I'm still working on a Monteverdi post, but in the meantime I ran across a quote in an Ann Althouse post that sparked some recollections:
Everybody was really competitive, even though there was nothing to win.
That was a reference to living in Manhattan, but it applies to the Canadian music business as well. I struggled for years as a concert classical guitarist in Canada and, by Canadian standards I was actually "successful". I made a living as a classical guitarist playing concerts, doing radio broadcasts on the CBC and teaching at conservatory and university. Successful! My most prominent concert was a performance with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra at the Odeon theatre in Vancouver, the largest concert hall in the city. This was broadcast live across Canada. I played the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto and a couple of solo pieces. The Brazilian consul was an invited guest. For this, which involved three months of hard work learning the concerto, I was paid the magnificent sum of $1,250 Canadian. My typical annual earnings were between $23,000 and $25,000. Sometimes I wouldn't open my mailbox for a month because I knew that it would contain only bills. One summer I got hired to do a summer course for a splendid $3,000 and because it was earned in a short amount of time about half of it was taken in taxes.
But yes, we were all very competitive even though there was nothing to win. In 1986 Vancouver was the site of a spectacular international exhibition with pavilions from countries around the world. In conjunction they held a classical music competition for solo artists. First prize was $700. This isn't a joke it is an insult. So yes, in the classical Canadian music business there is nothing to win. Canada has very little regard for classical music apart from a few square blocks in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
Of course, for classical guitarists in the world as a whole, the situation is not much better. When I was a young guitarist dedicating decades of my life to the hard work of becoming an accomplished soloist it would have been of immense value to me if I had had a consultation with a vocation specialist. He might have told me the following: there are perhaps a million classical guitarists in the world of whom perhaps 50,000 are striving for a serious career. Of these the ones who are actually successful are five. No, not five percent, five individuals. (I could name them, but the list would be out of date. Of the five I met four and studied with two.) One quite successful artist kept a large Mercedes sedan in Frankfurt and every year he would fly there and tour around Germany and other European countries. He also had a recording contract with Philips. He earned perhaps $500,000 a year. That is a successful career.
Here is a clip of a performance from the heydays of my career.
In conversations with Rolling Stone, instrument sellers Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and Reverb reported a bang-up year for online sales. In 2020, online-only store Sweetwater surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in the company’s 42-year history. It also served over 1.5 million customers in 2020, up from a million in 2019. CEO Chuck Surack says shipping out 15,000 to 20,000 orders a day was normal for most of the year, resulting in about a 40 percent increase from the previous year. And when “Black Friday stuff picked up” the numbers increased to 22,000 to 24,000 orders a day, peaking at about 30,000.
I hope this doesn't mean I have to go back to teaching beginners again...
Like many of you I've been watching some of the streaming concerts from Europe and North America and I've started to wonder what the classical music world will look like after this pandemic crisis is over. And when will it be over? These are questions that are difficult if not impossible to answer at present, but we can do a little speculating.
I have read in a few places that perhaps 30% of professional musicians have simply left the business as there was no work for them. If the current crisis lasts another year or a good part of the year as it seems it might, then wouldn't it be likely that another 30% or more might leave the business?
We might also ask ourselves which musicians in particular are least likely to survive the crisis? It seems obvious that it would be the ones that are most vulnerable: the part-time musicians, the players in the smaller regional orchestras, the musicians that were already struggling to start or sustain a solo career, and most of all, the local musicians.
I ran across an interesting essay recently about some of the ways that technology has transformed society and it might offer some clues about what the music performance world is facing. The article is Everything is Broken:
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.
This is something like what is happening now with the music world: the pandemic has shut down most of the cultural institutions that support performing musicians. The article takes a while to get going and you need to read the whole thing to get the details of the argument, but here is the crux of it:
The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.
I think we see the "hoovering up" illustrated clearly in the music world: well-established pop musicians are selling rights to their back catalogues for hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the vast majority of orchestral musicians are simply out of work. In some places in Europe they are being supported and finding some work in streaming concerts, but the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, are simply out of work and receiving no payments.
At the end of the day, I think we will find that the "renaissance" or rebirth of classical music-making will mean that the most-established musicians will find employment again, but the majority will not. Much local music-making will have simply disappeared and the music world will contract to a few major centers, most of them in Europe. Every concert will be an "all-star" performance and local musicians will simply not exist.
The consequences of this are likely to be very unfortunate and long-lasting.
I want to hear what my readers think. Please let me know in the comments.
For an envoi, one of those streamed concerts from Europe from a couple of days ago:
Over at Slipped Disc we get a brief glimpse of one of the realities of the music business:
The Danish National Symphony Orchestra has just closed applications for the Nikolai Malko Competition.
To its consternation, the number of candidates was more than twice the previous record – 563 of them, aged 18 to 35.
A flautist friend of mine told me that every time he applied for a job with an orchestra there were two hundred other flautists auditioning. We can discount Slipped Disc's usual sensationalist headline: "How many desperate conductors out there? 563" but at the same time recognize that the competition for jobs in the classical music field is ferocious. And, believe me, it is even worse for those who are not seeking a position in some musical institution like an orchestra or a conservatory, but seeking work as a soloist. On the one hand there are established artists like Grigory Sokolov who can likely play any hall he wants in Europe and do that season after season. On the other hand less well-known artists who are perhaps not quite as gifted as Sokolov struggle for every booking. I once called a concert series booker in Toronto every week for months trying to get a concert there with no result. Another time I sent a publicity package to every conductor in Canada (about seventy) and followed it up with a phone call to each one. With the same results.
For every possible opening there are hundreds of musicians competing for it. This is offset by network effects, of course. If you are a graduate of the Curtis Institute, it is much, much easier to find a position because you are already networked with Curtis graduates who are employed by every orchestra in North America. A lot of positions go to people who know people. This is not as unfair as it sounds as graduating from a famous school is a kind of filter for quality in itself. But the hard truth is that there are a lot of people who would like a career in music or the other arts, but are never going to quite achieve it. Even those who do achieve it may wrestle with depression and stress their whole lives as we learn from another Slipped Disc post:
Help Musicians UK has set up a task force to address high levels of mental illness in the music professions.
A new study identifies four contributory factors:
– Money worries – A career in music is often precarious and unpredictable. Many musicians have several different jobs as part of a portfolio career, and as a result get little time to take a break. It can be hard for musicians to admit to insecurities because of needing to compete with others and wanting to appear on top of things. Musicians can also find it hard to access affordable professional help for mental health issues.
– Poor working conditions – Music makers can be reflective and highly self-critical, and exist in a working and personal environment of constant critical feedback. As many musicians are self-employed, their work can result in feelings of isolation when it comes to dealing with mental health problems.
– Relationship challenges – Family, friends and partners play an important role in supporting musicians, but these relationships can come under huge pressure and strain.
– Sexual abuse/bullying/discrimination – Musicians’ working environment can be anti-social and unsympathetic, with some people experiencing sexual abuse, harassment, bullying and coercion.
Musicians wrestle with higher levels of depression than people in other fields. This seems to clash with another host of studies trotted out to support arguments for more music education because music helps us be smarter and lead more fulfilling lives. I guess only if you don't pursue it professionally. Both of these posts, by the way, have a host of intriguing comments.
Now set this beside the recent attempts to apply identity politics to the hiring of musicians. "Diversity" and "Inclusion" demands that orchestras hire based on gender and race so that the demographics of the orchestra reflect that of the society. Imagine if you were one of that host of musicians trying to win the position and found out that, due to your identity, your chances were much less? Talk about depression!
Music is one of the most unforgiving disciplines there is. In earlier times I suspect this was not as keen because you could be a regional musician and not have to face as much competition. But once recording technology was invented you were compared, not to the tenor in the next town, but to Caruso. Violinists were compared to Heifetz and pianists to Horowitz. As the mass media became ever more pervasive the careers of the famous and well-established tended more and more to crush the careers of the middle-rank artists. I noticed this myself when a local summer music festival, a modest affair offering four or five concerts in an area with a population of around 300,000 people, hired a guitarist from New York instead of myself! I was wondering, "are things so tough in New York that he has to come here and take jobs from me?" I guess so.
Every musician feels the need to be a unique voice, a special expressive resource that cannot be swapped for another. This rather explains the wording of a lot of puff-pieces about musicians who always come off sounding like emotional basket-cases. But the reality is that the emotional and physical demands are so great that few can survive them. I have watched the career of guitarist Miloš Karadaglić in recent years as he seemed to have the possibility of building a solid career. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:
2012 was a breakthrough year on the concert stage for Miloš, with sold-out debut performances and tours in the UK, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, USA, Canada, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. "Part of the reason Karadaglić has such a large following" commented The West Australian, "is his ability to straddle both hardcore classical and pop classical camps."
He even achieved the gold medal of recording achievement with a Deutsche Grammophon contract and released albums in 2012 and 2013. Alas, in October 2016 he announced that he was retiring from performance due to an injury to his hand. Lang Lang is also having to withdraw from performances due to a left hand injury and Hilary Hahn canceled a number of performances a couple of years ago for the same reason.
Well, I think I have belabored the point enough! Let's listen to some music. This is Miloš Karadaglić playing Asturias by Isaac Albéniz:
Marcelo Kayath is head of Latin American Securities at Credit Suisse in Sao Paolo. That’s big in banking, we’re told.
UPDATE: He’s been promoted to managing director of Credit Suisse in Brazil.
Before he climbed behind a desk, Marcelo was Brazil’s bright hope on the classical guitar. He was pretty good, we hear.
To stay in touch with his past, and to promote the instrument’s future, Marcelo has now launched an online launchpad for new guitar talent – such as Naumburg winner Jorge Caballero – and international guitar events.
The thing is that I know Marcelo Kayath--I mean we aren't beer-drinking buddies or something, but I remember him very well from the Toronto guitar festival and competition way back in, I think it was 1978. For a few years the Toronto Guitar Society held some very successful festivals and competitions. I think the years were 1975 (when the winners of the competition were Sharon Isbin, first and Manuel Barrueco, second), 1978 when the winner was Marcelo Kayath, and, I think 1984. I don't remember who the winner was then, but I was possibly distracted because I was giving a solo recital as part of the festival.
In any case, in 1978 I followed the competition very closely. Marcelo Kayath wasn't my favorite of the finalists. I think that would probably have been David Tannenbaum whose repertoire I liked better. But Marcelo was a very fine player indeed: big, beautiful romantic sound and a near-impeccable technique. For the final round he did an outstanding and lyrical performance of the Concerto by Castelnuovo-Tedesco with orchestral accompaniment. He won the competition and soon after released a pretty darn good Cd. But, according to the Slipped Disc item, he gave up his career as an international classical guitar virtuoso for a career in banking--which he seems to be doing splendidly at.
I have a lot of familiarity with this sort of thing as I have experienced some of it myself. Notice something first of all: both of the finalists in the 1975 competition went on to big careers. I don't recall who else was a finalist, but I have the vague recollection that they had pretty good careers as well. But the finalists in the 1978 competition have not fared nearly as well. Marcelo Kayath has become a banker and David Tannenbaum had a very modest career. And I don't even remember who the finalists were in subsequent competitions. The winners of a similarly high-profile competition, the Guitar Foundation of America one, held annually, are also having careers of remarkable obscurity. Just to cite one example, the winner of the 1994 GFA competition, which I attended (I was giving a lecture on the Brouwer guitar concertos as part of the festival) was Margarita Escarpa, a Spanish guitarist who gave one of the most delightful and liquid performances of Bach I have ever heard. But she seems to be virtually unknown career-wise. She released an obscure recording of Fernando Sor on Naxos (that's one of the competition prizes) and teaches at an obscure Spanish conservatory.
I think something started trending in the late 1970s that has just gotten worse ever since. The earliest recitals I gave, in the mid-70s, were very well-attended, paid not bad and were not hard to organize. But as time went on, the attendance dropped, it got harder to find recital engagements and the pay didn't get any better. A very high-profile concert where I was the soloist with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in a concert honoring Brazil with the Brazilian Consul in attendance in the biggest and best concert hall in Vancouver and that was recorded and broadcast nationwide paid, wait for it, $1300 CAN. I played the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto and some of his solo music.
The solo recital has become an endangered species as two important trends collide: on the one hand, mass market pop music dominates the music business so much that classical musicians can barely earn a living, especially in the mass media which includes radio, television and the new streaming services. And on the other, people are much less inclined to attend live concerts when they can sit at home and listen to recordings.
For these reasons, even highly talented artists such as Marcelo Kayath or Margarita Escarpa or (blush) myself have two unattractive options: on the one hand, like Margarita, you can keep slogging away with the occasional concert and a whole lot of low-paying teaching. I did this for 30 years. Teaching music, much of the time, consists in being trapped in a small room for hours on end with people who have little or no musical talent, telling them over and over again that there are TWO beats in a half note. The alternative is that you give up your music career entirely and become a banker or some other profession that rewards intelligence and creativity instead of punishing it as the music business often seems to do.
The most talented student I had who was a high-school student when I taught him, never for a moment considered a career in classical music even though he had the ability. Instead he chose to study law.
Like Marcelo Kayath, the option I have chosen is to have a remunerative non-musical career, but one that allows me enough time to devote to composition, something I never had before.
But there are still a few super-stars like Hilary Hahn that undoubtedly could do something far more economically rewarding, but choose to do music and can earn, if not really large amounts of money like a mid-rank hip-hop artist, then at least a pretty decent living. I just hope that continues.
This is Hilary Hahn playing the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paao Järvi:
At a rough estimate, I have written over a million words on this blog. That's approximately 800 words per post and over 1300 posts. I think that amounts to several books worth of thoughts on music. So I'm thinking, what with the fact that it is easier than ever to self-publish an e-book, that after I get this symphony finished in the next month or so, I might look into putting together an e-book of the most worthwhile posts from the blog. The Music Salon needs some commercial product! After this come the coffee mugs and t-shirts. I'm kidding. Well, maybe not about the t-shirts...
So I would like to ask my readers, do you think this is a good idea? Would anyone actually purchase such a book? I would try to add value, of course. The book would collect just those posts that are outstanding and I would work them over to improve the writing and argument. Remember, these posts are mostly thrown together on the day and would undoubtedly benefit from editing. The question is, what sort of posts to choose and what sections the book would fall into. Discussion of individual pieces of music would be one section, while others might include some chapters on pop music, some on aesthetics, some on the lives of musicians, etc.
There are some other important questions: how should I handle the problem of YouTube embedding? A lot of older posts have seen the original YouTube examples disappear. Should I include YouTube links at all or just say, "for the following musical example, go to YouTube and type 'Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata' into the search bar." And another big problem is how to title the book. One possibility is the title of this post: "Uncompromising Music" because that might give readers a hint as to the basic stance. But I could go with one of those lengthy titles so many non-fiction books are saddled with these days: "Exploring Music with a Performer/Composer/Musicologist: Getting the Inside Scoop on What's Wrong with Music These Days and How to Fix It".
Heh!
Or maybe I should just write a few more symphonies?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Here is what I have been listening to lately in my comprehensive survey of the symphony:
Now, I know what you are thinking, "isn't this the same guy that has always been complaining about how he can't stand the Mahler symphonies?" Sure, in recent years I have found them rather irritating for a number of reasons, but I have decided to do a comprehensive listening survey of the symphonic repertoire and Mahler's are some of the highest-regarded symphonies ever written. A few decades ago I was a big fan and listened to them a lot. Back then, purchasing even one meant buying an expensive box!
In any case, Mahler was on my list to re-listen to and I finally got to him just the other day. I realized that I have not listened to a Mahler symphony all the way through for years and I have never sat down and listened to all nine (or ten) in order. So that's what I am doing. They are, of course, enormously skilled compositions, superbly orchestrated. After I am done, I will have some more detailed comments and some criticisms.
A commentator left a long and interesting comment on my post the other day. In it he quoted an article in Wired magazine that talks about cultivating genius in the 21st century. My commentator quotes a bit from the article and adds:
"Bill James, the pioneer of Moneyball-style statistical baseball analysis, points out that modern America is already very good at generating geniuses. The problem is that the geniuses we’ve created are athletes." We basically value athletes & sports more than science, (classical) music, painting (although this one is valued quite much by certain rich people, you can own a painting after all, something that can't be said about music for instance) and so on.
Ah yes, what is the value of genius? I think the original article falls down badly in its analysis of what created clusters of genius such as we find in 5th century BC Athens, 15th century Florence, 16th century London and, for we music-lovers, 18th century Vienna. The article claims that:
We can begin to make sense of the “clotting” of creative talent. The secret, it turns out, is the presence of particular meta-ideas, which support the spread of other ideas. First proposed by economist Paul Romer, meta-ideas include concepts like the patent system, public libraries, and universal education.
Uh-huh. Does anyone even edit these off-the-cuff essays? Because if the "secret" is those "meta-ideas" there would seem to be a bit of a flaw as 5th century BC Athens, 15th century Florence, 16th century London and 18th century Vienna had none of this. Composers in the 18th century had no way of protecting their copyright and they had no access to any public libraries nor universal education. I guess we aren't supposed to notice glaring errors of logic these days.
But there is one element that we should examine: compensation. Is the reason that America is good at generating "genius" in the field of athletics (and I'm pretty sure that's the wrong word) is that they get paid enormous amounts of money? Let's have a look. Here is the Forbes list of highest-paid athletes for 2013. The top five range from around $50 million to nearly $80 million. Not bad! Now let's compare that to the earnings of some of the highest paid pop musicians. Now, of course, the article does not say "pop" musicians, but just musicians tout simple. It just happens that, through some quirk of fate, that all of the top musicians are in the pop field (including country, rap, and one dj). The top five here run from $64 million to $125 million. So, obviously, if compensation attracts genius, then we have a lot of genius in the field of pop. Aesthetically that doesn't seem to be the case.
Let's have another look at that quote from the article:
Bill James, the pioneer of Moneyball-style statistical baseball analysis, points out that modern America is already very good at generating geniuses. The problem is that the geniuses we’ve created are athletes. As James says, this is largely because we treat athletes differently. We encourage them when they’re young, chauffeuring our kids to practice and tournaments. We also have mechanisms for cultivating athletic talent at every step in the process, from Little League to the Majors. Lastly, professional teams are willing to take risks, betting big bucks on draft picks who never pan out. Because of these successful meta-ideas, even a small city like Topeka, Kansas—roughly the same size as Elizabethan London, James points out—can produce an athletic genius every few years.
But do we treat athletes differently? I don't think so. A lot of young music students get treated exactly the same way and there are also mechanisms to encourage success. Most places have music festivals and there are extensive programs (even though cut back somewhat in recent years) for music education from Suzuki up to youth orchestras.
Just out of curiosity, how are the superstars of classical music compensated? I'm not sure where to get the numbers for opera singers and other virtuosos, but a good indicator is how conductors are paid. Here is an LA Times article with the numbers. The top five range from $1.52 million to $2.17 million. That's just ... embarrassing! These are some of the greatest classical musicians alive and they get paid about what a successful real estate agent in a major urban center like New York can make. Yes, really.
My conclusion is that all of these explanations are off the mark. Genius does not come out of nowhere, as these clusters seem to show, but it certainly does not seem to be the product of careful cultivation through copyright protection, public libraries or universal education either. Because it would be fairly easy to demonstrate that the clusters of genius that we know about were not the result of any of this. And, as the figures for pop stars also seem to show, genius is not a product of huge amounts of money either.
So why not? I think a little quote from Einstein I recently ran across might give a clue. When the Nazis came up with 100 scientists who said Einstein was wrong about everything he simply replied "Were I mistaken, one would have sufficed." What I take from this is, for one thing, genius is not to be judged by mediocrity. Which is one reason why systems of education, universal, restricted or high-tech, do NOT produce genius. All systems of education are run by mediocrities for their own benefit and they, almost without exception, resent highly talented students because they always create problems for the institution.
Just as a speculation, I think that what creates clusters of genius are two things: genius itself and leisure to exploit it. You don't get an Aristotle by sending him to an Ivy League school with highly-paid professors and deluxe student dorms. But you do by exposing him at an early age to the thinking of Plato and Socrates. You need one potential genius exposed to another with the leisure to develop. So there does have to be some compensation. But I call it leisure because what genius really needs is not huge paychecks, but just time. You can't be a genius if you are slinging burgers because that just takes away too much of your energy.
Haydn was a potential genius who, through the patronage of the Esterházys was given the leisure to develop his abilities. In turn he was able to positively influence the genius of Mozart and Beethoven.
Too busy this morning to put up much--perhaps I will have time later. But I did want to just slightly depart from this blog's usual focus to give praise where it is due. Living in Mexico, I depend on Amazon for a lot of things like books, CDs and most recently, eBooks for my newly-purchased Kindle Paperwhite.
By the way, I am a big fan of the Kindle. When you are running around during the day and sometimes have to wait twenty or thirty minutes for someone, having your Kindle along means that you can do something useful while you wait. Right now I am reading a recent collection of essays by Richard Taruskin called The Danger of Music.
But the main thing I want to say is how impressed I am with Amazon's customer service. When I ordered my Kindle I was amazed that it arrived in only two days! Obviously they have a warehouse full of Kindles here in Mexico. But what really impressed me was how they solved a problem the other day. Because of a bit of a confusion with my credit card company, they suddenly froze my account. I was easily able to resolve the issue the next day, but in the meantime, Amazon was in the middle of downloading an eBook when it happened. So I owed them nine dollars that they couldn't collect! As soon as I got the issue cleared up with the credit card company, I sent Amazon an apologetic email and asked them to resubmit the charge. Within ten minutes I got an email back that was a model of courtesy and efficiency!
Now when was the last time you could say that a large company you deal with handled customer service with excellent courtesy and efficiency?
Right!
Now, how about some music? Here is something suitable: Heitor Villa-Lobos 1917 ballet Amazonas:
The Washington Post has a nice story up about Valentina Lisitsa, the Ukrainian-born pianist resident in North Carolina. Here is her story in a nutshell:
The three-minute video of Rachmaninoff’s Etude Op. 39 No. 6, or “Little Red Riding Hood,” went viral, despite the piece’s relative obscurity. Following its success, Lisitsa posted videos of herself playing Liszt and Tchaikovsky. Her first-past-the-post strategy of flooding YouTube with videos of the repertoire paid off, yielding more than 60 million views and 100,000 YouTube subscribers. Fame ultimately translated into album deals — “Valentina Lisitsa Plays Liszt” is her newest — and a global touring schedule that was scheduled to bring her to the Library of Congress last Thursday, a visit that was canceled because of the government shutdown.
I have posted about Valentina Lisitsa before, here and here. What I notice about her is not so much her marketing strategy, successful though it may be, nor her appearance, despite a remarkably bizarre comment on one of my posts, but her very compelling musicianship. She talks about the hosts of conservatory pianists that come out every year. But what I hear in her playing is how very convincing a musician she is. I am afraid that all too many of those young virtuosi are mere note-spinners with great publicity shots. Valentina Lisitsa is another kind of musician entirely. Here she is playing a waltz by Chopin. Listen to how beautifully every phrase is shaped and to the fluidity of the rhythm:
Here is a hilarious article about those little riders that big music stars put in their contracts. I think my favorite is "Axl Rose—Fresh Wonder Bread (white), Dom Perignon". This one is also intriguing: "Busta Rhymes—24 piece Fried Chicken, Rough Rider condoms, Guinness". I'll spare you the off-putting photo of that one, but by all means follow the link.
Now, if I were doing big concert tours, what would I require in my dressing room before? A bottle of 1985 Vieux Telegraph Chateauneuf-du-Pape, beef tongue tacos and a green salad with ranch dressing. For afterwards, Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Oh, and a framed photo of Dmitri Shostakovich for inspiration. This last inspired by Britney Spears: "Fish and chips, McDonald's cheeseburgers without the buns, 100 prunes and figs, a framed photo of Princess Diana".
This:
Or this:
Dmitri is way more inspiring, doncha think? Plus, cool hairdo.
Norman Lebrecht has an interesting piece this morning about the Madrid Radio Orchestra:
From Orquesta Sinfónica y Coro de RTVE: We are an orchestra and choir dependent on the national public radio and television, which proposed, as part of new contract negotiations, that we work for eight months a year and go on unemployment four months of each year. This is an unprecedented measure in Spain and the public opinion and our audience have felt so outraged that since it was announced there were spontaneous chants in our support,”publica” meaning “public”-as in “we want public, state supported culture”.
This reminds me of a couple of things. Back when I lived in Canada, I remember that sometimes artists who were able to get unemployment benefits, known as UIC for Unemployment Insurance Commission (if I recall correctly), now known as EI, would refer to them as a "UIC Cultural Grant". They would use the weekly check to support themselves while pursuing artistic endeavours.
It also reminds me that some Canadian orchestras simply do not pay players during the off season. I walked into a 7-11 (a 24 hour convenience store) once and saw the principal cellist of the orchestra working behind the counter. For him, being able to collect unemployment would be an improvement!
But what is truly odd here, unless there are some important facts being unreported, is that unemployment benefits come out of the same public funds as arts subsidies, do they not? It might be a different department, ministry of culture rather than ministry of labor, but it all comes from the same taxpayers, so economically there is no difference. Chanting that they want public, state-supported culture seems rather redundant when paying unemployment benefits to the orchestra members is certainly supporting them with state funds.
What seems obvious about our current system of support for the arts is that it is coercive in a way that the private patronage systems of the pre-welfare state were not. What am I saying? Now, state-supported culture means that all taxpayers are forced to pay for things they may not like or may be personally opposed to. Under private patronage, such as was practiced in Europe from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, this never happened. A group of nobles got together to guarantee a stipend to Beethoven. The inhabitants of the city of Vienna were not assessed a tax for this purpose.
The chamber music society that I am part of relies on no government subsidy, but only private patronage. This is preferable here because government support is notoriously unreliable and those arts groups that rely on it tend to disappear as soon as the funding does. Our group has presented concerts for decades with private patronage alone.
Now, let's listen to some music. Here is the Madrid Radio Orchestra with an excerpt from the Verdi Requiem:
Funny how stories seem to come in clumps. I've just run across two stories that do not reflect well on the music business. Here is one, courtesy of Norman Lebrecht:
The composer Nathan Currier has been given a green light by the state supreme court to sue the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra for stopping the premiere of his evening-long oratorio before it finished. Currier, 53, had paid $72,000 for the performance of Gaian Variations, but at 10.45, with overtime looming at 11 pm, the orchestra stopped playing.
The composer wants his money back. The orch says that would cause them financial difficulties. Not the finest hour for either side.
Ok, the thing to note is not the lawsuit, but the fact that the Brooklyn Philharmonic were charging Mr. Currier $72,000 for playing his music. Now for the other story, this time courtesy of the Guardian. There is a bit of a backstory, but the basic facts are that a person with no training or experience in music has a dream in which he hears a whole symphony and becomes so wrapped up in it that he leaves his wife and moves to London to see if he can get it performed. Here is what happened:
One day I sat on a bench outside BBC Television Centre and a man stopped to chat. He was a musician called Anthony Wade and after I told him my story he listened to the very rough recording I'd made using a guitar I'd bought for 50p. He was amazed by it and told me that it could be magnificent if it was orchestrated, but that would take hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Uh-huh. Apart from the pricing, this is a pretty similar story. I could add one of my own. I had made a master recording and was looking for someone to distribute it. A company in Toronto agreed, but said that they needed $5000 up front for production costs. I foolishly agreed and of course, they did not fulfill their contract and there was very little distribution and marketing. Years later they made the mistake of putting some tracks from my album on a compilation CD and I sued them for breach of copyright (which had reverted to me). They settled out of court for $5000.
I think you might be getting the idea? If you are not wise in the ways of the music business, DO NOT agree to pay someone a significant sum of money to perform or record or orchestrate your work. If it is worth while musically, sooner or later someone will want to perform/record/orchestrate it. Though my feeling is that if you can't orchestrate your own music, you should really learn how.
It's that story about sitting on the bench and some musician happening along and saying it would cost "hundreds of thousands of pounds" to orchestrate it that really outraged me. Unless we are talking about Gurre-Lieder or a five-hour opera, that is just ridiculous. First of all, do your own orchestration. If you can't then I have serious doubts about whether you have written anything worth the trouble. Second, for "hundreds of thousands of pounds" you could commission just about any composer to write a whole lot of pieces. Classical composers work pretty cheap these days. As an example, here are the commissioning rates from the Canadian League of Composers:
Schedule of Minimum Commissioning Fees
The fees indicated are the CLC's suggested minimum rates, effective January 1, 2013
*Please note that rates were raised on January 1, 2013 from previous rates.
I Chamber Ensembles Fee per minute
One or two $425
Three or four $475
Five to Eight $535
Nine to Fifteen $615
II Orchestra Fee per minute
Chamber orchestra up to 15 parts $615
Orchestra over 15 parts $790
III Chorus Fee per minute
A cappella (or with piano) up to seven parts $475
A cappella (or with piano) eight parts or more $535
With instrumental ensemble (up to eight performers) $560
With chamber orchestra (over nine to fifteen performers) $615
With full orchestra (over 15 parts) $790
IV Electroacoustic Music per minute
Plus studio rental unless provided $560
For the addition of an electronic part or tape to an ensemble add to the rate $145 to the appropriate rate
Hilariously inexpensive, isn't it? This means that you could commission pretty well any Canadian composer to write a 30 minute piece for large orchestra for-----wait for it----$23,700 Canadian, which is pretty much equal to US dollars these days. That's thirty minutes at $790 a minute. Hundreds of thousands of pounds? Hey, I have a bridge in Brooklyn (oddly enough) I could get for you really cheap!
Well, let's listen to Mr. Sharp's symphony:
Was that what you expected? It was certainly better than I expected. It does tend to sound too much like movie music for my taste, but it shows that some strange things can happen in the music world. Of course what we are really dealing with here is the back story: dead child, leaving everything behind, life on the streets, finally ultimate triumph. It's a book! The symphony is not so much a piece of music as the symbol of a human triumph. How genuine is it? Perhaps as genuine as the unnamed "musical experts" who attest that the symphony is a work of genius. It pretty much has to be to make the story come out right, doesn't it?
UPDATE: Here is a crazy comparison for you. This painting by Jackson Pollock sold for $140 million dollars:
Now sure, it's really nifty, but how would you compare the creativity and craftsmanship involved in creating it with the creativity and craftsmanship involved in creating a large-scale work for orchestra? More? Less? Similar? It just seems very, very peculiar to me that a large piece for orchestra is valued at $23,700 and this painting at $140 million.
All I have for you this morning is a very brief quote from Hunter S. Thompson on the music business:
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
Hat tip to Norman Lebrecht. I almost wish I'd said that! How about some music? The first movement of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No.8 in G major, Op.30.
