Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 34

Moral Fire and Mitt Romney

As readers of this blog know, I am the author of a recently published book titled “Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle.” My topic is culture as an agent of moral empowerment. That is: my portraits are of four late nineteenth century Americans who believed that exposure to Beethoven and/or Wagner made people “better” – more humane, more compassionate. This is, I argue, a notion far out of fashion – and yet pertinent today. #

Last week I received an email from a colleague – an American historian – inquiring if reviewers of Moral Fire “got it.” I wrote back that the reviews have been uniformly favorable, but cursory. Only one reviewer (in the Wall Street Journal) had expressed a caveat. She was disconcerted that I did not seem bothered that Henry Higginson, Laura Langford, and Henry Krehbiel were elitist “paternalists.” This caveat initially perplexed me because Moral Fire emphasizes that Higginson, Langford, and Krehbiel were democrats. That is: as inventor, owner, and operator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Higginson reserved 25 cent tickets for all performances. As founder of the Seidl Society (a remarkable Brooklyn women’s club that presented Wagner at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at Coney Island), Langford brought working women and orphans to her Brighton Beach concerts (which were even less expensive than Higginson’s at Symphony Hall). As the “dean” of New York music critics, Krehbiel opined that the Dahomians at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition (despised and caricatured by other writers) were “amazingly ingenious” musicians, more rhythmically sophisticated than “Berlioz in his supremest efforts with his army of drummers.” #

In the context of the late Gilded Age, an “elitist” would be , e.g., John Sullivan Dwight, whose Harvard Musical Association concerts were only attendable by members of the Harvard Musical Association. No less than Higginson or Krehbiel, Dwight believed that Beethoven was morally empowering. But he feared the rabble; Boston’s Irish seemed uneducable to him. #

Higginson, Langford, and Krehbiel, by comparison, were zealous democratic pedagogues. Higginson delighted in the variety of his patrons at Symphony Hall (a classless auditorium without boxes). Langford’s Society pioneered in presenting lectures with orchestra. Krehbiel wrote the most widely used primer for musical laymen. They shared a conviction that learning and (especially) the arts would spread sweetness and light. #

That Higginson, Langford, and Krehbiel can nonetheless be read as elitists is a function of their language and convictions resituated in our twenty-first century. Persons educated and (especially) cultivated, they believed, were better persons. Beethoven’s symphonies, as experienced by Higginson and Krehbiel, inculcated humanity. Parsifal, as experienced by Langford, inculcated compassion. #

The uses of “education” are otherwise understood today. When educators and politicians talk about education, they talk about jobs and about the path to professional status and income. There is no talk, as in the late Gilded Age, of education as a catalyst for character, and of status thereby conferred. #

Higginson, who cared about the wellbeing of his city and of his nation about as much as any single human being could, wrote and lectured about “citizenship.” What kinds of citizens comprise our electorate today? I am a cultural historian, inexpert in the history of government and politics. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that the pertinent machinery of propaganda is more pervasive and sophisticated than ever before – that the electorate has never been more manipulable. Education, which could counteract Fox News, is today redefined by learning standards and standardized multiple choice tests. Mitt Romney, in the third Presidential debate, recast himself as amenable and non-confrontational as a strategy to woo women. It seems to have worked. His credibility generally – his status – partly depends on his documented capacity to amass wealth. #

When Romney speaks of education in terms of the high rankings enjoyed by Massachusetts schools when he was governor, he is not talking about education as I understand it. What I understand is that he opposes the NEA, the NEH, and PBS. Higginson (who, like Krehbiel, never graduated from college) elucidated an educational ideal different from Romney’s when he wrote that the Eroica Symphony “opens the flood-gates.” “The wail of grief, and then the sympathy which should comfort the sufferer. The wonderful funeral dirge, so solemn, so full, so deep, so splendid, and always with courage and comfort. The delightful march home from the grave in the scherzo . . . and then [in the finale] the climax of the melody, where the gates of heaven open, and we see the angels singing and reaching their hands to us with perfect welcome. No words are of any avail, and never does that passage of entire relief and joy come to me without tears – and I wait for it through life, and hear it, and wonder.” #

Another exemplar of Moral Fire from late nineteenth century America is the composer Antonin Dvorak, hired by Jeannette Thurber to direct her National Conservatory of Music. Mrs. Thurber was a fervent, if unsuccessful, advocate of federal funding for the arts. (So was Dvorak.) She inspired Dvorak to help American composers find an “American” voice. Krehbiel eagerly abetted this effort. The notion of American cultural identity embedded in Dvorak’s New World Symphony is one that embraces African Americans and Native Americans as iconic Americans. Dvorak came to this view via moral fire: a butcher’s son raised within a Hapsburg minority, he compassionately identified with the poor and disenfranchised. #

Last spring, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra presented a “Dvorak and America’ festival exploring the message of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. JoAnn Falletta, the orchestra’s music director, later wrote: “What was truly astonishing was that many [concert-goers] said that the symphony was completely changed for them — revealed as a work with deep literary roots and steeped in Dvorak’s empathy for the cultural world of Native Americans and African Americans. The composer himself emerged not only as a consummate artist but as a great humanitarian and visionary.” #

The crux of this testimonial is that Dvorak’s symphony matters because it conveys a moral message that is timeless and inspirational. I would call Buffalo’s festival an act of education. #

P.S.: For more on Romney’s corporate view of American exceptionalism, and its educational content, see E. L. Doctorow’s “Narrative C” in the Winter 2012 Daedalus. #

Kurt Weill and Darwinian Adaptation

My topic has ever been cultural transplantation – the fate of classical music when exported from Europe to America. Of the composers America has imported, Kurt Weill is a special case. In Berlin, Weill’s defining success was The Threepenny Opera, to a scathing anti-capitalist libretto by Bertolt Brecht. In America, he became a Broadway composer whose big hits were Lady in the Dark (1941, with Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart) and One Touch of Venus (1943, with Ogden Nash and S. J. Perelman). #

The late David Drew, the first major Weill scholar in the English-speaking world, unforgettably explored the riddle of the “two Weills.” “The difference between Weill up to 1934 and Weill after 1940 is not attributable to any development which could be described as normal,” Drew wrote in 1980. “While some notable artists have simply stopped creating at a certain stage in their careers and a few have put an end to their lives, Weill is perhaps the only one to have done away with his old creative self in order to make way for a new one.” #

A revisionist “one-Weill” narrative, however, is now the conventional wisdom. In his new “Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform,” the music historian Stephen Hinton has subtly and magisterially enshrined the view that Weill in America maintained the same plateau of inspiration and originality that made his reputation abroad. For the general reader, Ethan Mordden has produced “Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya” – which I reviewed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. #

If Weill had an enduring anchor, it necessarily had something to do with the legendary composer/pianist Ferruccio Busoni, with whom he studied in Berlin, and whose memory he ever revered. Hinton’s book nails the Weill-Busoni connection. Mordden’s does not. As for the one-Weill thesis, I have no doubt that this dialectical response to David Drew will sooner or later produce a response in turn. But Hinton’s book will remain a benchmark. #

Weill’s was a creative personality always in flux, and so will be his reputation. Few composers offer as captivating a study in adaptation. He is a veritably Darwinian phenomenon. #

(I write about Weill’s American adaptation in my own Artists in Exile.) #

Recapturing Moral Vision (cont’d)

As readers of this blog know, I was recently amazed to find myself talking on the radio for 20 minutes about my new book “Moral Fire” in what turned out to be a completely unhurried exchange with ample time for thought. That was on Boston’s WGBH, thanks to Brian Bell. #

Now, thanks to Chris Johnson, Houston public radio has broadcast an even longer, even more expansive interview – 50 minutes of me waxing nostalgic about public discourse and institutional achievement during the late Gilded Age. #

I frankly confess that I adore this interview, especially the last 10 minutes beginning at 41:22, where I’m asked what it all means for TODAY. I found myself saying that moral passion has in our new century been “co-opted.” I talk about the riddle that the visionaries of late Victorian times seem no longer replicable. I talk about how a bygone world can inspire and instruct. I talk about the shrinking cultural vocabulary of a shrinking readership for books. And I quote the favorite sentences from my book, which read: #

“If the Met’s screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs in the 1890s are in fact unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” #

For the most recent review of “Moral Fire, in The Wall Street Journal, click here. #

For the correct URL for the Boston Globe review (vs. the one I posted), click here. #

For a “political” speech transcending politics and attaining a gravitas rare in what passes for public discourse today, click here. #

Jon Stewart and Moral Fire

As I have occasion to remark in my new book Moral Fire, moral passion is a phenomenon little glimpsed in public life nowadays, unless you happen to be a devotee of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Typically, moral passion as purveyed by politicians and the “media” is opportunistic and shallow, if not wholly counterfeit. #

My book celebrates practitioners of moral passion in late 19th century America, when it was more mattered than today. More specifically, I explore four individuals for whom the notion that culture – that is, music, literature, the visual arts – is morally uplifting was more than a Victorian canard. #

My first chapter remembers Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Higginson’s belief that Beethoven made people more humane was profound and true – at least for Higginson himself. His concept of “useful citizenry” was to amass a fortune so he could give it away for the betterment of the city of Boston. Though often misportrayed as a Brahmin snob, Higginson was not born to wealth. A cultural democrat, he set aside tickets for 25 cents – even in 1881 a modest sum – for all Boston Symphony concerts and public rehearsals. His friend Bliss Perry testified that “to his true comrades,” Higginson “was like a lover.” This capacity for affection, for honest intimacy, pervades many a startling Higginson letter. His singular range of close acquaintances – from J. P. Morgan to Henry James, whom he called “Harry” – anchored the man and his heroic scope of achievement. #

Thanks of Boston’s WGBH, I recently enjoyed an opportunity to talk about Higginson on the air for more than 20 minutes – an unhurried exchange with time enough for thought. Brian Bell, who is himself writing a history of the Boston Symphony, asked the big questions, including: Where in the arts are there individuals of such colossal personal vision today? And if we can’t find any, what happened to them? #

I’m additionally grateful to Brian for posting the interview online – and here it is. #

In Praise of Moral Fire

My new book Moral Fire is praised in today’s Boston Globe by Jeremy Eichler for its “elegant and warmly sympathetic” portrait of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony. I’m fortunate to have my book reviewed by Jeremy – and Boston is fortunate to be the rare American city with a classical-music press of stature. #

I visit Boston in early October to give the Elson Lecture at Harvard on rethinking orchestras as purveyors of the humanities – that’s 5:15 pm Tuesday October 9. And the next day, also at Harvard, I take part in a conversation about the future of classical music in the US – with Jeremy, Lloyd Schwartz, and Boston Symphony CEO Mark Volpe. #

That orchestras are moving toward “contextualized” programming – a preoccupation of this blog — seems to me both necessary and indisputable. Stay tuned. #

Mixing Art and Music (cont’d): Mixing Food and Music

Now that the always enterprising Anne Midgette has posted my blog objecting to live Bach cello suites imposed on visitors to the Corcoran Gallery, I’ve realized that I failed to indicate that this was not a museum concert. Rather, the cellist was offered as an embellishment to dining in the atrium. Johann Sebastian was enlisted to cheerfully accompany both Frederick Church’s “Niagara” and the consumption of soup, sandwiches, and pasta. #

As it happens, the day after I attempted to ponder “Niagara” at the Corcoran I had lunch at DC’s University Club with my son Bernie and a friend. We were talking — arguing, actually — about Bach at the Corcoran when Bernie and I became aware of the Waltz from Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 for two pianos. Our luncheon soundtrack — previously comprising anodyne Baroque selections — had suddenly obtruded. Both Bernie (who adores Vladimir Horowitz and hence the piano music of Rachmaninoff) and I found the excellent rendition of this two-piano showpiece, with its combination of virtuoso keyboard velocity and Slavic pathos, irresistibly compelling. #

Is Rachmaninoff’s two-piano Waltz appropriate restaurant music? I am reasonably certain that Rachmaninoff (who was no snob; he admired Art Ttaum) would have said: no way. #

And I would go further. I would say that the Club music menu, on this occasion, insidiously (if inadvertently) miscategorized Rachmaninoff (as many do) as a merely confectionary composer. #

Mixing Art and Music — An Open Letter to the Corcoran Gallery

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE CORCORAN GALLERY #

Dear Mr. Bollerer: #

As someone who writes frequently about the Gilded Age, I’ve long been eager to visit the Corcoran Gallery to study your most iconic painting: Frederick Church’s “Niagara.” I was recently in DC and seized the opportunity, arriving one Sunday in the late morning only to discover a cellist in the atrium playing movements from the Bach cello suites. The atrium is a resonant space and the cello was loudly audible in the galleries. #

A painting summons thought and feeling. It can also (in my experience) summon music. Music can equally silence the experience of a painting – Bach’s Bourees, Sarabandes, and Gigues were played (and also practiced) over and over. In between, the instrument was raucously tuned. Only during a brief respite could I discover the seething energy of Church’s rendering of Niagara Falls, unshackled by Bach. #

Though neither of your gallery books mention it, Church’s canvases are of course ambitious exercises in metaphor. “Niagara” was painted in 1857 – on the cusp of civil war. The calculated play of sunlight and impending storm can only be symbolic. The broken rainbow reinforces Church’s message of a nation’s ambiguous fate. Church intended that a leisurely examination of his large, painstakingly detailed canvases would provoke conscious analysis. #

An adjoining American gallery, in which Bach remained a deafening presence, displayed Thomas Eakins’s “Singing a Pathetic Song.” The parlor music of this painting is, I would say, an explicit soundtrack anathema to Bach. #

A museum considers framing, placement, and lighting in displaying its collection. What the ear hears can become as pertinent as what the eye sees. Silence is safest. And yet when visual art is discussed on film or TV, a symphonic soundtrack become inescapable. For any musically sensitive person, Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” was made unwatchable by the clumsy imposition of chunks of Schubert, Debussy, et. al. I remember giving up quickly, when Delius was applied to French Impressionism. #

Many years ago, in a conversation with the late Kirk Varnedoe, I discovered that this distinguished connoisseur of fin-de-siecle Austrian visual art had no ear from Mahler. And yet the profound relationship of Klimt to Mahler is mutually illuminating. As it happens, Tim Barringer – who as you know is a leading authority on Church – is a counter-example: a trained musician fascinated by resonances binding painters and composers. It’s been my pleasure to collaborate with Tim on a variety of museum programs investigating points of alignment linking Dvorak’s New World Symphony and American Suite with the “American sublime” of Church, Bierstadt, and Moran, and also with the genre paintings of Durand and Bingham. #

Anyway, I’m writing this letter in Rock Creek Park as a therapeutic exercise, having fled your museum after 45 minutes of enforced listening. The moment I exited my brain began to breathe. Frankly, what I’m trying to say to you seems self-evident to me. Would you consider doing without music? The paintings would appreciate it. #

Yours sincerely #

Teaching Music Across the Curriculum

Cross-disciplinary education is in fashion right now, but I have the impression it’s more honored in the breach than the observance, at least insofar as music is concerned. #

My vantage point is limited but informative. As readers of this blog know, I have for years espoused using the story of Dvorak in America to sneak the humanities into Social Studies and History classrooms by the back door. #

I have learned a few things in the process. One is that the usual obstacle is ostensibly curricular: learning standards and standardized syllabi that must be prioritized. Another thing I’ve learned is that this obstacle is more a smoke-screen: teachers shy away from classical music because they feel they don’t know enough to teach it. That may be true, but it’s remediable. #

With a modicum of training, even History teachers innocent of symphonic music will seize the Dvorak opportunity once it’s understood. Because it’s fresh, entertaining, and popular. #

All the “Dvorak and America” festivals in which I’ve taken part this year – via the Pacific Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and most recently the Buffalo Philharmonic – have linked to classrooms with teachers who attended the NEH “Dvorak and America” Teacher-Training Institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony two summers ago. In Orange County and North Carolina, the participating educators were Music and Social Studies teachers in elementary and high schools. In Buffalo a month ago, the participating educator was Brenda Cowe, who’s the librarian for the Buffalo Performing Arts High School. #

Brenda’s eighth graders studied Dvorak for a period of weeks. They all attended the Buffalo Philharmonic’s performance of the New World Symphony. And, amazingly, they all participated in creating Dvorak films. #

Brenda’s “Dvorak Project Page” — http://dvorakproject.wikispaces.com/ — embraces a cornucopia of Americana, including – for instance – exposure to wax cylinder recordings of Native American music in juxtaposition with the “Indian dance” that is the Scherzo of the New World Symphony. Her students also studied the role of Dvorak’s assistant Harry Burleigh in bringing spirituals into the concert hall. They sampled recordings by Burleigh and Marian Anderson. They pondered issues of American identity as explored by Dvorak via Native American culture and “Negro melodies.” #

In future seasons, there will likely be more Dvorak festivals funded – like this season’s – by the NEH’s landmark “Music Unwound” initiative. Music Unwound not only supports “contextualized” symphonic programming, but explores the role orchestras can play as a much-needed catalyst for incorporating the arts in “non-arts” classrooms and curricula. It pursues an ideal — integrated arts instruction — that deserves to become common educational practice. #

A Message for Young Musicians and Old Orchestras

I was recently entrusted with delivering the graduation address for the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I wound talking about the future of orchestras. My larger point was that this is a moment for young musicians – and not so young institutions – to hone their sense of mission. Here’s what I had to offer: #

A lot of the writing that I’ve done over the past 25 years has explored the story of classical music in America in its most dynamic period – the late nineteenth century. #

Here’s a vignette: the Metropolitan Opera presented the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 1886. When the curtain fell on Isolde’s Liebestod, stunned silence ensued for a period of minutes. Then – as we can read in the Musical Courier – women in the audience stood on their chairs and “screamed their delight for what seemed hours.” #

Here’s a second anecdote about the same event. In the third act, Wagner has Tristan tear the bandages off his wound when he sees Isolde’s ship approach. The wound bleeds copiously, and Tristan expires. When Albert Niemann, the Met’s first Tristan, tore his bandages and bared his wound, many in the audience swooned. At subsequent performances, the bandages remained intact. I don’t think that this story is about an audience’s timidity; what it documents is an unbearable intensity of experience. #

I would suggest that at least four ingredients account for the astounding urgency and immediacy of this epochal 1886 operatic performance. The first of course is Wagner’s opera – it was radically new. The second is the condition of the people who swooned and screamed. That the vast majority of Wagnerites in late nineteenth century America were women tells us that Wagner answered powerful needs, needs for self-realization not otherwise answered for corseted and sequestered Gilded Age housewives and mothers. #

The third ingredient is the Metropolitan Opera of the 1880s and 90s – never again would the Met be such a hotbed of innovation and experimentation. Its visionary mastermind was a charismatic conductor who had lived with Wagner almost as a surrogate son: Anton Seidl, the central missionary for Wagnerism in the United States. Fourth, and finally, Americans of the late nineteenth century were acutely susceptible to sophisticated art and culture: it crucially helped them to discover and define who they were, and what America was as a nation. #

I have a new book, published this month, titled Moral Fire. Here are three sentences from my introduction: #

“If screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” #

The full of title of my new book is Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siecle. The portraits are of Laura Langford, who presented Wagner concerts 14 times a week in summertime at Coney Island; of Henry Krehbiel, the onetime dean of New York’s music critics; of Charles Ives, arguably the most important concert composer that this country ever produced; and of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The binding theme is that all four of these heroic individuals embraced the notion that art is morally empowering. #

They inhabited a moment half a century before the music lovers Hitler and Stalin discredited art as a moral beacon. But we can still, I believe, draw inspiration from their example, and from those screaming Wagnerites at the Met. #

This afternoon, I would mainly like to ponder the saga of Henry Higginson and his Boston Symphony – its gestation and subsequent history – and ask what lessons this history might teach today. #

Higginson was not born to wealth. As a young man he went to Vienna to become a musician. When he discovered that he lacked sufficient talent to excel, he adopted a different life plan: to amass enough capital to create a world class orchestra for the city of Boston. He entered the family business, which happened to be banking. Then, in 1881, at the age of 47, he placed an announcement in every Boston paper headed “in the interest of great music.” #

What Higginson announced was the creation of a Boston Symphony Orchestra, wholly financed by himself. It would perform twice weekly, October thru March. Its membership would be stable – no playing for dances on rehearsal or performance days. Also, a certain number of 25 cent tickets would be set aside for all performances – because Henry Higginson was a cultural democrat. #

By 1900, Higginson’s Boston Symphony was already internationally acknowledged as a great orchestra. It was already a catalyst for the creation of important orchestras in Cincinnati and Chicago. It already gave more than 100 concerts a season. It already offered a summer series of Promenade concerts – today’s Boston Pops. In format, length, and ritual, its concerts were virtually identical to the Boston Symphony concerts of today. #

That by 1900 Higginson’s orchestra looked and sounded like American concert orchestras a century later either documents resilience – or inertia: resistance to change. Meanwhile, the world was changing – and in ways that impacted on the symphonic experience. #

A useful criterion in assessing any cultural event is “sense of occasion.” Higginson was lucky: his concerts created a sense of occasion automatically. In 1900, you couldn’t hear an orchestra in your living room on the radio or phonograph. Also, orchestras the caliber of Boston’s were few and far between. Also, Higginson’s audience was keenly inquisitive about new music: new symphonies by, say, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. Also, Boston’s audience equally appreciated local composers. Everyone understood that George Chadwick was no Beethoven – but every new symphonic work Chadwick composed was promptly premiered by Higginson’s orchestra. Theodore Thomas, the founding father of American symphonic culture, preached that “a symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community.” Higginson’s Boston Symphony did that. #

If this late Gilded Age moment marks the apex of classical music in America, that’s because it’s a moment buoyed by a central aspiration, an aspiration influentially pursued by Antonin Dvorak as director of Jeannette Thurber’s courageous National Conservatory of Music – the aspiration to create for American orchestras and opera companies a native repertoire of operas and symphonies that would gird American classical music to come. But this never happened. We instead acquired a mutant musical high culture, a Eurocentric culture privileging masterpieces by dead Europeans. #

How that occurred and why are questions that have long preoccupied me. Certainly, after World War I, visionaries like Higginson – or Thurber, or Dvorak, or Anton Seidl, or Henry Krehbiel, or Thedore Thomas – were little in evidence. Instead, the central powerbroker for classical music was a businessman: Arthur Judson, who simultaneously ran the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Columbia Artists Management – the major booking agency for conductors and solo instrumentalists. It was Judson’s frank opinion that an orchestra’s programming could QUOTE “only go as far as the public will go with us.” #

This notion that the audience sets taste was something new, a concession unknown to the pioneering tastemakers of turn-of-the-century America. #

With the advent of recordings, of radio and TV, orchestras could be heard at home. With the advent of modernism, audiences were estranged from contemporary music as never before. That every concert would generate a sense of occasion, as in Higginson’s Boston, could no longer be assumed. All of this challenged orchestras — or might have — to rethink the concert experience. Then came exigent challenges of another kind. Since 2005, the average orchestral deficit – and most American orchestras run deficits – has more than tripled. Classical music participation has dropped 30 per cent over the past two decades. Costs continue to rise faster than revenues. According to Jesse Rosen, who heads the League of American Orchestras, “The current problems are not cyclical problems. The recession has merely brought home and exacerbated longterm problems.” #

And here’s one more statistic – according to a survey of Philadelphia Orchestra subscribers – by reputation, a conservative body of listeners – only 21 per cent are in favor of standard format concerts with no talking. This hunger for information, I would say, reflects both fatigue with business-as-usual among “old listeners” and the growing needs of “new listeners.” #

I cannot recommend a panacea. But I’d like to cite one sign of constructive change. As never before, American orchestras are experimenting with what’s known in the field as “contextualized programming.” – explicating music in the context of cultural and political history, and in relationship to literature, the visual arts, dance and theater. The Chicago Symphony calls it “Beyond the Score.” The New York Philharmic has used the rubric “Inside the Music.” Philadelphia offers “Access Concerts.” #

In particular, a landmark $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supports a consortium of orchestras intent on absorbing contextualized programs not as a tangential option, but as part of their central artistic mission. #

During the season just concluded – the first year of this NEH “Music Unwound” initiative — three orchestras performed Dvorak’s New World Symphony in tandem with a visual presentation restoring the cultural vocabulary of the symphony’s first New York audience, culling pertinent excerpts from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, culling iconic paintings of the American West by Albert Biestadt, George Catlin, and Frederic Remington. #

The Buffalo Philharmonic’s “Dvorak and America” festival incorporated an event at an art museum exploring the relationship between Dvorak’s symphony and what art historians term “the American sublime.” The North Carolina Symphony’s Dvorak festival, last February, linked to 11th grade American History classrooms that made Dvorak‘s American sojourn a major curricular component. When the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra did its Dvorak festival, last March, all 100 members of the orchestra, grades 9 to 12, studied the Dvorak story in detail, and inquired into the possible impact of extra-musical readings on the way musicians hear and interpret Dvorak’s American symphony. #

The success of these festivals – all the participating orchestras are eager for more – suggests that today’s orchestras, unlike Henry Higginson’s Boston Symphony, cannot take their mission for granted. This is a moment for orchestras to refresh and even to reformulate their reasons to exist. #

And I would like to further suggest, in closing, that this lesson may pertain to young artists such as those assembled here today. #

Certainly those of us in classical music occupy a milieu in flux. It is, I would say, incumbent on us to discover and articulate, as never before, a personal sense of mission. We cannot assume that we can slip into existing niches of professional experience – because those niches are vanishing or evolving. When I meet with young pianists, I urge them to study composition and improvisation, and music outside the Western canon – to identify objectives that are specific, novel, and individual – new pieces or little-known composers that they believe in, or new ways of presenting music in live performance. And in fact a fresh wind of entrepreneurial innovation is everywhere apparent. #

Those 1886 Wagnerites screamed and stood in their chairs because Tristan und Isolde answered the needs of the moment – needs demanding a new kind of artistic expression, and new realms of aesthetic experience. Today’s moment again generates substantially new needs, needs impacting on artists and on artistic institutions. #

This challenge is equally an opportunity. #

Thank you very much. #

“Moral Fire”

I have a new book, just published: Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle. Here’s a sampling: #

“If the Met’s screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs in the 1890s are in fact unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” #

My portraits are of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Henry Krehbiel, who as the proactive “dean” of New York’s music critics was a leading catalyst for a nascent “American school” of musical composition; Laura Langford, who presented the Music of the Future fourteen times a week in summertime on Coney Island; and Charles Ives, who composed great American symphonies long before Serge Koussevitzky searched fruitlessly for a Great American Symphony during the interwar decades. #

These are heroic figures for whom the notion that art is morally empowering was a vital catalyst and inspiration. My book ends: “Though not all supreme art is uplifting, or intended to uplift, culture as a moral force is a concept that fills human needs stronger than any dogmas, be they aesthetic, political, or intellectual.” #

More info here. #