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 !

Why Classical Music cannot change

Mozart, Brahms, Bach, etc have all been codified by our society as classical music and have become a branded institution. Orchestral institutions now exist for the perpetuation and perseveration of the institution, not invention .
So we have institutions vs. invention. If you want new and innovative music you must look elsewhere. 

Tech the new creative outlet

The tech world inspires and rewards creativity. The classical orchestral world castrates it.

Youth

Youth has the illusion of possibility.

New Classical Music

New compositions in todays classical music climate are doomed from conception.

Classical Music

Progress runs on innovation.

Classical music runs on preservation.

Dilemma

I look at all these orchestral works on my desk.

And ask ?

Is it a waste of life to write something no one cares about ?

Or is it more of a waste of life  to write things people like,,, and you don't care about ?

What is the answer  ?

Musical Criticism in the Internet Age

Dear Kind Sir,

OK I GET IT !!!

My Venetians Concertos are relentless,rhythmic therefore most likley vile.

And I apologize for being naive enough to believe that art reflects time and culture ?

And since I live in the middle of New York city, not some quant alpine pasture my music reflects that.

And I apologize for being dumb enough to think that a critic can be objective rather than subjective and try to understand what I am doing instead of reducing my work to their own myopic level of understanding. Aesthetic criticism absents itself from the subjective experience and attempts through rigor and training to objectify the experience to quantifiably accepted criteria.  That's why aesthetic criticism is valid and important.  Otherwise, everyone would have a valid opinion!

Perhaps I should write adagio diatonic recorder and lute music for surfing Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumbler  and rest of the the new intellectual pursuits of our time. The word is dead and along with that serious music and literary criticisms. As we enter the age of Trump we will finally get the culture we deserve...

I suggest if you are up to stretching a little to listen to my Mice War children's opera.

Best

David Chesky

American Ballet Theater

Interesting program.......
Russian music. Russian ballets. Russian dancers, Russian choreographer..... but wait.... it will be an American audience, so I guess that is why they call it American Ballet Theater. It is sad that these institutions think that we are so inept as New Yorker's that we don't have the talent to create art, or in this case,  re create it. Perhaps they are doing Ailey's "Revelations" right now at the Kirov ?

EGO

EGO is mans downfall and the catalyst to make him soar. When it dominates us, we are natural born Killers. When we tame it, we can create great things. But the EGO monster has to be fed more than our stomachs to give us some power in a powerless situation. Perhaps nature gave us EGO so we did not sit under a coconut tree all day thinking what is the point of doing anything. Perhaps the smartest man of all sits under that tree and see the big picture and is content watching his 70 years go by in peace knowing whatever he does, does not matter.

Pop Culture

The way our culture is retrogressing in the not to distance future actors in a large theater will recite nursery rhymes to an adult audience that will stand up and cheer.

Our Culture

Cultural institutions must be circumnavigated in order to create new culture.

Opera, a DEAD art form ?

I just saw a new English opera the critics raved about that was a complete bore. If this was an indie movie we would bomb it as a banal, boring and non-relevant story, but since the culture vulture critics need to justify their existence they put modern opera on a pedestal and look at it like some ink blot test trying to find some hidden meaning the rest of us cannot. The great operas entertain, engage, and enrich us and that is why they have stuck around for centuries and will continue to do so. 

On another note, where are the great American operas that the American opera houses created and put into the repertoire? They simply gives us more old European works to cater to an older elite wealthy audiences. Take a handful away and the entire opera world disappears. The fact is opera is a DEAD 18th century art form supplanted by the art form of today, FILM. It has no relevance and connection to modern America. The next generation of Silicon Valley venture capitalists will not support it, and it will die unless the classical world as a collective can create works that speak to a younger audience. And I don't mean the downtown scene that lowers the bar to be hip and pander to pseudo-intellectual rockers, but to find new works that reflect our current society and its concerns while still being able to entertain and engage the patrons.....then new opera will speak to a new generation....

Business

Business is just legalized war.