Tough Times

Tallahssee, Florida (June 19, 2011) -- The City Council of Tallahssee (FL) voted yesterday to attempt to balance the city's budget by removing the third "a" from the city's name. A council spokesperson said that there were numerous attempts to save the letter, but to no avail. Church leaders were happy, saying they had "never liked [the letter] in combination with the two letters after it". The change was effective immediately, but critics say most of the savings were spent changing of the books in local libraries.

Florda Governor Rick Scott, speaking in Tallahssee, said he was following the capital city's lead, and would ask the Legislature to return to Tallahssee for a special session to consider removing the "i" from the state's name. Citing the fact that many people don't pronounce the "i" anyway, the Governor also said that the new name would help foster the populist image the multi-millionaire former health care executive spent 70 million dollars in the campaign to build: "I'm a two-syllable kind of guy, and Florda will be a two-syllable state as long as I am Governor."


(h/t to Alex Ross)

Step One

I don’t know for sure that I’ve ever made it clear here what I think about public (government) sector arts funding. I might have, but like I said, I’m not sure. So, I want to make as clear a statement on the issue as I can.

I’m agnostic about public funding of the arts.

I used to be someone who would offer a full-throated defense of Public Sector Funding of the Arts (PSFA) at the slightest provocation. A powerful case can be made for PSFA, and I’ve made it before and, when confronted with certain arguments against it, I’m willing to make it again.

Back in 2007, an Op-Ed piece in the Tallahassee (FL) Democrat (for which I wrote concert music criticism at the time) railed against PSFA in terms everyone with an interest in the subject has seen innumerable times: I don’t want my tax money spent on art I find offensive; I could do some of that stuff PSFA pays for; if its any good the market will support it; we can’t afford it (more on that one later).

My response, which the Democrat printed, went along the usual lines of return-on-investment, enrichment, etc.:

A . . . direct argument for public funding of the arts might go something like this: A culture expresses and communicates what it really is, for itself and its posterity, through its art. In a market-driven society such as ours, the best-seller lists, box office receipts, and top 40 offer one version of our artistic output. Public financing of artistic work can offer another perspective, one that is not market-driven and wholly subject to the desires of the buyer.

My thinking on the subject started to change[1] when I read Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. From my review:

This triptych of chapters [covering 1933-1945], one each on music in Stalin’s Soviet Union, FDR’s America, and Hitler’s Germany, shows what can happen when politics becomes entwined with art. Ross doesn’t specifically make an argument against government funding of the arts, but these are, at the very least, cautionary tales. These chapters abound with villains, but there are no heroes.

I explored this area further in an interview with Mr. Ross in the same issue of The High Hat:

SDH (me): Right after I finished reading the central triptych concerning music under Stalin, FDR, and Hitler, a friend played a passage from Ottorino Respighi’s Feste Romane (to illustrate a point about cymbal technique). I could barely stand to listen to it — after what I had just finished reading, it sounded like fascism. I’ve gotten past that since then, and I was wondering if you had any similar experiences while you were working on this project.

AR: I have a difficult time listening to one recording in my collection — a performance of Richard Strauss’s Friedenstag in Vienna that Hitler actually attended. It’s one of Strauss’s least inspired works; you can  sense him trying to find his place in Nazi culture. It’s also hard to deal with the music that Shostakovich wrote for the scene “Stalin’s Garden” in The Fall of Berlin. But in general I don’t believe that music is “stained” by the events that surrounded its creation. It can always be reshaped in listeners’ minds — bent toward good or ill or back toward good again.

SDH: Another thing that struck me after reading that middle section and for the rest of the book is what seems to be an incredible irony that continues to haunt us today. The Soviets, especially, demanded that their composers produce music that was close to the people, music that was accessible. This was also the case in other totalitarian countries, in the East and the West. The irony comes with the fact that music that is produced in response to the desires of the audience, or more ominously, in response to the market, similar in style and stance to that required by totalitarian governments. Do you agree with this? If so, what, if anything, do you think it means?

AR: This is more or less true, and it’s a haunting fact, but I don’t read too much into it. Totalitarian dictatorships are those that submit to the will of one ruler, and if the ruler’s taste is that of an ordinary music-lover, then naturally the music he demands from talented composers will appeal to ordinary music-lovers everywhere. However, I think it’s a mistake to believe, as many advocates of modernist music have suggested over the years, that there is something deeply amiss with the kind of mural-like populist composition pursued by Copland, Shostakovich and others during the 30s and 40s simply because totalitarian regimes appropriated that aesthetic. Again it’s that logic of the “taint” or “stain” that I reject.[2]

At the beginning of the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) recent telecast of the Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams’ Nixon in China[3], during the recitation of the funders, the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was read:

A great nation deserves great art.

This slogan crystallized my current thinking about PSFA. It, PSFA, is always beneficial to the nation/state/county/city doing the funding. Always. Period. In purely economic terms the return on investment is impressive—most analyses show that for every dollar spent on PSFA between 6 and 18 dollars of economic activity are generated.[4] PSFA (even on a minimal level, which is all we’ve ever done) allows TV slogan readers to say things like “A great nation”, etc., with a minimally straight face.

The problems with PSFA for the arts themselves are well-known, if not always exactly agreed upon:

• Projects funded are too high-profile or too big or too well-known—how many regional opera companies (for example) could mount productions with the money the NEA provides the Met?
• Projects funded are too low-profile or obscure—shouldn’t funding go to events more people will see?
• There is too much emphasis on re-creation (performance, etc.)/dissemination of existing works, not enough on creation of new works.
• There is too much emphasis on giving money to individual artists to create art, not enough to bringing art to audiences through performance or dissemination.
• Too much money goes to people with connections or to prominent institutions.
• Not enough money goes to people with connections—I voted for this so my husband could get funded.
• The imprimatur conferred by government funding stamps the work as the art of the establishment—a tool of the Man.
• Too much money goes to artists who question the foundations of our system.
• The art produced isn’t worthy because it wasn’t subject to the rigors of the marketplace.[5]
• Well, I could have done that.[6]

Again, all of these issues are problems for the art world, not for the funding entity. The funders still benefit from the funding, regardless of which of the above factors come into play. These factors can, however, be serious problems for art, calling into question, at least for me, the value to art of PSFA.[7] There are benefits to the arts in all of this, without a doubt, but are they worth it? I really don’t know.

On the other hand, there is one area where PSFA is absolutely essential: Education. On every level. Students, from pre-K through (at least) undergraduate should receive meaningful training in the arts.[8] I’m not an educator, by any means, so I don’t have clear ideas about how this should be done, but there are people who do, and we should give them the resources to figure it out, test, and implement their findings.[9]

Florida State University has one of the leading, strongest set of arts programs in the United States. The problems and possibilities listed above are all in play there. Every year, the University sponsors an arts festival that, for me, embodies the problems with PSFA—the roster consists largely of middlebrow acts designed to appeal to an affluent middlebrow audience, and to meet them in their comfort zone.[10]

On a day-to-day basis during the academic year, and to a lesser extent during the summer, FSU and dozens of other institutions like it provide a thorough, ongoing festival of art in all its variety. Hundreds of performances, countless lectures and presentations, and numerous exhibitions (and, on the FSU campus at least, an impressive collection of sculpture around the campus)[11] make these institutions ready loci of arts education. Let’s find a way to use them, to systematically extend the art making into the rest of the community, region, state, and nation. This will take funding, to figure out exactly what is to be done, how to do it, and to get it done.

I was tempted to end the previous paragraph with: “And do it we must.” But we know that in today’s environment, we aren't compelled. We can’t afford it, we’re told about everything except war and upward redistribution of wealth through the tax code. We’re in a “budget crisis”. Well, that’s just a lie. It isn’t true. The money is there. In fact, the money is there for anything we as a nation want to do. It just so happens that right now we want to fight unending wars and shovel money to those with money already. On the one side we have politicians who cut arts funding during a made up budget crisis, knowing the cuts won’t make a difference in the budget (because the amount is so small), but being too cowardly to make the cuts they want to make during more clearly flush times. And on the other we have a feckless opposition, who bend to the first because they want to be seen as “serious” by an out-of-touch corporate media.

John Adams, the President, not the guy who composed an opera about a President, wrote his wife, Abigail:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Looking at this as a blueprint for America’s future is sad, because it’s difficult not to conclude that we are still on step one, and that we are there by choice. We’re in a struggle for what we are to be as a nation, and I’m finding that there really are no agnostics in foxholes. “A great nation deserves great art”? Maybe, but that seems inadequate at this point in history—a great nation needs great art.

---

[1] Though I still agree with everything I wrote in the Op-Ed piece.

[2] I think Alex dismisses the relationship between the financial/political circumstances of the creation of art and the created art a little too easily, but that’s a huge subject, best left for another post.

[3] I’m still not the world’s biggest John Adams fan, but Nixon had some terrific stuff in it. For example and off the top of my head, the characterization of Richard Nixon (both as written and as performed by James Maddalena) is rich, complex, and nuanced, and the banquet scene at the end of Act I is musically exciting and theatrically effective. Also, it was moving to me to see an American composer take the podium at the Met to conduct his own opera.

[4] Most analyses land in the upper end of this range.

[5] If you don’t laugh (or at least smile knowingly) when you read the phrase “rigors of the marketplace”, having seen the products, cultural and otherwise, of markets, you just aren’t having enough fun.

[6] No, you couldn’t. Really. You couldn’t. Just. Shut. Up.

[7] Private funding of the arts presents its own set of problems, but there’s far more room for navigation there, at least in my experience.

[8] I promised an answer to the “we can’t afford it” argument. It’s coming. Trust me on this one.

[9] I can hear it now—why just throw money at the problem? The public schools don’t do their job as it is! Well, if the Pentagon performed like the public schools we’d triple their budget, not reduce it.

[10] Even so, one recent President of FSU, who clearly saw his position as being CEO of a minor-league football team, derided the festival thusly: “My idea of an arts festival is a John Wayne double feature and a box of popcorn.” This is offered as proof of what academia is really like, in contrast to the idea of the groves of it being a haven for liberal elitists. At any rate, anybody who knows me knows how much I love The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, but with all due respect, Fuck you, sir, and the horse you watched the Duke ride in on.

[11] The same President mentioned earlier was known to have contemplated getting rid of the sculpture collection. See the end of footnote 10.

Burning Ambulance 4

The fourth issue of Burning Ambulance magazine has just been published. It includes my article on concert music in 1968. Here's a taste:

. . . the events of May had a lingering effect on life in France and throughout the West[3], in terms of attitudes towards youth, the relationship of the State to its citizens, and the very nature of cultural life in democratic society. Never again[4] would cultural values—including means and modes of expression, artistic, sexual, and otherwise—be handed down from on high.

To read the whole thing, including the thrilling footnotes, click here.

 

Asbestos

The great Barbara O'Brien has asked me to post a link to a blog she writes on asbestos litigation, which I'm haapy to do. The link is located in the "Links and Resources" section to the left. Some time soon, Barbara will post here about the relationship between these issues and the arts. I look forward to being able to share that with you.

Veteran's Day 2008

We celebrate Veteran's Day in the United States on 11 November because that is when the Armistice that ends the First World War was signed.

There are lots of reasons World War II is studied more than World War I--most of them are legitimate and some (more footage, for example) are because the Second World War is easier to study.

I've never been able to shake the idea, however, that one very big reason World War I is not talked about is that it is an utterly pointless war--nothing was won, nothing was decided, millions were killed, and the stage was set for greater carnage and unspeakable horror.

And being utterly pointless, it's a typical war. The Civil War and the Second World War decided great issues and produced substantive victories. That's not the norm for war--most of them are exercises in murderous nihilism, the result of mistakes and tragic errors.

So, we study the "good" wars so that when somebody looks at us the wrong way, the image the populace has of war is that of a great endeavor, of national purpose played out on the world stage. That way, it is easier to convince the people that war is necessary.

And it is, obviously, the men and women of the service that pay the biggest, sometimes the ultimate price for this. The committment it takes to sign up for the military is beyond most of us, and those that can serve deserve our respect, and they deserve our effort in understanding the reasons they are called to combat, not passive acceptance of the call. It's really the least we can do.

Reading for the day:

Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Listening:

Benjamon Britten, War Requiem.

4 Nov 08

Happy Days Are Here Again!

One of the most moving nightas of my life.

Milton Glaser: "Art and Propaganda"

Milton Glaser is a graphic designer. His talk on "Art and Propaganda" was delivered at a symposium at the City University of New York Graduate Center on 15February. I'm generally uncomfortable with statements about the "purpose" of art, because I think that thinking of art in those terms can lead to some pretty uncomfortable places, but this quote from Glaser's talk is worth holding on to:

It's from Horace, the Roman philosopher and critic, who wrote, "The purpose of art is to inform and delight." I've been thinking about the purpose of art all my life and Horace helped me to arrive at an understanding. Art is a survival mechanism for the human species. Otherwise, it never would have lasted so long.

Glaser goes on to illuminate and expand on the implications of Horace's dictum and how dangerous it is when "inform" is changed to "persuade". Good stuff, and well worth a few minutes of your time.

Corporatism and Art

Kyle Gann has posted about a musicology class he spoke to at the University of Kentucky. He begins by describing the way the class' usual teacher structured the session:

The group had been reading my book American Music in the 20th Century, and he had each person prepare a question, the questions all asked in turn without being immediately answered; after which discussion could proceed with all the questions in mind.

I agree with Kyle that this sounds like a great way to structure an appearance by a guest scholar. It forces (or rather guides) the lecturer to relate the questions to each other and to answer them as a whole. The questions Kyle got led him to think about our current situation, which can be described as "music under corporatism":

We used to think the state was the government, but it's now become obvious that the state, in the U.S. at least, is the corporations that own and control the government, and the state's only interest, musically speaking, is in providing mass distribution to the music that can make the most exorbitant short-term profit, and squelching any musical outlet that threatens to pose competition to that profit.

I think this is a spot-on and very creative response. Corporatism dominates public life in the United States these days, and its effect on the arts is far from salutary. I don't have much to add to Kyle's analysis, I really just wanted to make sure you didn't miss it.

If I were to quibble, I would only object to the use of "populist" and "elitist" in this:

An elitist and a populist would certainly choose different paths through the socio-musical pinball machine, and there's little reason one might not be as successful as the other.

I know what he means, or rather what he means to mean, but I think it's a little sloppy, but not enough so as to undercut his very important argument.

The Faces on the Stage

Allan Kozinn reviews a concert by the Juilliard String Quartet, joined by clarinetist Charles Neidich, playing music by Wolfganag Mozart, Ralph Shapey (premiere), Elliott Carter, and Johannes Brahms.

A correspondent notes (after reading the review and seeing the photo that accompanies it):

Call me a grump, but 5 old white guys playing old/dead white guys’ music doesn’t thrill me so much. (Quoted with permission)

This is an interesting observation, and brings up an important issue in opening up our music to broader audiences. I do think that it is more a matter of presentation than of substance, and I think my correspondent would agree:

On the flip side, a woman’s presence doesn’t make it automatically better.

I don't think I've been to a concert recently where the faces on the stage were as old and as white and as male as this one. In fact, the only pictures like this one I've seen recently were a George Bush bill-signing and a GOP presidential debate, but at least Neidich and the Juilliards had musical instruments in their hands.

It's a complicated issue. Elliott Carter is quite old, but he wasn't at the time he wrote his Second Quartet, and the Juilliard Quartet was present at its creation, so there is a connection to youth in their performance. Ralph Shapey was old when he wrote 2 for 5, but the piece itself is young. Mozart never was old, but he was white and he is long dead. Brahms was near the end of his life when he wrote the Clarinet Quintet, but it is precisely that work's autumnal glow that we cherish.

The point is not about eliminating DWMs from the culture, or even old ones (pop would thin out pretty damn fast, no?), or about criticizing the Juilliard Quartet; it's about providing as many ways into concert music for people without experience in it. People notice the make-up of ensembles and programs, and it's not limited to "PC"-types and liberals: My correspondent is a political and social conservative.

Here and There

Alex Ross has a good overview of concert music's web presence here. And speaking of Mr. Ross, today is publication day for his first book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. I'll have a review of the book and an interview with the author, at a time and place to be announced.

And speaking of people named "Alex", I've been listening to Alex Shapiro's new CD, Notes from the Kelp, also released today. I like this CD very much. Ms. Shapiro handles a wide variety of instruments and idioms with style and expression. My favorite piece so far is Current Events, for string quintet (adding a viola to the traditional quartet). The piece is well-written for the instruments, expressive, and compelling. Ms. Shapiro's music stakes out so much musical territory that I am sure just about everyone will find somethng to like on the program.

I don't usually do politics here, but this post by Phil Nugent, who contributes to The High Hat and elsewhere, is as cogent a staement about where we are as anything I've read recently.

Topic A

The concert music blogosphere continues to be focused on the ongoing discussion of what is roundly called the "decline" of concert music. (In fact, one could argue that this issue is the reason the concert music blogosphere is as robust as it is.) Here are some links to recent posts on the subject, mostly from familiar players in the discussion (a tip of the fedora to Lisa Hirsch):

Matthew Guerrieri
Marc Geelhoed
A. C. Douglas
Alex from Wellsung
Greg Sandow

It's not clear to me that concert music is in "decline" in any meaningful sense of the word. There is today more of the music available in more formats than ever before and some musical institutions are reporting record ticket sales for the coming season, even while others report lower sales. Most important, from my particular perspective, a thousand compositional flowers continue to bloom, despite ongoing style wars offensives from all points on the stylistic continuum.

If "decline" or even "death" is not the issue, what is?

In the (increasingly distant) past, concert music held a place at the center of intellectual/cultural life in the West. That is no longer the case, and hasn't been for a very long time, probably since the West nearly obliterated itself in the Second World War. In fact, as Alex Ross masterfully demonstrates in his forthcoming The Rest is Noise, the centrality of concert music (especially opera) to the Nazi horror triggered a cultural backlash that continues today. From the other end of the political spectrum came stylistic requirements imposed on composers under penalty of ostracism, disappearance, and sometimes death. No such political strictures exist today, in part because music just isn't that important to the powers that be, though one could say that the part of the Composers' Union in the propaganda machineis now played by the Academy of Country Music and Clear Channel radio.

So it seems to me that the discussion is really about the place of concert music in our cultural and intellectual life is and what it should, or rather could be. I don't know the answers, but I do think it's an important conversation.

Happy Fourth!

Last year's holiday listening.

listen's first July 4th listening list, from 2005.

Here's this year's July 4th list, focusing on America as place:

Aaron Copland, Music for a Great City
Elliott Carter, A Symphony of Three Orchestras
Charles Ives, Three Places in New England
John Adams, El Dorado
Leonard Bernstein, On the Town
Alex Shapiro, Desert Waves
Steve Reich, Vermont Counterpoint

Bonus Tracks (long distance dedication to "GWB in Washington"):

Peter Maxwell Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King
Stevie Wonder, "You Haven't Done Nothing"

Slava

The great Russian cellist, conductor, and artistic rights champion Mstislav Rostropovich has died.

Allan Kozinn's New York Times obituary includes this:

As a cellist, Mr. Rostropovich played a vast repertory that included works written for him by some of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Among them were Shostakovich Cello Concertos, Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto, Cello Sonata and Symphony-Concerto, Britten’s Sonata, Cello Symphony and three Suites. He also played the premieres of solo works by Walton, Auric, Kabalevsky and Misaskovsky, and concertos by Lutoslawski, Panufnik, Messiaen, Schnittke, Henri Dutilleux, Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Lukas Foss and Giya Kancheli.

As if that list wasn't amazing enough, for its variety as well as its length, there's this:

Mr. Rostropovich always said that one of the principal lures of the podium was that the orchestral repertory seemed so vast when compared with the cello repertory. But he did not confine himself to the established classics. He commissioned regularly, and led the premieres of more than 50 works. Two of the pieces written for him during his National Symphony years — Stephen Albert’s “Riverrun” Symphony and Morton Gould’s “Stringmusic” — won Pulitzer Prizes. Leonard Bernstein, Jacob Druckman, Richard Wernick, Gunther Schuller and Ezra Laderman were among the other composers who wrote for him, or whose works had their world premieres under his baton.

He will be missed, but his artistic legacy remains as comfort, inspiration, and living memorial.

Arts Funding

The Tallahassee (FL) Democrat published a piece by a local political columnist this past Thursday, which piece called for the elimination of public funding for the arts.

My response is here. There's a lot more to say on this topic, and I hope at least some of you will say what you have to say in comments.

The Best Disinfectant

Stirling Newberry, posting at the Agonist, asks bloggers to remove On an Overgrown Path from our blogrolls because of this post, which links to an article in the American Spectator on affirmative action in orchestras. Mr. Newberry believes that the linking of the article is an indication of "soft bigotry" on the part of Pliable, the Path blogger.

The article is indeed a fetid pile of half-truths, unsupported assertions, condescension, frat-boy style bigotry, and false concern. (I say "false concern" becuase in the world dreamed of by the editors and writers of that magazine, there would be no elite orchestras, because they wouldn't be able to make it in that market-driven pit.) However, I won't remove the blog from my roll because I believe that we do better in fighting for what we believe in when those we opposed are exposed to the light of day. I don't know if that was Pliable's point in linking to the article, because he doesn't comment on it.

And that brings me to the action that I will take in response to this. I frequently post links to other sites, be they blogs, magazines, etc., and offer them without comment. In the future I will endeavor not to do that.

The Times Are Never So Bad (II) (Updated)

Stirling Newberry has another essay up at The Agonist, the subject of which is the response of the arts to the events of the last five years. Needless to say, he finds the response inadequate, to say the least. However, there is hope, if not for redemption, at least for realization and rebuilding.

The first comment is very good.

Update: Mr. Newberry puts his music where his mouth is, with a video based on the last three minutes of the second movement ("There Must Be Peace") of his C Major Piano Sonata (Ares), from a soon-to-be-released CD. I'm agnostic on the idea of attaching images to concert music, but it is certainly one way to to provide entrée into the music.

Liberation

Stirling Newberry posts on the "liberation of classical music" over at The Agonist. The questions that Stirling raises in this piece are not new; in fact, raising them again and again in new contexts seems to be an important part of his work. They are worth asking and worth thinking about.

Electric Now

Stirling Newberry has written a telling introduction to George Crumb's Black Angels and posted it on the Crooks and Liars blog. Crooks and Liars is a center-left political blog that chronicles the top down media's treatment of politics. I've posted about my mixed feelings concerning political posting on cultural blogs, but I think posting on political blogs about cultural matters and artifacts is a spectacular idea, especially when the two realms meet as they do in Black Angels.

I also want to add my conratulations to Alex Ross for completing his book on 20th century music. It appears, though, that the critics are already being catty.