Visit with Joseph Horowitz--what was most interesting?

What was most interesting (or stimulating) for you in our conversation with Mr. Horowitz?  Add a comment.

Videos and other links, part I

Some videos to illustrate some of the ideas I'm hammering at you:

We live in a global, international, multicultural culture.  Cultures are cross-fertilizing, birthing new artistic languages.  One of the great experiments in this area is the Silk Road Project, started by our friend Yo-Yo Ma.  Here are a couple of videos, one of a concert, and one exploring the collaborative process.  What would you call this music?  I don't think you can label it.

We discussed Mike Block, the cellist who arranges much of the Silk Road Project's music.  Mike is a fine classical cellist, plays folk and rock music, is a singer-songwriter, and a concert organizer himself.  He's now teaching at Berklee, on top of all that.  

In the opening of the Afterword, Joseph Horowitz describes Steve Reich's 70th-birthday concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring Music for Eighteen Musicians.  Here's a short video, which I love, because it's about a midwestern college new-music ensemble learning this piece:

I also love this video because it's a great video, and it's important for us to recognize that in a YouTube era, we need videography skills--or partners.  Speaking of video, look at this:

(Hmm . . . I can't get another video to embed, even in a different browser.  The link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6X_IhgJLzA, to another Reich piece, performed by Maya Beiser and a number of video versions of herself.)

Post-Classical Music and Joseph Horowitz (class visitor on Thursday)

Thursday, we'll be joined by Joseph Horwowitz.  You'll get the most out of the discussion if you are familiar with his main ideas and his accomplishments.  

Aside from being a brilliant thinker and concert organizer, Mr. Horowitz is a great example of a musical entrepreneur who has a "portfolio career."  I know him well enough to know he's more interested in big ideas and the history which illustrates them (and which those ideas explain) than he is in talking about himself.  I am, nevertheless, going to focus as much as possible of our discussion on his career, the qualities that have made him successful, and what he observes in others successful people.  

So, reading assignments:

1) Joseph Horowitz biography, on his website.  (You'll see it could use a little updating.  It's very long, but wade through the entire thing--what amazing things he has done.)

2) The Afterword to his book Classical Music in America.  I'll be adding more to point out key ideas as today goes on, but if you want to start reading it, here you go.

3) Mr. Horowitz's definition of "post-classical" music, which he provided for a symposium here at DePauw in 2007:

The 19th century Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight, who more than anyone else defined “classical music” for Americans, did so in juxtaposition with “popular music,” with the concomitant notion that classical music was supreme. (Dwight called Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” a “melodic itch.”) Dwight’s understanding of “classical music” illustrates why this term is poisonous today; it implicitly deprecates popular and indigenous music of every kind, Western and non-Western. We are challenged to find a term to replace it. For some time, I have opted for “post-classical” to designate a new and more variegated musical landscape into which classical music fits. I consider Philip Glass and Gidon Kremer “post-classical” musicians, and so are many others who matter nowadays. The term has been picked up with some alacrity by others.

4) For that same event, I wrote my own definition of "post-classical."  Here it is:

What is  the “post-classical” world, and why should music educators be interested in it? That’s a question more easily asked than answered,and one that the symposium will explore. 

A preliminary answer is that the “classical” paradigm is one which sees the Western art tradition as superior to others, while the emerging post-classicalworld is fundamentally multi-cultural, embracing non-Western and Western popular traditions to one extent or another. The classical paradigm emphasizes the performance of great works of the past, while the post-classical paradigm is centered in music of the present. The classical paradigm emphasizes acoustic, unamplified performances in traditional concert halls and opera houses; in the post-classical world, there is a growing use of amplification, multimedia presentations, and non-traditional (for classical music) performance venues. The classical tradition emphasizes the values of Werktreue (being true to the work) and Texttreue (being true to the text). The emerging post-classical world embraces improvisational elements (influenced by non-Western and Western popular musics) as well as performances of works in the classical canon that are freer interpretations and reinterpretations of those works than were often encouraged in earlier generations.

So, let's look at some key ideas:

• "Classical" music as understood in America was defined in many ways by what it was and is not: the increasingly popular forms of folk and commercial music, and non-Western music.  Classical music was seen as superior to other forms of music. Even people who didn't like it used to acknowledge that it was, at least in theory, better than the music they actually liked.   I've never seen anyone successfully define "classical music."  To some up, different from and better than other musics.  And I think the operating understanding of classical music is (my words) "the fully-notated art-music works of the common-practice period, those works that preceded them, and those which evolved in response to them while maintaining the notion of complete notation." 
• In the new "musical landscape," classical music "fits" into a wider picture.  It no longer dominates.  As a matter of fact, one of the challenges we face today is communicating the power and excitement of classical music. So many people think it's boring (and often we play it in a boring way).  
• That "wider landscape" includes all forms of popular, folk, and non-Western music. 
• Performances of classical music are being influenced by these other forms of music.

What neither Horowitz's definition above nor mine emphasizes is this:

• The distinctions between musical genres and musical cultures are evaporating; for many of the musicians, especially creative musicians, of the generation immediately preceding yours, they no longer make sense. This is illustrated quite well in the comments from John Adams on page 7 of the Horowitz Afterword. "I don't want to sound arrogant, but my intuition is that the really interesting young composers . . . are best when . . . they write for their own unique ensembles -- and these have more in common with alternative rock than they do with the European 'classical' tradition."
• During the 20th century, a classical-music industry developed.  For many reasons, including the fact that so many composers were writing in atonal styles that mass audiences resisted, that industry came to center on star performers, both conductors and soloists, who could be marketed like Hollywood stars and generate enormous revenue through radio (and then television) advertising, sales of recordings, and ticket sales.  What Horowitz calls a "culture of performance," rather than one of creation, developed in classical music.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, the great performers were also composers.  The star performer of (primarily dead) other people's music is a 20th-century phenomenon.
• In this new era, while a few of these classical-model performers are maintaining careers, the most successful young artists are again composer-performers, composer-arrangers, or performers working closely with composers and arrangers.  Going back to the future, we are once again in a culture of creation (in which older works have a role but less and less of a dominating one).  

4/18: Social Media and Branding

If you have time, skim through this New York Times (NYT) profile of musician Maria Schneider, Prarie Jazz Companion.

I find it very interesting that the title in the URL is "How Maria Schneider Reinvented the Classical Sound." (Italics mine.) The article itself is by the young NYT music write Zachary Wolfe, who writes primarily about classical music, and is not one of the Times's jazz/pop writers.

Schneider, who studied at mainline music schools (U of Minnesota, Eastman, U of Miami), has been best known as a jazz/big band arranger and leader.  Her latest project? A collaboration with the top-of-the-classical-world soprano Dawn Upshaw, on a recording that uses the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the St. Paul (Minnesota) Chamber Orchestra. It's called Winter Morning Walks.

Is it jazz?  Is it classical?  There's probably no answer, because we have entered what Joe Horowitz terms a post-classical era, one in which not only has the hierarchy of musics (ie., musical genres) disintegrated, but also the very idea of distinct musical genres no longer has controlling force.  For now, we (in this class) are just calling this "21st century music."

It used to be that most classical musicians looked down at jazz.  Look at how different things are now. Dawn Upshaw asks a jazz composer to write for her. 

She [Schneider] worked for years to flesh out the orchestral elements in her style of jazz, through her debut, “Evanescence” (1994), a combination of brassiness and lightness; “Allegresse” (2000), with its Brazilian accents; and her 2004 masterpiece, “Concert in the Garden,” whose pieces have the sweep and drama of tone poems. But what she had not done until recently was write for an actual orchestra, with its full complement of strings and its lack of improvisation. It was not long after “Concert in the Garden” that she met the soprano Dawn Upshaw, who came to prominence singing Mozart at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1980s and emerged as a bold advocate for contemporary music. Upshaw had gotten in the habit of attending Schneider’s band’s annual Thanksgiving-week performances at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan. 

“It was about the third year that I was there when I thought to myself, Wow, I wonder if she would ever consider writing anything for me.” Upshaw said. “I know that our worlds don’t collide typically, but what would happen if we tried to do something together?” Schneider had never incorporated lyrics before, and Upshaw sensed she was anxious. “But she was game,” she added. “And it’s one of the best musical experiences that I’ve ever had.”

Take a look at mariaschneider.com.  There's the new album, on the landing page.  (Somewhat surprisingly, Dawn doesn't have a website aimed at fans and followers, although there is a lot about her on her management's site and a smaller amount on her recording label's site.)

As the NYT article details,  Schneider decided awhile back to dispense with a commercial recording label and work with ArtistShare.  Her albums are funded by fans and backers, not by a label.  You can only get the album from ArtistShare (you can buy it through Amazon, for example, but it's actually sold by ArtistShare).

Here's the important thing.  For funders, there are a ton of videos in which they have been able to follow the creative process.

This is the age of personal connection.  Justin Kantor says if you have a personal connection with 5000 people, you don't need to worry about finding a manager, a publicist, etc., because they will come find you.  

How has Maria Schenieder been connecting?

She uses all the resource at ArtistShare, including the videos. (I just became a funder on your behalf, so we can watch some in class.)
She has an email list (there's a link on the home page of her site).
She has a Facebook page.
She has a Twitter feed. 

And that brings us to the three most common social-media ways of staying connected with your professional friends, fans, and followers:  video (usually YouTube), Facebook, and Twitter.  Blogging used to be a big thing, but it has been overtaken by Facebook and Twitter.

In class we'll look at how some other "21c" artists are using video, FB, and Twitter to stay in touch.

(Update Thursday morning)

We'll use the versatile cellist and SoM alum Jon Silpayamanant as a case study.

•   website
•  Twitter
•  Facebook
•  YouTube
•  Wordpress Blog
•  Google+
•  ReverbNation
•  Pinterest
•  LinkedIn
•  Songkick 
•  MySpace (which evidently still exists!)

Class topics for the rest of the semester

Class topics for the rest of the semester:

Thursday 4/18: Social Media and Branding


Tuesday 4/23: Post-classical/21st Century artists and ensembles

Thursday 4/25: Class visit with Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America

Tuesday 4/30: PR (including Press Releases) and Contracts

Thursday 5/2: School to Career

Tuesday 5/7: Funding and Money Management

Thursday 5/9: Presentations