The Health of the Classical Music Ecosystem

Let's take a quick look back at classical music for the last 120 years. What has been added to the standard repertoire ? I don't mean some token five-minute works that orchestras toss on a program to have something modern.

From 1900-1960 we have added to the standard repertoire Strauss, Mahler, Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel, Faure, Holst, Honegger, Berg, Rachmaninov, Janacek, Webern, Sibelius, Saint-Saens, Elgar, Vaughn Williams, Schoenberg, Debussy, Gershwin, Prokofiev, Ives, Shostakovich, and all the DiaghilevBallet Russes works, and I am sure we can find a lot more. Now what has been added to the standard repertoire from 1960 until 2020 ?

If you look at this like an investor would look at a business, you will see a very unhealthy ecosystem that would be destined to collapses as all business and art need innovation to be relevant. Do we have less talented composers these days or did the first half of the 20^th Century by luck produced all these ? Or did they have leaders in the classical industry with a vision that was the catalyst to create these masterpieces. It seems like today concert halls now sell history as their business models.

The Perception of Time in Music

 A quarter note is not consistently perceived as a quarter note the way a metronome might indicate, as time is not a stable mathematically precise constant for humans. Time is perceived by us depending on the time of day, how we feel, and the situation. I have noticed this when I compose, I hear the music a lot faster in my head as a pure non-physical abstraction and it makes total sense. Only when I hear it live might I say that the tempo is wrong. Sometimes when I am performing really fast Bebop jazz, time slows down and then when I hear it back later, I wonder how we were playing all those notes so fast.

 

If you play a concert at night in front of 10,000 pumped-up fans, your endorphins are pumped, and your senses heightened, and everything is moving at a faster pace. It is similar to walking in an airport on those people movers. Your walking is constant, but the entire escalator platform is moving thus you are moving the same, but the entire event perceived from an outsider is faster. If you record a concert like that and then listen to it the next morning in a calm house, the entire program will sound way too fast, as now your mind and perception of time is more relaxed. And vice-versa holds true: if you record a piece early on a quiet Sunday morning and then play that recording back later that night in a venue packed with 10,000 people, it would seem way too slow. We all have experienced time shifting,  when you are bored sitting in a school math class times sits still, and when you are engaged in some action movie time bounces along. So, metronome markings are not an absolute but only an indicator of the tempos as these should change according to the emotional context, the venue and situation.......

 

How can a composer have a direct relationship with the public outside of the concert hall?

The modern composer needs to circumvent the concert hall in order to reach their audience. The concert hall by perpetuating the same classic European works is choking the voice of the modern composer. How can American composers create their own unique sound in this environment that is the inverse of all the other art forms. The currant concert hall audience does not celebrate anticipation. With the progress of AI the pendulum will shift and the composer will be able to realize online and via recordings anything they can imagine. Perhaps in the future there will not be the social need to hear music as a mass collective via the standard orchestra and audiences perspective.  It is hard to let go because we romanticize this music and tradition. In the end Darwinism always wins. If the modern orchestra cannot adapt and reach out to a new audience and be relevant in a modern society rather than an aural museum the system will collapse and be supplanted with a new art form.

The State of the Arts, and thoughts while on the road

It is becoming clear to me that new classical music is doomed upon conception.

Berlin, for me, is a metaphor for cutting-edge arts. A city filled with great writers, artists, intellectuals, and composers.

But the mainstream cultural musical institutions of Europe are an insult and embarrassment to these incredible artists. These institutions recreate and sell European musical history to wealthy tourists while choking the voices of these contemporary artists. Every city I visit seems to have the same repertoire of musical works and operas in their concert halls. The only thing worse is in the USA as we sell not our own musical history but imported history, as if we must lack self-esteem with our own musical arts.

In all areas of the arts, painting, sculpture, literature, film, and architecture, there is a genuine inquisitive thirst for what is going on now. Classical music is the only genre I know that refuses to join the present with the rest of the world. What if we asked modern painters in the world to copy 16th-century masters all day? How creative would that be for them? But commerce dictates, and that is how wealthy patrons want the classical world to stay. Good or bad orchestras are now just only aural museums.

It's absurd for any critic that is truly a person of arts and letters to partake in writing and perpetuating the status quo. The institutions will kill off the very thing that any business, art, or genre needs to survive—innovation

Orchestras vs Virtual

After spending the last few days with a large orchestra I could not think of a worse environment to make music.

Looking at the faces of the orchestra you can tell they don't want to be there. You can bet that 50 percent or more don’t like it and resent playing the music. So how can they make art out of it?

You have to deal with the giant corporate bureaucracy, don't touch this, or do that, or go there. Not the least bit welcoming or relaxed. The symphony has an elitist social club aspect to it, and it alienates many music lovers.

Then there is the issue of the orchestra musician hating new music. Much of it is difficult and not what they learned 20 years ago in school. Then if all goes well they might book your work three years out so there is no immediate gratification like we have in jazz. In jazz everyone on the bandstand wants to be there, enjoys what they are doing, and the entire experience is fun, not some punch the clock factory job.

And in the rare event where they will let you record it, you’ll have to make 1000 edits to fix wrong notes to get it in shape for release. So find a great engineer editing team.

As virtual instruments get better composers will no longer have to deal with any of this. They will fine tune their creations like sculptures, without the interface and headaches of dealing with 100 people. The future for new music will be on electronic devices in your home and on the go. People will use the web as we now use a program in a concert hall.

One hundred years down the line if a piece of music enters the mainstream repertoire things might be different for the composer...

Rock vs Classical

How will young people will gravitate to classical music when it has a limited catharsis compared to the mass emotional raw visceral energy of rap and rock ? These musics reflect the electronic frenzied world we live in today as compared to when we had horses and buggies to get around and candles to light our homes.

Classical Music is a pre electric art form....

Today's World

You need to be a psychotic in today's world to be sane !