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We assembled a very small group: Pauline Oliveros, Charles Wuorinen, Leonard Slatkin, Don Toleen (from the American Symphony Orchestra League), and me. We talked about all of the issues, except for Pauline, who is wont to be very quiet at meetings. She tends to be very quiet, very serene, and when she says something it is the only thing that needs to be said for the entire meeting. When she was ready to speak we all quieted down, and she said, "Well, there's only one thing that matters these days," and we were all, well, you know, "What could it be?" And she said, "Sound." That's it. That's all she said. And do you know, she was absolutely right. That was all that needed to be said at that meeting. Here is why. There has been a revolution in sound. It's happened over the past one hundred fourteen years or so. It's happened thoroughly. It's happened worldwide, and it's the biggest thing to happen to music in two thousand years. Sound, the revolution in sound. She said "sound," and I said to myself, "And the classical music world hasn't got a clue about it, about what it means." The quality of sound has changed radically, ultra-radically, supernova-radically, in the past one hundred fourteen years or so, and it effects how we think of ourselves as classical musicians, how we think about classical music in the world in which we live, and it is terribly complicated. So I began to think about sound, where are the young people, where are my colleagues, what's going on here? Two years ago I wrote an opera about P. T. Barnum's tour of Jenny Lind in America. I wrote the opera because I wanted to study the intersection between art and entertainment. I decided to blame the confusion between art and entertainment on P. T. Barnum, who was a marketing genius. He really was the first person in our culture to articulate that you could sell something to the mass of people. Barnum was the guy who defined the market place as an undefined mass of people and began to practice selling to the masses. We still use his model today. He's the person who thought up celebrity licensing, and he did it with Jenny Lind. Jenny Lind was the biggest thing going in Europe at the time, but nobody in America knew who she was. And so he decided that he needed to sell her if he was going to recover his money from the tour. He licensed her name to everything—pin cushions, carriages, furniture, tongue depressors, anything he could think of. So well did he sell her name (without telling her, by the way) that he made seven times the amount of money from the tour that she did. He set up a model, a paradigm, for marketing art as entertainment. At that same time I read a study by the McKnight Foundation, a study of arts in the suburbs (someone said today that that's an oxymoron). They asked who lives in the suburbs, how do they get there, do they appreciate the arts, what kinds of arts do they appreciate? One of the things they found out is that there is a great deal of artistic activity in the suburbs, and that, interestingly enough, a suburbanite's transportation habit gives that person thirteen car trips a day. A day! Those thirteen car trips do not follow the old model, to the center of the city, like the spokes in a wheel. Those thirteen car trips go in concentric circles, from suburb to suburb, and not to the center of the city. What the McKnight Foundation is suggesting is that when we are trying to bring people into our concert halls we are really trying to lure them back into their cars for their fourteenth trip, at night or on a Sunday morning, to come to a centralized ritual hall, whether a concert hall, a large church, or an auditorium. The model of a centralized ritual place, and people who live around it and come to the ritual place for their ritual, is disintegrating if not already disintegrated. In fact the transportation habits of a culture are evolved by the culture as needed. And so I thought, OK, I'm going to study transportation and classical music because I think the two of them are inextricably intertwined. I am going to spend my time, while I have all the resources at the Library of Congress, researching this to see whether it is true and what it means to my colleagues, to those of us who bring large groups of people together in congregations, whether to listen to music or for worship. If cultures evolve transportation habits and patterns in the ways that they need to, then those of us who spend our lives in congregational activities need to understand that, and realign the way we deliver our—I don't want to call it product, because it certainly is not a product—the way we speak to them. And so I set off. I began to wonder if more people listen to music in cars or on personal sound systems than in concert halls. I began to wonder if we have enough places in our culture to practice abstract listening alone. Where can we practice just listening to music in our culture? I began to wonder if the concert itself can be looked at not as a single event but as a multi-venued modular experience. In fact, we may be talking about a whole different definition of concert. Let's say you are interested in a piece of music, or in a reading, or in a sermon. You could listen to the King's Singers live in an acoustically perfect hall, which is really just a big speaker you sit inside of. Then you could get into your car and put their CD in your sound system. That car is a wrap-around concert hall which gives you the best seat in the house. Is the car then part of a multi-venued concert experience? You could then listen to the King's Singers broadcast through the sound system of public radio, which can be a very different sound depending on who is on the mixing board and what their preference is for the mix of sound. Is it possible that we are now evolving a culture that allows us to listen to a single event in a multi-venued modular way? I think that the answer is yes. I began to wonder if the definition of classical music has morphed, meaning that classical music now is more the sound of certain instruments than a particular repertoire. I wondered about it so much that I decided to put it to the test at Interlochen last summer. I was a composer-in-residence for a week, and I took myself over to the local public radio station and had lunch with Tom Paulson, who is their program director. I said, "What's classical music, Tom? What is your definition of classical music?" He really couldn't give me a definition. I said, "Well, is it Mozart?" and he said, "Yes." I said, "Is it Beethoven?" and he said "Yes." I said, "Is it Samuel Barber?" and he said "I don't know." I said, "Is it the Beatles?" and he said "That's not classical music, although the Beatles are classic." There you have it. Now we have a teaching point. A point of learning. So I said, "May I ask you an experimental question?" and he said "Sure, go ahead." So I said, "OK, you have a programming slot, you have the Beatles performing ‘Yesterday,' and you also have the Canadian Brass performing ‘Yesterday.' Which do you play?" And without batting an eye he said "The Canadian Brass." And I said, "So you wouldn't program the Beatles playing their own music?" and he said, "No, I wouldn't, and I couldn't." So I said, "Why can you program the Canadian Brass and not the Beatles?" and he said "Because the Canadian brass are classical players." And I wanted to jump up on the table and say "See, I told you I told you!" But I didn't. I said, "Is it possible that the definition of classical music is changing from repertoire-based to sound-and-instrument based?" and he said, "Well, it could be possible." People like Glen Branca and Steve Mackie, who work with electric instruments, are not programmed on public radio because theirs is not classical music even though it is entirely classical in how the music is formed, and the thinking behind the notating, and the counterpoint, and the form, and the structure. It's the sound of the instruments. There are no electric instruments in classical music. I also began to wonder if the development of electricity and portable sound over the past eighty years might signal the eclipse of a larger musical period and the beginning of another music period. Might we consider rethinking what we call the classical, and the romantic, and the early modern period of music? Might we take the classical, and the romantic, and the first thirty years of the 1900s, and think about that as an era in music, as a period in itself? It might make sense if we did. I began to think that maybe we are in a fudge period of time, between eras. There are always fudge periods between eras, when it seems to me that five things happen. The first of these things is that the instruments begin to change. Old ones are adapted and new ones are invented. Then the ensembles and the makeup of the ensembles change to reflect the sounds of the instruments combined. Then music changes, bringing secondary and tertiary parameters to the foreground, and eclipsing parameters that have dominated the music of the previous period. Time signatures, key signatures, the dominants of beat, stress patterns, are eclipsed, and new parameters begin to take the foreground, timbre, flow, pulse. The notation system adapts to reflect the new instruments, the adapted old ones, and the evolving musical language. (We are also in the middle of a sea change in our notation system. I think that we are at the beginning of a tsunami, and that's digital notation. It may be that we will come to a point where digital notation replaces the Guidonian hand system. It may look like the Guidonian hand system, but if you are notating on a computer you are not notating the Guidonian hand system, you are notating a digital notation. It is translating what you are doing. And its actually quite rudimentary. So don't be fooled that you are actually notating for yourself when you are punching notation into a computer. It's not precise.) |
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