Mark Likes Music

I'm posting this because I like it. And because that's my parents' house in the opening shot.

Terry Teachout's article on the decline of jazz generated a lot of buzz. Teachout himself responded to the backlash and appeared on WNYC in New York to discuss. Robertcostic, who commented on Anne Midgette's blog entry about the hubbub, hits on one of my beefs with jazz as an institution: "I thought it was easy trying to find famous jazz artists of the past. But then when it came to looking for local jazz performances to actually attend, I was at a loss ... [I had] no way to know whether a performance would be enjoyable or not ..." Like robertcostic, I've always found the jazz community to be insular. Most jazzers believe the hype about their music being "art" and feel no need to cultivate fans. Sometimes, I feel that they (performers, but also the connoisseurs) don't want listeners. They're happy to while away the time they have left doing things they're way. Because they're artists. Robertcostic's comment also u...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a note questioning Charles Blow's assertion in The New York Times that the recording industry is on its last legs . Responses from Times readers to Blow were mixed. Of course, letters from industry muckety-mucks such as Mitch Bainwol, Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, found Blow to be "unduly pessimistic" and spoke euphemistically about "transformation" (this from Rich Bengloff of the American Association of Independent Music). Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps raised a good point that the "business-to-business side" of the music industry is booming, with streaming services providing constant and growing revenues. As I said in my original pos t, these streaming companies are customers. Those without supply-side skin in the game were much less enthusiastic, and cited their own reasons for the decline of the industry. One reader bemoaned "the growing unavailability of music we might ...

A recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that jazz audiences have been getting smaller and older, and Terry Teachout pondered the reasons for these stats in a Wall Street Journal article this weekend . Jazz is now considered a serious art form, but this new status has come at a cost according to Teachout, alienating popular-music audiences that skew young. Once a part of everyday cultural life for the hip, jazz is now a stuffy museum piece, one that shares the problems facing orchestras, museums, and other high-culture emporiums. Comparing jazz to classical music, I'd say that jazz faces a distinct problem: most of its major art works are recordings. Although there are umpteen-thousand excellent recordings of all major classical pieces, orchestras can always pitch the live performance as the most authentic experience possible of the score. (Whether they do this well or not is another story.) Jazz presenters, on the other hand, can't present ...

To my surprise, I found the biography of William Schuman at Borders today. John Clare interviewed the author, Juilliard president Joseph Polisi, last year. There's more--including clips of lots of Schuman's music--at the website to promote the book, schuman-americanmuse.com .

Yes, it's Barack Obama's birthday, but it's also William Schuman's, and there was a time when that would have been a pretty big deal. As John Clare reminded us on his blog , Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic celebrated Schuman's 50th birthday in 1960, opening their October 13-16 shows with his Symphony No. 3. Two years later, as Schuman began his tenure as president of Lincoln Center (he was previously president of the Juilliard School), he appeared on What's My Line?

In a New York Times op-ed piece Saturday , Charles Blow declared that the music industry (by which he means the recording part of the music business) will cease to exist "before Madonna's 60th birthday." According to Blow, people are going to stop buying music because they can stream it for free online. But the music streaming companies aren't the killers here: they're new customers. They have to get their content somewhere; if labels stop recording, streaming services will have nothing new to play. Also, people are still buying music. They still like their iPods. And they still like having control over their playlists. They may not buy as much in the future, and may not buy for the same reasons as before (for example, they may not be willing to shell out $20 for an entire CD of junk just to get the one hit song), but they will buy. So don't stick a fork in the recording industry yet. It's far from done.