Filed: 27/07/2005)

Rupert Christiansen listens to an analysis from someone who is actually making the noise

Blair Tindall’s autobiography, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music, created quite a stir when it was published in America last month. I ordered a copy, in guilty expectation of a muck-raking page-turner as compellingly nasty as Gelsey Kirkland’s expose of the business of ballet, Dancing on my Grave.

Alas, Tindall doesn’t live up to her titillating title. There’s very little about Mozart in these pages, even less about the jungle. The sex is desultory, the drugs are Class C. But what makes the book well worth reading is its intelligent analysis of the state of classical music, emanating from someone on the floor, actually making the noise, rather than a pundit or academic.

Tindall was a professional, freelance oboist – clearly a very good one, but not a front-ranking soloist. She characterises herself as a product of the post-war boom in high culture, and specifically of the expansion and fetishising of symphony orchestras (a theme explored in Joseph Horowitz’s magnificent study, Understanding Toscanini).

It’s hard now to imagine the status and glamour attached to the career of a classical instrumentalist in that reconstructive era, but Tindall notes the significant statistics and phenomena – between 1940 and 1960, for instance, the sale of musical instruments in the US quintupled. Van Cliburn was greeted with a ticker-tape parade after winning the 1958 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, and conductor Leonard Bernstein became one of the 1960s’ superstars. Classical music was prime-time and, even if it couldn’t be profitable, it was seen as fundamental to civic and national self-respect.

But a generation reared on Elvis, the Beatles and the space race, impelled to modernise and liberate itself, gradually lost its deference to the music of the old order, with its attendant class associations. Only the lifejacket of subsidy – whether European state funding or American private philanthropy – could keep it afloat, and when that deflated, the classical music industry finally had to accept itself as an over-valued commodity.

The system didn’t adjust quickly enough to this social change, with the result that a glut of young musicians were groomed to enter a profession that was both puffed up and weighed down with its own status and restrictive practices. By the turn of the millennium, Tindall estimates, the imbalance between supply and demand meant that more than 5,000 music graduates were pursuing 250 orchestral vacancies.

The remainder of these instrumentalists earn their living in the freelance market, of which Tindall paints a graphic picture. In the 1980s, anyone established on the circuit could find plenty of work. The record companies were still busy, fired by the arrival of the CD format. Advertisers needed accompaniments for jingles, films had original orchestral scores. Broadway shows used large pit bands, and almost all orchestras allowed “subbing” (known as “depping” in Britain), whereby an instrumentalist could pass his chair at a rehearsal or concert to a substitute and take a vacation or a better-paid gig.

Twenty years on, the scene has changed dramatically. Classical recording has shrunk to vanishing point in the US. Classically focused radio stations have dumbed down or sold out. Many smaller civic orchestras have closed or merged, and even the most prestigious ones have battened down the hatches after weathering untenable deficits. Movies increasingly use rock soundtracks, and on Broadway the unions have capitulated to the synthesizers and a reduction in the size of bands. An extraordinary amount of orchestral music can now be effectively simulated by digital means.

In sum, classical music’s great wave of self-confidence has subsided, and despite a flurry of clever marketing strategies, it is doubtful that it will ever win back its former eminence in the cultural hierarchy, or the attendances of the 1950s and 1960s.

I’m not convinced this is altogether a bad thing. The stable was dirty and stuffy: it needed cleaning out. Perhaps, Tindall wisely concludes, “classical music could learn from the diamond companies, which have transformed a relatively common mineral into something precious by limiting its abundance in the marketplace”.

Too much of the recent debate about classical music has focused on the decline in the quantity of performance or the size of audience, compared with the levels achieved in that brief post-war boom. Yet the quality of music-making should also be considered, and surely nobody who heard the Royal Opera’s Die Walküre or John Eliot Gardiner’s Nelson Mass at the Proms last week could come away worrying about a decline in standards.

We may have less classical music communicated to fewer people than we did 30 years ago, but how much does that matter if the quality of performance and the enthusiasm of audiences remain undimmed?

By Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The grass is never greener than in the verdant nostalgia of the classical music lover’s mind. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin, to name a few, were geniuses, but overall, there are more quality composers working today than in any given year of the 18th or 19th centuries. Those eras overflowed with rote. Half the reason Beethoven remains so revered is because of how ho-hum many of his contemporaries were. But we don’t see it that way. We still mostly like the oldies.

Why then, did classical music, especially in this country, take such a different course from the other arts, with audiences generally disconnected from contemporary creations? That’s the basis of a fascinating and significant book by Joseph Horowitz, “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall.” It is the focus of a WFMT-produced special airing on WQED-FM Tuesday at 8 p.m.

While the book is more thorough, the radio show, hosted by Bill McGlaughlin, backs up points with recordings. You could do this yourself with a superb two-disc collection just released by Naxos, “The Story of American Classical Music.” It contains representative music from many of the composers Horowitz outlines, as well as a lucid history.

Through a historical overview of American musical institutions and composers, primarily in Boston and New York City, Horowitz drives home an insightful thesis: A major factor in the “fall” was a spurning of our living composers in favor of star, often foreign, performers who gravitated to established music. This ossification created an unbeatable canon, “rejecting contemporary culture, enshrining dead European masters and celebrity performers.”

For all its independence on other fronts, the United States remained culturally subservient to Europe for some time. All art forms felt it, but classical music has struggled the most to escape its pull. In its first centuries, America produced more institutions of great repute than composers. Compare Carnegie Hall to George Chadwick or the New York Philharmonic to Edward MacDowell. Our biggest contributions were of form, not content.

Whenever Americans in the 18th and 19th century wrote music that didn’t ape European trends, it “would be rejected by most of the [American] public as primitive or irrelevant,” writes Horowitz.

American audiences would compensate for low esteem in composition by “out-adoring” Europeans for Europe’s own, whose music they could at least be proud to hear in their “better” concert halls and by their more proficient orchestras. Horowitz calls it a “psychology of insecurity,” and it meant Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Dvorak and others were more beloved here than Americans Foote, Fry or even Ives.

Horowitz feels this sentiment made the United States particularly susceptible to that Romantic musical phenomenon: the superstar performer. He cites Wagner’s pamphlet “On Conducting,” published in 1869, which rejected “time-beating” in favor of conductors who molded scores interpretively.

Wagner was writing in support of a growing trend, and as conductors took more artistic control of music, they began to be worshipped as its high priests. Arturo Toscanini was more important to many than the composers whose music he conducted. The same was true with other musicians. By the time Vladimir Horowitz held regal sway over the ebony and ivory, he was as famous as the music sitting on his piano. The same certainly was true for tenor Enrico Caruso.

It’s fine that a musician stands equally with a specific piece — classical music lives in the musician’s contemporary interpretation of music despite its age. But when a generation or two of conductors and performers retreat within the canon, it ultimately stunts the field. It is simply bizarre that if you ask someone to name some of the important musical figures of the 19th century, you are likely to get Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert and the like. Ask the same question about the 20th, and you often hear Toscanini, Heifetz and Ma.

Composers did play a part in this shift, some writing modernist music that turned off audiences. (The withdrawal of music education and the rise of the recording industry also played a part.) But for every Boulez there was a Menotti. And there’s no telling how the modernist trends would have turned out if more conductors and musicians had been a part of the process.

Eventually, the crowd-pleasing focus on the canon ran thin, and the audiences began to move away from classical to more popular and vibrant music: pop and rock. The current financial situation of orchestras and other groups has much to do with not keeping audiences interested in contemporary developments over the years. It’s culminated in today’s environment, in which a new album by U2 or Wilco, a new play by August Wilson or musical by Stephen Sondheim, or a new building by Frank Gehry or Rafael Vinoly makes headlines and builds massive excitement. Not so with new compositions by John Adams or Michael Daugherty. And Beethoven hasn’t written anything new in decades.

Classical music could stand to be more vital to the greater population; it could stand to be more healthy. Horowitz’s book is most significant for outlining how we got where we are. But I cannot subscribe to the pessimist subtitle of the book. I don’t think classical music has “fallen” — it’s just different than before. There are some aspects I don’t like, some I do.

There is much music out there that is moving and that could generate excitement if the field had shepherded itself better. And when these works are performed, they are done by better professional musicians now than ever before. The level of even a small-budget orchestra is astounding these days. Take that, 1800.

And don’t forget, yesterday’s classical music scene was astonishingly limited in its world view — some of it downright classist and racist. If you lived in the 18th century, odds are you never would have been allowed to hear Haydn’s music, unless you were a noble. And if you were a person of color or of a certain ethnic group, you could add many more restrictions. Today, classical music is more diverse and open than ever, in audience, orchestra, opera and composer makeup.

Things could be better, there is no doubt. The field definitely was its own worst enemy for some time and continues to struggle to define itself. But don’t try to sell me on the “fall” of classical music. That’s a specious trap many of us tend to fall into about the past.

Someday, people will be longing for the good old days of 2005.

By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 19, 2005; C01

The board of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will meet this morning to decide whether to appoint Marin Alsop as the ensemble’s 12th music director. Whatever decision is made, it is likely to leave bruised feelings within the orchestra and throughout the tightly knit world of classical music.

If Alsop is named, it will be against the express wishes of as many as 90 percent of the musicians in the BSO, who have asked for a continuation of the search to audition several other conductors.

If Alsop is rejected, it will be a huge setback for the management of the orchestra, which has backed her for the position and has suggested since late last week that board certification of her appointment was just a formality.

Complicating the matter is the fact that Alsop, if selected, would be the first woman to run a major American or European orchestra. Her appointment would therefore be of considerable historical importance and the word that she is the front-running — and only current — candidate has already been picked up by news organizations throughout the world.

There have been female conductors — Antonia Brico led a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra as early as 1930 and Nadia Boulanger’s mid-century appearances with the New York Philharmonic were legendary. In recent years, artists such as Anne Manson and JoAnn Falletta (the latter will lead the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap on July 28) have won appreciative followings as guest conductors — and both have served as music directors of some well-regarded medium-size orchestras. But no female conductor has ever been selected to shape the overall direction of a group as significant as the Baltimore Symphony.

In an era when women commonly run everything from universities to Fortune 500 companies to entire countries, why has it taken so long for a single leading orchestra to take the step?

The fact is, classical music has been extraordinarily hidebound when it comes to gender issues. The Berlin Philharmonic admitted its first female player in 1980; the Vienna Philharmonic steadfastly refused to let women enjoy full membership status until, grudgingly, two harpists were hired in the late 1990s. (In a 1996 interview with West German State Radio, Helmut Zaertner, a violist with the Vienna Philharmonic, explained that because harpists were stationed so far at the edge of the orchestra, “it doesn’t disturb our emotional unity, the unity I would strongly feel, for example, when the orchestra starts really cooking with a Mahler symphony.”)

American orchestras have been far ahead of many of their European counterparts on this front, with women making up a third or more of the membership of several leading ensembles and regularly dominating the string section. (Brass remains mostly a male preserve, although the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra has long featured Susan Slaughter on principal trumpet.) But things have been just as hard for female conductors in the United States as they are across the Atlantic.

Indeed, the late critic Harold C. Schonberg began his generally illuminating and entertaining history “The Great Conductors” (1967) with a grandiloquent definition of a “maestro” that would seem to rule out half of humanity:

“He is of commanding presence, infinite dignity, fabulous memory, vast experience, high temperament, and serene wisdom. He has been tempered in the crucible but he is still molten and he glows with a fierce inner light. He is many things: musician, administrator, executive, minister, psychologist, technician, philosopher and dispenser of wrath. . . . Above all, he is a leader of men. His subjects look to him for guidance. He is at once a father image, the great provider, the force of inspiration, the Teacher who knows all.”

There were no profiles or photographs of women in Schonberg’s book. They weren’t on the radar.

Of course, 40 years ago the same might have been said of virtually all corporate leaders, who were simply expected to be men. The world has changed enormously since then — but classical music has changed less than most fields.

In part that is because it has come to seem a retrospective art form, with virtually all of its “greatest hits” written by male composers who are long dead. The last truly popular piece to enter the symphonic repertory was Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” composed in 1944. For most of its history, classical music has been a man’s world.

“The idea of a woman managing the performance of music remains anathema even in societies where women have achieved the highest office,” the British critic Norman Lebrecht observed in his book “The Maestro Myth” (1991). “Committee wives in Middle America are said to abhor the notion of a female incumbent, while male commuters want the symphonies they hear while driving to work to be conducted by one of their own. Whether they act tough or soft, women conductors have been given a hard time by male-dominated orchestras.”

But things have begun to improve somewhat in the past couple of decades. Attempts to reach Alsop at her New York apartment and on her cell phone have been unsuccessful; her management said that she would have no comment until after today’s board meeting. But in the past, she has regularly startled interviewers with her opinion that, if anything, the fact that she is a woman had helped her career.

“In America, at least, I’ve found very little resistance to the idea of a woman conductor,” she said in 1990. “It’s still unusual enough that the orchestra might even get some publicity for engaging me.” She has made other similar statements over the years.

Falletta concurs. “I’ve never felt any discrimination in the United States,” she said yesterday. “Twenty years ago, at the beginning of my career, I’d find a certain coolness in other countries — especially in Germany — but even that has gotten a lot better. If anything, I’d say that there is more prejudice against American conductors in general, whether they are male or female. We’re still sometimes treated as second-raters — and that goes on here as well as in Europe, I’m sorry to say.”

It is probable that a new generation of female conductors will arrive — certainly, there are plentiful candidates now studying in conservatories. Young musicians growing up today no longer face the prejudices that were once accepted as a matter of course, and much of this is due to the example of artists such as Marin Alsop.

The BSO musicians’ request that the search for a conductor continue did not mention Alsop’s name, nor did it raise specific concerns about her qualifications for the job. But a letter dated April 21 from Anthony S. Brandon, a board member who has been outspoken in his opposition to Alsop’s appointment, to Philip English, the chairman of the BSO board, is specific. It was drafted with the help of other board members, with input from a number of musicians, and copies have circulated freely in circles close to the BSO. English has previously refused to comment on the appointment and he did not return calls yesterday afternoon.

“The overriding justification for eliminating Alsop is that 90 percent of the BSO musicians oppose her appointment,” the letter states. “In her appearances with the orchestra, the players say, Alsop has not produced inspired and nuanced performances of standard classical repertory. They cite ‘dull,’ even ‘substandard,’ performances of Brahms’s Symphony No. 3, Mendelssohn’s music for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2.

“They say that she either does not hear problems or — because her technical limitations prevent her from fixing them — that she ignores them. Her musical sense is inhibited by her own lack of depth as a musician and she becomes frustrated when what she hears in her head does not come out from the players. Upon finding something wanting in rehearsal, she responds with vagaries such as ‘I’m not feeling it’ (Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’) or exhorts them with abstractions such as ‘make magic’ (Brahms’s Symphony No. 3).

“When an orchestra believes it is being pushed by unmusical ideas, tempos and phrasing and being told that the orchestra itself lacks imagination, musicians feel they are dealing with a conductor who lacks ideas, conviction and technical skill.”

The current music director, Yuri Temirkanov, steps down at the end of the 2005-06 season. So, whether it is Alsop or someone else, the BSO must find a conductor soon.