In advance of their participation in the SXSW Nonclassical Showcase, in partnership with Naxos Records and co-curated by Fast>>Forward>>Austin, I recently sat down with the award-winning Aiana String Quartet, the graduate string quartet in residence at the University of Texas Butler School of Music in Austin, TX.
Friends,
Thank you for your patience. You may have noticed that What Music Is has been on an unceremonious and unofficial hiatus. Thanks to those new readers and listeners from all over the world who have stopped by, even in (especially in) the absence of new content. I hate to reinforce a certain stereotype about graduate school, but my final semester in the Butler School of Music’s ivory tower (that bleeds orange) has proven to be a formidable challenge to maintaining this site. All the same, I have been involved in new adventures as a Graduate Fellow with Texas Performing Arts, working to convene Austin’s Classical Music Task Force. You can follow our twitter feed here. I’ve also resurrected my own personal twitter feed here. The whatmusicis twitter feed has had to stay on hiatus as well (maintaining three twitter feeds is also challenging. How’s that for a First World problem?).
Thank you to the many who have called or emailed to ask when the next podcast is going to be posted. The good news is…..a new one has already been recorded! It has to be edited, but I hope to have it up over the weekend. It was actually done in partnership with Texas Performing Arts, and it takes the form of an archival interview with a very exciting young chamber group based in Austin. I’ll tell more later, but a hint is that this group will be performing at this year’s SXSW convention in Austin, as SXSW continues to branch out into classical music.
Thanks again, readers and listeners.
Lane
P.S. How about that Golijov story, huh? If i was doing the podcast regularly, it would LEAD every one. #wouldacouldashoulda
Apparently, Samian Quazi is a real person. I, like many people, simply could not imagine who would have benefited from such an article (see previous post) advocating the defunding of university arts programs based on the perception that the arts do not contribute in any meaningful way to the economy of a city or on the equally-incorrect position that it is unlikely for arts graduates to find jobs. Turns out, it was written by a misinformed student. I can accept that. I still challenge him to a public debate. I’m also still upset that The Daily Texan did not give equal space in the same issue to an opposing viewpoint.
There has been a lot of buzz this week about this asinine article that appeared in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of The University of Texas (where I’m a doctoral candidate) on Tuesday, November 15. It was authored by someone named “Samian Quazi,” whom the article states is a “nursing graduate student.” No such name appears in the UT Directory and the UT registrar’s office confirmed to me today that it has no record of a student with that name enrolled in the university. Granted, the student may have requested that this information be kept private, but is this what student media has come to? Is this responsible journalism? Is it a pseudonym? What if all journalism was conducted this way? There is no evidence that equal space was devoted (in the November 15, 2011 issue) to an opposing viewpoint.
The article advocates defunding arts programs in universities because artists don’t meaningfully contribute to the economy, and because there are no jobs anyway, so one shouldn’t bother.
Who would stand to gain from such an article? Many outraged students in UT’s College of Fine Arts have suggested that the article originated from a member of the College of Fine Arts itself (to generate the impassioned and well-informed comments that follow the article on The Daily Texan’s website), from someone on the Board of Regents, and even from the Governor’s office. The content of the article is ridiculous enough; with no facts and no statistics, it appears that no research was done before writing it. It also appears that The Daily Texan printed a column authored by someone using a pseudonym without giving equal space to the opposing view in the same issue of its paper. This is what fairness in journalism is predicated upon, and The Daily Texan has dropped the ball. I intend to make these observations known to Texas Student Media, the parent organization of The Daily Texan, as its Executive Committee meeting and its Board of Operating Trustees meeting take place tomorrow afternoon at 12:30pm and 1:00pm, respectively. For information about these meetings (which are open to the public, though the agendas were set about a week ago, before the offending article appeared), go here.
The phone number of The Daily Texan is (512) 471-4591. Call this number and demand to speak with “Samian Quazi.” Demand to know why The Daily Texan gave print space to this and not to an opposing viewpoint.
Finally, hear me now…..I hereby challenge Samian Quazi to a public debate on the subject of his pathetic article, based on terms that will be agreed upon in advance by both sides. The debate will take place within the College of Fine Arts. I dare such an individual, if he actually exists, to come onto our turf and repeat what he wrote. Samian Quazi, show thyself. My name is Lane Harder, and I’m in the UT directory. Email me at: lane@whatmusicis.com.
Classical music is rarely on the world’s collective radar at any one time. The last time I can recall the entire world focusing on a piece of classical music at once was when Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Anthony McGill played (mimed, rather, due to the cold) John Williams’s Air and Simple Gifts at President Obama’s inauguration in Washington. Tomas Tranströmer lost the use of his right arm and so can only play piano with his left, presumably playing repertoire the likes of which other similarly-affected pianists like Leon Fleischer have plumbed in their careers as performers. How heartening for someone of Tranströmer’s stature to deflect the spotlight from himself and onto music.
Click here for the article from The Independent and here for a Spanish-language video with a clip of him playing.
The Great Wagon by Michelle Deaver
On Saturday, October 1, an Austin audience at Moody Theater (best known as the studio venue for the television show Austin City Limits) was privy to a program called Austin Pictures, the inaugural concert of the 2011-2012 season of the Austin Classical Guitar Society. The program featured the ACGS Classical Guitar Orchestra (96 guitarists, by my count) conducted by Austin Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Bay, the Miró Quartet (resident string quartet at the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music), and the incomparable guitar soloist Jorge Caballero. The program featured painters and visual art students who exhibited original works based on individual movements of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, it featured a student film detailing each painting and interviewing each student artist, it featured a new work for the guitar orchestra and string quartet written by Joseph V. Williams II (a doctoral student in classical guitar at the Butler School), it featured a commissioned work by Jorge Morel (a real gem, I thought), and it featured Jorge Caballero performing something of a Holy Grail of solo guitar literature, the aforementioned Pictures at an Exhibition. That’s right. All of it. By himself. !!!
On paper, this looks like the miggedy-miggedy mack daddy of classical performances. A renowned soloist, a beloved conductor, a huge guitar orchestra, an exhibit of paintings based on the music,…..what’s not to love? The performances were top notch, the paintings were outstanding, and the sentiment for the whole event was very high.
So why did the evening as a whole fall flat?
There’s a lot of talk these days about making classical music “more accessible” to audiences. The reasons for the push for accessibility are numerous, some sound, some misguided. There seems to be a perception that concert halls are stuffy and boring. Composer and songwriter Gabe Kahane said as much in an interview with Kurt Andersen on NPR’s Studio 360 last week. Mention the idea of mixing classical music up with other styles of music on a concert program, and you’ll typically get an affirmative response. Mention the idea of taking classical music outside the concert hall to bars or nightclubs, and it also gets cool points. Good ideas, right? Well, are they?
Here’s what happened at Saturday’s performance, which took place at a location not exactly known for its association with classical music.
The Moody Theater stage was backlit with dramatic, colorful lighting, and a pre-concert film was being screened as the audience filed in. I have to admit that this built a sense of anticipation for the event. After some welcoming remarks from the stage, the Classical Guitar Orchestra and Miró Quartet (conducted by Peter Bay) launched into Joseph Williams’s excellent Austin Pictures, which had been commissioned for this event. Immediately there was something wrong. The resonance of the instruments was completely destroyed by their amplification. All the instruments were miked up (or “mic’ed up,” depending on your preference). Now here’s the irony…..One is used to hearing amplified classical guitar if it’s being performed in a large space. It’s a compromise that audiences understand all too well: mike it up or we won’t really hear it at all. This is especially true of larger chamber pieces performed in large halls in which a guitar is only one instrument of many. I didn’t understand amplifying the string quartet, however. Their natural, resonant sound was compressed into a tiny and tinny one coming from one of many loudspeakers. A student of mine, who is a guitarist, was there at the concert and I asked him what he thought and his immediate response was, “You could have done that whole piece with just four guitarists. They’re all miked up anyway, it’s not like you need the rest of them.” One could parse that second statement out a bit, but his point is well-taken. It’s not as though the music was ALL THAT MUCH LOUDER anyway, it just sounded worse.
Another irony is that, even with the amplification, the ambient noise in Moody is substantial, and considerably greater than what one might hear in a concert hall. The rear of the hall (on all levels) has a lot of open space so latecomers can be heard walking great distances on hard floors to get to their seats. This might not sound like a big deal, but there is a LOT of nuance in the music that got drowned out by it. What is a classical music lover to think about this? Is this somehow an improvement over the traditional model? Didn’t catch that great suspension that Boccherini wrote in his Introduction and Fandango because someone’s speech or footsteps could be heard from a considerable distance? What should the response be? “Oh well”? Here’s the problem…..there may not be another one of those moments in said piece or any other piece. It’s not like a pop song that might dwell on the same guitar riff for several minutes.
One of the most problematic issues was the lack of notice the audience received about the ending of either of the two intermissions. This caused a LOT of latecomers to the second third of the program. Many people missed out on the opening of Jorge Morel’s truly wonderful Songs and Dances for guitar and string quartet. And those that were in their seats had to contend with the noise of the latecomers. Now, had ZZ Top been performing there, the audience would have known that the band was back on stage after a break because they would hear Frank Beard’s drum kit being pounded and the roar of the crowd. Not so with classical music. Again, how is this change of venue an improvement over traditional ones?
I do believe that classical music can not only be exported from the concert hall but can thrive in non-traditional spaces (I’ve seen plenty of concerts in lofts and art galleries that were out of this world), but this particular event didn’t quite achieve the clarity that it needed and would have received had it been in a traditional space for classical music. And I don’t blame the outstanding Austin Classical Guitar Society, it’s just that Moody Theater is not set up for the delicacy and nuance of classical musicians playing on traditional instruments. It’s set up for audiences to be loud and have a good time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The performances on Saturday night, though, demanded full attention, demanded every sonic resource that the venue could give. The one that it needed most, namely silence, is one that it couldn’t give. It’s a shame that such wonderful performances were at the mercy of an ill-suited venue. So, to return to a common theme at whatmusicis.com, the idea was right, but the execution wasn’t. The next time we talk about taking classical music to non-traditional spaces, before we give it a rubber stamp of approval, we should strongly consider the real-world execution of such an endeavor.
A student in my Elements of Music class asked me today why whole rests and half rests look so similar. It’s a good question. Absent the staff, one gets a better sense of it:
I’m pretty up on the history of certain notational conventions but not on rests. Any takers?
This semester, I am privileged to be teaching music theory to sophomore music majors as well as to non-majors. The latter group is taking a course entitled Elements of Music. One of the components of the course is a series of assignments wherein students tweet (on Twitter, of course) about various topics, articles, videos, or pieces of music that I give to them. Their tweets include the hashtag #mus606 (the course number). Feel free to follow their discussions by searching for that hashtag. This week, they are commenting on two excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s Dialogues and a Diary. Even though we all know that much of Stravinsky’s authorship is spurious (what was it about Robert Craft’s involvement with his work that was so creepy?), these excerpts have some compelling points.
From Dialogues and a Diary (“Thoughts of an Octogenarian”)
by
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1963), pp. 23-36
What about the much-publicized “infinity of possibilities” in connection with the new art material of electronically produced sound? With few exceptions “infinite possibilities” has meant collages of organ burbling, rubber suction (indecent, this), machine-gunning, and other – this is curious – representational and associative noises more appropriate to Mr. Disney’s musical mimicries. Not the fact of possibilities, of course, but choice is the beginning of art. The sound lab is already a part of the musical supermarket, however. (Especially in the field of publicity. The structure of a new piece by Xenakis is advertised as having been “worked out on the IBM 7090 electronic computer” as though that were a guarantee of quality.) I know of a composer who wanted “something electronic, kind of middle range, bassoon-trombone like” – these were his only instructions to the sound engineer, who nevertheless flipped a toggle switch, made a few connections, and handed the composer an envelope containing a tape of the desired noise. The composition, I am told, sounds like “electronic Brahms.” …..
…..
An electronic machine cannot dehumanize (whatever that may be); indeed, it can only do what it has been directed to do. It may extend memory functions, for example, when a man has established its memory locations and devised the means to signal and connect them. But the most nearly perfect musical machine, a Stradivarius as well as an electronic synthesizer, is useless until joined to a man with musical skill and imagination. The stained-glass artists of Chartres had few colors, and the stained-glass artists of today have hundreds of colors but no Chartres. Organs, too, have more stops now than ever before, but no Bach. Not enlarged resources, then, but men and what they “believe.”
Podcast fans, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been appointed the Graduate Fellow of Texas Performing Arts, an arts organization based on the campus of The University of Texas. My job with Texas Performing Arts will consist of helping to convene a Classical Music Task Force to develop a vibrant and sustainable classical music community in the city of Austin. This position comes as a result of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
More info can be found here.
I’m excited about this position, because I feel that the aim of the project overlaps a great deal with my own, namely that of extending the conversation about classical music and its myriad issues beyond the classroom and boardroom and into more of a public arena. I am certainly interested in continuing the conversation with the listeners. Feel free to write me at any time with your thoughts about the future of classical music, the current state of classical music, or any related topic. My email address is lane@whatmusicis.com. Performers and composers regularly write to me to give me great intel about the experience of performing a new work, about what composers are worth checking out and which ones aren’t, etc. Soon I will be deferring to the collective wisdom of the What Music Is listeners on some of these issues that we tackle with Texas Performing Arts. Granted, we’re not out to “save classical music,” but seeing it vividly through the lens of one city’s approach to it is going to be rewarding, challenging, and fulfilling, I have no doubt.
By the way, I’m going to keep doing the podcast.
Congratulations to Benjamin C.S. Boyle, a friend of the podcast, on the new release on Innova Records of his brilliant Sonata-Cantilena for flute and piano, performed by Mimi Stillman and Charles Abramovic. I know lots of people that have been looking forward to this release for some time.
Onward.
Always be prepared to make the argument.
We are ambassadors. All artists, teachers of art, and consumers of art are ambassadors for art to the rest of the world. We must never forget this. Increasingly, we are placed in the unfortunate position of having to justify our collective existence. This is not the most fun circumstance in which artists might find themselves, but it is also a wonderful opportunity for us to sharpen our arguments in support of arts and arts education funding.
In the wake of the recent fallout from an article appearing in The Daily Texan recently about defunding arts programs at the university level (mentioned in a previous post), I have had a number of conversations about this subject with teachers, administrators, other colleagues of mine, and students. Many have crafted finely-honed and articulate reasons in favor of arts funding. Some have one argument at their disposal, maybe two. Some however, have responded with complete bewilderment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I just can’t believe that someone [the author of the article] can advocate for cutting arts funding. Doesn’t this person know how important art is? Art is everywhere. If there were no art, there would be no music, no television programming, no films, no advertising, etc.”
You can’t believe it? Well, believe it.
There is no rule, anywhere, that will hold anyone who has access to the purse strings of a university responsible for making a balanced, rationale choice in the form of considering how important art is to culture, and, moreover, how vital arts education is to a society. Disbelieving that someone could advocate for cutting arts funding is no longer a valid response (not that it ever was). We in the arts community must always be ready to advocate and educate those who would oppose our existence via public support.
I have formed a new page on this site entitled “Arguments for Educational Arts Funding.” [I took down the Worst Titles List. While I'm still convicted about it, I feel that this new page is a more responsible use of the space on this site.] Please visit it and contribute your own arguments for arts funding. Feel free to link to this page and get as many people involved as possible. As we have seen, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach to this subject, and we must always be prepared to defend ourselves against those who would take away our support.
2 comments | tags: Arguments arts educational funding university education University Texas public taxpayer | posted in Blog posts, News and Commentary