I heard a piece by the American composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel and liked it, so I looked him up and discovered he’d written a piece called “Language Instruction” that you can read about, and hear a snippet of, here. One of the quotes on that page is an excerpt from Allan Kozinn’s NY Times review (Dec. 8, 2003; archived) of a performance:
For all one hears about the classical music world being a museum culture, there is an alternative musical world in New York, just outside the spotlight focused on the big performing institutions.
Virtually every night new music is on offer, usually in the smaller halls (or in places that specialize in it, like the Kitchen and Roulette), performed by musicians whose interpretive interests draw them toward what’s next rather than what has been. […]
The centerpiece was Derek Bermel’s “Language Instruction” (2003), an amusing full ensemble work based on the rhythms and gestures of language tapes. The clarinet was, in effect, the voice on the tape, and the other instruments were the students — variously willing or difficult, competent or bumbling — who must repeat the phrases. Mr. Bermel spins this interaction into an increasingly chaotic fantasy that would have been perfectly at home on a program with Berio’s Sequenza III and the works by Ms. La Barbara, Mr. Aperghis and Mr. Gal.
It sounds like a lot of fun (I enjoyed the audio clip), and I’m very glad our local classical station plays a good deal of contemporary music instead of sticking with the mossy 18th- and 19th-century standbys. (And if you’re curious, as I was, about the surname Bermel, it’s a “habitational name from a place in Rhineland named Bermel.”)
I heard less about “the classical music world being a museum culture”, more about it being an academized culture, with results that are heavily theory driven and of less interest with what would be the traditional audience. Sometimes these academic composers will accidentally produce something that people will listen to.
There might be parallels to the academization of literature.
You’re talking about the classical music world of the universities and other places where avant-garde composers are subsidized by institutions that don’t give a damn about listenability; he’s talking about the classical music world of actual performance, which is subsidized by paying customers who do give a damn about listenability. Apples and oranges.
There is no actually-existing classical world of actual performers supported by paying customers, i.e. audience ticket purchases. Every performance space for anything that could loosely be called classical music, ranging from Carnegie Hall to Roulette,* is run by a non-profit heavily reliant on grants and donations above and beyond what people pay at the door. These institutions are part of the same general ecology as universities in current American life. Live jazz in NYC is still presented by a mix of non-profit entities and traditional for-profit (although it’s a tough business …) nightclubs, but at least some of the non-profits try to simulate the nightclub experience in that they have “selling you drinks as a revenue source above and beyond ticket sales” as a big part of their model. You can buy an expensive glass of champagne at intermission at Lincoln Center but then you can’t bring it back into the auditorium to drink while you listen, so it’s not the same vibe.
*I go to Roulette mostly for things that are jazz, broadly defined, but I think they probably do also still present various musical things that fit into an “avant-garde classical” box better than any taxonomic alternative. The Kitchen (which I haven’t thought about in decades) is still operational but seems currently to be more focused on dance and visual art than music-as-such.** The Stone is a good performance space that has both experimental jazz and other stuff that’s maybe more avant-garde classicalish, but it has relocated to new space physically inside an academic institution and worse than that doesn’t sell booze to the audience.
**When I checked out their website etc. I was confused that it didn’t match up with what you’d quoted but then i saw that what you quoted was from 2003.
Every performance space for anything that could loosely be called classical music, ranging from Carnegie Hall to Roulette,* is run by a non-profit heavily reliant on grants and donations above and beyond what people pay at the door.
Fair point, but surely you’ll agree that there’s still a strong incentive to play what’s popular; otherwise, why all the goddam Beethoven symphonies?
When I checked out their website etc. I was confused that it didn’t match up with what you’d quoted but then i saw that what you quoted was from 2003.
Heh.
Subsidized by paying customers in some small way perhaps, but according to the Wikipedia he’s involved primarily with organizations that are supported by endowments, grants, and gifts. He seems primarily to be an ethnomusicologist.
Well, it’s nearly impossible to be in any of the arts that require more support than a computer or some canvas and paints without being involved with organizations that are supported by endowments, grants, and gifts. I refer you to the first point in my response to JWB.
Note sure how these models work for, say, funding of classical music in the 18th century.
The repertoire of Soviet concert halls also was (and I think is) listenable.
“Language Instruction” – I’m not surprised.
I’m tempted to write a story in the form of a language textbook:
dialogue, explanations, vocabulary
dialogue, explanations, vocabulary
dialogue, explanations, vocabulary…*
Basically, any work of fiction contains “dialogues” and “explanations”.
*I don’t know if it should also contain exercises🙁
The non-profits that program a lot of Beethoven symphonies tend, I assume, to have board members that personally like attending performances of Beethoven symphonies, and if some of the staff wishes they programmed more avant-garde stuff than they do, that’s why they’re staff and not on the board. I do suppose that when you get out to your smaller markets (Chattanooga or Ft. Wayne or what have you) the local symphony is more likely to have some programming of the “special orchestral arrangements of the hits of that one arena-rock band from the Seventies” genre that may not reflect board-or-major-donor taste but do reflect an imperative to get more bottoms in seats. And of course some board members are not going to so much be Beethoven enthusiasts but Important Local Businessmen that view putting on programming that successfully gets sufficient bottoms in seats as a desideratum in its own right.
Some of the stuff Haydn wrote when he was in London late in his career was more or less commissioned by the nightclub owners of the day who anticipated making more from ticket sales (and maybe ancillary sales of booze?) than they spent in paying the composer and musicians, but I think that was a somewhat unusual deviation from the more customary approach of being on the payroll of some noble or ecclesiastical patron.
I don’t know how the USSR’s classical-music venues and/or the ensembles performing therein chose their repertoire. There are probably books about that, and the ideological gymnastics or maneuvers that made various extremely bourgeois pre-1917 composers fully acceptable from a Scientific Materialism perspective.
As far as I know, the only justification that was used or needed was “Lenin liked it.”
Mr. Bermel composes some interesting works. His mushy tone makes his clarinet recordings difficult to listen to for more than half a minute. Find a copy of the Drucker/Mann/Hambro recording of the Contrasts (The Peter Bartok label) to savor the difference.
The subject piece does a fine—and funny—job of emulating a language lab of the 1960s.
Now I’m wondering about the jazz-club model for classical music. Try it in NYC where you should theoretically have the largest potential audience in the US. Get a small storefront-or-basement space on a side street that will hold an audience of let’s say 60 to 80 before the fire marshal complains. Charge $30 or $40 plus a two-drink minimum for an hour of chamber music. Could be a string quartet; could be four woodwind or brass players plus a piano or whatever. Repertoire can be Haydn/Mozart or cutting-edge composers that aren’t even dead yet or anything in between; whatever the club owner thinks is most likely to draw an audience. If you stay for the second set you may or may not have to pay the cover charge again in addition to buying more drinks, but you are guaranteed that the musicians will play completely different pieces then they did in the early set. Would it be possible to break even doing this? Why or why not?
Do people in small jazz clubs ever talk during the music? That would be absolutely untolerated with chamber music.
@Y: In the better clubs these days it’s typically frowned upon except for when you’re ordering another drink from the waitress. The transition from “music to socialize, carouse, and dance to” to “music to listen to intently and attentively in an intellegentsia-adjacent way” was already occurring in jazz clubs in the 1950’s.
Russian intelligentno, intelligently.
Which would be some of the less-than-better clubs that you are familiar with?
@Y: well, we have the problem that the better clubs are of course the ones I frequent, so almost by definition I lack familiarity with the less-than-better ones … There certainly are a few left that still work on a no-cover-charge basis where the musicians may not net much more money than they can garner by passing the tip jar at the end of a set and those may have more talkative-during-performance audiences.
For all one hears about the classical music world being a museum culture
A lot of culture-specific preconceptions there. I think I could kick off my litany of objections by saying “you say that like it’s a self-evidently bad thing. Care to explain why?”
Perpetual formal innovation as a sine qua non of a valid art form … perhaps related to the apparently incontestable view that perpetual economic growth is the sole viable economic strategy?
Also, perhaps a rather tendentious and unimaginative view of what museums are actually for. (Even Trumpites know that museums are subversive institutions, that must be strictly controlled by the Master Grifter and his shills.)
So it doesn’t bother you if the major orchestras and classical stations play endless recordings of the same Bach/Mozart/Beethoven oldies and never play anything by a living composer? You’re welcome to your opinions, but I like to change things up occasionally.
Hang on, hang on. You can never play too much Bach. Are you suggesting his music is somehow not living?
Today I went to a violin+piano recital: Brahms (stodgy), Prokofiev — certainly changing it up.
Tomorrow Pandemonium!, who will be fun!
We might even get some Gareth Farr — who’s very much living.
School holidays this week, so I’m hoping the concert will be packed out with kids.
I love Bach, and I have lots of Bach I can play whenever I feel the urge. When I turn on the radio, of course it’s nice to catch the occasional Bach piece — especially if it’s not a Brandenburg (it turns out even Bach can be overplayed) — but basically I want to be stimulated, not lulled (which doesn’t mean I want thumping orchestral climaxes), and I like hearing things I haven’t heard before. And I said “a living composer,” not “music that lives”; don’t put words in my mouth. If you’re content hearing the same old stuff world without end, more power to you; you will have little trouble finding classical stations to enjoy. And if you think Prokofiev is the last word in modernity… well, you think like the programmers of those stations.
Trish — who schedules the lunchtime concerts — is affronted. She points out that today’s programme included five pieces by actually living composers (well one passed within this decade); plus an arrangement from Bill Evans, who’s hardly ancient; plus a Debussy, for balance although even he’s later than the ‘oldies’ you listed.
And the performance was indeed buzzing with kids being anything but stodgy.
She readily agrees Prokofiev is not the ‘last word in modernity’ — which I did not claim: you also could be accused of putting words in mouths — but when you have an actually living Russian-born actual Professor of Violin at the RCM volunteer to play actual Prokofiev, you do not turn it down; especially when she can fill the hall with (apparently) a whole Matryoshka-full of portly Russian matrons gabbling away in living Russian.
There’s a chicken-and-egg/nesting dolls problem: if the radio won’t play modern stuff[**], the audience won’t be attuned to turn up[***], the performers won’t volunteer to play it, the schedulers won’t want an empty hall.
[**] I don’t think Radio NZ Classical channel would be very guilty thereof — I see in today’s schedule many pieces later than Prokofiev, although they probably push the more modern stuff to unsocial hours.
[***] I think I told of the couple sitting next to me who thought Rite of Spring “rather shrill, terribly modern” — this was at a centenary performance.
I think I told of the couple sitting next to me who thought Rite of Spring “rather shrill, terribly modern” — this was at a centenary performance.
I think it’s both. You can tell it wasn’t written in the 19th century, but I don’t think you can tell it wasn’t written last year (apart from recognizing it). Might be my lack of musicality, of course.
Ah, I meant merely I think I told the Hattery of (the episode with) the couple. And indeed I did.
(On the musicality/style, I think you can tell the Rite was written before Shostakovich. Written before WWI? It sounds like it was written slap in the middle of WWI, in the trenches under artillery fire.)
BTW is it worth a Hattery topic on the naming of the Hang (handpan):
The piece today was so contemporary it was attributed to ‘Hang Massive’ collective.
Modern as in current, or Modern as in pre-post-modern?
On the musicality/style, I think you can tell the Rite was written before Shostakovich
OK, I don’t have the musicality or knowledge of Shostakovich to tell that.