There has been a lot of criticism of director-driven European opera productions, but personally, the ones I have seen have been entrancing and stimulating. Alex Ross talks about a new production of Wagner: The Waves.
Leave it to the director Peter Sellars to make “Tristan” mind-bending once again. His production of the opera, created in collaboration with the video artist Bill Viola, was first seen last fall, in semi-staged form, at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, and the definitive version opened last month at the Opéra Bastille, in Paris. I saw the last performance of the Paris run, and came away in something like the state of dazed bliss that Baudelaire described.
Esa-Pekka Salonen led the pioneering performances of the Sellars-Viola “Tristan” in Los Angeles last fall, and he travelled with the production to Paris. He offered a hugely impressive interpretation of a score on which almost every great conductor of the past century has made his mark. Already in the Prelude, you had a sense of a canny master plan, with crescendos plotted like parabolas of expanding size. Not unexpectedly, this contemporary-minded conductor made much of the work’s sharper edges: he had the violins lean on a passing note in the Act III prelude, highlighting a brief semitone clash. There was a startling sonority in the scene of Tristan’s death: the wind and brass choirs were eerily glassy and smooth, almost electronic in timbre. For the most part, though, this was an authentically Romantic reading, not a revisionist one. True to the atmosphere of the production, it had a surging and ebbing natural rhythm.
Read the whole thing.
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Can we now mark the classical concert reform movement as having reached its absurd stage?
The ‘Converse Conductor’ Fighting Elitism in Classical Music
Jonathon Heyward wears sneakers onstage and embraces genres like jazz as part of his effort to bring more people into the concert hall.
That might encourage Converse-wearers and jazz lovers, but anyone else?
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Norman Lebrecht asks the musical question: WHEN DID THE ARTS COUNCIL CHANGE ITS TUNE?
The Arts Council was founded in 1946, in the words of Maynard Keynes, ‘to encourage the best British national arts, everywhere, and to do it as far as possible by supporting others rather than by setting up state-run enterprises.’
The arts, said Keynes, ‘owe no vow of obedience.’
The Arts Council, he specified, is no schoolmaster or regulator. ‘How satisfactory it would be if different parts of this country would again walk their several ways as they once did and learn to develop something different from their neighbours and characteristic of themselves.’
Today, Arts Council England defines itself as follows:
‘We are the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our creative vision in ‘Let’s Create…’
How was that unconstitutional overthrow allowed to happen?
ACE needs urgently to be reverted to its founding purpose.
Does the UK even have a constitution?
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JOB OF THE WEEK: PROFESSOR OF COMPOSITION AT £44 AN HOUR
At the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester they are setting their fees low:
Salary Grade: £44.30 to £54.44 per hour (dependent on experience) (pending Pay Review)
Closing date: 12 Noon, Tuesday 6th August 2024
Interview date: Friday 16th August 2024
Applications are invited for a professor (Tutor) in the School of Composition. The appointee will be a composer with extensive professional experience. The appointee will have appropriate teaching experience in higher education, or other specialist composition teaching experience.
While an essential area of experience will be acoustic instrumental and vocal composition, additional and complementary areas of expertise might include electronic music, experimental music, and/or composition for theatre, dance, screen, and video game.
The appointee will be expected to deliver one-to-one composition lessons at undergraduate and postgraduate level, potentially some small group teaching, and may be called on to contribute to auditions, examination, and seminars as required.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Wait, you were serious? Let's put this alongside another salary story:
CLEVELAND FAILURES TAKE HUGE PAY HIKE
Heads of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where teachers have voted no-confidence in the leadership, are doing well out of the crisis.
President Paul Hogle (pictured) added $180,000 to his pay packet, which now tops $700k.
Executive vice-president Scott Harrison now makes quarter of a million.
These figures are Form 990s from fiscal year 2023
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Wait that was also serious?!??!
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It's a weird week when most of the items come from Slipped Disc. On to some envois. The only obvious choice is Tristan:
Here's something unusual: the first movement of the Symphony No. 15 by Shostakovich for piano, violin, cello and percussion trio:
And here is the original orchestral version:
16 comments:
The broader quote, as I recall, goes as follows:
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an unuprooted small corner of evil."
He later asks, if I recall correctly (and I might not) that we are all diffident at getting rid of or reforming a piece of our heart. Who wants to part with a piece of their heart?
The quote comes from the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago, p. 75. The whole paragraph reads:
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
This caused me to do a self-examination. Did I shirk my responsibilities as an artist when I quit performing and teaching in academia? What exactly are one's responsibilities as an artist? How selfless does one have to be? Today it seems that the display of virtue (or seeming virtue) is very common. But much less common is the acceptance of one's own failings.
Jonathon Heyward wears sneakers onstage and embraces genres like jazz as part of his effort to bring more people into the concert hall.
Does anyone realize anywhere that jazz has an even smaller active listener base than classical music? If he wanted to intersperse a few classical pops intermezzos that might be a slight plan.
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Just for clarification. A position paying 44 BP is about $50 an hour which for a full year is 100K. That is not a low salary by any means. My question would be how widespread is that salary level in the arts in the UK? I think Steven would have to weigh in here.
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Another clarification. Peter Sellars is an American opera and theater producer so the referenced production is not European created Regietheater. Regietheater is a complex phenomenon to discuss since it is dependent on individuals. I would say as a dedicated opera fan that the proportions of bad vs good Regietheater are similar to any other endeavor i.e. mostly poor, sometimes good. However since this is basically a Euro phenomenon that has gone on for decades, one has to say that their audiences seem mostly on board for it.
Maury, re the hourly wage, you are assuming a 40 hour week and as I recall, there was mention of 6 - 8 hours a week. Steven might be able to clarify. My reaction was based on my getting paid $40 to $50 an hour thirty years ago for private instruction at conservatory/university.
And of course you don't work anything like 52 weeks in a year. So what this probably comes to is less than $30,000 a year. Steven?
The UK has a lower income standard than the US so that has to be adjusted somewhat. $50 an hour 30 years ago was an excellent rate in the US or Canada. Are you talking about Canadian dollars or US dollars re: your pay? As you say the amount of hours total per year is highly relevant for a career but just as an hourly rate $50 is quite adequate even now in the US. If the position is really less than one day a week we are talking about an intermittent employee not even part time. So this would have to be either one class a week or teaching very experienced students who only need once a week discussion or evaluation. This would be a very atypical situation not a good basis for evaluation.
In 1995 the US dollar was worth 1.37 Canadian dollars so if you are talking about Canadian dollars it was about 3/4 of $50 or $37.50 US hourly pay. This is still a decent US hourly wage outside of the most high cost US locations.
I was talking about Canadian dollars and I take your point about the different valuations. I don't recall the years exactly, but there were lots of times when the Canadian and US dollars were roughly at par.
Let's remember that what we are talking about is not a normal hourly job. This is teaching composition, likely in private lessons, which is very similar to giving private instrumental instruction. You don't work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks of the year because you can't, not without burning out pretty quickly. You typically teach three or four hours a day, five days a week, for maybe 8 or 9 months of the year. The rest of the time is taken up with things like maintenance of your own skills, professional development, holidays and, sheesh, if you are a composer, composing. When I had jobs like this, which I did for a couple of decades, I did not make more than $30,000 CAN a year.
Now let's talk about those insanely high renumerations for the guys in Cleveland!
I mean remunerations!
There is no question that non profit corp executives, whether arts or not, make excellent money which may be outlandish on occasion. Whether it is excessive or not would depend on their fundraising prowess IMO. Simply running an arts organization without fundraising responsibility that is good sized but not in the top 10 I think would justify a basic income around 200k-300k these days. There has been a lot of inflation in the past 30 years after all with the current US dollar worth about half of a 1995 dollar.
That's a high hourly rate compared to most people. Indeed, many professors are certainly paid much less than £45/hour. I do private guitar teaching and charge £40/hour (union rate), which non-musician friends think is a very high number, but as you say Bryan there is so much (mostly unpaid) musical work outside of this. And most music teachers are not doing anything close to 35 hours of lessons a week. From what I understand, UK orchestral musicians are often paid less still, in effect, and need side jobs.
I used to justify the pay to myself by noting that by keeping me at a sessional lecturer level (hence the hourly pay) they were avoiding making me an assistant professor, tenure track, with all the associated benefits. Universities are making more and more use of part-time sessional lecturers so they can reduce the number of professors. And at the same time, the number of administrative staff just seems to grow and grow.
I got my first conservatory job in 1978 so I was doing it long enough ago to be able to estimate that remuneration for these jobs, because of inflation, is probably worse now than it was forty years ago.
Re orchestral musicians, back in the 80s I was shocked, walking into a 7/11 (corner convenience store) to see behind the counter the principal cellist for the orchestra (regional level). It was the summer, hence no services, and he had to have a second job.
Just for reference for current US orchestra musician salary pay averages:
Philadelphia Orchestra $150K
Atlanta Orchestra 90K
St Louis Orchestra 80K
San Francisco Orchestra 165K
Seattle Symphony 80K
Concertmasters (Lead Violin) make the most, averaging typically twice the average musician salary. But they are often the union leader too and the media face of the orchestra musicians, apart from the conductor of course.
More local orchestras are basically gigs. I should note that most orchestras took big pay cuts during the pandemic years 20-22. I looked at non musician salaries at the orchestra and they generally were quite modest with few over $100K.
Thanks, Maury, I haven't seen a recent list of orchestral salaries. I imagine principals get a bit more and of course there are players who only get occasional work (tuba, English horn, etc.). I think New York and LA would get more than these numbers. European orchestras I don't have a clue about. But I imagine there is a huge gulf between what players in the Berlin Philharmonic get and the ones in the Nuremberg pick-up orch.
Compensation in Canada is less. Even as a soloist with orchestra I was poorly paid and CBC was also pretty meagre.
Bryan,
Here's the link for German orchestra salaries in 2019. Doubt they are much different now as the German economy has been sluggish over this period.
https://slippedisc.com/2019/05/what-they-really-earn-in-german-orchestras/
Thanks, Maury. There is not a lot of detail, but it says "Tutti players in the Berlin Philharmonic are paid on average 114,000 Euros (US$128,000, UK£98,000)." Now by "tutti players" I understand rank and file players, i.e. not the concertmaster or assistant concertmaster or the principals in other sections who will undoubtedly be paid significantly more. So $128,000 USD is a pretty good salary. Now for the quibbles: what is the cost of living in Berlin? How bad are housing costs? Even more significant, how high are taxes? I have the impression that taxes would likely amount to almost half of the gross salary. That takes you down to $64,000 US. But all that is not particular to musicians, of course.
Anyway, I think we have squeezed this topic of all its juice!
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