Censors, and would-be censors, are part of the larger class of utilitarians who today are widely ensconced in the academy, the media, and arts and culture venues. You will know utilitarians by their mistaking of art for political activity, for community-building, for therapy. Art should produce results in the present, they contend—results for society and for the self. An ascendent belief among utilitarians, expressed by some and held more or less consciously by others, is that righteous art can stamp its righteousness on audiences, who will leave the museum or finish the poem with their priorities realigned, their commitments affirmed. For believers, herein lies art’s purpose: to sway hearts and minds. This fatuous idea undergirds activist art, which supposes its content can be conveyed directly into the psyche of the reader or audience, as though art were a delivery system in service to some more important thing, namely its “message.”
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Slipped Disc tells us about OVERCOMING THE BIGGEST COMPOSER’S BLOCK OF ALL TIME:
Back in the day, around the turn of the century, the US-Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov was the hottest thing around, with major orchestras competing for his next work.
Then, around 2011, Golijov hit the biggest composer’s block of all time. Deadlines came and deadlines went and Golijov never delivered. Orchestras asked for their commission money back. The Met cancelled an opera. Silence ensued.
Now, it appears, Golijov has broken his hex for an upcoming Carnegie Hall premiere.
I was a big fan of Golijov back then as he seemed to have found a wonderful blend of an advanced music idiom combined with a rich vein of referentiality. Glad to see him return to productivity.
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STUDENTS DEMAND FEES FREEZE. JUILLIARD SAYS NO. SO THEY ARE OCCUPYING THE BUILDING
Follow the link for the details. I honestly don't see why a music education should be so expensive. Mind you, I have no direct experience with Juilliard myself, but I was able to obtain a pretty good musical education for very modest amounts. I came from a poor family so there was no question of coming up with a lot for tuition anywhere. I studied at two Canadian universities and the fees were very low. In fact, when I went to graduate school my income actually went up because they defrayed the tuition and gave me teaching jobs. My private studies were also not expensive.
All students at the Curtis Institute receive a full scholarship, I believe. I think that the Conservatoire system in Québec has a similar policy.
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How one symphony is shaking up the business to grow their audience:
If you work in the classical music world, you’ve likely heard of audience growth wunderkind Aubrey Bergauer. Joining the California Symphony in 2014 as Executive Director, Aubrey brought the struggling orchestra from the brink of financial ruin to vibrant health with jaw-dropping speed. By 2019, Aubrey had not only increased the California Symphony’s audiences by nearly 100% but had also quadrupled the size of their donor base, paid off longstanding debt, and established an endowment of one million dollars—outstripping national trends on every front...
What was the driving factor behind this astounding coup? From the perspective of the Jobs to Be Done theory, three facets of Aubrey’s work predestined her success: a self-professed obsession with the customer; a willingness to ask nonconsumers what they hate about the customer experience (and to make radical changes based on this feedback); and a new model for audience development. We’ll examine each of these through the lens of Jobs to Be Done theory.
Might be worth while reading the whole thing. Would this work in larger, more established markets?
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Now That You’ve Bought a Multi-Million-Dollar Music Catalog, What Are You Going to Do With It?
Over the past few months, Bob Dylan sold his song catalog to Universal Music Publishing for between $300-400 million, Neil Young sold half of his to fast-rising upstart Hipgnosis Songs for $100 million, and Stevie Nicks sold hers (along with other intellectual property) to Primary Wave for $100 million as well, sources say. Dozens of artists, songwriters and producers have piled on, commanding dozens of millions for some or all of their music assets, slicing and dicing the pies in a head-spinning variety of manners, many of them selling to investors rather than music companies.
“We really believe in the long-term value of creative content, whether generating new content or enhancing the value of the existing IP, and we’ve done this extremely effectively over the past 15 years in film and TV,” he says. “Our focus on film allows us to tap into those relationships and elevate these music catalogs toward symbiotic opportunities beyond music — film, TV, videogames, sports, book publishing — and this gives us a wide perspective of how content can be repurposed, and synergistic opportunities.” And while he says the company has just “a couple” of full-time staffers focusing on music opportunities, he points to the company’s wide network of portfolio companies and its currently small catalog of just a few dozen music copyrights.
You know, I really don't know what to think of this or how it might affect music as an art form over the long term.
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Here is a new article on a very old dispute: The Classicist Who Killed Homer
We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. Earlier scholars had advanced this as a hypothesis, but it was Parry who demonstrated it beyond a reasonable doubt.
The whole article is an entertaining introduction to an age-old controversy, but for a more sober discussion see the introduction to the Robert Fagles translation by Bernard Knox.
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We really need to hear some Golijov. Here is his Tenebrae for string quartet performed by the Odeon Quartet in Moscow in 2013. The piece was inspired by some of François Couperin's vocal music.
22 comments:
Education is much more heavily subsidized in Canada than here in the US, because of our brave resistance against socialism LOL. We prefer to let the arts be governed by the invisible hand of the market.
Ah, so Homer has its JEDP advocates, eh? :) Not too surprising that a parallel documentary hypothesis for Homer developed around the same time one emerged for the Torah.
The funding of education is one of those seriously complicated things that is not easy to sort out. Let me add a couple of details. The province of Québec is the ONLY one to have a free conservatory system with well-compensated faculty--cultural differences. The rest of Canada struggles along with private conservatories only partly subsidized. This is why so many fine classical musicians emerge from Québec. Canadian universities are fairly cheap, though. I suppose they are more equivalent to the state universities in the US, though we do have our own "Ivy League" consisting, I guess, of just the University of Toronto and McGill, my alma mater. I think the question is, why are US universities so very expensive? Because there is certainly a lot of money thrown their way, is there not?
I don't know the JEDP acronym. Critical literary studies?
US private universities get subsidized directly and indirectly, but not well. Few of our state schools are free, and few of them are even all that cheap anymore, we've been cutting their funding viciously since conservative ideology became ascendent in the federal government in the 80s. The private universities get "subsidized" mainly in the form of scholarships and student loan programs, so few people pay the full sticker price, but now we have this spiraling student loan crisis. America's education funding model is a lot like our health care funding model: we're obsessed with "market-driven" and "business-like" approaches even when those are vastly more expensive and less effective than the way the entire rest of the rich world does things.
It is a practical necessity to subsidize both basic scientific research as well as non mass market types of art for similar reasons. Their effects are too long and uncertain in the making for the market to support or correct their inefficiencies. A society has to determine what level they want to provide. The US society for historical reasons I suppose supports funding of basic research more than they support the arts. Other societies in Europe are the reverse to a large extent.
I think it is quixotic to expect societies to become something different at the whim of every opinionist. We have something roughly in the nature of a world civilization at this point so I don't see a division of responsibilities as bad. Let Europe subsidize non mass market arts as they have proven good at it and have the Anglo world take care of the mass market arts which are excellent or at least accepted world wide because they are market driven and very nimble.
That's a pretty reasonable view, Maury. I think that one reason the Europeans do a good job of subsidizing the arts is that they have a deep well of tradition and expertise to draw on.
Bryan,
Clearly that is the case. If we look at your Canada, the French founded province subsidizes the arts more in the manner of the French government practice and the UK founded provinces mostly follow Anglo precedent in their provinces. So maybe Canada should do its own division and I guess does at some informal inconsistent level. New Orleans was too remote and insignificant to field a similar position on the arts in the US as did Quebec province but even so some vestiges of French culture survive there. My point being you have to go with the flow in pursuing objectives rather than constantly fighting it.
I would be more sympathetic to the idea of letting everyone else subsidize the arts, in particular music, but the US should not be left off the hook for that. Our minority communities have produced some of the best and most popular music in the world for the past hundred years, from blues to jazz to rock to techno to rap, but they have done it under conditions of enormous hardship. Sure, those musics have made plenty of money in the marketplace, but it's not usually the Black/POC creators making the money. And the market only rewards specific forms of these styles. Rap, for example, is vastly larger and more diverse than the parties/guns/drugs version you hear on the radio, which caters specifically to white teenagers. Creators of less commercial forms of the music persist, but they struggle hard. We were horribly slow to recognize jazz as an art form and to employ its masters in universities, and in the meantime way too many of them died in poverty. We're making the same mistake with the underground emcees and producers.
the documentary hypothesis proposes the Pentateuch was assembled from a Jahwist strand; an Elohim strand; the deuteronomistic history (Deuteronomy as its own coda to the Torah); and a priestly strand of material. Thus the JEDP shorthand. It's another example of 19th century linguistic and textual scholarship arguing that a canonical work considered to have unified single authorship was a composite work.
That such scholarship emerged in the 19th century when the cult of the solitary genius was getting formulated in contemporary arts rather than classical and biblical literature might be an irony to alternately savor or find annoying some other time. :) At different points in my life I was considering seminary and later grad school in music. I ended up doing neither because I couldn't afford either and there were some rules in my state that precluded me doing grad work at the UW without at least a BA in music.
So that's where lack of money for continuing education in music comes in in my experience. My composition teacher warned me that because of my interest in jazz/blues classical synthesizing experiments grad school probably wasn't gonna have any place for me (even in the 1990s post-tonal/serialism held too much sway for my tastes).
All kinds of artists and creators have endured hardship, neglect, scorn and poverty. I think the kind of government subsidization that Mr Hein seems to be advocating would be a non starter as the public and our political class view the genres he lists as mass market and lucrative areas. I don't disagree that many of these artists are ripped off as were the rock musicians or C&W musicians etc. But government sponsored rap music has an oxymoronic flavor akin to corporate rock. And with any knowledge of how such government sponsored music would be managed and funded, it would be as safe in its way as Lawrence Welk. It is necessary to remember that European classical music subsidization has not led to new Mozarts and Bachs being nurtured but simply to maintaining the system needed to perform these kinds of works.
I think the one genre in his list that might have objective claim to a non mass market but long standing American art form would be Jazz. Unlike the others it astoundingly has less success in the music biz than even classical music in terms of music buying. In addition, unlike most blues (the other genre with a long history), jazz has a level of musicianship that takes long years of practice to attain, akin to classical music.
So philosophically Jazz does have a claim to being a native but non mass market genre that would merit some support. I think however that perhaps a dedicated foundation would be a better avenue to support Jazz. There is a Jazz Legacy Foundation but I don't like the term Legacy. But I don't know enough to dismiss it as a potential vehicle for maintaining Jazz as an art form independent of particular artists.
Yes, government subsidy for the arts is always philosophically problematic, I think. As Maury says, it promotes the safe and predictable rather than the genuinely innovative. Canada has tried to deal with this by setting up an organization, the Canada Council, that is at arm's length from government. I.e. they are given government funding, but they spend it independently of government supervision. How this works is that they set up small committees to award grants to individual artists. These committees are made up of other artists in the field. The result, often, is that one hand washes the other: colleagues and friends award grants to colleagues and friends so that there is kind of a clique of artists that form an inner circle that manage to award most the funds to themselves. Not surprising.
Whether or not more public funding for the arts in the US is politically plausible, I'm making a moral argument. I do not accept the assumption that all publicly funded art is intrinsically bland, any more than I believe that all privately or self-funded art is intrinsically risk-taking. The world is too complex for these generalizations. I see exciting and bland music coming out of universities, out of bedrooms, out of corporate labels, out of the independently wealthy, out of everywhere.
Let's take this from the abstract to the concrete. Let's talk about my friend Toni Blackman. She has been a visionary emcee for 30 years and a professional teacher of rap for 25. She was employed by the US State Department as its first hip-hop ambassador, doing the same kind of work that Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington did back in the 60s. She has sometimes toured and done commercial recordings, has sometimes self-released music out of her own pocket, and has been through periods of terrible hardship along the way. Being on the government's payroll and then off it has not affected the quality of her work, it just made her life easier as she went along. The idea that we should be inflicting unnecessary hardship on Toni and people like her out of an abstract idea that it would be good for the arts is unacceptable to me.
It's very easy to say now that, well of course jazz is an art form, but in its period of peak cultural relevance it was held in the exact same level of contempt that cultural authorities now hold for rap, and for exactly the same reasons. The mainstream view in the music academy all the way through the 1950s and into the 60s was that jazz wasn't music at all. Sound familiar? Even now, there are plenty of university departments that consider jazz to be "pop" music, and it's still marginal everywhere except Berklee. I have a mountain of academic references for all of this if anyone wants them. Start with this:
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2017/duke-ellington-percy-grainger-and-the-status-of-jazz-in-the-academy/
I don't necessarily disagree with this: "I do not accept the assumption that all publicly funded art is intrinsically bland, any more than I believe that all privately or self-funded art is intrinsically risk-taking." Everything should be evaluated on its own individual merits. But it is a logical leap to the assertion that "we should be inflicting unnecessary hardship on Toni and people like her out of an abstract idea that it would be good for the arts." There are always far, far more deserving artists than there are funds to subsidize them with. Scarcity of funding does not equate to "inflicting unnecessary hardship" because there is always scarcity. That is a basic truth of economics.
Bryan, Ethan, your back and forth is more progress in conversation than what I get with John Borstlap, who insists that jazz, no matter how developed as a musical art form it may have become in the last 120 years is "entertainment" music that has nothing to do with "serious" art.
I think people can and should be able to take themes by Ellington and Thelonious Monk or Scott Joplin or James Scott and write sonata forms with them because it's not at all hard to do if you take the musical materials seriously but that, I think, is the point Ethan has been good about stressing about the history of music education.
Angelo Gilardino made a great point in saying that the relative demise of the symphonic repertoire and salon music of the 19th century has been a boon for guitarists because what we do isn't found wanting compared to the orchestra that was held up as a synecdoche of "society" or the nation-state. I keep meaning to blog about Gilardino's fantastic guitar sonatas but other stuff keeps happening.
Finally, this might be a bit optimistic on my part but I notice that when we don't always agree about things Bryan, Ethan and I can converse with the guitar as a shared instrument. Matanya Ophee was right when he said our instrument is itself considered "outside" the classical music mainstream and considered the negligible step-sibling in music education but that we should never have an inferiority complex about our instrument and what we can do wit hit. Ophee's lecture "Repertoire Issues" has been a touchstone for me for decades on the matter of how just because entrenched academics don't take the guitar seriously doesn't mean we guitarists can't take it seriously. Per Leo Brouwer, we also don't have to regard the boundaries between "art" and "entertainment" music as being as impermeable as mainstream Western music educators and theorists do.
But that's me soapboxing a bit for the weekend, I admit. :)
Thanks, Wenatchee. Yes, I think this is an excellent venue for good discussion of all manner of issues--as long as we avoid purely political aspects! While I am not a jazz enthusiast myself, I readily acknowledge the great artists in jazz and respect their accomplishments. Same with hip-hop. But all my serious musical studies were in Québec, which has a European élan, Spain and Austria. So I tend to look at things from a European perspective. I am rather a fan of the music of Angelo Gilardino, though the only pieces I know well are the etudes. And, like Golijov, I do tend to like the admixture of different genres of music.
It's a logical non sequitur to say that because we can't fund everyone, we shouldn't fund anyone. The US is the wealthiest civilization in the history of the world, we could scale up our arts funding by orders of magnitude with the change in the federal government's metaphorical couch cushions. It would make a real difference in the lives of people like Toni if they could have a pension, health insurance, predictable housing and so on.
To reintroduce Richard Taruskin's comments from The Ox, it might be useful to consider what Ethan has proposed in light of what historians have dug up on U.S. bankrolling of European avant gardists to tick off the Soviets. Money that was spent on promoting Pollack and integral serialism wasn't going to more literally popular musical art forms. When I think of what stuff the CIA "was" willing to bankroll during the Cold War in the arts compared to what I actually want to listen to, I think there's a case to be made that arts funding could be bigger but that we need to reassess what U.S. arts policy really was.
I think the sticky wicket with arts patronage from the state is that arts patronage from the state invariably serves the ends of the state and, per the Philip Jeffery article I linked to a while back. a lot of post WW2 arts policy in the U.S., to the extent that it existed as a coherent set of policies, was framed entirely in terms of Cold War ideological battles. I've got Mark McGurl's The Program Era on my reading list and another book called Workshops of Empire that look at how creative writing education was built around, from what I've read of them so far, anti-Soviet ideologies.
It's one of the reasons I hesitate to accept that the default in arts education has been white supremacy. That "has" been an element but I think it has been exacerbated in other ways by the Cold War era policy of bankrolling whatever Western European avant garde stuff would tick off the Soviets, as a kind of side effect. And yet Nikolai Kapustin got to actually meet Duke Ellington, as I remember reading in a book of conversations with the late composer.
To put this still another way, the sheer tonnage of money dumped into the F-35 debacle (which even conservatives on defense have complained about here in the U.S.) could fund a lot of arts projects.
As pension, health insurance and housing go, that reminds me (again) of how Haydn had all those things through his patronage relationship and his contribution to music history is, well, you know, history. He wasn't even living high on the hog and had what we'd call a comfortably middle-class life.
Yes, well that wasn't MY logical non sequiteur. All I said was that "There are always far, far more deserving artists than there are funds to subsidize them with." Or, put differently, not every artist can be subsidized as they would like. The problem is always who decides?
I'd propose the problem could be put differently, every artist who IS subsidized becomes a servant of the state. Every time. A Noah Berlatsky could ask whether or not artists with progressive interests WANT that deal with the proverbial devil. Getting paid would be great but there's a potential double bind in more mainstream acceptance and funding. Sure, it probably won't have to be as harsh a relationship as Shostakovich with the Soviet regime or turn out like Mosolov repudiating all his early avant garde work and making jingoistic music a la Zhdanov era policies, but I mentioned the US Cold War policies as a point about the conundrum of what does get funded by the state. The state will fund what serves the interest of the state. Does X style serve that interest? Yes? Funding. Does Y style serve that interest? No? No funding. Does Z style serve that interest? Kinda so the state won't fund it but the state will bankroll cultural diplomacy trips for artists in style Z to show that Style Z is amenable to the basic ideas the state wants to promote. Ergo jazz ambassadors to Europe and the Soviet Union from the U.S.
The John Philip Sousa and Paul Hindemith warning about state subsidy of the arts would probably be to say that one of the category mistakes about the vitality of musical cultures is any claim that the professional musicians are the indicator of the musical vitality of a culture. The amateurs and the hobbyists may be thought of as the bottom of the pyramid in terms of prestige and status and certainly income but the bottom of the pyramid is probably a better indicator of musical life than the super-stars at the top.
But why Elliot Carter got into music history books at all is a provocative question for me. :)
Wenatchee, you always bring a kaleidoscope of things to consider to the table.
I think Ethan's point about better funding for more contemporary art forms is a very salient concern. I think the history of US arts patronage, though, forces us to consider that there's likely to be some jingoistic prerequisite before state subsidy is granted, whether we're talking Soviet era socialist realism or American financing of art that was an ideological fit for American policy interests. Now I'll admit to an element of reflexive skepticism about the goodwill of government stuff with half my lineage being Native American. :) The nature of the jingoism may change but that it will be jingoistic art, whatever is funded by the state, I have a pretty firm conviction about. But then I've been somewhat open about how my musical activities are that of an amateur and a hobbyist who occasionally contributes to church music. There are institutional possibilities for shaping and contributing to musical communities that don't always involve the state so directly. Musical clubs and societies can do a lot in urban centers.
I am, all that said, very sympathetic to Ethan's interest in having music theory education meet students within styles they are actually currently listening to and not just the 19th century canonized classical warhorses. I'm a ragtime fan and as Kyle Gann once put it, there's an awful lot of harmony you can teach students using ragtime that saves you the trouble of trying to find comparable harmonic moments in the canonized 19th century European salon literature for piano. I like how Ethan is able to switch back and forth between discussing Bach's D minor chaconne and songs by Prince. That is the direction I would like theory discussions to keep going even if I'm way more to the classical guitar side of things than Ethan is. :)
Thanks, Wenatchee. Your remarks on jingoism and arts funding remind me of a comment made by Solzhenitsyn. He averred that liberalism has no very effective defence against socialism and socialism certainly has no defence against communism. The one thing that can defend against the forces of progressivism is tradition. Now, the relevance to your thoughts is this: I think that the reason arts funding in the US may be susceptible to American policy interests and, more recently, to concerns of social justice is that it is a fundamentally liberal environment. The difference in Europe, I suspect, is that arts funding rests on a firm base of long-standing tradition. These traditions are well-supported in the general populace.
By the way, I was delighted the other day to discover that Samuel Andreyev's analytical videos are not restricted to just classical music. I found ones devoted to the more avant-garde tracks by Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground.
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