Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Soldiers in the Armory

Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

    A few weeks ago, I followed the overflowing Whitney Biennial out of the museum to the Park Avenue Armory, a spectacular edifice of genteel militarism with peeling paneled walls, lofty ceilings, a room by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and an arched Drill Hall reminiscent of a nineteenth century train station. That’s where the lollapalooza of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival will take place: Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s angry and gargantuan opera Die Soldaten, in a production by David Pountney imported from the Ruhr Triennale. The score calls for an orchestra of 110, including fifteen percussionists, a jazz combo, and a stage band–so many musicians that the New York State Theater couldn’t contain them all when New York City Opera gave the New York premiere in 1991. The Armory's Drill Hall was designed for overwhelming force, though, and it will also provide the requisite industrial-age creepiness and modest dilapidation. (The show's big technological selling point is that the audience will sit on platforms that move on tracks alongside the catwalk-like stage.)
    The place is slowly being fixed up and impresarios are salivating; Gerard Mortier has plans to bring Messiaen’s Saint Francois d’Assise there. Some neighbors are less enthused, though they claim that their beef is with traffic on performance nights, not with colorful modernist music or oversize opera.

Recession and the Arts Quiz

by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

A collapse in the New York real estate market will . . .
    a) never materialize.
    b) finally produce housing in Manhattan even artists and musicians can afford.
    c) produce a glut of empty megamillion dollar condos, but leave regular-people housing just as scarce and expensive as ever.

Rising oil prices will . . .
    a) slow expansion in car-dependent suburbs, thereby concentrating growth in cities and bringing audiences closer to urban arts venues.
    b) force oil conglomerates to find creative ways to spend their trillion-dollar windfall, some of which will flow into the arts.
    c) cause worldwide panic, supplying apocalypse-minded artists with plenty of fresh material.
    d) All of the above.

The weakening dollar will . . .
    a) raise costs of foreign travel, making it prohibitive for American orchestras to go on tour.
    b) make a weekend at the Metropolitan Opera seem like a bargain for Spaniards, who offset the defections of Bear Stearns opera fans
    c)  give Asian and European companies a bigger bang for their sponsorship buck than they would get at home; watch for more “global sponsorships” like Credit Suisse's deal with the New York Philharmonic.
    d) All of the above

Wall St. losses will . . .
    a)  deprive the arts of sponsorship money and wealthy ticket-buyers, causing some organizations to go out of business and others to scale back dramatically.
    b) relieve visual artists of the pressure to churn out work that functions as high-priced investment tools, allowing them to go back to making plain old art.
    c) temporarily loosen materialism’s headlock on culture, creating breathing room for the arts.
    d) All of the above.

A drop in public money available for the arts will . . .
    a) be partially offset by increases in spending by the National Endowment for the Arts if a Democrat becomes president.
    b) have little effect on major arts organizations, which reduced their dependence on government funds –  and the concomitant political problems – to a bare minimum years ago.
    c) be devastating for small arts organizations that depend heavily on state and local grants.
    d) All of the above.

Answers in late 2009.

Free associations

By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

    I have two portfolios at New York magazine: one is so-called-classical music, the other architecture. Both are intensely social, mostly urban arts that require institutions, consensus, community, patience, vision, and plenty of money. Decide today that you’d really like a new office tower and a new opera, and they’ll both start to acquire some reality around the same time, in, oh, 2012.  In this week’s column, I take the Cooper Union to task for commissioning a beautiful building but neglecting the wider urban environment around it. It’s the same with many musical organizations that read their mission narrowly, see their education departments as a way to increase their own future audiences rather than foster the art form, and figure that if they give a world premiere every now and again, they have dispatched their duty to contemporary music.
     Developers in New York City can at least count on an activist Bloomberg administration to take a hand in the public realm. Arts organizations have only each other to leverage their efforts. The one institution that appears to take its collaborative, citywide responsibility most seriously is Carnegie Hall, which last fall fanned out across the boroughs for its tribute to Berlin and next season will head up to the Apollo Theater during a festival of African-American culture curated by Jessye Norman.
    The event gets under way a year from now. I wonder if it just might rate a visit from our first post-racial president?

Money Pit Bands

by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

    These days, when depressives can get their fix of morbid news more efficiently from the business section of the paper than from the obituary pages, an analysis of the economic health of American symphony orchestras gets a little lost in the general clamor of gnashing teeth. The latest report, commissioned by the Mellon Foundation and written by Stanford economics professor Robert J. Flanagan, makes it clear that running a symphony orchestra requires a high tolerance for paradox and fiscal frustration. You could raise ticket revenue by adding concerts, but that only means more empty seats. You could try to fill the seats by doing more marketing, but Flanagan shows that once you’ve covered the basics, new advertising initiatives are often not worth the investment. Neither are gala benefits, in many cases: the largest orchestras would actually save money by fundraising less. Vanishing subscribers are being replaced by single-ticket buyers, who are by definition harder to please, more expensive to reach, and less likely to return. It's also costing organizations more to earn less, because they have to keep paying those pipers. The one segment of the classical music world whose fortunes are improving is orchestra musicians whose income has “increased more rapidly than the pay of most other groups of workers.”
    This doesn't mean that the symphony orchestras are no longer viable, or that they're about to be extinct, only that they have to do everything right. As Flanagan reports, “most orchestras cannot achieve economic stability by selling out their concert halls, or by ever-increasing marketing expenditures, or by drawing prudent amounts from their endowments, or by relying on direct government support.” (Nor, presumably, does it help to follow the opposite strategy: play less and less music and tell fewer and fewer people about them, until you’re performing a couple of encores in a darkened hall.) To stay financially stable, orchestras have to be deft and also lucky enough to inhabit the right community. A shuttered factory, a spate of crime, a surge in traffic, a beloved conductor’s departure – any of these can undercut an orchestra’s efforts at staying in the black.
    Of course, Flanagan limited his analysis to financial reports, which means he couldn’t evaluate the fiscal impact of musical quality or  imaginative programming. That may be the secret–or at least unstudied–weapon in the fight for solvency. After all, orchestras make money in order to make music, not the other way around.

1969

by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

  The dauntless new music group Alarm Will Sound is embarking on another of its crazy projects. Having orchestrated the electronica of Aphex Twin, dispatched Varèse's Intégrales, and turned the Shaggs's implausibly incompetent–or is it sublimely virtuosic?–folk into concert music, the group has now turned its attention to the Year of Madness, 1969. It will be a while before the project gels in its full multimedia glory, but the repertoire gets its first public outing in two performances this weekend at The Kitchen. Today I sat in on a rehearsal for "Revolution No. 9," an obsessively accurate transcription of that signal event in the history of organized delirium.  Suffice it to say that at one point a percussionist asked other players to move away so they wouldn't be hit by shards of flying glass.

Solo

by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

    For reasons I can’t quite articulate, Philip Glass tops the list of composers whose music friends and colleagues keep telling me I really ought to love but that, in fact, I don’t. (The rest of the list is confidential, and I will neither confirm nor deny that Bruckner’s name appears anywhere on it.) However, I have become smitten with one freshly blown Glass recording: Songs and Poems for solo cello, played by Wendy Sutter. Instead of the richly layered thrumming of his orchestral pieces, which often put me in mind of a showroom full of idling Jaguars, Glass has pared his patterns down so that they sound intensely personal. Glass and Sutter reportedly fell in love over this score, and it does have a romantically melancholy tone. It’s not a conversation, though, but a soliloquy, that most unsociable of forms. Sutter has a big sound, which makes her cello seem that much more solitary–a filament of expression; a lone, repeating rune. The CD includes Tissues, for cello, percussion, and piano, from 2002, which is chamber music of a particularly stark and lonely, though eerily beautiful kind. The patterns seem like stutters here: the cello keeps trying to formulate a complete thought–to connect with instruments that either keep their distance by moving along in parallel motion or shimmer in a floating harmonic halo.

Hot Zone at the Met

-Ernani!

-Bless you.

Loss

By Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

The director Anthony Minghella, a genuinely romantic soul,  is dead at 54. Among other consequences, this leaves Osvaldo Golijov without a collaborator for the opera, tentatively titled Daedalus, that the Metropolitan Opera commissioned for the 2011-12 season.

Tinkering with Market Forces

by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

Reality-Based Item No. 1: Harvard Graduate School of Design and the architectural firm RMJM will pool $2 million in an effort to guide freshly minted architects and engineers away from “more lucrative careers in high-tech and management consulting.”

Reality-based Item No. 2: Harvard Law School announced that it would waive $40,000 tuition for third-year students who agree to spend five years working in government or for non-profit organizations.

Fantasy-based Item No. 1: Harvard Business School and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies form a partnership to develop a new economic model for journalism in a post-print world. “While ink on paper is a replaceable technology, the catastrophic implosion of the news-gathering business is a threat to democracy,” the two institutions announce in a joint statement. 

Fantasy-based Item No. 2: Harvard Business School and Harvard's Office for the Arts create a new foundation to guide artists, filmmakers, choreographers, and composers away from more promising careers in, say, criticism.

Carter Tops the Charts

by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com

    An article from the Omaha World-Herald points out that classical music is far more (relatively) popular among downloaders than it was when you could walk into an emporium, hear Karl Böhm's Brahms 4th rattling the racks, and ask for advice from an obsessively well informed young man with a beard. The article mentions e-music, which is the mother of all bargain bins, with classical fare from large independent labels such as Chandos, Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, and Koch, as well as outfits that existed only long enough to stamp a logo on a compact disc. I write a column for e-music's online magazine, so I spend a fair amount of time combing through the catalog, but I don't have a prayer of keeping pace with the flow of new additions: 365 CDs just since the beginning of March! There's a lot of chaff, of course, but the site's subscribers don't seem to have any trouble hacking through it to assert their idiosyncratic taste. The current chart-topper is the Pacifica Quartet's recording of String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 by that easy-listening phenom, Elliott Carter. (A free promotional download helped, but still.) No. 2 is Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic, a minimalist portrayal of slow-motion calamity that caused one Floridian subscriber's spouse to ask: "What's wrong with the player?" Move over, Bocelli.