The Art of the Sell

If you asked me to describe what I do, “entrepreneurship” wouldn’t be

in the first sentence of my response. It probably wouldn’t even be in the first chapter. After hearing a novel and not wholly unconvincing talk last week by Jeffrey Nytch, director of the CU-Boulder Entrepreneurship Center for Music, however, I don’t think I’m any closer

to throwing it in there.

Nytch’s lecture began with an admission that concert music in America is in bad shape—”serious trouble,” I believe, was his diagnosis. No argument from me there: Not only are arts organizations fighting for

their livelihoods, but in the era of the wholly commodified image, the justification for pursuing and purveying art music at all becomes more difficult to articulate in twenty-five words or less. Cultivated music

is no longer a vehicle for and legitimator of upward social mobility; even though this fundamentally bullshit reason to attend concerts is off the table, however, a vestige of ancien régime formality still prevails in the concert hall, emblematized by the proscription of

clapping between movements. Nytch pointed out, and rightly so, that a concert of classical music is a venue at which newcomers stand a very real chance of being shamed for breaking inscrutable and not especially sensible rules. None of this is news to anyone reading

NewMusicBox.

Nytch’s solution is the adoption of entrepreneurial strategies—knowing one’s product, developing a plan to get it to its audience, and following through with regular assessments. He proposes stripping

away the desiccated husk of custom that surrounds classical music, seeking more welcoming performance spaces, and striving to engage the senses as fully as possible. Again, all of that sounds entirely reasonable—a little too reasonable, in fact.

The title of Nytch’s talk, “Why Don’t We Riot Anymore? New Concert Paradigms for the 21st Century,” makes reference to the premiere of

the Rite of Spring; we all know what happened there. (Speaking for myself, I think it’s an improvement over those days of yore that I can safely leave my pepper spray and retractable baton at home when I head

out to a concert.) As Nytch acknowledged, it was choreography, not music, that is generally agreed to have agitated Parisian concertgoers, but in any case it was the content of Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s collaboration, not its wrapping, that enraged them.

Accordingly, although I wholeheartedly agree that there are many things about Western concert practice that bear reexamination, I wonder whether the content of concerts is more culpable than Nytch’s model suggests. To be fair, he does address programming—and, as a

composer, his personal investment in the promotion of new music is clear—but I think I might be too cynical to accept that if we could

only make the environment of concerts friendlier to newcomers, they would be disposed to fall in love with the fare on offer.

There’s another way to put this, a way that gets at something much

deeper and more troubling than where and how concerts are put together: As a graduate student, I find that the more I know about music—and not just the “music itself,” as if there really were such

a thing, but the ideas and economics that bore it—the harder it

is to remember why I loved it before I knew all of those things. In other words, if I didn’t have the analytical tools to read Beethoven through the literary tradition of German idealism as a

conflict of a musical immanence against socially conditioned norms of compositional practice and the artist’s own psyche, I don’t think I’d like his music, even though I know I did before I learned all of

these things. I’m glad Nytch is on the case, even though I don’t entirely share his perspective, because I don’t think I have the mental apparatus anymore to empathize with how nonspecialists actually

understand music. I just hope that the marketing professionals whose job it is to resuscitate classical music in this country are considering all sides of this problem, because those of us who are in the muck ourselves are probably incapable of doing so.