Mark Likes Music

Matthew Yglesias weighed in last week on tax-exempt giving  to nonprofit organizations: ...it'd really be worth scaling this all back a great deal. A rich guy giving a gift to an elite university that mostly serves the educational needs of rich kids is not particularly worthy of a tax subsidy. That's doubly true when we all know that the "gift" is in some respects a bribe to boost the admissions prospects of his own family members. We don't have a shortage of political advocacy in the United States. God is not going to become angry at us and punish us if our churches become less splendid. Due to the progressive rate structure of the income tax, these tax deductions are very much a way of increasing the social and political clout of the rich and don't seem to inspire a ton of charity in the sense of helping poor people. In addition to tolerating a tax code that exempts from taxation multi-million dollar gifts that uphold an elite status quo , we live in a wo...

Last week, Tom Jacobs of the Pacific Standard reported on a recent paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing that examined what compels people to buy tickets to an orchestra concert. Jacobs felt that Wagner Kamatura and Carl Schimmel's research--"Mahler meets Moneyball "--upset assumptions about new music by showing that "less-popular works written before 1900 have a stronger negative impact on occupancy than less-popular works from after the turn of the 20th century." There were plenty of other things that, according to Kamatura and Schimmel, actively enticed concertgoers (a big-name star like Josh Bell and familiar works by Beethoven and Mozart) so saying that contemporary music doesn't drive people away as much as second-tier Romanticism is hardly an endorsement, and certainly not a revolutionary upending of conventional wisdom. So many people in concert-music circles want to convince themselves that it's only weak-kneed artis...

In its Arts, Briefly section today, The New York Times reported on news that Detroit's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is contemplating selling some of the Detroit Institute of the Arts's collection to cover the city's $15 million debt. Metropolitan Museum president and CEO Thomas P. Campbell predicted that the "disheartening reports out of Detroit today will undoubtedly shock and outrage the city's residents." Let's look at some data  that Campbell probably didn't consider before making his comment: The median household income in Detroit is $25,192 (the national figure is $50,502). 36% of Detroit residents live below the poverty line ( which is $11,170, $23,050 for a family of four ).  57% of children live in poverty in Detroit, three times the national rate.  The high-school graduation rate in Detroit is under 25% ; in 2011, the Michigan government approved a cost-cutting plan for school closures in the city that would increase high-school cl...

Magic Hat and Kentucky beer company West Sixth are currently embroiled in a trademark-infringement fight  that has become a very public battle. West Sixth is the underdog here, but it's doing itself no favors with its sarcastic, overblown, immature attacks on social media. Here's an example from  a recent post on Facebook, where the company addresses Magic Hat directly: We saw that you finally decided to hire a PR person to reply to our petition from yesterday. I suppose after more than 10,000 people signed it, you couldn’t ignore it any more.  Since you decided to publish our letters (which I hope everyone takes the time to read, they’re hilarious), we also want to make sure everyone can see the full text of the bogus lawsuit. As you can see there are some crazy claims in it, and some that even look like it might have been copied and pasted from other lawsuits – what’s that craziness about us moving into South Carolina? There are probably a lot of people who will s...

Here's how Zachary Woolfe  explains the significance of Yuja Wang's short, tight dresses : ... the tiny dresses and spiky heels draw your focus to how petite Ms. Wang is, how stark the contrast between her body and the forcefulness she achieves at her instrument. That contrast creates drama. It turns a recital into a performance. I appreciate that Woolfe doesn't revert to  gape mouthed aawking , but doesn't ignore the issue either. His is as good an interpretation of how Wang's dress affects a listener as any I've seen. (Another worthy read on how critics address the dress is here , by Anne Midgette.) That said, there still is something lascivious about the whole affair, particularly after reading the "so short, so tight" comments made by other middle-age male critics. Onto another issue: someone needs to get Woolfe to lay off the purple prose. Check this out, from the same review: The liquidity of her phrasing in the second movement of Scriab...

If someone told you to pick a song as a lullaby for your baby, would you pick this? Well, one of the parents in a Beth Israel Medical Center study on how music effects premature newborns did. And with was no doubt a great deal of imagination, the participating musicians converted it into a much softer, more palatable song lullaby. The results of the study, which involved 272 children over two weeks, point to subtle but real developmental benefits for premature newborns. But it's important to remember that this wasn't about how music benefited the babies, but how one form of music--the lullaby--helped. As pointed out by the Average White Band example, the researchers went to great pains to take suggested songs from parents and convert them into "lilting waltzes" accompanied by gato drum pulses and the whooshing sounds of an "ocean disc." When it came to making musical choices, the researchers made a priori, culturally grounded assumptions about wh...

Last winter, when working at the Rochester Philharmonic, one of our musicians sent me an article by Zachary Lewis on the outstanding success the Cleveland Orchestra had last fall in increasing its ticket revenue by focusing on students and young people, groups that are often afterthoughts in classical-music marketing strategies. Overall, earned income was up 24% in the first half of this season (the article ran January 19), and student attendance was up 55%. The Cleveland Orchestra got there by offering $10 student tickets, and a $50 Frequent Fan card, which gave students access to as many concerts as they could take. Also, the orchestra gave out 26,112 free tickets to children. To prime the pump for all of this, Cleveland started October with Student Appreciation Weekend . While worrying about the aging out (dying out) of their audiences, orchestras and classical-music presenters come up with a host of excuses to ignore the youngest concertgoers: students have no money to spend; ...

On the Raffetto Herman company blog, David Herman compares good marketing with good jazz : In jazz music, the use of improviastion means each performance is different, often affected by the audience listening. A good marketing strategy needs to do the same. By using different themes and avenues, a company can reach a broader customer base with the ability to shift its campaign based on response. As important to jazz as improvisation is preparation: great jazz musicians spend years practicing scales and arpeggios, memorizing changes to hundreds of standards, and imitating the styles other great musicians, all so that, when the time comes for them to be in the spotlight, they'll deliver their own satisfying, spontaneous, enjoyable performance. Likewise, a good marketing strategy is still only as good as the planning that goes into it. That gives you the tools you need to respond to any situation--or in the jazz parlance that Herman uses, to improvise on any theme--and win over a...

Mark Stryker  of the Free Press recently wrote about how the Detroit Symphony  is faring two years after settling its embarrassing, divisive strike. Some of the changes that the orchestra has made shows that the board and management are really making efforts to be forward-looking and relevant to today's audiences. For one thing, management is incentivizing musicians to participate in community engagement. Although the orchestra took a 23% pay cut--the base salary is still $81,000, pretty good in a city that has no money --there is a clause stating that musicians will get an extra $7,000 if they participate in education and "outreach" programs. It's essential for orchestras to start thinking of themselves not as concert promoters exclusively, but as educators and advocates for their art; the bonus money, although modest, at least shows that the DSO is aware of this reality. The DSO is also opening up new ways for people to enjoy its traditional repertoire. Because ...

Last weekend, students at the Parsons School of Design unveiled the alternative orchestral attire they've been working on since the start of the school year as part of a project funded by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony . Judging by the photos, most of the designs were surprisingly traditional: most of them maintained the black-on-black color scheme for women, and the men are still in tuxes, still looking like waiters. Some students showed an interest in electronic technology, such as motion sensors in clothes to trigger projections, but that doesn't really do much to change how the musicians look on stage. In addition to an article on WQXR's website , you can read about it on Classicalite.com .