Reflections on Music Criticism

Sometimes I am reading some music criticism and it reminds me, in an odd way, of a typical New York Times political think-piece. You know the kind: "Republicans: Threat or Menace?" But in music criticism it is usually the opposite sort of thing, more like, "young, gifted pianist: too smooth or just right?"

It is likely that real music criticism demands a fair amount of courage, because if you are doing it right, you are going to annoy a lot of powerful people. One example I have mentioned lots of times is Richard Taruskin who writes articles in various places including the New York Times that often go against the conventional wisdom. But this is a subsidiary career for him; his primary one is as a musicologist, not a journalist.

I know the pressure not to give offence can be very strong. If I am not taking on the responsibility of doing a review of a concert, I prefer not to even start, especially if I know the artists personally. I would rather discuss it with them privately. But sometimes it can be good to have a real, straightforward piece of music criticism, just so we don't forget what it is like! Years ago I can recall reading some writing on wine by Auberon Waugh that was so acid, so telling and so funny that I often ended up laughing out loud. Here is a little excerpt where he talks about what writing on wine should be like:

Wine writing should be camped up. The writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him; sulphuric acid should be discovered where there is the faintest hint of sharpness. Bizarre and improbable side-tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of french railway stations or ladies’ underwear — anything to get away from the accepted list of fruit and flowers. I am not sure that it helps much but it is more amusing to read.

I don't think that this would be the right approach to take with music criticism--sounds too frivolous--but most music criticism these days leans too far the other way, towards complete blandness. For example, here is how one review of a CD of Beethoven piano sonatas summed up:

While some might feel increasingly short-changed by these performances, others who admire the polish and assurance of Bavouzet's playing as well as the surface slickness that goes with it, may well enjoy every one of these performances.

If you can get performers to talk about the music, you might get either a mini-self-promotion or some candid thoughts. In The Guardian's recent article about Richard Strauss ("Richard Strauss: Threat or Menace?") no wait, sorry, the actual title was "Richard Strauss: profound genius or gifted entertainer?", we get a bit of both. Soprano Susan Gritton comments as follows:

It is always a glorious treat to sing Strauss. He knew instinctively how to write for the soprano voice; you feel this particularly strongly in those songs he wrote for his wife, Pauline de Ahna. The richness of the orchestral texture is actually where the beauty lies for the voice because, with a sensitive conductor, it becomes a sumptuous wave for the voice to surf, with wonderful opportunities for timbre and line. The lieder written later for Elisabeth Schumann have a deeper, more thoughtful quality; you can feel they were composed for a different voice. My own favourite Strauss role is Capriccio's Countess Madeleine – it is rich with sparkle and lyrical elegance – and fits me like a glove.

Which I think counts as self-promotion! Cellist Steven Isserlis is more critical:

I can't say that I like Strauss, as a rule. I saw Salome once, and never need to see it again. His natural language is post-Wagnerian hothouse romanticism that I'm just not into – I long for a bath of Mozart after hearing it!

I couldn't agree more. Sometimes the urge to compliment a famous composer comes out as mere blather. Conductor Juanjo Mena comments:

In 1896's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Strauss abandoned what he found to be the restrictive classical form, developing it to reveal a new structure that took the shape of a great symphonic work, but in one single movement. The process culminated in 1915's Alpine Symphony. In both works, Strauss was clearly conscious of presenting art as a form of expression, stressing that music should have poetic elements to it, as well as the most imaginative representations of living phenomena – those of man, life and nature. He channelled all this incredible optimistic energy into his scores in a masterly way, and his instrumentation, with its inexhaustible wealth of orchestral colour, is intoxicating.

Well sure, you don't want to say anything critical about a composer like Strauss when someone might read it who is thinking about hiring you to conduct him next season. "Art as a form of expression"? Wow, that's certainly a fresh perspective.

If criticism should be memorable, then Richard Strauss himself was probably a better critic than many of his critics. A sample:

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

Osvaldo Golijov echoed exactly this in an interview once, referring to himself. I only just now see where he got it.

One writer who does venture critical opinions fairly regularly is Norman Lebrecht. Here is a link to a piece on a new CD of music by Delius. A sample:

The weaker pieces here are the longer ones – a 25-minute suite for a theatre play satirising Norwegian politics (how amusing) and the interminable Eventyr, actually only 15 minutes long. Even the title sounds like eternity.

His best line about the CD: "Use it on friends to demonstrate Elgar’s exceptionality."

This is part of my critical methodology, of course. There is nothing quite so revealing as putting two things side by side. I learned this at quite a number of wine-tastings. You have to choose two things that are in roughly the same aesthetic arena, otherwise they are incommensurable. Two that Lebrecht mentions are Britten and Tippett. Let's have a listen. As I'm a guitarist, I'm going to pick two pieces for guitar. The first is The Blue Guitar by Michael Tippett:

And for comparison, Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten:

Without getting into technical details, which in a case like this are not helpful anyway, let me make an analogy. Imagine two television shows: one is full of interesting and likeable characters whose lives and fate engage you. The other is full of people whom you vaguely dislike at first and more and more as you get to know them. They seem vain, shallow, self-absorbed and very much not interesting nor engaging. You could care less what happens to them.

That is how I feel about these two pieces. With one of them, every note seems right and draws me in. With the other, the themes seem so pointless that I couldn't care less how they are developed.

Do you see what I mean? Which is which, do you think?

Music Journalism

I was very interested to read the article titled "Best Music Journalism 2013" until I actually followed the link. Go ahead and read it, then we'll talk.

Dum-de-dum-de-dum... Back? Ok, what do you notice? Well, apart from the fact that since they don't mention any of the posts from The Music Salon, it can't actually be a list of the best writing on music. But what else?

Except for two exceptions, every single one of the many, many pieces of music journalism listed is exclusively about popular, or perhaps I should say non-classical music. It is as if there was a decision made somewhere that the only thing deserving of being called music these days is popular music. Now, of those two exceptions, one is only very marginally about music, but the music that it is marginally about is classical. The piece is "Women, Gays, and Classical Music" by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker. And yes, it is all about how woman and gays do not get enough exposure in the world of classical music. So it is really about that and not about music. The other example is one that I wrote about on this blog and it is the real thing: an actual article about classical music that talks about the music: "The Most Beautiful Melody in the World" a well-written piece by composer Jan Swafford about beautiful melodies.

Let me say it again: apart from these two pieces, every single article of the dozens and dozens listed is about pop music from various angles. No wonder fewer people listen to classical music (if that is actually true and I'm not sure it is): it is as if there is a conspiracy of silence to keep people as ignorant as possible. I know it sounds wacky to say that, but I sometimes have suspicions that the ruling class actually prefers the rest of us to be as ignorant as possible so that we will keep voting for the people they think we should be voting for!

What happened to the idea that it wasn't actually a huge flaw in classical music that you needed a bit of knowledge to get the most out of it? When did it become a fundamental truth that all music had to be instantly digestible on first listening?

Isn't it a basic human response to be actually interested in those things that are intriguing, that is, that need a bit of investigation? When you hear a piece of music that you don't instantly "get", doesn't that make it more appealing? It's not just me, is it?

Well, enough of these rhetorical questions. I'm just going to put up three pieces of music that I hope might intrigue you into investigating further.

The first is a ballade by Brahms played by Michelangeli:

Next is a tombeau on the death of a certain M. Blancrocher by Johann Jakob Froberger:

And last is the middle movement of the third of three divertimenti (K. 138) that a young Mozart, age sixteen, wrote while touring in Italy with his father.

I'm just reading Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart and, while we have all certainly heard about his gifts, it is fascinating to read just how remarkable Mozart was from an early age. He started playing keyboard when he was four years old and before his fifth birthday he could learn, that is play from memory, a minuet and trio after half an hour's work! While on a long, long tour with his family that lasted from when he was seven to ten years old, he played for most of the royal families of Europe and was frequently tested, in public, by being given difficult pieces to read at sight. All of which he managed. He was also given texts for which he composed arias on the spot. Oh, and given a theme, he would improvise on it at great length. In other words, before he was ten years old he could do things that even the most talented musicians of today would be very reluctant to attempt in public. And he did them every day.

By the time he was into his teens, he was being commissioned to write operas. Oh, and as I learned last year while writing some program notes, he once wrote an entire sonata for violin and piano in an hour. Don't know how that is possible, but since it was Mozart...

"Now with extra ideological content!"

I was in Mexico City last week and went to two museums. They are both popular ones and there were interesting things to see in both. But what struck me was the ideological aspect of them. Utterly different ideological content, as a matter of fact, which makes it stand out more.

The two museums were the Museo Soumaya which I have visited before and the Frida Kahlo Museum, which I have not. The ideology of each is quite clear and there is really nothing mysterious about it. But oddly enough, I suspect most visitors are oblivious to it. Here is my take on each.

The Museo Soumaya, Carlos Slim's tribute to his wife, is a wonderful triumph of architecture and presentation. The building is very modern and innovative and the contents are presented with clarity and professionalism. (The top floor remains devoted to an exhibit of sculpture, mostly Rodin and Salvadore Dali and the rest is a selection of artworks of various kinds from the 17th century to the present.) Not surprisingly, given that it was the creation of the head of a wide range of companies that include communications and technology, the ideology is simply that the important values to hold are modern and technocratic ones. Let me emphasize that there is nothing wrong with this. Mr. Slim has every right to promote those values he believes important. Perhaps people miss the ideology because it is so simple and straightforward.

UPDATE: Here is a photo I took of one of the Rodin sculptures in the exhibit:

The Frida Kahlo Museum has quite a different ideology. For one thing, since it was her home, it has the feeling of a shrine as her bedroom(s) and kitchen are faithfully preserved. It is this very preservation that gives us the ideological clue. In one of her bedrooms are displayed photos of several people she particularly admired. They include Leon Trotsky, who resided with Frida Kahlo for a while and whose bedroom is also preserved in the museum, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and someone I didn't recognize (maybe Engels?). There is quite a lot of recent scholarship that attributes an astonishing toll of deaths to these figures (well, maybe not Trotsky and Marx). You might call them the greatest mass-murderers of the 20th century, which would come as a bit of a surprise to Hitler, I'm sure. A more palatable aspect of Kahlo's ideology in the museum is her collection of folk-art, showing her connection to the people.

Now, how am I going to tie this to music? A lot of recent musicological scholarship has tried to uncover the secret ideological subtext to a lot of music. Sometimes, as when it was discovered that the CIA had a program that supported the work of the post-WWII serialists in Europe, this has proved to be a bit uncomfortable! But in other cases it has proven quite interesting. Richard Taruskin has published innumerable essays on the ideological content and origins of the neo-classical and early music movements. Turns out they both originated in the Stravinsky circle.

But here is my point, and I actually have two. First, there is quite a lot of music that does have some or a lot of ideological content. There is no denying that the glories of the French Baroque in the operas of Rameau and the instrumental music of Couperin, were intended to gild the Bourbon lily of the French royalty (the very title of some of Couperin's pieces, the Concerts royaux shows that pretty clearly). But that brings me to my second point, in order to be truly effective, this ideological content needs to be pretty obvious. There is nothing subtle about one of the prime and original examples of musical ideology, the Marseillaise of revolutionary France. It was originally titled "War Song for the Army of the Rhine."

But a very subtle and covert ideology is really a contradiction in terms. It just won't fulfill an ideological function. Have a look at the examples of Socialist Realism by Shostakovich. The subtle, covert aspect is what musically contradicts the overt message!

So the conclusion is, yes, some music has ideological content, but it is usually poorer for that. The best music very much transcends the ideology and historic and social content of the time of its composition and this is as true of a Shostakovich symphony as it is of a Beethoven string quartet or a harpsichord piece by François Couperin. Speaking of which, let's end with one of those. Here is (are?) Les langueurs tendres from the Second Book:

Is there "timeless" music?

I keep coming back to a small group of questions, but that's ok, because there are only a few important questions. One of the ones that is important is the question of historicism, the view that there are overwhelming historical forces that determine the course of events. There are varying versions of this with varying amounts of plausibility. Karl Popper wrote a telling critique of the stronger versions in his book The Poverty of Historicism.

I'm giving this background because I think it helps understand a recent debate about what is going on with the humanities (which include the arts) in academia. Here is an interesting discussion of a recent dust-up by Peter Wood, President of the National Association of scholars. This quote will give you a good idea:

In December, the New York Times in an article headlined, "Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe," emphasized that the United States is not alone in treating the humanities as "nonstrategic." Australia, Britain, India, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and France have joined the decline. 

So there is abundant reason to wonder why the humanities are in trouble. These disciplines have thrived in the academy in various forms for some 800 years. Why should they be in such steep decline today? One explanation is that students are worried more than ever about their career prospects and, fearing that a major in history or English will reduce their chances of future employment, the students have hived off to study accounting and economics. There is surely something to this explanation. Faced with crushing loads of student debt, students do need to take counsel on how they will pay their bills.

But that explanation goes only so far. Even students who major in accounting could take plenty of history and English courses if they wanted to. To explain their reluctance, we need to look deeper. My answer, offered in various places, is that the humanities have in many cases descended into triviality. They have become aggressively ideological in causes such as race, class, and gender equity; they have turned into engines of contempt for the great traditions of cultural achievement and scholarly inquiry they used to represent; and they have become smugly self-referential, as if the declarations of the professors matter as much (or more) than the deliberations of statesmen and the profundities of great works of art and literature.

I think I have noticed before that deep irony of scholars of the humanities, whose fundamental responsibility is to transmit the content of culture and civilization to each new generation, have instead reconceptualized their role as to be the main critics of this content. I have often chosen musicologist Susan McClary as my example because of an early article she wrote accusing Beethoven of creating the impression of being a frustrated rapist in the way he handles the recapitulation of the first movement of the Symphony No. 9. Sure sounds silly summarized that baldly! But the general trend of sneering at the great artistic traditions of Western Civilization as a means of advancing one's career in academia, under the guise of race, class and gender analysis, is widespread in the humanities. Read all the above article for a sense of it.

In music departments, all the pianists, violinists and orchestras play Beethoven all the time. But the musicologists tend to steer clear of him, unless they can find an angle like McClary's. The reason is that, unless you are deconstructing him according to race, class and gender, it seems as if what you are doing is old hat, old musicology, already done to death. One of the most important pressures on young scholars is to come up with new angles and they have been going to the well of race, class and gender for decades now, though music departments have been slow to catch up.

This past weekend I went to two concerts by a string quartet that I first heard last season and gotten to know a bit. The first violinist is from Vancouver and they are based in Toronto. They are the Afiara Quartet and the link is to their website. I won't review the concert as I know them personally, but I would like to take the concert, and one piece in particular, as a good example of the timeless timeliness of music.

Afiara do Beethoven particularly well (one member even told me that they wouldn't mind only playing Beethoven quartets!) and they ended the second concert with a terrific performance of the Quartet in C# minor, op. 131. I have talked about this piece before here and here. The rest of the pieces performed over the two concerts were by Haydn, Mozart, Dvorak, Hugo Wolf and Schumann. What really stood out for me was how different the Beethoven was from the other music. All the pieces were very fine, of course, but there is something different about Beethoven. The late quartets are full of the most extraordinary contrasts of mood, meter, tempo and harmony. The remarkable thing is how they hold our attention. The music is so extraordinarily expressive that we listen, on the edge of our seats. No matter how lovely the other music was, it never quite grips the listener as thoroughly.

And this is an important aesthetic fact. Musicology tends to steer clear of Beethoven (and Haydn too, for that matter) as he provides little for them to deconstruct. Sure, he had race, class and gender, but these lenses add little to our understanding and enjoyment of the music. Trying to put Beethoven through the academic blender just tends to make the scholar look a bit foolish. Like Shakespeare, Beethoven stands there defying the tools of our doctoral thesis and demanding to be taken seriously as a great artist.

The real irony here is that music is the most timey of the time arts as every vibration from the pulse of the tempo to the vibration that gives the pitch of the melody note, is all about time and nothing but time! But still, despite this, music contains many pieces that certainly seem to transcend their immediate historical and social context and speak to us with as much or most likely more, aesthetic authority now than they did when they were written.

So yes, there is timeless music, or will be as long as we have ears to hear it. I was fortunate to find a clip on YouTube of the Afiara Quartet playing the whole of Beethoven, op. 131, so you can see what I mean:

A Room Full of Guitars

I always seem to get a lot of comments when I write about music education, so let me share an interesting experience I had once. Way back when I was just beginning to study music formally, I think I was in first or second year undergraduate, I was hired to teach a night school guitar course. I think my father mentioned me to someone at the school board or something, though he never admitted it.

This was almost the first experience I had with teaching music and it was certainly like getting thrown in the deep end of the pool! I had only been playing for four or five years myself and was just getting started as a classical, as opposed to popular, musician. But that didn't matter as these folks just came to learn a little basic guitar.

Remember when everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted to play guitar? That was the sixties and seventies and this was around 1972. I showed up at the high school where the night school course was going to be held and the large room was absolutely full of people with guitars. There must have been sixty of them at least!

I have to tell you a bit about my father: he wasn't the musical one, it was my mother who was the musician, a fine intuitive fiddle player. My father grew up as a farmer and then worked for many years for the railroad. His cultural experience was very minimal. But he did get me this job and drove me out to this remote suburban school because I didn't have a car. In fact, he even hung around during the class. This was probably the first time, apart from hearing me practice at home, that he had seen me at work.

So, sixty guitars and people wanting to know how to play them. Well, I couldn't do anything with them until we got them all in tune. I talked a bit about how the guitar is constructed and how to tune it but then going around to everyone individually and checking on them took, oh, I don't know, at least thirty minutes--half the class! Some of these guitars had not seen the light of day in years. And the strings...

Now this was not a classical guitar course, just basic guitar, so they were mostly steel strings. I don't even remember what guitar I brought along. I was expecting maybe ten people, so I didn't even bring handouts. I think I did have one song ready to teach them and it was probably "Blowing in the Wind", an early song by Bob Dylan. Three chords: C, D and G. And if you don't care much about voice-leading you can even teach radically simplified versions of these chords to get started with.

Everyone had heard the song, so I spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes showing how to play the three chords--meaning where to put a couple of fingers on the left hand on the frets for really simple versions of the chords. Then I taught them some of the words and voila, for the last five minutes of the class I got the whole room of sixty people all playing and singing a Bob Dylan song.

This was probably the only time I ever really impressed my father. Afterwards he said, with a note of surprise in his voice, "how did you do that? Those people didn't know how to play anything at the start and in one hour you had them all playing a song? I just don't know how you did it."

It's hard work teaching music, but here are the "tricks", if that's what they are:

• First, you start with motivated people who really want to learn music (the others, don't bother with)
• Second, break everything down into really simple bits and go over and over them
• Third, be positive and optimistic: most people will actually learn how to play something in a lot less time than they thinkl

Over many, many years of teaching private lessons, which is really the only way to go with music (there was one exception, which I will get to in a minute), I have honed this a bit, but these three things are still fundamental. With a person of ordinary ability or potential I can have them reading very simple music at the end of the first lesson. At the end of the first month, they will know all the notes in first position. By three months they will be able to play a simple classical piece from memory for other people. I get them to this point by scheduling monthly "guitar nights" where everyone has to come and play. It is a great experience for new and old students.

Ok, now that exception. I was involved with a private music school once that wanted to offer small group instruction so they could offer lessons for a bargain price. I said I would try it, stipulating only that the students in a group had to be all about the same age. I ended up with five ten-year-olds and started working with them. As the group was small I as able to give each person a lot of individual attention, which is crucial.

Now here is how that played out: of the five, one dropped out in a few weeks. The other four stayed and I basically turned them into a professional guitar quartet. By the time they were fourteen or fifteen, I had them on local cable television a few times and in lots of concerts. The most interesting performance from my point of view was one they gave for a group of high school guitar teachers (which links up with my opening anecdote). As guitar professor at the university I was scheduled to give a talk on teaching classroom guitar. But I thought, instead of just babbling about it, why not show them?

So I showed up and started the talk by just chatting with the teachers (it was a small group). I asked them what they typically did and a lot of them did something like what I did with my night school class. But they spread it over a whole semester. So then I said, well, you could do something different, more like what they do in band with the guitarists each with their own part instead of everyone playing the same three chords. And then I invited in my quartet of fifteen-year-olds. Without any cue from me they came in, arranged the chairs, set up their music stands and tuned to the leader, then sat looking at me. So I just said, "go ahead" and they played a nice guitar quartet by John Duarte. Here is one of his pieces for guitar quartet, though more virtuoso than the one they played:

But you know, it is even very satisfying to play something very simple on guitar, like "Blowing in the Wind" with three chords:

I didn't mention what happened with the young guitar quartet. Two of them dropped out in their later teens to pursue other goals, but the other two stayed on and took private lessons with me at the conservatory. One went on to do a bachelor's degree at McGill and the other became a performance major at the University of Victoria and then won a Goethe scholarship to study at a masterclass in Europe. She later did a master's in arts administration.

I like to think that studying music helped them all out, even if they did not become professional musicians.

Haydn Adagios, Part 2

About a week ago I was trying to dig into a couple of Haydn adagios to see what was going on. Here is the link to that post. I was stymied by not being able to download the scores. Turns out it was a software glitch on my computer. (A warning to others: the new Mac operating system, Mavericks, still has a couple of bugs in it, so download with caution!)

Anyway, now I have the scores to both the adagios I wanted to look at, so here goes. First, the third movement of the Symphony No. 68 in B flat:

This impresses me more each time I hear it! Let's see what Haydn is doing here. I think we always tend to think of the mood or aesthetics of an adagio cantabile as they were shaped by Beethoven, Schubert and the 19th century Romantics: inevitably melancholic with melting harmonies. Here is an example, the adagio from the Pathétique piano sonata by Beethoven:

Or this, the adagio from the C major String Quintet by Schubert:

But Haydn's adagios are more of an 18th century conception: not necessarily melancholy at all. In fact, his sense of humor is as likely to appear in an adagio movement as anywhere else. Here is the first page of the score to the Haydn adagio:

As was usual with Haydn, this is in the subdominant of E flat. The subdominant is the key of less tension used for slow movements and the codas of sonata movements. The melody begins with a simple arpeggiation of the tonic chord over two measures. Then one measure of dominant where the melody has a quick, falling scale passage ending with repeated F notes (the fifth of the dominant harmony). Then this quick scale fragment is repeated on the tonic and again on the dominant and finally for the last time on the tonic to end the phrase. So far so rather conventional. But here comes the Haydn touch: dovetailing with the end of the phrase the winds (2 oboes, 2 bassoons and 2 horns) come in with the accompaniment figure forte! It is as if the stagehand were suddenly to come out with a soliloquy in Hamlet! The conventional thing would be to have the winds repeat that whole opening phrase with their contrasting tone color. Or to have them echo the end of the phrase. Instead that "echo" is much louder than the phrase. The passage taken to echo is the second violin iteration of the simple accompaniment figure E-flat G E-flat G from the first measure. That was marked piano staccato. The wind interjection (and it is not just the winds, the violas and cellos join in, all in octaves) is forte staccato. It's the opposite of an echo, except we don't have a word for that and if you are listening for the first time with your volume up, it will knock you right on your keister.

The climax of the first section of the movement (with repeat indicated, but not taken in the above performance) is this passage:

Click to enlarge

This is an odd sort of harmonic progression that has the V 4/2 of V of V (C7 with B-flat in the bass) followed by vii° 6/5 of V of V but going directly to V 6/4 instead of to V of V. But that's not what is really odd. It's the dynamics again. Immediately after all this fuss, we have two diminishing echoes: piano and then pianissimo. Then the first section ends with a brief recap of the opening theme. Haydn works within a basically conventional structure but with a little rhythmic ingenuity and by inserting a couple of incongruous dynamic ideas, he creates a unique movement. And notice something that really speaks to his consistency: the second incongruity is a mirror-image of the first, which is what makes both of them work so well, I think.

Apart from all the usual mastery of the compositional craft that Haydn always displays, his real genius here is in making an adagio movement absolutely unique by using dynamics, the louds and softs, in quite unpredictable ways. And in being musically consistent in doing so, if you can absorb that paradoxical thought! What I mean is he has a loud echo of a soft accompaniment and then later on he has a soft echo of a loud climax, which is the inversion. But you weren't expecting it because by this point you had gotten used to the loud echo. See what I mean? This all works very well when you listen to it, but it is amazingly difficult to put into words.

Let's listen to that movement again. Here is a different performance of the whole symphony. For the adagio, just scroll ahead to the 10:15 mark:

Classical Music's "Business Model"

The music critic for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, has a column summing up the economic difficulties that classical music has seen over the last year. Let me quote a few excerpts:

The New York City Opera was hovering near death. The company needed $7 million immediately to avoid bankruptcy and proceed with its scheduled season. When asked whether Bloomberg Philanthropies, which had been supporting the company for years, would come to its rescue, Mr. Bloomberg said no. Even if he were to intervene, he added, City Opera’s “business model doesn’t seem to be working.”

Ah yes, the famous "business model"! On the other hand, the folks who run the Minnesota Orchestra seem very focussed on their business model, to the point that it doesn't seem to include an orchestra that actually plays concerts:

Most people would pick as the year’s second-worst story the continuing struggles of the impressive Minnesota Orchestra, where a standoff between the board and the musicians, deadlocked in bitter labor negotiations, resulted in the cancellation of the entire 2012-13 season and, so far, the first half of the current season. In frustration, Osmo Vanska, the orchestra’s music director, resigned after a decade of critical acclaim and popular success.

Mr. Tommasini's take on this?

Any institution, big or small, old or new, must have a clear artistic vision, a purpose that connects with audiences and the community. But the performing arts have never been profit-making endeavors. It is more important than ever that all institutions, from a fledgling string quartet to the lofty Metropolitan Opera, have an effective business model.

This seems nothing more than a platitude to me. As he also mentions, there is one fact about the situation in Minnesota that needs to be taken into account:

In a November Opinionator column for the website of The New York Times, “The Real Humanities Crisis,” Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, discussed the overall decline of support for the humanities and pointed to the travails of the Minnesota Orchestra. At a time when a deficit of just $6 million has pushed the orchestra almost to collapse, Mr. Gutting wrote, the Minnesota State Legislature appropriated $500 million to help construct a new football stadium for the Minnesota Vikings.

I think that people often forget that society, in the form of government, doles out astonishing amounts of money to things like professional sports. There are a lot more voters in a football stadium than a concert hall.

So in the spirit of this blog, let me see if I can uncover some uncomfortable truths about the relationship between classical music and society these days. In order to start, I am reminded of a segment I saw on CNN the other day (no, I don't actually watch CNN or any other TV, but I was in a restaurant where they had it on). The piece was about the historically low opinion rating people have of Congress these days. I felt like shouting at the screen: "but you elected every one of those louts you are now complaining about. If you want a better quality of politician, then vote for some!"

The same, I am afraid, goes for music. We live in a society dominated, not by a landed aristocracy as in the 18th century, or a burgeoning middle class as in the 19th century, but by a clever technocratic class who run government, media and academia. They run things for their own benefit, of course, and do so by sly manipulation of public opinion. Most people think roughly what they have been told to think by media commentators directly and indirectly by the way stories are slanted. In order to retain their hold on popular opinion, the technocratic class must appear to be non-elitist to a fault, which is why classical music does not fare well in the mass media or politics. It still has a toehold in academia, due to music departments that tend to help universities with their public image.

It is safe to say that no politician today would be caught dead admitting to a love of Bach over Beyoncé in public. We are far from the days when a major magazine would have a special feature on what records politicians like to listen to and the answers included Mozart and Puccini.

The "business model" of classical music today is exactly what it has always been: who pays the piper calls the tune. In the 15th and 16th centuries, composers were called upon to glorify and gild what needed glorifying and gilding whether it was the dedication of a new cathedral in Florence or a banquet of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Patrons who ordered portraits or other paintings sometimes would specify exactly how much gold by weight would be used--literal gilding!

The 18th century landed aristocracy, like the Esterházy family, loved music and were happy to pay what it cost to have a composer like Haydn as a permanent employee along with a chamber orchestra and everything needed to put on not only orchestra concerts, but also opera. Prince Nikolaus liked opera, so he built his own private opera house. Nowadays the Metropolitan Opera in New York is supported by wealthy lovers of opera. As it should be!

This has always been the case. Classical music has never had a viable "business model" in the sense of being a commercial product that you could simply sell in the marketplace and make a profit. Every production of every opera since it was invented around 1600 has lost money and needed the patronage of affluent music-lovers. Here is quote about the business model of opera:

“Profits at the door, the basis of the business investment, instead of growing are diminishing, evidently endangering the continuation of this noble entertainment.”

The source? It was a comment made about opera in Venice in 1681!

So, if we live in a world where orchestras like Minnesota and operas like the City Opera in New York seem to be failing, perhaps we should recall that they need financial support and always will. If you lose your affluent donors as it appears City Opera did, then you cannot rely on a business model to get you back on your feet.

The business model of classical music has always been reliance on the generosity of affluent music lovers. Unfortunately, while in the past, the affluent also saw the point of using music to glorify their station in society, they now look to other things like material possessions instead.

We obviously need a better class of affluent persons! More like the the landed aristocracy of the 18th century who seem, hands down, to have enabled the best music in history. Maybe the French Revolution was a mistake after all...

Let's listen to some music by Étienne Nicolas Méhul (1763 – 1817), one of the most famous composers of Revolutionary France. Here is his Symphony No. 1 in G minor, which sounds a bit like Boccherini with extra spicy revolutionary fervor: