A ramble on this upcoming Beethoven year

Some people are making a big deal of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in December of 2020 with festivals and special programming, and some people are reacting to the hubbub by vowing to avoid listening to Beethoven for the year. While looking for some kind of middle ground in these internets, I found my way to this proposal to spend 2020 listening to a wider variety of music than usual.

Unfortunately everything on this list seems to involve recorded music, and I, as a recovering classical radio professional and CD reviewer, rarely get the kind of pleasure from recorded music that I do from live music. I also rarely derive as much pleasure from hearing other people play a piece of music as I do playing it myself. Following the score while listening to a recording helps. So does watching videos taken from concerts. Sometimes I play along with recordings, but only as a tool to help me learn the viola part of an unfamiliar orchestral piece.

As I grow older I notice that the musicological community has grown younger, and those young musicologists have a formidable presence in these internets. Their mission is (in part) to challenge the status quo, and make a case for more gender equity and racial equity in music. There's nothing wrong with doing that. The world of music is full of people who are biased, egocentric, opportunistic, bigoted, and sexist. It always has been that way, and it will probably always will be. (Beethoven probably had many of the above characteristics.)

When I was in my twenties I thought I knew a lot about music. When I think about how little I know now, I can't imagine how musically "provincial" I must have been as a young person. My musical coming of age coincided with the beginning of the HIP (historically informed performance) movement, and after I learned about the recorder and the baroque flute, I had a goal of only performing pieces of music on the instrument they were intended to be played on. Some of the Handel sonatas, for example, were written to be played on the recorder. That worked for a while, until I got frustrated with the limitations of the repertoire. (It was before musicologists discovered the thousands of pieces of flute music that fell out of print, only to be woken up again with the advent of the Werner Icking Archive and the IMSLP.)

During my twenties and thirties I worked as the person who programmed the music for the local college radio station (four or five hours every day). I was not happy with the state of public radio programming at the time, and was eager, in my innocence, to provide the local radio audience with an alternative. In order to attract and maintain their listeners NPR stations played single movements of pieces rather than entire works. They also played select pieces of music over and over again. Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances was big. So was Rhapsody in Blue. There was a moratorium on twelve-tone music, and one on vocal music, so it's no wonder that driving across the country (or at least from Illinois to New Jersey and Boston), I could recognize every piece on the radio. Usually in two or three notes.

Our radio station was different. We played whole pieces. We played vocal music (song cycles during the week, and on Sundays I would often play an opera). Fridays were devoted entirely to early music played on period instruments (and sung, of course). We played new (twentieth-century) music. We played twelve-tone music. We played as much commercially recorded music as we could find that was written by women, as well as concert tapes of new music written by women. Beethoven was in our regular rotation, but we usually played each of his symphonies about once a year. A year would also include a single playing of each of his string quartets and other chamber music, as well as his sonatas.

I felt kind of "cutting edge" at the time because nobody in the "larger world" of radio could get away with the kind of self-indulgent programming that I could get away with. Our station was not part of NPR, and the powers in the University that were in control of the radio station did not do anything to measure listener response. Many of the recordings that went into the station's library were bonus recordings sent to me by the CD reviewing magazine I wrote for (they sent a list every month, and I checked off the things I wanted for the library). I had a friend at Naxos (the father of the vice president), so I got their whole catalog during their early years, and added the recordings to the station's library. The Marco Polo recordings of unusual music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were mind expanding. Every monthly shipment was an education. I would, of course, only allow excellent recordings in the library. Less-than-excellent recordings were (ahem) "traded" in order to pay for expenses (like my salary).

This radio paradise all came to an unfortunate end twenty years ago. At that point I went to graduate school to study composition, and I learned to love Beethoven's string quartets through their viola parts. I also spent a few years learning all of Beethoven's violin sonatas, and performing most of them. I have only played the viola parts of the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh symphonies, along with a handful of overtures, and have played the violin parts of the sixth and seventh. I have played the flute parts of them all (including piccolo in the ninth). I really hope I get a chance to play the viola part in the second, third, eighth, and ninth symphonies before my playing anatomy gives out.

Now that I have reached an age four years after the age that Beethoven ultimately reached, I look forward to this upcoming celebration of his work. My feeling about Beethoven during the past thirty-five years has grown. At first I regarded him as a perhaps over-played composer that I would put in equal rotation with other classical-period composers, and now I believe that he was a remarkable composer who is worthy of all the accolades associated with this 2020 celebration of his work.

You might find these posts about radio and these posts about Beethoven I have made here over the year interesting reading.

Live and Local Radio

You may not live anywhere near the WILL-FM listening area, but you can still hear the interview that John David and I did on the air today to promote our concert next Saturday!

A Radio Moment

When I worked as a radio announcer, I would sometimes have what I call "radio moments." They were moments of coincidence. A big one for me was when I had Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 59 #3 in one CD player (let the video load to :52), and Jean-Féry Rebel's "Les Elements" queued up in another. If you put the above links in different tabs or windows and play the first two chords of each one after the other, you will notice a bit of cosmic nifty-ness.

Another "radio moment" happened after teaching a class on Richard Strauss, who was not mentioned at all in the edition of our textbook that I was using (the textbook editor has since repaired the glaring omission). When I got in the car and turned on the radio, I heard an obscure neo-classical piece on the radio that turned out to be by Strauss.

Anyway, my radio moment today was with Wagner. I turned on my car radio shortly after the beginning of a very engaging performance of the overture to Tannhäuser. I noticed dynamic contrasts and textures in this recording I had never noticed in other recordings, and I started thinking about Daniel Barenboim, and what he had to say about conducting Wagner in Music Quickens Time.

It is essential to understand the difference between power and force, which is related to the distinction between volume and intensity in music: when a musician is told to play with greater intensity, his first reaction is to play louder. In fact, the opposite is required: the lower the volume, the greater the need for intensity; the greater the volume, the less the need for intensity. The effect produced by the huge outpouring of sound in Beethoven or Wagner is much greater when the sound is not forcefully controlled every step of the way, but rather allowed to grow organically, its natural, inherent power being the result of gradually accumulating strength. The build-up and release of tension are central to the expression of music. Thus even the most powerful chord should be played so that it allows the inner voices to be heard; otherwise it lacks tension and depends exclusively on brutal, aggressive force. One must be able to hear the opposition, the notes that oppose the main idea.

After the piece was over, the announcer told me (and the rest of the listening audience) that the performance was by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.

My Own Public Radio

A couple of years ago I wrote this post about my experience working in classical radio.

Back in the 1980s the trend in public radio stations was to play music that was "scientifically designed" to appeal to the suspected audience, and stations tended to play music that was familiar as well as music that was not too long. Back in my radio daze in the 1980s, fresh from Boston and New York, where I cut my teeth (or should it be ears) on the best radio known to man or woman, I built up a library of eclectic music written by relatively little-known composers. All the selections that I programmed for the 30 hours per week of classical music on our radio station were pieces and performances that I really cared about, and towards the end of my radio life we had a large enough library to keep all of our music in about a six month rotation. It was wonderful when people stopped to talk with me in the grocery store to talk about some piece or some performance that had been on the radio that morning. Unfortunately too many of those people are no longer alive, or they have moved away. But I digress.

Since the elimination of classical music from the radio station in my community, I have been listening to the two public radio stations, one to the south, and one to the north, that we can reach in our area. I have been rather impressed over the years with the number of pieces that I have heard that are new to me, even though some of the newer announcers drive me a bit batty with their, misinformation and sometimes unwelcome comments. Then again, I have devoted a good deal of time being critical of radio announcers, both professionally and as an informed and educated musician.

I was particularly struck by one quick comment this morning that an announcer made between pieces and PSAs (which are NPR ads) stating that everyone knows that orchestral musicians make good salaries, particularly in larger cities, but many of them are out of work or have other jobs. Then the announcer pressed a button and happily played some more music. Why did she just drop a statement like that without any further discussion? Was she talking about our area of Illinois where professional musicians have to piece together a living? This may be news to many public radio listeners, and it might be the source of serious emotional turmoil for others. She might as well have said to a different radio audience that steel workers make good salaries, but there are a lot of steel workers who are out of work. I steamed about it for a while, and then drove off to get a headlight replaced (which was why I was in the car in the first place).

The electrical system had to be turned off in order to replace my headlight, so I had to re-set the car's radio buttons after the headlight was replaced. I noticed that both radio stations were playing the exact same Chopin waltz, but at different intervals, which got me excited for a moment. Then I noticed that it sounded like the same performance, which the announcement confirmed. I spent the rest of the drive home trying to figure out who was broadcasting live and who was using a feed--maybe someone was on vacation. Then it dawned on me that those people who I thought were living in one or the other community and were broadcasting the classical music on the NPR stations might be broadcasting it from somewhere else entirely.

Oh how naive I have been! A quick search confirmed that everyone seems to be broadcasting their classical music by way of Minnesota Public Radio. Maybe that radio announcer could have said something about classical radio announcers being out of work. Nah. That would only happen in my own private radio.

My Own Private Radio

I used to work at a college radio station. I was called the classical music drector, and I was responsible for building a classical record (I started working there in 1986) and CD library, teaching students how to pronounce the names of composers and performers, making programs, and spending a bunch of time on the air myself.

It happened that the university held a special workshop with Karl Haas, back in the days when the university in the town where I live invited classical musicians and people connected with the classical music world to campus.

I was a novice at radio, and I spent most of my time learning on the job. I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I was asked to do a radio interview with Karl Haas. I had been interviewed a few times, but I never actually conducted an interview before. I found Mr. Haas charming, and we got along just fine. When I confessed to him that I had never done an interview before, he told me that it was best not to talk too much before we got on the air or the interview would suffer. Once we were were in the studio and the microphone went on, Karl Haas changed from a medium baritone to a bass baritone. I believe we talked very frankly about music, but he was in total control of the interview. I learned everything I needed to know about classical radio from those thirty minutes.

Now that I am older and maybe a little bit wiser, I would love to be able to interview him again, but he is no longer alive, and my radio days ended when the university radio station abandoned its classical music programming.

Rebuilding the Audience for Classical Music

The musical world as we see it today is a mass of contradictions. The level of technical musicianship among young people today is extraordinarily high because we have so many well-trained teachers. Thirty years ago students of popular instruments considering serious music study had between ten and twenty fine teachers to choose from who where teaching in prestigious colleges and conservatories (less popular instruments like the oboe, for example, had fewer teachers). Now students have hundreds of competent (and often excellent) teachers to choose from teaching at all kinds of colleges (including affordable state universities) who take extraordinary pride in their teaching, knowing that their own opportunities as soloists are severely limited by the lack of demand for soloists and orchestral musicians in the music market.

Many of these students, especially the string players, had the benefit of Suzuki training, which, when taught properly, can lead the way to the development of a fine technique at an early age. Music has enriched the lives of many of these students, and many choose to pursue music as a career because it is what they love most. Many believe that music provides a valid contribution to society. They are supported by their parents, their teachers, and their school community, but when they find themselves in the “real world” it becomes clear that during the years that they were developing as musicians their peers were becoming increasingly unaware of the value of music, especially live music.

The formal study of music education as a discipline is alive and well within colleges and universities. There are whole courses of study devoted to pedagogy—how to teach, and the school systems that still value instrumental and choral music programs as vital components of their plan for education benefit from band directors and choir directors with training far superior to band directors from previous generations.

For the informed music listener we live in a time of virtual paradise. Recordings are available of just about every piece by the composers we consider “major” composers, and recordings are available of the complete works of composers we might consider “minor” composers. Recordings are available by composers we have only read about in history books, and recordings are available by composers who only appear in footnotes in history books. If a recording is not available of a piece, it is quite easy to make a recording of exceptional quality, duplicate it professionally, and make it available to the whole world by way of the internet.

Many musicians who saw the difficulty of pursuing a performing career as the gates of musical opportunity were beginning to close in the 1970s and 1980s, devoted their passion for music to the study of musicology. These scholars have made extraordinary discoveries concerning performance practice of early music and connections between music and society. There are very few subjects concerning musicology that extremely smart scholars haven’t written something about, though the current musicological journals are far more limited in their scope these days because the agendas of academic musical scholarship have moved away (temporarily, I hope) from the substance of music itself. Virtually all published musical scholarship is available to anyone with a library card through the interlibrary loan system.

Other musicians found their true calling in instrument making. We now have exponentially more fine instrument makers than we had 30 years ago. It is now possible to special order an instrument made to exact specifications: a duplicate of a historical instrument, an instrument with a specific ergonomic shape to help ease stress on the body, an instrument made out of a specific material or made to play at a specific pitch. There are student string instruments being made that are extremely affordable, and bows made of synthetic material that play as well as bows made of rare rainforest woods. Many of the makers of these instruments are able to make a living because they can advertise their trade in widely-read music publications and on the internet. They are accessible from anywhere in the world so they can have their workshops in places that allow more space and require lower rents than they would have in major cities.

Music has made its way into the smaller cities of America. There are excellent community orchestras in smaller cities all over the country, and there are ample opportunities to hear concerts in places where parking is not a problem. Now children living more than 100 miles from a major city can get the same quality of musical training as children living in major cities. Many parents who have fled the city to raise their children in a more peaceful and less stressful environment support the teaching studios of thousands of private teachers living in smaller cities and towns because they believe that the study of music is beneficial for the overall development of their children.

What is wrong with this picture? In a way these developments represent an ideal situation for music to continue to grow and thrive in this country, but one major component of the musical ecosystem is missing. Somehow while we were teaching our musicians to play better, teach better, and think about music in new ways, we have lost our audience.

The thriving audience for music in America during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century didn’t just happen. It had to be built. A young America built squarely on industrialism had a generation of wealthy children who wanted to bring attributes of European culture to America. They imported musicians from France and Germany, built concert halls, and provided the necessary funding for professional symphony orchestras to begin giving concerts. When America started to “grow” its own soloists (like the violinists Albert Spaulding and Maud Powell) and its own composers (like George Gershwin) it was a major cultural accomplishment for the entire population, even those people who did not live in major cities. After the Homestead Act, high schools in the West made sure to include music in their courses of study. Appreciation of the arts went hand in glove with a well-rounded education when America was creating itself.

The piano industry also found its strongest market in America. Pianos could be delivered by train to any city with a train station. People played piano for recreation and entertainment, and people had an increased interest in hearing the instrument played well.
As political situations became more difficult for European musicians during the years of the two World Wars, more and more musicians from Europe immigrated to America, and America enjoyed its greatest musical times. Along with this gift of talent from Europe came the need to understand it, so many people put themselves to the task of educating the public through publications, lectures, concerts, and recordings. Maud Powell’s recordings were originally intended to introduce people in the remote American cities where she toured to the music that she was planning to play during her visits. Early recordings were never intended to replace live performances, but rather to remind and inform people about music.

Radio became a vibrant stage for music. Radio stations had their own orchestras, and a large body of first-rate musicians made their living playing on the radio. Many first performances of important musical works happened in live radio broadcasts. Radio brought music into every home in America. Because of the quality of the broadcasts and the importance of music to the people who ran the programs, the radio became vitally important in the musical education of America.

Early television was booming with musical talent. The original talk show host Jack Paar regularly had the pianist Oscar Levant as a guest on his show. Harpo Marx was seriously interested in music (though he never learned to read and played the harp backwards). Fred Rogers was a composer before he began his work on children’s television, and wrote many operas for children using the puppets in his neighborhood. The musical climate of Southern California was so lively that the violinist Jascha Heifetz chose to live there until the end of his life.

Early television put a great deal of effort into music education, and Leonard Bernstein’s educational television programs introduced thousands and thousands of people to music. His Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic became a model for many orchestras to follow. Bernstein, who received his musical education later in life than many professional musicians, understood the importance of early exposure and to music and also the importance of speaking to the intelligence of young people instead of pandering to their need for entertainment. His audience became the audience of music lovers that supported American orchestras and chamber music ensembles into the 1970s.

Suddenly the bottom dropped out of the education system, and by the end of the 1970s every state in American made drastic cuts to their music programs. It is possible that people assumed that the audience for live classical music would remain strong, or it is possible that at that time American society was so twisted and confused that these cuts were made without any thought at all about the cultural cost that the country would pay for reducing music programs.

It is sort of like exposing only the students who have a genuine interest in writing fiction to reading. Our music education programs have failed in educating a whole generation of people who have put what could have developed into a love for the music played by their peers into other things. Now this generation of people in their thirties and forties who have never been taught to listen to music with any depth fail to see the importance of music in our society, and these people are making financial decisions that end up destroying musical institutions simply because they don’t know what they are doing.

If we want to continue to have live art music (the word “classical” implies music from a limited range of styles) alive in our society we need to change the way it is presented to students in schools. We need to teach students to love listening to music as an activity in itself. We need to involve them in the ritual of concert-going and teach them the beauty of allowing the emotional “meaning” of the music that they hear touch them. They need to hear people play in concerts and they need to learn that their participation in a musical experience as a member of an audience is as vital as the participation of the people playing.

We need to sensitize young people to the emotional range of music making, and teach them to appreciate the fact that one musician’s interpretation of a composer’s work can be wildly different from another musician’s interpretation and still have validity and meaning. We need to teach all of our audiences to listen carefully to the musicians who live in their cities and towns and support the work they do. The quality of a musical performance has no relation to the price of a ticket, but it does depend on an intelligent audience.

The financial burden of supporting musical organizations has been carried by relatively few members of our society. If we succeed in developing a large and vital audience for music to balance our large and vital population of performing musicians, and those people each contribute a small share to the economy that supports live music we might find ourselves living in the best of all musical worlds.