in particular teaching at Juilliard for 22 years (and visiting other conservatories) I think we’re constrained. So many things classical musicians are told not to do. So many things orchestras and other big classical institutions feel they can’t do, for fear of displeasing their donors or their audience.
You’d think pop music has the same constraints, because people (and record companies) want to make money. But it doesn’t work that way. Classical musicians go through a long education, a long apprenticeship, in which they’re systematically told what they’re not allowed to do. And aren’t given examples of people who did new things.
Whereas in pop, you go your own way. And absolutely everyone knows examples of people who came out of left field doing something completely new, and succeeded. Because that’s what pop music history — ever since the dawn of rock & roll in the 1950s — is all about. That’s what it teaches. The world is always changing, and those who do new things in music have history on their side.
I think people coming to classical music from outside can sense our constraints. And feel, whether or not their conscious of feeling this, that constraint is a turnoff.