Arts Re: Who Cares About the Music?
Fnarf wrote:
As near as I can tell, the criticisms levied against Mr. Schwarz are identical to those made for the last 70+ years. Too conservative, limited repertoire, keep the little old ladies happy. All still true, of course, though I don’t think traditionally it’s been the dowagers so much as the conservative business elite — the names at the top of the benefactors list tell you all you need to know about who they want to keep happy.
There may well be a “artistically adventurous” crowd in Seattle now, but the question is, can or will they write $10,000 checks?
Fnarf, your assumption of the timelessness of the situation is off. Never before has the Seattle Symphony looked so painfully behind other orchestras traditionally assumed to be unimportant, i.e., San Francisco and Los Angeles.
And never before has American classical music been in such a state of self-awareness and self-questioning. Not that you’d know anything at all was going on if all you did was attend Seattle Symphony concerts.
Read Wall Street Journal critic and composer Greg Sandow’s blog on http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/, or check out Joseph Horowitz’s 2005 book The Rise and Fall of Classical Music in America, or hell, go to an orchestral concert in any other city that is a part of this conversation—try the South Dakota Symphony in Sioux Falls, which has gained a serious following for performing major works by Pulitzer Prize winners on nearly every concert; or Cleveland, where the players go into the audience to talk to people after they play something new; or any number of places where the music directors actually host thoughtful discussions via blogs; or even the crusty New York Philharmonic, which has started to question its own habits by introducing new technologies (whether they work or not).
The conversation about classical music has markedly changed in the last few years. Most orchestras are well aware that something needs to change in the art form, or that something already has, and it needs to change back—like the fact that music should be played and talked about, not enshrined and worshiped. If the music is dead, what’s the point of writing the $10,000 checks anyway? The thoughtless repetitions that many of these concerts represent are an insult to the art form, and very much not the only way to do business. As other orchestras have proven very well these past years, it’s certainly not a choice between “risk,” that cliche that has become nothing more than an excuse for pablem, and survival.
The last time there was internal debate like this in American classical music might have been in 1869, after Patrick Gilmore’s Peace Jubilee in Boston, which Horowitz writes about in his book:
This account of classical music in the United States began with John Sullivan Dwight, whose worshipful promulgation of dead European composers defined “classical music” in contradistinction to popular culture generally and—in the case of the Peace Jubilee of 1869, with its anvil-pounding firemen—Patrick Gilmore specifically. Gilmore’s eclecticism—mixing high and low, New Worlds and Old—blithely embodied what classical music was not. Today, closing the circle, it is Dwight who signifies the past and Gilmore who suggests the future.
both things could be happening, ya know.