I'm sure I have written about this before a few times, but it is only possible for a very few musicians to make a decent living. And here is an illustration:
At 43, opera singer Andrew Potter has finally made it. His voice is at its peak. He's making more money than ever, booking lots of gigs. But in an open letter to the opera industry last month, he announced he's retiring from the stage.
POTTER: We just have to start telling the truth, and that is that unless you're in the top 1- or 2% of singers in the world, this is not something that you'll be able to sustain a family with.
ATKINSON: Potter is good but just outside that 2%. Last December, he sang in a metropolitan opera production. And for him, that's when it became clear he could barely afford to do this work.
And opera singing is probably, along with orchestral conducting, the most lucrative niche in the classical music world. If you are a classical guitarist, the odds are much, much worse. Out of a few hundred thousand classical guitarists in the world, how many make a good living? Back in the 80s when times were much better for classical guitarists, about five. Not five percent, no, five people: John Williams, Julian Bream, Pepe Romero, Narciso Yepes and maybe Christopher Parkening. I don't think the top five now are doing nearly as well. I could speculatively estimate that Pepe Romero might have made $500,000 US a year, which is a darn good living for a musician. The others perhaps a bit more or a bit less. But that is five artists out of, well let's conservatively estimate the world classical guitar population at 100,000, so that is 0.005%. If I had known those were the odds I would have done a degree in philosophy instead.
Let's start with something that caused me to rethink the history of literature over the last one hundred years:
Hilary Layne is an incisive critic of literature with many worthwhile videos. But this one is on another level. She uncovers a massive and long-standing project to redefine and therefore dilute the meaning of the word "classic" in literature. In so doing she re-evaluates the whole "middle-brow" project where publishers issued many older works in new accessible formats for the masses. Watch the video for her detailed argument. What I want to do here is compare the parallel history of classical music.
One comment on the clip: Hilary is brilliant in uncovering the clever way that publishers finessed the use of the word "classic" in order to promote modern authors as "classic." Which they are not. The true definition of the classics are those works from the ancient world that truly form the foundation of Western Civilization such as the philosophers, playwrights, historians and poets of Ancient Greece and the poets and historians of Rome. The Lord of the Rings, while a fine work, is not a classic. Nor is Madame Bovary or Crime and Punishment. These are modern novels. She also included Dumas and Cervantes in this category. My question is, where do the classics end? Is St. Augustine classic (probably yes). How about Dante? Or Shakespeare (I'm guessing probably not). But a few comments on where the dividing line is would have been helpful.
But the big question here is how different the history of music has been from the history of literature. Mind you, one thing they have in common is the financial support of the CIA and other US agencies for the avant-garde post-WWII.
The crucial difference between the history of modernism in music and in literature seems to revolve around the commercial aspects. Modernism in literature was supported by publishers because there was real money to be made once they marketed it as "classic." In music, however, the term "classical" has a quite different application, namely to the lighter, more transparent musical language of the Viennese composers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, in recent years the term "classical" in music has come to refer to any of the composed music dating from around the year 1,000 AD to the present as opposed to popular, folk or world music. The least profitable niche in the music "industry."
Apart from a few isolated promoters like Diaghilev, there was no-one who saw modernist music as being exploitable for profit and that has pretty much remained the case for the last 100 years. Instead, there were lots of critics who condemned the new dissonant music of the 20th century. It took the efforts of many composers, historians and scholars to install the avant-garde in all the musical institutions even though the music was largely ignored by the general public. And still is. Contemporary masterpieces like The Rite of Spring or the symphonies of Shostakovich or the music of Arnold Schoenberg has become well-loved among the cognoscenti, but still doesn't make any money.
The music world has no "classics" in the literary sense. The music of the ancient world, along with perhaps 90% of the literature, has been lost. The notation to enable the composed music of Western Civilization has only been available for the last thousand years and for the first five hundred it was awkward and inefficient. So what do we have that could be considered classic, that is, works of incontestable, objective aesthetic value? Given the historical differences, perhaps we could make a strong case for from the music of Léonin and Pérotin up through Machaut, Josquin, Du Fay, Monteverdi and so on up to Bach. And one would strongly want to include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. From then on, the music begins to resemble the modern novels by people like Dostoevsky that Hilary Layne admits to liking, but not admitting them as classics with objective value. I guess I would be ok with that.
I just finished this one yesterday. I first read the Tao Te Ching forty or fifty years ago and at least once more since then. But this relatively new edition is far superior to those plain translations. This edition has the original Chinese text, a new translation taking into account some new discoveries of different versions of the text, plus a selection of 2,000 years of Chinese commentary. Wonderful book.
I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book, a collection of excerpts from John Ruskin's enormous output. His Modern Painters is in five volumes and he wrote about many, many subjects. Primarily an art critic he was a tireless advocate of Turner as the greatest landscape painter of all time. Lots of very detailed commentary on culture and society.
This is a mammoth undertaking--a thousand pages of rhyming iambic pentameter in archaic English. It is actually easier to read than James Joyce. I'm just a few cantos in, but really enjoying it. Never read anything like it. Hugely influential on all English poetry since it was first published in 1590.
Next up will be The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro and Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar.
