Introducing a New Series: Under-Appreciated Composers for Eager Appreciators

Today's post will be a quick one; I am hoping that you all save your word-count quota for the subsequent entries this post details. I have been at work on a few different write-ups, and I decided to turn them into a recurring series on The Development Section:

Under-Appreciated Composers for Eager Appreciators

The list of composers held in the pantheon of undisputed greatness is already long and unwieldy. Since these composers are all considered vital for understanding the evolution of classical music, it becomes difficult to devote the time needed to take a musical road less-traveled. Unless the performer or label is well-known, it can be risky to record music outside the "greatest hits" of the standard repertoire, making some genuinely great music all the more difficult to come by. New listeners are sometimes discouraged from listening to obscure composers without first gaining context by listening to the works of "pantheon" composers, and so the cycle begins anew.

For this reason, I have decided to start a small series of write-ups on some composers who, in my personal opinion, merit closer attention, even if that closer attention only takes the form of forty minutes spent with a long-forgotten string quartet and a glass of wine. The write-ups themselves will not be much: simple biographies, sometimes with the benefit of historical context, a small selected bibliography, and perhaps a portrait of the composer if there is one in the public domain. More importantly, I will try to embed high-quality performances of selected works when possible, and when not, I will provide "For Listening" and "For Further Reading" lists. If even one person seeks out a few works by one of these composers, then this little blog will have done more than I could reasonably expect of it.

In general, there are some common threads that have hurt certain composers' legacies, keeping them away from the tips of listeners' tongues:

1. The composer wrote in a conservative style. By my count, two composers sit on the "pantheon," without debate, who spent their careers perfecting what came before rather than introducing something new. Granted, they are regarded as two of the very greatest:

Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Commons.

For most composers, innovation had a large part to do with legacy. Conservatives often ended up enjoying local and regional success in their lifetimes, but as History selected some other composer to be the one most "characteristic" of their styles, they were left on the library shelves to be forgotten.

2. Frankly, the composer is not quite "great." This affects many composers from the first list. Perhaps Bach, Mozart, and Brahms never composed any weak music, but basically every other composer has at least one "dud" to his or her name. This is the nature of creation: those who are unafraid to fail while exploring the union of personal expression and human aesthetics are those who can achieve greatness. However, odd decisions and uncontrolled changes are the rule rather than the exception for some composers. Often, this leads to the reasonable conclusion that these composers were weak writers, but that conclusion runs the risk of marginalizing some wonderful works that are just as capable of elevating the human spirit as works by the glorified masters. Think of all the one-hit wonders on the radio. Some of those "one hits" can move you to tears, make you drop everything and dance, or get an entire room singing along, without irony, faces lit up with joy. Do we ignore those hits just because their authors lack a catalog of eight multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated albums?

3. The composer was born in the wrong place or time. Personal liberty has come a long way in the last several centuries. It is unthinkable now that any musician would be censored or controlled unless his or her music literally incited riots and crimes. However, many composers have not enjoyed this same sense of freedom, often due to ethnic or religious background. Thus, some composers have lost their seat at the "pantheon" just for being born the wrong way.

4. The composer is female. Music history is sexist. Exactly one opera by a female composer has been produced at the Met. This is actually scheduled to change in the 2016-17 season, but over a century will have elapsed between opera by female composers. Over a century has not elapsed between great female composers. I, for one, am tired of the "classical music is dying" tropes, but rather than go after perceived stodginess in the music, if I were trying to make that argument, I would start with the culture of sexism that continues to shape the course of classical music history.

With all of this having been laid out, I have about six composers I am interested in introducing through this blog series, but I am hoping to receive some requests. I am happy to do a little research if needed, and if my listeners' digests are any good, perhaps your suggestion will have helped somebody else find a way into classical music. -SB

Written Reflections

1. What composers would you like to see featured in a series of this title?
2. Do you often seek out less-appreciated music, classical or otherwise, or do you prefer to have these works "come to you" in the form of curated lists and personal recommendations?

New Music Could Be So Much More Inviting Sometimes

As far as musicians go, I am about as closed-minded as they come. That is a hazardous thing to admit in a field where willingness to try new things can score gigs. There are just some experiences for which I see little hope of enjoyment or meaning, and I prefer to let them fall on more-expert ears and into more-expert hands. Curmudgeonly though I may be, I am amazed by the tone in conversation often taken by performers and listeners alike regarding music written since World War I, and particularly regarding works written in this century. It scarcely serves composers well – not that composers deserve or need our sympathies.

Generally speaking, I have observed two groups of people when I attend concerts of new music: those who categorically reject all new music, assume dissonance and unanticipated changes to demonstrate deficiency in compositional technique or knowledge, and assume that avant-garde composers are those who cannot write well traditionally; and those who categorically accept all new music from fear of being dismissive, vocally insisting upon their enjoyment of certain qualities of the music in the hopes that this will make them actually enjoy it. Conspicuously absent are those who simply enjoy what they like and avoid the rest, whether it was written two centuries ago or yesterday. In other words, new music makes people afraid to have taste, as though it is frowned upon to have a nonintellectual opinion about a new work.

This, to me, is a great shame, because the stigma is shaping the enjoyment for many people in a way that affects both the audience for new music ensembles, and the level of musical enrichment possible in listeners' daily lives. Like historically-informed early music, mainstage symphonic concerts, and major rock festivals, a well-executed new music concert attended by a receptive and interested audience can have a primal, breathtaking effect that does not need to be described to be felt. By clinging to either disdain for dissonant sounds or timid, generic enjoyment, people are limiting their ability to see what a piece of music can "make" them feel.

Just last week, I attended a concert at the Aesthetic Parlour in Pittsburgh, co-produced by Alia Musica Pittsburgh welcoming new resident artist Ken Ueno. The program featured four main selections that could not have been more different from one another, even though three of the major works were completely improvised. I was not necessarily enchanted by all four pieces of music – another risky admission, given the favor in which I hold Alia Musica as a performance organization, and my newfound fandom of Ken Ueno – but that is not the point. The point is that, for many reasons, this concert served as an excellent, positive example of what new music can be when all of the ingredients for proper appreciation and production come together.

• The Aesthetic Parlour is essentially an expanded living room and guest area in a beautiful old house in Lawrenceville, arguably a current hipster stronghold in Pittsburgh. There was seating for about forty, and by God, that house was packed.
• The audience came from all backgrounds – music students, fine art students, general music fans, rock music fans and musicians, local music scholars, and even other composers – and the close quarters invited, if not begged, conversation among everybody.
• As there was not a true “backstage” entrance, performers were not afraid to change the standard mode of taking the stage. As they walked around and through the seating area, they said hellos and introduced their work without a microphone, in a way that was brief, conversational, and gave just enough idea of their styles to establish a norm from which there were many surprises.
• Most importantly, the performers understood their music, and music in general, and were committed and engaged. “Engaged” here is not a generic term for putting on an intense-looking face, but instead a true sense that these men and women were in character, and understood that music can have more than one character.
  • The opening piece had elements of musique concrète, ambient and industrial techno, free jazz, and classical avant-garde. In practice, this meant periods where the dominant sound quality was audio feedback, and there were a few long tones from saxophone and trombone to rise above the din, with distorted guitar and drum punctuations. Generally speaking, the performers were aloof from one another, something that my classically-trained instincts shunned at first, but it served to add to a sense of communication into a chaotic void. Because each performer was so consistent in his posture and demeanor, it started to almost resemble the avant-garde equivalent of shoegaze.
  • The second piece, the U.S. premiere of Seven Visions of Alchemy by Federico Garcia-De Castro, was the only fully-notated work on the program, and fit much more neatly into the canon of “classical music” that most define for themselves. The performers, flutist Sarah Steranka and cellist Cody Green, carried themselves as the seasoned chamber musicians they are, with eye contact, matching movements that diverged when the music did, and wonderful selling of transitions and character changes.
  • Headline act Ken Ueno is a vocalist – a voice user. This does not mean that we were then presented to a few bel canto aria selections. Ueno specializes in overtone singing, and his improvisation featured this, as well as a sort of perpetuum mobile of whispered vocables that were nothing short of virtuosic, primal screams, and manipulation of a bullhorn to create synthesizer-like effects. His performance energy was inimitable, and essential for the music. With so many rapid changes in the type of sound he was producing, his face, posture, volume, direction, and general sense of emotion were like light switches.

Consider this video, taken from the encore by Garcia De-Castro. The ambient noise from the room unfortunately deprives us of some of those amazing, rapid-fire whispers, but nonetheless, please observe that it is possible to conceive and execute a Tuvan, emocore, slam poetry quasi-scat jazz tune:

Whatever your personal taste regarding this style of music, notice how closely the audience is situated in this venue. The performance was loud at times – in particular, during the first piece, I felt like I was at a seedy rock 'n' roll club – but it always felt intimate, like the swells in sound were encompassing the performers and the audience in the same sphere as the walls rumbled and the chairs rattled. Note the bipolarity in Ueno's part, and the bipolarity with which Ueno performs it, holding the tension in the room until he suddenly releases it by breaking the fourth wall to say, “Thank you very much.” With incredible conviction and talent from all three performers, this improvisation accomplished what so many pieces of music fail to do: it kept an audience silent for four minutes and transported listeners into another world.

It is possible to list the opposites of my bulleted list, and thus spell out some of the negative stereotypes plaguing the typical new music environment. Some concerts take place in the same venues, and exact same mode, as “mainstream” classical concerts, but without changing the means of promotion, draw about a tenth of the audience. Whether your audience is ten or ten thousand, the venue should feel full. Ten listeners can create a wonderful listening environment, but in an empty hall, the atmosphere is stifling for performers.

Then, not to shield performers from too much blame, there are some unwilling to break their conservatory comfort zones, and play with a disengaged, neutral face, eyes locked on their music stands, from downbeat to Fine. This is not encouraged in Romantic orchestral music either, but in Romantic orchestral music, the elements involved are ingrained in our cultural understanding of what “music” is. The entire point of many newer works is that a musical experience can happen without such narrow constraints as rhythm, pitch, and even melody. Listening for other elements that are initially more abstract, such as texture and tone color, we can broaden our definition of music to mean “organized sound” and listen intently to music that may challenge us, or even lead us to feel physically uncomfortable. After all, our culture accepts and expects most other art forms to occasionally be abrasive – why not music?

For this to work, though, the performers have to be paying attention to the elements that they need the audience to notice, and the concerns that lead to Vacant Performer Face Syndrome need to be so well-prepared as to be automatic. If a performer cannot maintain consistent body language through the end of a phrase because the last bar of the phrase is on the top of the next page, or if a performer is not able to conceive of a "phrase," instead seeing a series of disjunct rhythms and scattered notes, that moment was insufficiently prepared.

An empty concert hall, filled with music that the performers do not always fully understand, is sure to leave that mostly-empty audience striving to convince themselves that what they heard was good, instead of saying with conviction that they liked or did not like the experience. For better or for worse, that decisiveness is a much truer measure of the success of a new music concert, and it makes sure that the concert is talked about and is a part of our musical culture. This requires some investment of attention from both performers and audiences.

People understand not to write off Indian food as bad food because it tastes different from Italian food, and yet they shun new music because it is made of different ingredients than it was in past centuries. Like any genre, there is both good and bad new music. Like any genre, different people will define those categories differently. Like any genre, it can be well-understood, even if not instantly. Accepting those three thoughts can accomplish three things: open a new world of sound and feeling to the closed-minded, put the fearfully open-minded at ease, and make the standard audience much less stuffy, welcoming more people to become enthusiastic new music listeners. None of these are bad things. -SB

Written Reflections

1. Do you seek out, or have you ever attended, live concerts of new music? How does your experience relate to your experience with other concerts?
2. Do you notice the body language and level of engagement of the performers when listening to any style of music? Does the visual communication shape your overall enjoyment of the performance?
3. What are some of the things that negatively impact your musical experience at a concert of any style - rock, hip-hop, classical, avant-garde, or even open mic nights at coffee stores?

Cell Phones and the Concert Experience: The Customer may be Winning, but He's Still not Right

Today, I kick off The Development Section with an age-old tactic for high school essays written at the deadline: sound off on a debate that already has plenty of participants, peaked in fervor about two years ago, and is moving decisively in one direction. In this post, the sights are set on a point of contention for performers and audiences alike: the use of electronic devices during performances and events. Beyond the issue of their appropriateness, I explore whether it is worth continuing to embrace their use as part of both the promotion and dissemination of live art.

I should really get into the habit of checking my facts on claims like this, but in the twenty-first century, it can be safely concluded that consumers have seen an increase in the number of devices that beep, blink, buzz, squawk, screech, and otherwise emit. These devices enable us to connect to the outside world anywhere, anytime. This is generally a good thing. However, some lines have to be drawn when the squawking and the buzzing bleed into the experiences of others. Thus, most decent folks have agreed to refrain from using devices in the midst of large groups who cannot simply choose to leave – buses, movie theaters, and, to a lessening extent, live performances.

Courtesy of SplitShire; in fact, one of the first results for "concert."

I am a curmudgeon about having electronic devices out in most social settings, and it amazes me just how many environments have become “normal” opportunities to check texts and e-mails. I often scold my parents about keeping their cell phones on the dinner table at restaurants, and if I could find a way to do it without being condescending, I would scold my friends, too. Constant access to both friends and work has led a lot of people to get their wires crossed about the relative urgency of the things on their screens. On a vain note, the vacant-eyed expression of a person trying to have a conversation with both eyes on an e-mail is scarcely flattering. People argue that “it isn't better or worse, it's just a different way,” but in the "new way," there is a distinct difference in the basic display of respect for the people in front of us. And businesses humor it rather than confront it!

This is no longer just a “kids these days” rant: arts organizations are including theater Tweeters in their marketing strategy.

Just about everybody has something to say about it, too, and like any political, social, or cultural issue in the twenty-first century, two reasonable schools of thought have set themselves diametrically apart, each with ample vitriol about the flawed cultural worldview the other school espouses. In one predictably-grumpy corner are people who, for all their grandiose statements about the value of art and lectures about courtesy to other patrons, usually bet the farm on the core argument of, “You're having fun the wrong way!”

In the other corner, we have, well, this.

The debate may rage on about what should be, but as far as what is, a sea of dimly-lit 600x600 images leave us no mystery. This is not limited to pop and rock concerts, either. In fact, though the scope of their use is exponentially greater in the world of amplified arena shows, the tone from the organizations is arguably more welcoming in the world of classical music.

Among vocal detractors, to the point of prohibiting electronic devices at concerts:

• Jack White
• Beyoncé
• Corey Taylor (Slipknot, Stone Sour)
• She and Him
• Prince

Among classical music organizations that have or have tried programs specifically promoting the use of mobile technologies:

• San Francisco Symphony
• Kansas City Opera
• Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
• Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra
• Charlotte Symphony

I thought about orienting this post strictly around the argument that it makes no sense to spend money, time, and emotional energy getting ready to attend a concert and then watch it through a screen just like most other forms of entertainment. I thought about arguing that, rather than trying to make classical music “hip” by promoting a twenty-first century attention span, more pop musicians should be like Corey Taylor, and (sternly) encourage audiences to reconnect with the part of the mind that can create a rich and memorable experience with just one stimulus. (Granted, in Corey Taylor's case, that “one stimulus” actually involves grotesque masks, full-body costumes, flashing lights, decibel levels only whales can produce naturally, and gyroscopic drum solos.) About two paragraphs in, though, a thought occurred to me: is this all actually working?

There is definitely a correlation between the change in attitude and the current economic climate of orchestras. By the way, it is refreshing to point out that, at the moment, that climate is a good one. In fact, from my brief list of phone-savvy orchestras, two were called out by the Met Orchestra Musicians for spectacular gains in attendance and endowments.

Something that bears repeating, though (and as a career contrarian, I am happy to repeat it), is that correlation does not imply causation. Take the case of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, which not only increased attendance but generated a budget surplus in 2014. A budget surplus in 2014 sounds incredible, given that the business model for a city symphony orchestra relies on donations more than ticket sales by design. But that surplus was only made possible by a musicians' contract that involved a hefty pay cut and roster reduction.

In fact, many of the orchestras that faced bitter, high-profile labor conflict in the early 2010s – like Detroit, Minnesota, and Chicago – appear on that Met Orchestra Musicians article, with suddenly-cheery forecasts. Rather than suggest that the reductions were the correct move, this only shows me that some executive boards have no intention of learning from their mistakes and excesses, but that is an argument for another article. This is all before even considering that the overall economic climate in the Western world has been better since the start of Obama's second term. (Pop quiz: was that a correlation, or a causation?)

It is too early to draw any meaningful conclusions, as electronics-enabled concert programming has really only been a major trend in this decade, but there is little in this first batch of evidence to suggest that permitted cell phone use is driving the growth of arts organizations. That leaves one argument to consider, often made by proponents of pulling out a phone during a performance: now that we have the technology to preserve and share our lives with the people important to us, why not keep a digital memento of a major event?

Pictured: my digital memento of a major event. Can you tell who is playing?

I decided not to link to any specific video and single out some poor fan as an example of my counter-argument, but comb through this list of Foo Fighters live videos. It is instantly obvious which ones are bootlegs of professional footage, and which ones were shot by fans on cell phones. Between the constant camera blurring and the inability to hear anything besides bass, screaming fans, and the buzzing of an overloaded camera mic, what exactly do these videos preserve? What is their goal? Will the person who took them be able to actually relive some of the experience (which the fuddy-duddies say they're missing anyway) by watching? Could this be shown to non-fans, and would they be able to form an impression of the Foo Fighters? Would the band want material that portrays them sounding like this online?

While the camera overloading is not nearly as dramatic, take some time to look through orchestral pops videos taken on cell phones as well. There is one of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra playing “Lose Yourself” that pretty clearly indicates the sort of things I am talking about: dim lights, silhouettes of fellow patrons blocking some of the view of the orchestra, generally thin woodwind and string sound because of the nature of home digital recorders, and just generally poor video quality.

It is my opinion that society is too accustomed to being told that it is right. It makes basic business sense to appeal to the audience rather than criticize it, but the arts are special because of their ability to elevate us beyond basic business sense. Music and theater have long used allegory and metaphor as a catalyst for social change; why not in the direct influence on concert etiquette? If it has not already happened, caving to cell phone culture is going to have a negative impact on the integrity of the product that goes beyond the nuisance of a ringtone interrupting Mahler. -SB

Written Reflections

1. Do you think the impact of cell phone use during concerts is positive, negative, or insignificant? Do you have any experience from a live event, either seeing a cell phone used or using one yourself, that affirms your opinion?
2. Do you think that current attempts by classical music organizations to cater to modern technology are effective? Do you think that they could be used to enhance the concert-going experience, regardless of whether you think they have yet achieved this?
3. As a performer, has an audience member's use of a cell phone affected a performance you have given?