“If you imagine a Norman Rockwell Christmas image, you can imagine that the music that would be playing in the background would be something like ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Winter Wonderland,’ which was written either by an Eastern European Jewish immigrant from the Lower East Side or a descendant of one of those people,” Curtis said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.To Curtis, the fact that Jews wrote so many Christmas classics isn’t a coincidence. From the 1880s to the 1920s, the United States experienced a huge influx of European Jewish immigrants. They weren’t readily welcomed into American society. Many universities had strict Jewish student quotas, and many industries weren’t keen on hiring Jews.The music industry, however, was wide open, and Jews excelled in it. From about the dawn of the 20th century until the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s, pop music was dominated by Jewish songwriters. Most of it was done behind the scenes, with many songwriters changing their names to sound less Jewish.
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Yes, it is possible to make a good income with classical music. Case in point, André Rieu: André Rieu: ‘I see a lot of jealousy around me’
We shouldn’t be surprised that Rieu is a box office sensation. In an era when, we are told, nobody sells DVDs and CDs anymore, Rieu has sold more than 40 million of them. Last year, the Dutch violinist and conductor sold more than 700,000 tickets to his concerts, bringing in $55.9 million (€50.6m) from 71 shows. It’s an impressive haul for someone who has seldom been the beneficiary of media hype.
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It simply wouldn't be Christmas without the traditional bemoaning of the loss of prestige of classical music. Nationalist Anthems: Remembering a time when composers mattered more
To be sure, the dwindling interest in classical music in the latter part of the twentieth century flowed from a number of sources, not least the ubiquitous appeal of more vernacular genres such as rock and other forms of pop music; a decline in music education curriculums, which no longer offered a broad musical education in elementary through high school; and the pervasive attraction (and distraction) of television and digital culture. At the same time, the end of the convergence between the world of classical music in the United States and international political developments meant the music no longer exercised the powerful hold on the American people that it had from the Great War through the Cold War.
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I've been saying this for years: Why 10,000 hours of practice won’t make you an expert.
If you met a genie who offered to grant you one musical skill for the rest of your life, a skill that would flow effortlessly and masterfully from you whenever you needed it, what would you choose? Stage charisma? The ability to move your audience? Technical prowess? If you are wise, you might choose the skill of practice. Because mastering the skill of musical practice could mean mastering all musical skills.We all know that quantity of practice is important. The popular claim that 10,000 hours of practice is the key to becoming an expert in any task holds some truth – you don’t get to Carnegie hall without spending a sizeable chunk of your waking hours cranking out scales and etudes.However, music psychology studies have shown that quantity of practice alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Expert players vary a lot in the number of practice hours they put in, and on average amount of practice can only account for about 30% of variation in performance quality, meaning that 70% of the story about musical expertise remains untold. Here we turn to the real topic of interest: quality of practice.
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Here is a pragmatic look at things: A full-time singing career costs a million dollars. Seriously.
Imagine you have a million dollars, and someone offers you a wager. ”Invest it all with me,” she says. “We’ll wait 10 years, at which point you’ll have nothing 99 times out of a hundred.”
“Hmm,” you think, “that 1% must be one hell of a payoff with those odds.
“Oh,” she says, “you’ll get nothing that time, too. Actually, not quite.” She pulls out a calculator, punches in a few numbers, and smirks. “That 1% of the time, you’ll owe me…$600,000.”
Would you take that bet?
If you’re a full-time performing artist, you already have.Read the whole thing for the details. But the sad truth is:
For full-time performers, the game is rigged. There is simply no chance of making it given the start-up costs of building an arts business and maintaining it over time in a high cost of living city. The best-case scenario is you walk away early and have time to rebuild. The worst-case scenario is you have a middling career, strung along with a few opportunities every year, just enough to keep you going, and you are staring down the barrel of 40 at a mountain of debt with no other skills.Except for the 1/10th of 1% who do manage to achieve an international virtuoso career, of course.
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Our envoi really needs to be André Rieu doing "White Christmas" does it not?
Ok, I have tortured you enough! Here is the Quatuor Ebène doing the String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók:
9 comments:
Re: "To be sure, the dwindling interest in classical music in the latter part of the twentieth century flowed from a number of sources..." Missing from the list is the fact that music academies emphasized atonal, screechy, unpleasant music that lacked any hint of charm. How did they miss that?
The history of music in the 20th century is just so damned complicated!! I find it very hard to visualize an overall shape or narrative for it so I tend to try and see it through the careers of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. They both started out doing pretty charming music, things like The Firebird and Gurre-Lieder. But WWI dealt a heavy blow to all traditional forms of life including aesthetics and we had music like L'Histoire du Soldat and Pierrot Lunaire. That is how the avant-garde started, with a quite understandable reaction to a great tragedy. It wasn't the academies that were promoting this, not at first.
Patrick, wide public interest in classical music gradually dwindled in the mid-20th-century even in those countries whose conservatories chided students for exploring atonality (the Soviet Union) or which did not really go for avant-garde atonality until the 1970s (Finland). Considering that atonal music was a sideshow that fairly few regular audiences got to hear even in the West, it seems silly to blame it for the societal shifts, regardless of how much you personally might dislike it. Instead, it seems pretty clear that pop music simply had better marketing, as savvy types were able to depict it as in tune with the values of ordinary young consumers, while classical music was easily disparaged as antique, elitist, etc.
Wait, "elitist" is a criticism? 8>)
I think that the Big Shift came after WWII. I recall reading that one of the things driving the huge success of the Beatles (and others) was that the early boomer teens had disposable income and the record industry had commodified the individual song with the 45 single. So yes, marketing savvy. From the 60s on it is pop music that has had the big economic clout. Alongside this was the trend towards the disparagement of aesthetics and aesthetic judgment. Everything else follows from that. However, the job of the creative musician has been, in my view, made much more difficult by all this. But it remains the same.
Donald Mitchell had a short book The Language of Modern Music (1967) with a series of essays he wrote over a period of years. Interestingly he discovered in the last essays what you and the commenters are alluding to - there was a fundamental break in music history after 1950 or so. The Language that Mitchell referred to basically expired after WW2 and he realized that he was at sea trying to discuss the avant garde music of the late 50s and early 60s.
I would say that the collapse of the classical music establishment was what allowed the takeover by pop music in the 50s with the LP, the same way that the disappearance of the dinosaurs allowed the early mammals to take over. This is why pop music has bravura and confidence and why classical music is constantly slouching towards it when it thinks it can. After all there was a vigorous pop music industry in the 20s 30s and 40s too but it looked up to classical norms.
I don't think though you can blame the "culture" unless it actively rejects new great art. If there were a Beethoven or Shakespeare who was publishing to universal jeers that would be on the culture. If no one is composing or writing at such a level then it becomes a chicken - egg situation.
Schoenberg, in an essay on Mahler whom he admired, commented that all great artists are punished unmercifully during their lifetimes by the mediocrities that surround them. Critics suffer the opposite fate: often feted during their lives, they are universally reviled after their deaths as it is discovered how very wrong they were!
Neither Beethoven nor Shakespeare was recognized as being as great as they are during or shortly after their lifetimes. Recognition of their stature grew and grew after they were dead. Similarly, if there are great artists alive now, and there likely are, we won't know who they are for a hundred years or so.
I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this point. I am not talking of critical acceptance which always comes last. The tastemakers are the connoisseurs and the public respectively. There are practically no great artists who weren't recognized at least as excellent in their lifetimes by one or both of those groups. The problem is that neither group regularly takes up the pen to document it. Even Shakespeare was esteemed by Jonson and other peers and popular with the theater going public. Just because the reputation grows posthumously doesn't mean that most are jeered while living except by critics.
The reason that great artists are disappearing is because of the breakup of the connoisseur class. They are out there but too widely distributed and lacking in funding to make an appreciable dent in media notice. Thus promising artists are not held to a higher standard and sustained through lean periods.
Have a nice Holiday Season and Merry Christmas. Feliz Navidad to your friends in Mexico.
Maury, honestly I have no settled opinion on this. I was quoting Schoenberg there, which doesn't necessarily mean I share his view. I do think that at any given moment in music history there are artists who are very famous and highly renowned but who are actually not as great as some others less well known. I love Haydn and he is a great composer in my book, but I suspect that even though he was the most famous composer in Europe in his lifetime, people now would rate him below Mozart and Beethoven.
You are probably right that the disappearance of a connoisseur class has a real effect on at least the recognition of great artists. That's a good point.
Very best wishes to you and your family and friends as well!
Maury's comment about reception and connoisseurs reminded me of a comment by Manfred Bukofzer on music during the Baroque era. He pointed out that in earlier eras of music the patrons and producers of music did not have the knowledge gap in terms of styles and techniques that have come to exist in the 20th century between production/performance/reception and consumer groups. Or as Jacques Ellul put it in The Empire of Non-Sense, aristocratic patrons didn't need critics to tell them what they were supposed to like, they told the musicians and artists they hired what they, as aristocrats, wanted to hear.
Since it was the centennial of his death a couple of years back, Scott Joplin's bids at opera and piano concerto didn't come together. Treemonisha was completed but A Guest of Honor was lost, along with the piano concerto. Only Joplin's rags managed to survive and become popular. Joplin died on the cusp of the jazz age and it's not clear whether or not his style would have retained popularity in that newer age, even though Jelly Roll Morton had nice things to say about Joplin's work. Joplin was well-regarded among musicians and was well-regarded in press coverage but his efforts at higher prestige musical formats failed. Then in the 1970s the ragtime revival made it seem that the genre was a kind of parlor music for piano when, by Joplin and others' accounts, ragtime was more a genre of popular song with vulgar lyrics, not altogether unlike rap. Joplin was in some important ways trying to clean up ragtime's act. Black and white clergy railed against ragtime in general in the 1890s the way they would rail against rap and hip hop a century later and Joplin was sensitive to the fact that rag songs tended to traffic in violent and racist stereotypes. Joplin's work has survived but as John McWhorter put it, ragtime seems like juice and cookies compared to the hotter sounds of the jazz era. Joplin had mastered a sound and a style that was about to become passe shortly after he died. The ragtime renewal movement didn't emerge from jazz except as a reaction to bop, bebop and free jazz that has since been regarded as reactionary. The ragtime revival that kicked off around the 1970s happened because, to put it a bit too broadly, classical musicians and music historians revived the style. It makes a kind of sense that in an era in which American academically praised music featured integral serialism that Joplin and his peers were heard as a tuneful alternative. Joplin turned out to be right that the real scope of what he achieved wasn't appreciated in his lifetime but among musicians he did have a solid reputation. Jelly Roll Morton was known to rip on plenty of musicians but he always had good things to say about Joplin's work.
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