Broadening the Concert-Music Repertoire: Good for Audiences, Good for America

-
As a guest blogger on the Cross-Eyed Pianist, Simon Brackenborough argues that programming composers like Arnold Bax, half-lost to history but still with passionate advocates, will invigorate concert music and attract new audiences:
It’s not about whether enough people will like Bax. But by confidently confronting the question of why he produces both obsessive fans and sniffy detractors, you have exactly the opportunity to engage people that the Proms should have seized with both hands. Disagreement, after all, is a sign that an art form matters: a repertoire of limited risk is a repertoire of limited relevance. The industry will be in a healthier place when concert-goers are less sure that they will enjoy the experience, but are willing to pay to find out.
I'm not sure we should promote concerts with the slogan, You May Not Enjoy This: Pay to Find Out, but I do agree that there is great value in putting "masterworks"--pieces we hear all the time, season in and season out--next to their historical contemporaries so that we can find new enjoyment in debating the canon: how and why certain music makes it into our virtual musical museum, and whether we should be changing things up in there.

Within the field of American music, digging through the vaults is particularly important and exciting, as we have such a nascent concert-music canon. We have a chance to form a real, living history in the concert hall, to have a say in what we want to hear, and what we want to remember. 

We also have the chance to do some pro-sports-level shit-talking, a good ol' American tradition in its own right. Did Ives really write the only two Great American Symphonies, and did George Templeton Strong really write the most beautiful slow movement in American history, as Joseph Horowitz says? Do you think he's completely off base, or did he steal your thunder by bringing it up before you? I think George Rochberg's Symphony No. 2 is the most important 12-tone piece ever written and performed in the United States; who'll care enough to prove me wrong? And how does Amy Beach's "Gaelic" Symphony stack up?  

In his post, Brackenborough (who also runs the blog Corymbus) compares classical music with being stuck in dead-end job, "comfortable routine that just about pays the bills, but whose narrow scope and dull repetition prevents any hope of reaching something greater." I don't know if we'll get something greater by getting more music out there, but it could certainly end up making things more fun.




Popular posts from this blog

Maybe Michael Kaiser Just Isn't Looking in the Right Places

-
On Sequenza21, Armondo Bayalo claims that Michael Kaiser is "just plain wrong about the state of the art"--and then proceeds to tell us all the reasons why he's right. Bayalo's real point isn't that Kaiser is wrong, but that he is only right within his own big-arts frame of reference. He doesn't see all the great stuff that's going in "smaller, leaner operations" than the Kennedy Center: Fair enough, but part of the problem is that the funders and fundraisers who hold the purse strings aren't willing to invest in those grass-roots groups so that they can grow.
Read more

Louisville Orchestra Restructuring Slog

-
The dreary business of the Louisville Orchestra's restructuring is going forward, with the CEO threatening to close up shop if he has to pay the band. Today, a US Bankruptcy Court judge ruled that the organization can't cut its budget by voiding its contract with its musicians ,who will now get cheques until April as a result, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. In testimony prior to the ruling , the board president, Chuck Maisch, said that the orchestra could only honor the contract by dipping into its endowment; the orchestra's CEO, Robert Birman, said that the orchestra would simply have to liquidate assets. It looks as if that  the proceedings start up again in Louisville on January 6 .
Read more

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Ravel's Bolero (Part II)

-
Here's what Uncle Fred had to say about Ravel's Bolero : "It's the most descriptive sex music ever written." According to his niece-in-law Jenny, played by Bo Derek in 10 , "he proved it." To anyone with qualms about pedophilia (I'm firmly in this camp), Jenny's little story, meant to seduce poor hapless George (Dudley Moore), is uncomfortable, to say the least. (The whole movie gives me the creeps.) Although he was an incestuous cad, Uncle Fred had a point about Bolero . As mentioned in an earlier post , the piece opens with the snare drum playing the distinctive rhythmic pattern of the Spanish dance it's named after. The seductive flute melody that enters shortly after sets in motion a gradual blossoming to a climactic finale; as that rhythm pulses below, the melody repeats, the orchestration expands, and the music becomes ever more incessant and powerful. It's hard not to get all worked up when you listen to it. Bolero set Rav...
Read more