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Plan B

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Looks like Sam will be dealing with jetlag as he and the Orchestra begin their week across the pond; I’m coping with my own jetlag, having returned from a two-week visit to my mother in Hawaii this past weekend. Easing myself back into the working-from-home drill that takes up much of my summer (a lot of the planning/producing/arranging for concerts in the upcoming season takes place in the summer months), I’ve been catching up with industry news as well, including the continuing crisis at the Detroit Symphony.

The DSO contract expires on midnight Sunday, and last-minute bargaining talks are scheduled for Friday, although given the hard line that both sides have taken, hope for agreement seems slim. This particular article (and most I have read) focus on the DSO management’s “Proposal A” (which would reduce salaries by 28%, withdraw from the American Federation of Musicians’ pension plan and alter work rules by making certain non-performing duties part of the job) and the musician’s counterproposal (a 22% pay reduction, continuing with the AFM plan and a joint musicians’ committee/executive board job performance review of orchestra management.)

Neither paycut is a pretty scenario, but at least both parties seem to agree on the point that player salaries need to be dramatically altered. There’s been chatter about the proposed changing of work rules to include non-performing elements (such as teaching); musicians are concerned that shifting the focus away from pure performance, even for a relatively brief period (it’s capped at 3 weeks per musician per season) dilutes the musical product of the ensemble.

While there’s an element of truth, doesn’t it seem to be more about perspective than anything? After all, those most strongly voicing their opposition are established players. These days, conservatory graduates are as likely to receive some training in teaching, public speaking and scripting and producing educational concerts as they are to take lessons and orchestral repertoire class. The expectations of a young musician entering the job market is markedly different from those of past generations; what might seem extraneous to older career musicians is a presumed given for many just entering the profession.

But what really interests me about the ongoing conflict is the relative silence about “Proposal B”. Here it is, as outlined by the Detroit Free Press:

Management Proposal B (comes into play if players don’t accept some form of proposal A by Saturday)
• Replace 52-week structure with 36 guaranteed weeks (including three paid vacation weeks). Optional work offered beyond 33 weeks paid at incremental rate based on revenue generated by the work.
• Salary: $70,200 (year one); $72,000 (year two); $73,800 (year three). New hires paid $63,000, rising to $66,600 in year three.
• Pension similar to proposal A.
• Eliminate seniority pay and tenure. Implement comprehensive performance review.

Now, wait a second. This proposal would essentially reduce the actual season by a huge percentage, and if additional pay is based on “revenue generated by the work”, it would never assure any set amount. And then look at the last point: eliminating tenure and seniority pay. This is huge. Essentially, Proposal B completely takes away what a full-time orchestra employment represents; assured pay and job security. Why aren’t more people talking about this?

Perhaps the very existence (or threat) of Plan B is meant to bully the musicians’ committee into agreeing to some form of Plan A. But what if bargaining comes apart and all that’s left on the table is Plan B? It would utterly change the landscape of our profession – it represents a completely altered model of what constitutes an orchestra – and it would set precedence for other ensembles in similar situations to do the same.

But then, here’s the painful question: if Plan B is sustainable from a practical financial point of view, is that such a bad thing?

Posted in all music is local, stirring the pot, the business of music | 2 Comments »

Everything Old Is New Again

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I’ve written ad nauseum on this blog about the various woes and financial afflictions that plague American orchestras during economic hard times, and honestly, even I’m getting a little sick of the subject. But I wanted to seize the opportunity to offer some clear evidence that, as dark as things often seem for non-profits in times like these, a glance at the history of our industry appears to show that we all tend to perceive these things in the moment as being more dire than they actually are.

The ray of hope, in this case, comes in the form of a decidedly pessimistic article about just where orchestras stand at a moment of economic peril. It’s from TIME magazine – go check it out, then come back here. I’ll wait…

…

Pretty dismal, eh? Sounds like the Detroit Symphony’s dangling over the precipice of insolvency, a bunch of smaller bands are either talking merger or bankruptcy, and even the Big Five are commissioning studies that make them seem pretty darn vulnerable. There’s barely a bright spot to be found.

Unless, of course, you were to check the date at the top of the article.

Yup, 1969. America was mired in an unpopular war in Asia, things at home had turned decidedly nasty on the political front, the economy was stuck in a major slump, and government had been forced to cut way back on funding for arts and culture in the name of austerity. Sound familiar?

On top of that near-perfect mimic of the conventional 2010 assessment of orchestras, check out this paragraph:

“Even though symphony-going is not dominated by the rich to the extent that it was 40 years ago, it is still a formal experience that most turned-on youth regard as static, outmoded and irrelevant. As the conservative, 19th century-oriented programming of most orchestras proves, the institutions are trapped into patterns of pleasing the wealthy patrons who support them—and by and large, the patrons like Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. This does not mean that the orchestras would automatically attract larger audiences with avant-garde programs. The real problem is attracting the young today so that there will be an audience tomorrow.”

Gee, how many times have you read something that sounded exactly like that in the last few years? It would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating. I guarantee that a little research would turn up multiple articles from the 1920s and ’30s expressing this exact same (citation-free) sentiment, begging the question: for exactly how many decades do we plan to allow the prophets of doom to continually shout from the mountaintop that orchestras are withering on the vine before pointing out that their dire predictions have been consistently, unceasingly, 100% wrong?

Bottom line: there’s not a single orchestra said to be at risk in the TIME article that doesn’t continue to exist today. Buffalo and Rochester never merged, and both are still model regional orchestras. Neither did Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and many would place both of them in the nebulous “major orchestra” category. That’s not to say that recessions don’t hurt orchestras (Detroit always struggles badly in tough times, for obvious reasons,) and certainly, some smaller ensembles that were already being mismanaged in a good economy tend to fold their tents when the seas get rough. What I’m saying is that the chattering classes are just monumentally, staggeringly bad at accurately assessing how a localized crisis applies (or doesn’t) to the wider industry. (Also, most of them never seem to learn anything much from crisis periods of the past.)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t talk about the problems we have as an industry, or what changes could be made to our overall business model to make us less vulnerable. There are some quite reasonable things being written these days by orchestra managers, veteran union types, and others on the subject. I just think that we’d do well to take a step back whenever the drumbeat of bad news approaches soul-crushing levels, and remember just how many times this has all happened before.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Why I Love Minnesota

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

The radio silence around here this week is due to it being one of the busiest times of the year for both Sarah and me. By tomorrow evening, I will have played 15 services (a service is either a rehearsal or a concert, at least two hours each) in 6 days, prepared and performed nine different full-length pieces (plus a pops concert with the awesome Josh Ritter) totaling around 7 hours of music, and generally logged more hours at work than at home. It’s actually been a lot of fun – busy weeks are chaotic, but exhilarating, and hey, weeks like this are why they pay me, right?

So anyway, Friday had been another very long day at the office, and I’m biking home from that night’s concert, exhausted, and think to myself: I’ve earned a treat. Saturday morning rehearsal or no, I’m stopping in at my favorite neighborhood dive bar for a couple of beers before heading home. Which I proceed to do.

I’m sitting at the bar with my Surly Furious, and because there’s nothing else to do, I start chatting with the burly guy on the barstool next to me about, you know, whatever. The Twins’ new ballpark, why local breweries are putting so many hops in their beers these days, etc. Dive bar small talk. Somehow we get onto the subject of grandparents, and he mentions that his grandpa, currently 91 and starting to slip away a bit, lives out on Lake Minnetonka. I say get right out of town, my grandparents lived on Minnetonka for decades until my grandpa started to slip away. So we’ve got that.

Then he tells me that his grandpa and a lot of other guys basically built the town of Excelsior way back when, and I tell him I’ve always liked that town, sort of frozen in time as it is, with it’s own little bustling downtown and all. I mention that I’m a musician, and I play a concert out in Excelsior every fourth of July. He realizes this must mean I’m in the orchestra, and I say yes. He says that he and his mom have been going to the Minnesota Orchestra together on a regular basis ever since he was a kid, and he just loves it, even though his wife never wanted to go – she’s more into clubbing and dance halls – until this one concert a couple of years ago that she loved.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised at this point when I run into people all over Minnesota who not only don’t grimace when I mention that I play classical music, but actually talk about the last time they came to the orchestra. But I can’t help it – I didn’t grow up in a place where seemingly half the population goes to plays and museums and orchestra concerts. Heck, half the population of my hometown pretty much never left their own houses at night!

So back to my friend at the bar. I go into my usual musician/ambassador mode, chat about a few concerts he’s been to, and tell him to come up and say hi the next time he’s at the hall. He says he’ll try to recognize my face in the crowd, and just to get it out there, I tell him to scan the brochures in the lobby, because I have this concert series I do with one of our conductors…

Instant recognition. Instant. Not only does he know exactly who I am as soon as the words are out of my mouth, but as it turns out, he’s been to at least four of our Inside the Classics shows. He even has the musical vocabulary to describe Sarah’s conducting style, and it turns out that show his wife finally liked was our Mendelssohn show from the 2008-09 season. He went on and on about all the stuff he loved from various shows, from the Baldwin sisters singing a Fanny Mendelssohn song to our performance of the swashbuckling Mendelssohn Octet to Mike Gast playing part of a Mozart horn concerto on a beer funnel.

Anyway, his folks live about a block away from me, which is why he was in the neighborhood, but dude. Talk about your only-in-Minnesota coincidences. Nice end to a chaotic work week…

Posted in all music is local, audience feedback | Comments Off

Music vs. Decorum

Monday, July 5th, 2010

One of the great things about living and working in Minneapolis/St. Paul is the staggering popularity of the live music scene. I tell people that a lot, and I’ve found that lifelong Minnesotans are often surprised to hear me mention it. They’re aware, of course, of the rich history of the local scene that spawned Prince, Dylan, The Jayhawks, and countless other legendary performers, but they’re often unaware of just how rare this is in 21st century America. I’ve lived in and around five good-sized metro areas in my life, and MSP is the only one of them to have a seemingly ingrained tradition of thousands of ordinary folks going out to see live music, regardless of genre, on a very regular basis.

That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, either. Someone had to lay an awful lot of groundwork for a populace the size of ours to be willing and happy to support as many live venues as we do. And while we’re not alone among American cities in maintaining such a commitment, the club is getting smaller, as the Internet and other homebound hobbies take their ever-increasing toll on industries that depend on getting people out of the house.

And that brings us to New Orleans. When you think of authentic American Music Towns, New Orleans would have to come in pretty near the top of everyone’s list. Not just for its incredible proliferation of musicians in what is actually a very small city; and not just for the immediately identifiable jazz sound that has served as the backdrop for every Louisiana-based film or TV show for decades. What makes New Orleans a music destination is the pure joy that so many of the city’s performers seem to take in their craft, and their willingness to break into song, or bebop riff, or brassy fanfare at the slightest provocation, indoors or out, at any hour of day or night.

And that exuberance, sadly, seems to be running afoul of the post-Katrina reality, in which overworked and understaffed officials are trying desperately to keep New Orleans functioning, sometimes at the expense of the city’s legendary freewheeling style…

“Effective immediately, the New Orleans Police Department will be enforcing the below-listed ordinance”—Section 66-205, which says, “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.”

Yup, that means just what it looks like – musicians who have been plying their trade on the famously lively streets of the Big Easy for years, sometimes decades, are now being arrested for it. Jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld, who’s working on a book about the city’s attempts to recover culturally from the hurricane, has been following the story:

None of this is new stuff: There’s a rich history of musicians being arrested while making music in New Orleans. When I first began interviewing musicians, I was shocked to learn that just as surely as the horn players I spoke with had soaked up musical tradition from authoritative sources like Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a beloved musician and bandleader who died in 2004, so too had they been introduced to this other legacy—arrest while playing—by badge-wearing authorities. Even Tuba Fats got arrested. More often than not, the way musicians tell it, the police tasked with enforcement knew him. They’d take him in to the station, show him a bit of hospitality, send him off 30 minutes later. It was as much a game as a show of force. But it served a purpose.

Now, being the champions of decorum that Minnesotans are, I’m sure many of you are thinking that there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with enforcing a noise ordinance after a certain hour of the evening. Minneapolis has such an ordinance, and I’m pretty sure St. Paul does as well. And I’m not really suggesting that anyone living in New Orleans should have to lose much-needed sleep just because I like the image of New Orleans as a town where the music never stops.

But it does seem a shame that some of a city’s defining character might fall victim to an overabundance of law enforcement twitchiness. I mean, if I chose to live in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District, I’d have a hard time claiming that the noise and congestion associated with Twins games was an unfair burden to my quality of life. Likewise, if I set up with my viola and an amplifier on a deserted street corner in Eden Prairie at 11pm, I wouldn’t really have a leg to stand on when the cops came along wondering just exactly what I thought I was doing. (Amplified viola, of course, is considered at all times a disturbance of the peace in at least 39 states.)

Larry Blumenfeld sums up the tricky dance between New Orleans as a place people live and New Orleans as a place people love with an important warning…

Beyond practicality and promotion, there’s a deeper read to all this. Michael White, a clarinetist who began his career in brass bands and is now a Xavier University professor, told me: “There’s a feeling among many that some of our older cultural institutions are in the way of progress and don’t fit in the new vision of New Orleans. That they should only be used in a limited way to boost the image of New Orleans, as opposed to being real, viable aspects of our lives.”

Decorum aside, that would be an awful shame.

Posted in all music is local, contemporary culture, state of the art | 1 Comment »

Still Missing That Special Day…

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

From pop music overlord Chris Riemenschneider at the Star Tribune:

I still wish city leaders and the Minnesota Orchestra would figure out a way to bring back the sorely missed Day of Music to that same neighborhood. That used to be the best weekend for local music.

Yes. Yes, it did. Chris smacked us around a bit for canceling it last year in the wake of budget cuts, Macy’s wholesale pullout from sponsoring the Day, and, y’know, the Most Crippling Recession Of Our Lifetimes. At the time, I wrote this in response to his broadside:

I understand fully why the Day of Music got canceled this year, and I actually believe it was the right call… [S]ome tough calls have to be made, and those calls are going to make some people upset. But I hope that, when the dust finally clears and the economy stops shifting under our collective feet every few minutes, people like Chris Riemenschneider are still there to remind us that we owe one to Minnesota’s music scene, and that it’s time to pay up.

He’s still there. And though there’s no realistic way we could possibly have resurrected the Day of Music this summer, with everything about the world economy still very much teetering on the brink, I just wanted to be clear that Chris isn’t the only one who believes whole-heartedly that every one of us who plays live music in Minnesota will be better off when we find a way to bring it back.

Posted in all music is local, popular music | 1 Comment »

Another Round Of Navel Gazing

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Veteran arts observer Terry Teachout had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, in which he looked at the fiscally troubled Pasadena Symphony and used their situation as a springboard to ask a very loaded question:

What, if anything, justifies the existence of a regional symphony orchestra in the 21st century? Many people still believe that an orchestra is a self-evidently essential part of what makes a city civilized. But is this true?

Quick timeout to define a term here: within the orchestra business, a “regional orchestra” is considered to be one that has a relatively small annual budget, pays its players an hourly wage rather than a salary, performs a limited concert schedule, but is nonetheless made up of professional musicians, many of whom play in several of these regional orchestras in order to scrape together enough money to live on.

(The term “regional” is sometimes used in an entirely different way by the press. The New York Times has a bizarre habit of referring to any orchestra that isn’t in either the Northeast or California, including ours, as “regional,” even when the orchestra in question is pretty much universally agreed to be a major international ensemble. I suspect this probably happens because New York writers are used to referring to all theater companies outside New York, no matter how prestigious, as “regional companies,” and they just assume that it works the same way for orchestras. It doesn’t.)

Anyway, Terry’s using the term correctly, and he’s asking a very important question. He also makes several other good points that I’m not going to get into here, but I highly recommend reading the whole article. It’s just one of a slew of pieces that have been popping up in recent weeks questioning how sustainable orchestras are, just how much we need to change to adapt to modern realities, and whether some orchestras might not be better off just blowing the whole thing up and starting over as a Different Kind Of Organization.

It’s not a coincidence that so many analysts are jumping on this particular meme just at this moment, either. It just so happens that the League of American Orchestras, which is a group comprising orchestra management types from around North America, is currently in the middle of a huge online/offline brainstorming session they’re calling Orchestra R/Evolution. Catchy title, and one that might just make a number of musicians nervous.

Anyway, the LAO is basically encouraging anyone and everyone interested in the orchestra business to weigh in with their ideas for the future, and to do so in as many different ways as the social media universe allows. I suppose the idea is that crowdsourcing has been effective in some other industries, and besides that, anything that gets more people on the interwebs talking about orchestras has to be a net positive, even if most of the ideas are either unworkable, unrealistic, or contradictory. I can get behind that, in a general sense.

But what tends to take me from a place of genuine interest in a project like this to a place where I find myself rolling my eyes at 90% of what gets said/written/posted/tweeted in the course of the project is the realization that most of the big ideas are coming from people with only the vaguest grasp of how orchestras actually function from a business point of view. And that includes a scary number of people who call themselves experts on the subject.

I started thinking about this last night after reading a fascinating blog post by a venture capitalist in California named Bill Gurley. He was writing about the cable TV business, not music, but his broader point struck me as awfully relevant to a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading lately…

More often than not, we here in Silicon Valley are prone to idealism. We see a scenario the way we want to see it, and make predictions that fit our view of how we think the world should work, or perhaps even how we would like the world to be… Outsider “luddites” who do not immediately grok the remarkable disruptive power of our latest and greatest technologies are doomed to the business trash heap – driven there by obsolescence and an obstinate refusal to accept their fate. Often times, our version of them “accepting their fate” would require them to abandon everything they know, walk away from the majority of their revenue, and terminate 80% of their employees. But hey, that’s their problem, not ours. We love disruption. It serves our purpose.

Now that, in my opinion, is just an excellent description of the disconnect between those who think about orchestras for a living and those who actually make our living by them. Which is not to say that the outsiders are always wrong and we’re always right – the whole point of bringing in a consultant is to get a fresh take on your company’s situation from someone with no internal baggage. It’s just that so many of those wringing their hands about the future either seem to be suggesting that we magically conjure a massive new audience for orchestral music that absolutely adores both Brahms and Stockhausen; or that we slash overhead to a point where the constant fundraising that keeps orchestras afloat can cease to be so difficult. Both of these are completely bubbleheaded notions that cannot be achieved in the real world, and they are therefore unhelpful, no matter how prettily they’re packaged.

So here’s my contribution to the din: All Music Is Local. I’m utterly certain of this, and I’m further convinced that the reason so much broad-based thinking on “the orchestral model” hasn’t been terribly helpful to individual orchestras is that each of us is a completely different beast, with different challenges, different strengths, and entirely different constituencies. The National Symphony is not a model for how to run the Minnesota Orchestra, and we’re not a model for Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.

In fact, I’d venture to say that a far better way to evaluate orchestras is against other large non-profit organizations in our own cities. In our case, MPR and the Guthrie can tell us far more about what’s realistically achievable in Minneapolis/St. Paul than a horror story from some orchestra in crisis 1500 miles away. Is there a thriving theater scene in your city? A lot of philanthropic money pouring into higher education? Is yours a company town, where one or two high-profile bankruptcies could throw the entire local economy (and your funding base) into chaos? These are the relevant comparison points that matter to an orchestra, not whether someone in another city programmed 50% more pops last year.

I’m not saying that I don’t think there’s value in orchestras getting together to share information and swap strategies for the future. I am saying that, in my experience, there’s no shortage of people within the industry who think they have all the answers (but have strangely not yet managed to implement them,) and a startling shortage of people looking outside our cloistered subculture for ideas.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 2 Comments »

Stop Helping. Please.

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

This one is going to turn into a rant. I can already tell. Which isn’t ideal, because I think I actually have some coherent ideas behind what I’m about to write, but I’m having a lot of trouble organizing them into anything more focused than general explosions of frustration and irritability.

But here goes. I read a lot of articles, both in mainstream publications and in your more insider-y blogs and magazines aimed at those of us in the music business, all purporting to detail either what’s wrong with the orchestral business model, or what should be done to fix it, or why it can’t be fixed at all. Every once in while, I find an article claiming that there’s actually nothing systemically broken in what we do, which you’d think would be reassuring, but is usually just frustrating in a new way, since I’ve never read anything on the subject that couldn’t be directly and succinctly contradicted by something else I’ve read elsewhere.

Basically, to hear the self-styled experts tell it, orchestras are utterly doomed to eventual extinction (or not) because we don’t play enough new music; because we play too much new music; because we wear tuxes and have formal concert rituals; because we dumb down the concert experience and try too hard to be casual; because we don’t talk to the audience; because we insist on talking to the audience; because we fail to put our music in context; because we force context no one asked for on our audiences; because no one under 60 cares about what we do; because we’re far too focused on attracting younger audiences; because we’re too market driven; because we stubbornly refuse to give our customers what they want; because the musicians are paid too much; because we’re too incompetent to properly capitalize ourselves and pay our employees a reasonable wage; because ticket prices are too high; because ticket prices aren’t high enough to pay our overhead costs; because we haven’t figured out how to use the internet properly; because we’re more focused on our websites than we are on getting people into the concert hall; because our CEOs and music directors are grossly overpaid; and because we’re too provincial and small-minded here in City X to realize that the salaries of our CEOs and music directors are set by what the market will bear in what is, truly, a global industry.

You can see how this sort of “advice” would start to drive you up the wall after a while. And what’s really infuriating is that these screeds tend to come either in the form of snarky, condescending reports from consultants or analysts who usually seem to think that they’re stating wildly original ideas (they aren’t) that should shake the orchestra business to its core (they don’t,) or from some supposedly hyper-creative and dynamic think tank made up of individuals from wildly different corners of the business, all of whom usually came into the process with exactly the same set-in-stone opinions that they’ll leave with after writing their final report.

And then, there’s the most pointless, misleading, and utterly unhelpful article prototype of all: the kind in which some journalist discovers that there’s something called “crossover classical” in the world, goes and interviews someone who’s made a lot of money playing it, and then asks whether this sort of utterly groundbreaking thing could “save” traditional classical music. Which absolutely does (or does not) need saving. (See above.)

It’s not just that so many of these supposedly helpful analyses are self-evidently dead wrong (some of them have to be, since they all contradict each other!) It’s that, for those of us working in relatively healthy organizations (which, contrary to what many would have you believe, most major symphony orchestras in America are,) who spend several nights a week staring out at the literally thousands of people who have paid quite a bit of money to sit and watch us perform week after week after week, all the dread premonitions and proposals to overhaul the entire industry from the ground up start to ring awfully hollow. Yes, there are things that need to be fixed. Yes, there are some outmoded traditions that could stand to be kicked to the curb. But for the love of God, could all the Chicken Littles just shut the heck up for even a week and stop trying to help us into our professional graves?!

(See there? Ranting. Told you it was gonna happen. Apologies – I’ll finish up with something positive.)

I was actually quite happy to read a piece that popped up on the Wall Street Journal’s site this weekend. (Aside from its truly bizarre editorial pages, I happen to love the WSJ, read it regularly, and think its cultural coverage, while sometimes maddeningly inward-looking, is quite impressive given that it’s primarily a paper about finance.) The story was written by a guy who seems mainly to write about rock and hip-hop, and in writing an article about the sort of classical crossover music that “serious” music writers are forever wringing their hands over, he seems to have immediately latched onto an obvious truth that eludes so many others.

Basically, he took what could have been a fluffy little interview with Dutch showboat Andre Rieu about his attempt to bring his waltz-based dog and pony shows to the US, and used it to point out that, far from driving new audiences either towards or away from traditional concert music, Rieu represents an entirely different genre with its own audience base. Which is obviously true. Everything we know of people who adore Rieu’s schmaltzy, over-the-top (and, truth be told, not terribly skillful) concerts tells us that they’re the same folks who loved Yanni at the Acropolis, John Tesh at Red Rocks, and it’s probably not a reach to suggest that most of them have a few Barry Manilow records at home, too.

Basically, Rieu’s crowd is the lite-rock crowd. He just happens to play the violin and have an orchestra, but there’s nothing remotely classical about him. In fact, I’d argue that the kind of audience we attract to Orchestra Hall has far more in common with the sort of people who pack indie-rock shows at The Varsity than with what I’ll call the PBS Pledge Drive fan base. Our crowd (and the Varsity’s) tends to be passionate about music, pretty seriously engaged with their local scene, probably goes out to see live music quite a bit, and is maybe just a bit snobbish towards genres of music that they consider less than serious.

That doesn’t even begin to square with the PBS crowd, who likely consume most of their music at home, from TV, radio, or recordings, and consider a concert ticket to be an occasional splurge for special occasions such as Andre Rieu making an appearance in their town. In other words, the consumer behavior these fans exhibit is the exact opposite of the behavior that would make them a good candidate to come to one of our orchestra concerts, a fact which the WSJ’s pop writer spotted immediately, even as so many others steeped in classical culture fail to see it.

And maybe that’s what’s really ailing the orchestra business. We’re so inundated with consultants, commentators, and other self-styled experts, each with his/her own highly specific agenda, that we’ve started to miss the larger (and fairly obvious) truths of how people decide what music is worth their time and money. Maybe it’s time for us as an industry to start tuning out all the internal babbling (and yes, I realize I’ve just added 1300 words of babble to the pile) and just look around our immediate surroundings to see how others are creating the passion and loyalty that every musician needs in our fan base.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, stirring the pot, the business of music, the media | 12 Comments »

The Classical Blackout

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

So, I see that City Pages, Mpls/St. Paul’s award-winning alt-weekly newspaper, is out with its annual Best of the Twin Cities issue, and perusing the parade of winners (Garrison Keillor as best columnist? really?), I find myself left with the same question I have every year. In fact, it’s the same question I have every week when I pick up City Pages.

Where’s the classical music?

Seriously, people. This is a newspaper that calls itself “the arts and entertainment weekly.” I understand that it’s basically a hipster rag written by aging hipsters for other aging hipsters, and I get that Orchestra Hall isn’t exactly crawling with that particular demographic (thank God.) But that doesn’t stop CP from covering literally every other art form in town! They cover dance, they cover movies, they cover live theater, they cover art, and they cover every genre of music imaginable – except classical.

I really can’t overstate what a bizarre editorial decision this is. The Twin Cities has, literally, one of the largest and most diverse classical music scenes in America. We’re the only metro area in the country that sustains not one but two major orchestras, the Schubert Club is one of the most respected presenting organizations in the US, Minnesota Opera seems to be on a mission to make itself a nationally known company, the new music seasons that the Walker and the Southern put together are as good and diverse as any series I’ve ever seen, and the Cities are packed to the brim with good freelance musicians and ensembles doing any number of interesting things on a weekly basis…

…and yet, to City Pages, it’s as if this scene doesn’t exist. Thousands upon thousands of tickets sold every week to performances at the Ordway, Orchestra Hall, and any number of smaller venues, but to the cool kids over in the warehouse district, we’re apparently irrelevant. Not marginalized, not confined to an occasional mention or blurb – totally, utterly, 100% invisible and unreported on. And it has been this way for as long as I’ve lived in Minneapolis and, I’m told, much longer than that.

It’s not like this is a typical thing for alt-weeklies, either. The Boston Phoenix puts together some of the best classical coverage that city has to offer. New York’s Village Voice (also CP’s parent company) covers classical, and the New York Observer does some of the best classical stories of anyone in the Big Apple. The Cleveland Scene not only recognizes the existence of classical music in a city that doesn’t have nearly as much of it as we do, it wrote a series of scathing articles about accusations of nepotism at the Cleveland Orchestra a few years back that absolutely rocked the industry. (As far as I can tell, those articles aren’t online anymore, thus the lack of a link.)

Someone at City Pages (I’m guessing someone who’s no longer there, since nearly the entire staff has turned over in the last few years) obviously decided at some point that classical was too old, or too boring, or too uncool, to be worth the paper’s time. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that whoever this was had probably never actually bothered to attend a classical concert in Minnesota before making this decision, because dude, everyone knows classical music is for boring old people! (It’s worth noting that this hatred of classical doesn’t seem to extend to CP’s advertising department, which is only too happy to take our money every single week and run ads aimed squarely at the very demographic groups the editorial side obviously thinks could care less about what we do.)

Of course, there’s no shortage of classical coverage in this town. Both of our major dailies cover classical, as do MinnPost, Minnesota Public Radio, and plenty of other local outlets. But that’s not the point. By deliberately and permanently rubbing classical music out of existence in its pages, City Pages is perpetuating a weekly insult to one of the greatest – and most popular – arts and culture scenes in America. And it’s time someone demanded an explanation.

UPDATE, 7:15pm: MN Orch PR chief Gwen Pappas reminds me that the late, lamented Twin Cities Reader used to publish regular (and rather feisty) classical music commentary by David McKee. The Reader was shut down in 1997 when it wound up being owned by the same company that owned City Pages.

Also, MinnPost’s media guy David Brauer adds a few salient points of his own, and also does the journalistic legwork I don’t know how to do, getting us an actual response from City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman!

“We can never cover all of the things various constituencies want, but we try our best,” [Hoffman] replied, vowing, “you’ll be seeing more fine arts coverage this year in the Dressing Room blog, and we’ll try to include classical as a category in next year’s ‘Best Of.’”

Uh-huh. I’ll be looking forward to that one-paragraph “Best of” a full calendar year from now. Way to step up there, Kevin.

Further Update, 4/22: Hey, willya look at that? Just one day after I post this little rant and David Brauer calls CP for a comment, a preview of this weekend’s classical music offerings pops up on CP’s aforementioned Dressing Room blog! Now, granted, the item is filed under “theater,” the roundup is written by the paper’s theater critic (who, for all I know, may also be a huge classical music buff,) and it only covers the big dogs (MN Orch, SPCO, and MN Opera,) but it’s not nothing…

Posted in all music is local, stirring the pot, the media | 7 Comments »

Best Week of the Season?

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

It’s no secret, of course, that we in Minnesota are ridiculously spoiled when it comes to the arts. Week in and week out, there’s more to see and do in the Cities than any other comparably sized metro area in the country (I read a stat a few years back that said that we have the highest concentration of arts and culture events per capita of anywhere in the US save New York,) and the sheer breadth of the music and theater scenes, in particular, can even be overwhelming at times.

So with that in mind, I wanted to point out that this week, the week in which basically everyone in town is focused on the Twins and Target Field, also happens to be one of the most jam-packed music weeks of the season. In fact, if you’ll forgive me the audacity, I’d like to schedule your next several evenings for you, seeing as the Twins are playing pretty much all day games this week. (Also, my own concert schedule means I won’t be able to make it to most of these shows, so it’ll make me feel better to try to get the rest of y’all to go…)

That sound okay? Very good, then. Here’s what you should absolutely be hearing live in Minneapolis/St. Paul this week:

Wednesday, April 14 - Nico Muhly & Sam Amidon, Southern Theater, Mpls. I believe I’ve brought up Nico’s music before – he’s been the It Boy (okay, one of the It Boys) of the New York new music scene for a few years now, and despite his careful cultivation of a distinctly hipster-ish, outsider image, the mainstream of classical music has recently been waking up to what his synth-tinged, genre-busting style could do for us. His show at the Southern last season with violist Nadia Sirota might have been my favorite concert of the year, and this collaboration with indie songwriter Sam Amidon should be another memorable show.

Thursday, April 15 - Thomas Zehetmair, violin, with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Trinity Lutheran Church, Stillwater. First of all, can we talk about this program? Beethoven’s towering violin concerto, played by one of my favorite violinists in the entire world, and that’s the appetizer? Zehetmair’s theme for this ambitious concert is pairing late-Classical music with serious modernism from the likes of Anton Webern and Ernst Krenek. There’s definitely a right and a wrong way to mix the 12-tone crowd with the classics, but this looks very, very promising. The SPCO has been putting together the most creative and interesting programming of any group in the Cities (yeah, I said it) for several seasons now, and this looks like it could well be a highlight of 2010.

Friday, April 16 - Symphonie Fantastique, Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestra Hall, Mpls. Yeah, I know, I’m shameless. But the fact is that Berlioz’s hourlong masterpiece is one of those epic symphonies that somehow gets left off most lists of 19th-century greats, and it’s a crying shame. I mean, how many symphonies do you know of that take as their subject a lovesick artist in the throes of an intentional drug overdose? …well, exactly. It could have been one of the all-time overwrought flops, especially given Berlioz’s melodramatic tendencies. Instead, it’s absolutely riveting from start to finish, and it’s one of my favorite pieces to play. Oh, and as a bonus, both our guest conductor and piano soloist for the week are rising young stars making their local debuts. Be there.

Saturday, April 17 - Chick Corea & Gary Burton, Dakota Jazz Club, Mpls. Chick Corea is one of those extraordinary musicians who everyone should hear live at least once. Whatever you might think of jazz’s “electric fusion” era, Corea’s music was always a strong argument in favor of jazz as a living art form, looking forward rather than back, and he backed it up with some of the best chops I’ve ever heard from any musician of any genre. And Gary Burton? He only more or less invented jazz marimba. This could be an unforgettable evening of music.

Sunday, April 18 – Salome, Minnesota Opera, Ordway Center, St. Paul. I remember hearing Garrison Keillor tell a story years ago about the opera singer Eileen Farrell. Supposedly, Farrell was once singing the lead in Tristan & Isolde, when she paused in between arias, leaned down towards the conductor in the pit, and said, in full voice, “You know, this is really a very dirty story!” I’ve no idea whether that’s true, but I do know that Tristan and his girlfriend have nothing on Salome when it comes to dirty. This might well be the most profoundly disturbing opera ever written (though The Crucible might give it a run for its money,) as well as one of the most musically spellbinding, and the Minnesota Opera’s production has been getting some rave reviews.

So there you go! Your week’s all planned out, and there’s no need to thank me. Unless, of course, anyone feels like making an illicit bootleg of Zehetmair’s Beethoven and shooting me a copy…

Posted in all music is local, orchestras not named minnesota, shameless self-promotion | 4 Comments »

Copland’s Cummington

Friday, April 9th, 2010

This isn’t a summer camp story. I just want to make that clear right up front, because I’ve written a few times before about the camp I’ve been going to since I was ten years old, and yes, this story is also going to partially take place there, and yes, I know that no one likes stories about someone else’s stupid summer camp that you never went to. But, as I said, this is not a summer camp story. Really. Promise.

…everybody still reading? Okay, good. As it happens, this is a story about Aaron Copland, arguably the preeminent American composer of the 20th century, and certainly of the century’s first half. And it happens to take place in the tiny town of Cummington, Massachusetts, which happens to be home to Greenwood Music Camp. These happenings will all intersect later.

The story begins with Copland, already a successful composer of concert music in the late 1930s, looking to break into the lucrative business of film scoring. Hollywood was well into its golden age at this point, and composers who could capture the drama of a cinematic epic without overwhelming the narrative were in high demand in Los Angeles. But Copland had yet to compose either his iconic Fanfare for the Common Man, or the ballet score we know as Appalachian Spring – the two works which, more than any others, would establish his signature sound as America’s sound. And Hollywood, for its part, was still in the thrall of Euro-style neo-romanticism. Film scores in this age were lush, richly orchestrated things, more redolent of composers like Brahms, Wagner, and Strauss than the spare, wide-open scores Copland was becoming known for.

Eventually, a score Copland wrote to accompany a documentary to be screened at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York caught the attention of the film industry, and he began to be tapped to score films with distinctly rural themes. (The music he wrote for Thornton Wilder’s omnipresent Our Town still has a home in 21st century concert halls.) But still, the pickings were slim, and as World War II drew to a close, Copland found himself with an offer to score what amounted to a propaganda film for the US government.

The film, which is actually awfully sweet and uncontroversial as propaganda films go, was called The Cummington Story.

It was set in a very real hamlet in an area of Western Massachusetts known (when it’s known at all, which is seldom) as the Berkshire Hilltowns. I don’t know how many people lived in Cummington in 1945, but I know that there were still only 978 souls living there at the 2000 census. (This is a town I’ve known like the back of my hand since I was a 5th grader, and that population figure seems shockingly high to me.) It’s a dot on the map, with a one-block Main Street, a hardware store, a ridiculously outsized annual fair, two churches (though one burned down a few months back – the one with the lovable pastor who works at the Old Creamery Grocery out on Rt. 9,) and, like I said, this music camp.

What made Cummington special, back when the government decided to make this film, was that it had been selected as one of the places that refugees from the war in Europe would be sent to begin their new lives. And in the wake of the horrific violence that had engulfed the world over the previous decade, it’s understandable that the feds wanted to showcase American generosity of spirit, etc. And what could be more American than relocating refugees not to some bustling, impersonal metropolis where they would blend into the background, but to a small, agrarian town in the middle of nowhere, where they would literally reenact the struggles of the pioneers as they attempted to rebuild some semblance of a normal life?

In the end, the film depicts a small triumph of the American “melting pot” ideal, and I have no idea whether it even remotely resembles what actually occurred in Cummington in the post-war era. I do know that the film garnered relatively little attention, and that Copland’s score never made it into the list of his works that still get regular hearings today. But a few years back, the director of Greenwood Music Camp, which sits on a hill overlooking “downtown” Cummington, happened across some mention of it, and began to look into the film and its musical history. She placed a call to the camp’s orchestra conductor, Ken Freed (who just happens to be a violist in the Minnesota Orchestra) to ask whether he thought a collection of 10-13-year-olds would be capable of playing the score.

It was a dicey proposition, to be honest. Copland’s music is full of leaping intervals and complex rhythms, not at all the sort of thing you hand to a young child and expect him to master in less than two weeks. But Ken agreed to try, and that next summer, the Greenwood kids spent an hour every morning scraping and squawking through The Cummington Story before trotting off to rehearse the Haydn and Mozart string quartets that were so much more in their comfort zone. About a week after camp started, they all gathered in the camp’s big performance barn to watch the movie. I would describe their reaction as something between bored and perplexed.

But word got around about what was being prepared up on the hill, and the camp’s director made a point of inviting everyone in town up for the concert. So on the day of the performance, a considerable number of Cummington residents squeezed into the barn next to the usual collection of parents, siblings, and friends that attends the camp’s weekly musical marathons. I’ll admit, I was nervous – like I said, Copland is not something you would ordinarily give to 10-year-olds, and Ken had been looking decidedly stressed all week.

I shouldn’t have worried:

Film credit: David Tartakoff

I doubt that The Cummington Story is what most of the kids who were at Greenwood that summer will remember about their time at camp. Most of them tend to remember their friends, or a particularly great piece of chamber music they played. Orchestra is something to be gotten through at that age – it’s only later that you come to appreciate the musical equivalent of a team sport.

But when they finished the Copland, and the audience erupted, I saw more than a few tears in the audience. I saw a look of immense pride (mingled with relief) on Ken’s face. And I watched, after the concert, as the townsfolk made a point of seeking out the director and thanking her for reviving this musical portrait of their home.

It’s a powerful thing, music. And it’s at its best in moments like that, when it reminds people of why we do what we do, why we live where we live, and why we value the things we value. I’ll never know whether Copland had these things in mind when he wrote The Cummington Story. But I know what it meant to me, and to the folks in Cummington, on that August night.

Posted in all music is local, composers, the young people | 2 Comments »