First Words: A Panel Discussion About Reviewing Premieres

First Words: A Panel Discussion About Reviewing Premieres

A group of North American music critics spar with composers on the best approach to covering premieres of new music at the 2002 Music Critics Association conference in Santa Fe NM.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.



(left to right) Frank J. Oteri, William Littler, David Stock, Barbara Jepson, John Kennedy

2002 Conference of the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA)

July 25, 2002
Hotel Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM

Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane

Panelists:
William Littler – Classical Music Critic, Toronto Star
Barbara Jepson – Classical Music Critic, Wall Street Journal
David Stock – Composer and Conductor Laureate, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
John Kennedy – Composer and Artistic Director, Santa Fe New Music

Additional Comments:
Margaret Barela – (Albuquerque, NM); Janet Bedell – Program Annotator, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Muriel Brooks – Retired Classical Music Critic; Dimitri Drobatschewsky – Former Classical Music Critic, Arizona Republic ; William Dunning – Music Critic, Santa Fe Reporter and Radio Announcer, KSFR-FM (Santa Fe, NM); Marc Geelhoed – (Bloomington, IN); Paul Hertelendy – Editor, ArtsSF.com and Former Classical Music Critic, San Jose Mercury News ; Johanna B. KellerFreelance Music Journalist and Former Editor, Chamber Music Magazine ; Nancy Lang – (Washington D.C.); James ReelFreelance Music Journalist and Former Arts Editor, Tucson Weekly (Tucson, AZ); Donald Rosenberg – Classical Music Critic, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) and President, MCANA; Jim Van Sant – Classical Music Critic, The Absolute Sound (Santa Fe, NM); and Steven Swartz – Publicity Director, Boosey & Hawkes

FRANK J. OTERI: This panel was put together with the help of Don Rosenberg, the new president of our Music Critics Association, to really reflect the diversity of sides to the issue of covering premieres. I think it’s going to be a very interesting discussion, but I don’t want people walking away thinking there’s a right or wrong answer here. I hope that everybody walks away asking themselves more questions than when they came in, because that’s the point of this discussion and we’ve put together quite an illustrious group of people: John Kennedy, a composer and a conductor based here in Santa Fe who also writes very eloquently about music and I should say, in an effort of full disclosure here, he was recently elected president of the board of directors at the American Music Center, the organization that publishes NewMusicBox…

JOHN KENNEDY: Does that make me your boss?

FRANK J. OTERI: Hmmm, well, you’re actually on deadline for me right now [laughs].

JOHN KENNEDY: Yes, I am [laughs].

FRANK J. OTERI: So it’s a very interesting situation. To his right, Barbara Jepson, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and has written for The New York Times, among other publications, is a freelance classical music journalist based in New York who covers a lot of premieres of new pieces. To her right, David Stock, another composer and conductor based in Pittsburgh who has done a great deal of work for a variety of composers for a very long time.

DAVID STOCK: A really long time!

FRANK J. OTERI: Since probably before I was born, I think. And to his immediate right we have the illustrious William Littler who is also on the board of directors of the Music Critics Association. He is also the classical music journalist for the Toronto Star in Canada and also covers a lot of premieres of new music, but from the perspective of somebody who is not a freelancer, who is a daily critic, which is another perspective entirely. I want to open this discussion with a couple of quotes that I am not going to identify and then I am going let everybody speak to issues and I have a bunch of questions, but I’d like to try to keep it open form…but these are the quotes I want to read because I came across them and I thought they were very apropos to this discussion:

“Must then always new pieces be played? Only worthless compositions should not be heard again and the preference of the concert giver for such works is the only reason for the ill-mannered craving for the new. An artwork is new as long as it offers nourishment to our mind and heart. Many will prove unhearing to the old.”

And the other quote:

“So shrill and complicated that only those who worsh
ip the failings and merits of this composer with equal fire–which at times borders on the ridiculous–could find pleasure in it.”

That was a review from the world premiere of Beethoven‘s Eroica in the Berlin Musikalische Zeitung. And the first quote was from Adolf Marx, “Some Words about Concert Life, Especially in Large Cities,” (Berlin 1824). And actually, one last one:

“…the clarinets–if I’m not mistaken!–miscount and enter at the same time.”

That was from a review of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1809. I bring that third quote in because I love the humility of it “…the clarinets–if I’m not mistaken.” Now, bear in mind, this is a world premiere and I think that that raises the quintessential question of this discussion–what constitutes the approach one should have as somebody writing about a world premiere, a piece they’ve never heard? And I would like to first take it from the perspective of the two critics who are at the table and then open it up to the two people who frequently get “criticized.”

BARBARA JEPSON: I think what I am going to say is applicable even if it’s not a premiere, but it’s a relatively recent work that hasn’t been performed in New York City… I do whatever it takes to complete the assignment in the time I have available to me. But I think it’s the way I approach it that makes it work rather then any specific tools I use, like scores or rehearsals or recordings. And my primary objective in covering a piece I haven’t heard is to enter the composer’s world, no matter what that world is stylistically. I just want to try to immerse myself in this person’s music. And to try to understand it from the inside out, and that’s hard, and I don’t succeed in doing that, but I get a certain way into a journey and then that is the basis upon which I write. Now, in terms of how I actually do that, more specifically, I like to get a score ahead of time and I like to do something that might sound weird–I like to look at the score just as an artifact. I covered an exhibition of scores a number of years ago at The Drawing Center: there were wonderful things by Earle Brown. They were just presenting scores as works of visual art and it kind of changed the way I look at a score. And so I just first like to look at it visually and see what impressions come to me. And then I start to look at it in the way I’m sure all of you look at it, in terms of: what is the harmonic language; and is there an instrument that acts as a catalyst in the piece, introducing new material or acting in opposition to one of the other instruments; whatever… I look more at the details. In terms of how much more I do than that, that’s where the time factor comes in. I should talk a little bit about how the stories I do for the Journal might be different from what someone on staff at a daily newspaper does. If it’s a piece where I’m writing on a single composer, then I really do try to get to the rehearsal, or if there is a performance tape; if, for example, it’s a New York premiere and I can get a performance tape from the world premiere, I do that. I have even listened to MIDI realizations even though they’re awful. But they do give you some sense of the rhythm. I like to sit at the piano actually and play through little snippets of parts in the score. That’s what I do if it’s a piece by a single composer. If I’m covering a new music festival–and in thinking about this panel, I think that my record was covering about 25 to 30 new pieces in 8 concerts in 1200 words. [laughter] And I assure you that I did not go to any rehearsals and I didn’t have time to do all the things I just talked about, but I did look at those concerts and some of the works were by composers who are very familiar to me. And I knew their idiom. I know their work. Others were totally new to me, so I spent more of my time with the ones who were unfamiliar and that included a program on turntables. I had never heard of the X-ecutioners nor had I heard their music and I realized that this was a whole area of this festival that I really did not feel equipped to evaluate, so I called up someone on the Lincoln Center staff who’s young and hip and goes to dance clubs, and I said that I needed some more information and she sent me a video on this whole phenomenon of the turntablists and it was extremely helpful. Then I went out on the Web and I bought some recordings and I wound up actually loving that program and I thought I was going to hate it. But those are some of the things I do. Let’s see if I’ve missed anything…Oh, well, again if it’s–sometimes I’ve written about a work that’s been written for a specific performer. In that case, I like to telephone the performer and ask them, you know, “What are the technical challenges of this piece? How does it treat your instrument, in your opinion? How does it compare to other pieces that you’ve played?” All those things…and that all goes back to this objective of trying to understand what the composer has done.

WILLIAM LITTLER: I think I would have to subscribe to everything that Barbara has said. Conductors are expected to behave like gods; critics are virtually expected to be gods. We always appear as the official record for history and the unfortunate thing is, we’re offering the first word and it is assumed to be the last word. I don’t think enough attention is given to the fact that what we’re offering is preliminary responses to almost any new work of art and we can’t be expected to buy into definitive judgments. On the other hand, we’re expected to be forthright, frank, and honest in our observations and the result is that the record of history tends to be the record of initial impressions, which is rather unfortunate. Nicolas Slonimsky‘s Lexicon of Musical Invective is just full of those made by composers as often as non-composers with the same record of accuracy, which is not very good. So what can we do to confront the situation? I was once in an argument with Harold Schonberg on a panel, in which he accused me of splitting hairs over what I believe is a distinction between reviewing and criticism. And anyone can review by going to an event and having a response to it, but the critical act from my point of view involves fitting the particular into a larger picture. Knowing, as Barbara said, more of the composer’s music in which to make sense out of the specific piece you are reviewing, for example. All this takes time, it takes effort and it’s an almost an impossible task to perform by the daily reviewer because we have so much music to confront and we don’t have the opportunity to know it as well as we would like to. So it’s a difficult task of being called upon to offer a judgment when we really are only witnesses, at this stage, to the art rather than judicial judges of its merit. Nonetheless we’re called critics. If we go back to the old Greek, the word really means an active understanding, but we’ve come to make it an act of evaluation. I think that the problem with our credibility is we are making that act, we are performing it, before we really have sufficient information to make the judgment. But if we’re on a daily newspaper, we don’t have more time, alas. We always, if we can, get a hold of scores. And some of us go to rehearsals, some of us prefer not to. Just apropos to that issue–which I think is an important one–some critics feel, and I think fairly, that when you go to a rehearsal you are watching an attempt to solve problems and your consciousness of those problems might affect the way you actually listen to the first performance. Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, said he wanted to see artists’ solutions. He did not want to see their attempts to confront problems. So there…but we feel differently about that and we feel differently about how much information we need in order to make our judgment. Some of us feel we have to be part of the milieu. Clement Greenberg was an authoritative interpreter of the art scene, not simply because he was a brilliant man but because he knew the artists and he knew their thinking because he knew something about them. The complete evidence of one piece, one performance, doesn’t tell you the full story of what went into that composition and exposure to the artist in many ways, through his scores, through his thinking, through knowing, through sleeping with him or her–all these are sources of information.

[laughter]

BARBARA JEPSON: Are you advocating that?

WILLIAM LITTLER: That we all have to evaluate on an individual basis as to what’s useful to us.

FRANK J. OTERI: John, can you follow that? [laughs]

DAVID STOCK: I’m glad I’m not next!

JOHN KENNEDY: You’d like our perspective on preparing a premiere?

FRANK J. OTERI: I’d like your reaction to what you’d want a critic to prepare for in a premiere and then we’ll open it up because I’ve got a bunch of questions that will emerge from what everyone says.

JOHN KENNEDY: Well, the way Barbara described preparing for a premiere is beautiful and one would hope that that kind of care is exhibited by everyone involved in the premiere as well, you know, because ideally when I prepare a work for a premiere I love to get into the music as deeply as possible and, of course, we don’t always have the time to find all the mistakes in a brand new score and that sort of thing. But it’s interesting, I’ve been sometimes interviewed by journalists in advance of a premiere or a new piece and I’ll find that someone has done their homework and knows aspects of a composer that I haven’t had time to learn or might point out resources that have been very valuable to me because I am so busy learning the notes and figuring out how to get the piece executed as well as possible. But something that’s interesting to me in the post-concert review situation is it seems that there’s a habit in musical criticism of when we’re hearing music that is known to us, we really focus on the quality of the performance and, you know, how the performers realized the work and the bulk of the review is so often about that. And when you see a review for a premiere, the focus is almost exclusively on the music, as it should be, but so rarely then is the quality of the performance discussed, in part because we’ve never had an opportunity to hear it and compare it to another performance. But it’s sometimes frustrating to performers of new music because they’re not getting the credit that they deserve; sometimes they’re not even mentioned in the article, you know. A cellist who’s learned a fantastic piece, devoted hours to, in fact much more time than learning a piece of standard repertoire. And so, I think that’s a balance that in an ideal review would start to come forth: that more attention would be paid to the nature of the performance and even if aspects of the accuracy are not known, that there’s some sense from the energy and the vitality of it and the sense of assurance that’s present on stage.

DAVID STOCK: I just have to start off what I’m going to say by following up briefly on what John said. Until three years ago I conducted a professional new music ensemble–the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble–and over the course of the 23 years that I did this, I conducted, I don’t know, several hundred premieres, a lot of second, third, whatever performances, hundreds of new works and in all that–now I’m speaking from the performers’ perspective rather than the composer’s, which I’ll switch to in a moment–and in all those years there was only one time that anybody actually mentioned the performances! You know, Don Rosenberg criticized my tempo in Schoenberg. That’s old music but I was so happy that somebody even noticed. [laughter] Anyway, I will now put my composer hat back on and put away the performer hat. The most important thing for us composers, what we really want from you and your journalistic colleagues is very simple, it’s to be taken very seriously. Look, we all know that the general public that goes to symphonic concerts or chamber music concerts, they want to read about how the blah blah quartet or the blah blah conductor did whatever. But, you know, they’re not going to be able to do all that much to Beethoven. They’re not even going to be able to do that much to Mahler or Rachmaninoff. They’ll play it faster. They’ll play it slower. They might get a little bit louder here. They might get a little bit softer there, but the music is there, the essence of the music is there. Sure, we all know there are terrible performances, but it isn’t really such a big deal how the performance went if you really think about it–and we’re talking about the long term, O.K.? Does anybody really care what X conductor really did in 1946 on such and such a piece, when you have to really delve back into the archives to even know that conductor X conducted such a piece. But, if an important work was premiered in 1946, that really means something because the works have a historical legacy. Even the ones that don’t stick around, they have resonance. So, just by taking it seriously, by putting it in the proper perspective we composers, except those who do electronic music of course, are totally dependent upon performers. We love performers. I’m not lowering the role of the performer. I’m just, I guess, advocating balance between “Yes, the Beethoven Fifth went pretty well,” and “Yes, this new piece has such and such qualities,” or “It stinks,” or whatever. The second thing is that unfortunately, which makes me very sad, most of what you and your colleagues say about composers makes almost no difference. It’s terrible! I’m sorry. Probably some of you sense this. I’ve never heard of a composer whose career was made or broken by a couple of good reviews or lousy reviews. I could quote you a few of my lousiest reviews, but I won’t. We’ll save that for later. It makes no difference! That’s the bad news. You see, now understand, it makes it very hard for you to take it very seriously. With performe
rs it’s another story, you know, with young performers especially. A couple of good reviews in the right places and BAM! [claps hands], they’re off to the races. And you know sometimes it doesn’t actually do them any good, because sometimes their careers move much faster than they should just ’cause somebody said something nice about them in some important place. This doesn’t happen with composers. It just doesn’t. In the short run, I can’t think of anyone whose composer career went up or down because of it. It’s very sad. I hope that my saying that doesn’t discourage you from taking it seriously. I know that it seems like my second point contradicts my first point.

WILLIAM LITTLER: Yeah, it did.

DAVID STOCK: It did, but, yet again it has to do with balance, you know.

DAVID STOCK: When someone has taken the trouble to find out something about me or my colleagues and shows some care in the review, it means something to the composer. Who cares whether it means something to–you know, it’s not going to convince the Philadelphia Orchestra to take up Joe Schmoe‘s piece. It just isn’t. I wish it would, but…

WILLIAM LITTLER: Now, you’re assuming that we want this power.

BARBARA JEPSON: Yes. Yes.

DAVID STOCK: Of course not! No, no, no, no, no! I don’t assume it, but I know that, I just don’t want you to feel that because it isn’t as important as it is for performers that it’s not as important for the composer him or herself.

BARBARA JEPSON: But we’re not writing to advance anyone’s career…

DAVID STOCK: Of course not.

BARBARA JEPSON: …or to derail a career…

DAVID STOCK: Of course…that’s not…

BARBARA JEPSON: We’re writing to communicate…

DAVID STOCK: Yes.

BARBARA JEPSON: …to the readers.

DAVID STOCK: Look, we all know why you do what you do and it’s extremely important. It’s the effect that I’m talking about, the ripple effect.

BARBARA JEPSON: Yeah, yeah.

DAVID STOCK: The third thing that we really need as composers is something that is impossible under journalistic conditions for most writers in the United States and that is what I would call critical studies–taking another step. In Europe, there still are people, mostly either composers or musicologists, who actually do critical studies. They have time. They’re not on deadline. Maybe they’ve got a pamphlet coming out or a book or something and they can actually spend some time and really assess the long range of a composer’s work if he’s someone that has stuck around for a while. And ultimately, that kind of attention is infinitely more important for the lifeblood of the music than the daily review. First of all, on top of everything else, is the fact that pieces change over time, as you said. I’ve been astonished to discover that some of my own pieces develop a performance tradition…when I’m not there! I can’t understand it! Do they hear the tape and then…? I don’t know, you know, so if there are more people who had the luxury–and I know many of you wish you did–to take the time to study Composer X or Composer Y or Group B or Group C, you know, the downtown school, the blah blah school, the turntable school, and write about them in some depth over time, this would be fantastic. Of course, it’s not very likely under the circumstances that all of you work under.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, it’s very interesting hearing everybody at this table with their stories and what Bill was saying about The Lexicon of Musical Invective versus Barbara coming to turntable music and doing essentially a deep study because she had the time…

BARBARA JEPSON: It wasn’t deep.

FRANK J. OTERI: But it was deeper than one normally has the opportunity to do.

FRANK J. OTERI: I think it’s an interesting question to throw out for we who pass judgments on pieces of music–how often have you changed your mind about a piece of music that in print you have said one thing about? And I’d love to open this up to the audience. How many times…I’d love to hear some stories of changing your mind on pieces.

WILLIAM LITTLER: I’ve allowed myself to change my mind. For example, there was an opera with a libretto by Robertson Davies, our leading Canadian writer at the time, on The Golden Ass. And I was really quite unmoved by it and reflected that in my review, but I said, this is an important premiere, important people are involved, I’ve got to go back and take another listen. And I fully intended to write about it again and it turned out that I felt basically the same way the second time. This is a Harold Schonberg belief again, he said a piece generally for a sensitive listener makes its point and you can make a decision fairly quickly about it. And I know that there are pieces probably that I feel differently about–I remember writing as a child or in adolescence my opinions of certain compositions and with greater maturity I’ve understood those pieces better. I’m told John Cage said if you don’t like a piece of music, listen to it again. If you don’t like it then, listen to it again. Life quickly disappears under those circumstances, but you can understand his point.

[laughter]

JOHN KENNEDY: I’m not sure he followed his own advice, but…

[laughter]

BARBARA JEPSON: I’m not sure if I can think of an example. I probably will tonight, you know, at 2 in the morning.

DAVID STOCK: Don’t call us!

BARBARA JEPSON: I think what’s changed perhaps is my understanding of a certain context, of a certain idiom that maybe in the beginning I was less receptive to. The first minimalist composer that I ever heard was Philip Glass and this goes back many, many years and I didn’t like it. And he’s still not my favorite composer, but I actually do like some of his later works. Then I heard pieces by Steve Reich and John Adams and the list goes on and on and I liked them, so I think maybe, maybe more than one exposure to an example of a particular stylistic movement is helpful.

DON ROSENBERG: I wanted to talk about what you just said about your view of a piece changing. Sometimes I go to a dress rehearsal of a piece by the Cleveland Orchestra, a brand new piece, and I always sit there with a score at the rehearsal and that night I go to the premiere and I listen without a score. And I find that sometimes my impression of the piece changes remarkably from the rehearsal to the performance partly because in the rehearsal it’s a very
visual process. You’re watching what the piece looks like, not just listening to it, and when you get to the performance without a score you’re not watching anymore. Your whole being is devoted to hearing how the piece works, not in details but as an overall, unified composition. So I find it sometimes, I write about this piece in a very different way than I would have if I had just gone to the rehearsal and then written about it. Now, of course, we have a problem with deadline writing. How do you write about a new piece in 20 minutes, which we have to do sometimes? We have to go to the performance. We have to assimilate the language. We have to try to put it into some language that the general reader is going to be able to absorb. We have to be able to describe what we heard and sometimes very quickly. This year the Cleveland Orchestra did a new piece by Matthias Pintscher, the young German composer, and I had requested a certain amount of space because I knew that it would require a little more space. Well, at 5 o’clock the editor said, “Well, I’m sorry but the Metro section can’t take your review, so we need to take it in another section and you’ll have to write so many inches.” Well, it turned out that the performance was very long and at intermission I called and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to get this to you on deadline, especially since this is a premiere and I have to write about a premiere.” Well, they said, “Well, don’t worry, we’ve got you 6 more inches. [laughter] That meant that I had to write this review in 20-25 minutes, including the premiere. So it can be very difficult to do this. But, as Bill said, you have the impression really once you’ve heard it. You can give that preliminary impression right away. It’s not going to be cast in stone and even as you listen to it in further performances or recordings, your idea will change. But I do think that we have the responsibility to try to convey the flavor of the piece and have even some kind of opinion about it. It’s not easy to do that, but you can tell the reader whether something was very striking or something was very ugly or something was enduring. You want to go back and hear that piece. Sometimes you say that you may never want to hear the piece again. And you can do it. You have to do it on the basis of what you hear, unfortunately.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Barbara made an interesting comment about hearing Philip Glass the first time and not liking it and subsequently finding minimalist pieces that she did like. It raises an interesting question. How are we judging something when we judge it? Are we judging it on its own terms? In art criticism–visual art criticism–there’s a very big movement to judge a painting by how it fulfills its own terms rather than necessarily your own view of it. But is that always an intellectually honest position? If you just simply don’t like that style no matter how good it is, how honest are you being to yourself or your readers if you deal with it that way in your writing. Obviously, you should be laying your cards on the table because maybe it’s unfair for you to be covering it if you don’t like that style. But it’s also dishonest to say if you don’t like something, that you know, “Well, this is a good piece of this.” I’m wondering, John, in your experience, you perform music of such stylistic variety and a lot of times somebody might not be familiar with that particular style or where it fits into the trajectory of new music…

JOHN KENNEDY: Certainly, as one of the arbiters sometimes of what gets performed and what doesn’t…I mean so many scores come to me by composers or from publishers, and I’m looking at what I’m going to perform and all my own tastes and dislikes are going to come in to it. I think, certainly in my own experience, I’ve evolved a lot over the years. When I was younger I was much more polemical about, you know, what music needed to be advocated stylistically. Now I feel like we are in such a sort of healthier place in our musical culture where the style wars are just so passÈ, no one cares about them. At least it doesn’t feel like the composers are so concerned about them anymore and it’s smooth…there’s a lot of fresh air in that regard.

DAVID STOCK: Except in Europe, where it’s key.

JOHN KENNEDY: Except in Europe. It is key. You’re exactly right.

FRANK J. OTERI: Except you know, interestingly enough, those battles don’t die that quickly as I discovered on our own forums on NewMusicBox. There are some very polemical posters who are in one camp or in the other and if you say something about minimalism, then all the serialist people come out and say, “Why are you covering this nonsense?” And if you cover serialism, all the people on the downtown side say, “Why are you covering all of this academic, mathematical stuff?” And the twain still doesn’t meet for some people. For us, covering this, entering into this fray, writing for a general public that might not even be aware of these stylistic wars and where things fit. We’re trying to make a context not where that piece fits in with that camp or with that style, but where it fits in in the larger picture of a concert that will feature, you know, a Tchaikovsky violin concerto or a Mozart string quartet and trying to make this bigger picture. Anything that’s new music, whether it is from one camp or the other, is new music to the general public.

JOHN KENNEDY: Exactly.

DAVID STOCK: Well, actually, it’s even worse than that because sadly after 90 years if you say contemporary music or new music or any of those words to your average B-flat concertgoer, he or she still thinks it’s, you know, atonal–whatever that means to them. You know, we’re still battling the Schoenberg 1909 battles all over. In their context, in other words, we who live with this stuff, whether we are composers or performers or journalists or whatever, know that time marches on. But your ordinary person who says that he or she loves Schubert or whatever, thinks that it’s still all like that and they have this instant response that is negative. New music in general has had very bad PR, mostly from its own doing, for a long time. Blame Schoenberg, you know, Schoenberg is allowed to answer for it in this regard. The Society for Private Performances is one of the most significant things to happen to music in the whole 20th century. It only lasted a couple of years but, boy, we’ve still got echoes of it now in ways that I wish it didn’t.

JOHN KENNEDY: You’re not exaggerating. We have a concert tonight at 8 P.M. and two people have called our office this week to ask if the music is atonal.

DAVID STOCK: Right. There you go.

[laughter]

WILLIAM LITTLER: Well, it’s your own fault. You’ve gone ahead of the audience and your language has progressed and developed at a faster rate than the audience is able to absorb. And remember, we don’t have to give lectures on music history now, but the commonality of musical language has broken down in the 20th century and it’s taken so m
any different directions and the amount of newness represented by each piece has increased to such a state that it’s difficult for the audience to know enough to be able to be aware of what’s going on. That’s the fact of the matter that we all have to live with. Now, there’s another factor too. You mentioned Schoenberg. He did, in that famous quotation, say: “My music isn’t really modernist, it’s just badly performed.” And the fact of the matter is the difficulty of it isn’t sufficiently addressed in rehearsal and so we often are hearing performances of music in which the music isn’t able to build its own case strongly enough because the resources haven’t been there to prepare it. Because it is more difficult to perform. So there are all sorts of complex issues here, but the audience cannot totally be blamed for the problem. It’s an aesthetic problem that is the result of the progress of the evolution of music.

DAVID STOCK: If I may respectfully disagree with something you said, the newness factor is gone. In other words, there’s really been nothing new in music since about 1964. I mean, the birth of minimalism

WILLIAM LITTLER: True, true. I was talking about the 20th century.

JOHN KENNEDY: Well, I respectfully disagree, but…

DAVID STOCK: Well, come on! I mean, there’s nothing really new stylistically that’s come down the pipe. There have been some modifications, there’s certainly some technological advances in the field of electronics but that’s the last new thing and that’s, you know, a third of a century ago. It’s more than that, isn’t it, now? That’s a long time for the newness factor to have gone away. If we’re talking strictly about concert music, O.K.? So I think that’s…that’s no longer as true as it once was.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what about that turntable concert?

DAVID STOCK: That’s what I said. Technologically there are some differences. Certainly the influences of rock and the more far out versions of rock such as the turntable people etc., have started to creep into concert music, but it is still relatively minor compared to the time from 1906 to 1964. I mean, the rate of change is way slowed-down.

JOHN KENNEDY: But the audience alienation to certain kinds of new music and what that means, and then how you have to write about it–it’s not just a result of the arc in evolution of music itself. It’s part of the habits that we have culturally, which include what constitutes a concert, what we wear, what the program should be, and how it should be listened to and how it should be reviewed. And I mean, it’s my dream that in my lifetime we’ll see an orchestra that will play new music or music from the last 50 years or 100 years and that for something different they’ll insert in the program something that is 200 years old by someone from a different culture, you know.

JIM VAN SANT: I’ve been listening for the last 10 days to a radio transcription of L’amour de loin and probably a lot of you have too. And at one point, the old phrasemaker, I do all kinds of dumb things about polishing up my rhetoric before I even know what I want to say–but I had to say to myself, I’m going to write that there is nothing in this opera that could not have been written after 1925. It was all written–the whole vocabulary, all the architecture, everything, was all ready to go as soon as Franz Schreker finished his most important operas in the 1920s, especially the Christophorus. And though I had to think to myself, “You old fool, that’s not what this opera is about!” And I don’t think it makes any difference whether the new materials of music stopped in 1964 or whether they’re still going on. Who was that marvelous anthropologist at Harvard who died prematurely about three months ago, his name leaves me?

WILLIAM LITTLER: Gould.

JIM VAN SANT: Stephen Jay Gould had some really interesting things to say on that subject and he would agree with those who say that new music, contemporary music, newly composed music is not popular because there really isn’t anything else new to say. I would disagree with that too because I am not as qualified as most of the rest in that regard. I think it’s the way materials are arranged. I think it’s the artfulness of the dramatic situation. I think it’s the text. I do think it’s the performance–big time. Gosh, what’s happened to Dawn Upshaw? She’s gotten a lot better. She’s singing in tune in this opera, it’s fantastic. These things–that’s just an abstract example–these things I think are highly relevant to our enjoyment of the piece and also to its validity. I don’t know that some of the very greatest top 10 names in classical music were always doing something new or using something new.

BARBARA JEPSON: Exactly. Exactly.

JIM VAN SANT: I think it’s how they use stuff. And I will respectfully suggest that if you do have time to get repeated exposure to a piece of music, that will present itself as one of the core elements to think about

BARBARA JEPSON: If I could just interject something the composer Paul Moravec said, he said, “In our time, we have an addiction to neophilia.” [laughter] And this obsession with the new, somehow that has been elevated above every other value in terms of assessing a piece of music. I think it’s certainly a valid thing to consider, but it’s by no means the only one. I mean, you can look, I don’t think Bach was considered new at certain points in his career. There were times when he was very old-fashioned and out-of-date in relationship to what his sons were doing and his sons’ contemporaries. And we don’t hold that against him now.

DAVID STOCK: I’m sorry, I’ve got tell you a great story about something that happened, gosh, this is already a long time ago. Roughly around 1966, right at the height of the “you gotta be new, you gotta be different” time, right? I was a graduate student at Brandeis University and a friend of mine was working as a graduate assistant in the electronic studio. Remember now, this is still early so we’re talking about razor blades and splicing, right? So a composer came from Israel to write in the Brandeis studio and he had this fabulous idea, he’s going to write a piece based on baby cries. So he goes in there and he has my friend, who shall remain nameless, a pretty good composer, he’s gonna help him with this piece and he tells my friend what he wants to d
o. He’s going to write a piece based on baby cries. And my friend says, “Gee, that’s really interesting. My last electronic piece was based on the baby cries of my daughter.” So the guy looked at him in horror, went back to his dorm, packed his bags, and went back to Israel. [laughter] Because somebody had already done a piece with baby cries. You see? There’s no point in doing it anymore.

WILLIAM LITTLER: But the history of criticism is the history of criticizing the new. It’s only in recent generations that we’ve been preoccupied with performance practice. And in fact to be a music critic was to be a witness for what was happening and to communicate that and I hope we haven’t lost that sense of priority. But because so much of what we review is not new, we tend to be oriented toward performance and I think some of our skills in appreciating the new may not be as sharp as they need to be.

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY: Do you remember, David, serving with me on a panel in Chautauqua?

DAVID STOCK: Yeah, where was it? Chautauqua, O.K. That’s where it was.

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY: There was an experience that we had together. This was a panel of music critics and composers–contemporary composers obviously since they were sitting on the panel and we were presenting to a very knowledgeable audience. Anybody who goes to a seminar in Chautauqua at least has the desire to be knowledgeable. They are not the average public. And during this panel a soprano was asked to perform a new piece–I don’t think it was yours but it may have been yours–imitating birds. Now, the soprano to begin with was not–she was not Dawn Upshaw. She was not good looking. She sang probably quite well, but the music she had to perform without any introduction to it was difficult to absorb to put it politely. And as she sang and it was over, people applauded politely and we were ready to pack up and go home. It was 5 o’clock and before we could really get up, a little white-haired gentleman in the audience raised his hand and said, “If I may please say something,” and we generously allowed him to say something and he started to tear into the performer and the composer in his high-pitched geezer voice. He went ahead, “How dare you insult me! My intelligence, my sense of aesthetics with this awful noise. How could you do this to me? How could you people allow this to be performed?” This was the reaction to something that was different and new. I don’t remember if we calmed the guy down or…

DAVID STOCK: Never, no.

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY: But it was an incident, which I have to–I do some lectures up there. I cite, I quote this incident because it’s very, very, I think, relevant, if nothing else.

JOHANNA KELLER: Well, I was just going to add a story when the L’amour de loin incident came up… An interesting anecdote about somebody with great intelligence and great ears changing her mind. It was when I was interviewing Betty Freeman recently, the great philanthropist who, as we all know, funded Harry Partch and Terry Riley and Steve Reich and very much in the modernistic and California end of things and that’s her favorite kind of music. She was telling me–she had been one of these funders for L’amour de loin–she had gone to the premiere and she said, “I really didn’t like it. The music was too soft.” She said, “It was too pretty. I really didn’t care for it at all.” She said, “But then I heard it seven more times. [laughter] Actually, I’ve become very fond of the piece; I see what she’s after.” And I thought it was a really interesting–Betty is very musically astute–but I find that’s a lesson for all of us because we’re all called to write about a piece right off the bat, but later, we may change our minds about it. We may find that an aesthetic begins to grow on us and then we begin to understand, keeping our ears open, even, you know. Here someone funded the piece, you know, but it was a very honest response to an aesthetic change and I thought, O.K., if you do listen to something seven times then maybe your mind does get changed eventually. It was an interesting story.

MURIEL BROOKS: I want to comment on that because I think the most successful compositions that I have heard an audience take to have been in concerts where the work was played twice at least with the composer talking about it in between. And I think one of the problems is even in performance–it was mentioned before–the performers have a great deal of trouble with some of these difficult scores and they even improve on a second performance and therefore both the critic and the audience has a better chance of understanding the work or at least coming to accept it. And I think this is one of our biggest problems. And I would also just like to say about this an anecdote that I did tell to David Stock before. I have a very close friend who is a wonderful composer and she was commissioned to write a work for chamber orchestra and chorus. She was very pleased there was only one other work on the program–Beethoven’s Ninth. And after the performance–and everybody didn’t like the program–and this was done by Paul Dunkel. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with him. He was with his orchestra in Westchester commissioning a new work for every concert and having the composer for a pre-concert lecture. So after this, I asked my friend, Ruth Schonthal, how she liked the performance because it went over very well and the audience enjoyed it. And she said, well, she wasn’t pleased and I said, “What was the matter?” “Well,” she said, “it was on this program with Beethoven’s Ninth so they had to spend more time rehearsing the Beethoven’s Ninth because more people would be familiar with it.” And if they made errors in her work, nobody would know, so rehearsals for her work are short-shrifted and that is a big problem. But on the other hand, many composers like Ruth don’t like to be part of a program which is all new music. They want to be part of the act.

MARGARET BARELA: A couple of things occurred to me because I’ve been having high energy conversations with performers that are doing new works and they always complain about that one–how can you possibly make a judgment on that if you’ve only heard it once? And one of the things that I say to them is that I may have only heard it once, but the performers have a real obligation in premiering a work because they have had access to the work. They are the ones who have to be convincing and project the piece in such a way that it goes across to an audience. And an audience wants to find a connection, going back to your point about neophilia. That’s probably one of the things people can’t identify with. They’re sacrificing content for newness and not thinking about having something to say. That’s a shift of values that I think over a period of time in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, you know, was simply the case. The second thing, there was a very interesting thing that happened in Albuquerque this past spring. They had only the second performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Albuquerque in the history of Albuquerque concert music and it happens that the man that was my piano teacher, who used to be a student of a colleague of Schoenberg‘s, performed both in the first performance in the ’50s and in this second performance. He made the comment that the first time they spent many, many weeks preparing for it. It was conducted both times, but the first time the person doing it had a real commitment to really putting the piece across and I remember, I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, and it had a huge impact on me. I just liked that dark stuff for some reason. But the second one was less satisfying for a variety of reasons. But my former piano teacher’s comment was, “You know, we didn’t have nearly the rehearsal time this time.” And I think maybe it’s because of union considerations about how much rehearsal time they can allot to different pieces, that they give short shrift to a lot of performances. And that doesn’t do a service to the music; it doesn’t do a service to the performers.

FRANK J. OTERI: How do journalists then respond to that? How do we in our role as people who are trying to make the field better address that issue? When there’s only so much space to allot to anything? And another thing that nobody’s touched on here that I wanted to get into: the situation where you’re covering a performance and, say, you don’t like it, but the audience did. Or, you loved it but it was clear that the audience hated it. Should that be something that’s part of your review? Are you reporting on the event as well as giving critical evaluation of what you’re covering? Now David wanted to get something in there…

DAVID STOCK: Yeah, I just wanted to ask all of you two quick questions. The first one was, think back the last, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7 years, wherever you were working. How often in those 6 or 7 or some such number of years has the same organization, symphony orchestra, chamber music, whatever, repeated the work in a future season? Once, twice?

JANET BEDELL: This is just something we’re starting to get into at the Baltimore Symphony–the sense that organizations feel, “Well, we’re doing our bit for contemporary music by commissioning, commissioning, commissioning.” When we start looking back over what we have commissioned it becomes clear that some of them are real winners. Some of the pieces that came up are really quite striking and really deserve a re-hearing and we’re just starting to think about it–and I think many organizations should be thinking about this–in this whole suite of repetition that we do of familiar repertoire, why not look back over recent commissions and bring them back. Bring them back quite soon and, you know, give the orchestra a chance to get better on top of what they did the first time.

DAVID STOCK: Can we see a straw vote? How many people remember this happening more than occasionally wherever you are? About 3 or 4. Yeah, yeah. My other question, which is much more complex in a certain loony way, is how many of you think that in whatever span of time you’ve been working in the city you are in that what you say about contemporary music has any direct effect on what actually gets played? Do think the orchestra or the chamber music society or whatever, pays attention?

PAUL HERTELENDY: I think perhaps a very strong arts organization with a very strong sense of goals and determination, they can be bulletproof as far as critiques are concerned. In a lot of areas, like where I live, I find that they are weak-willed enough that if reviewers jump on world-premieres and make them out to be rather negative experiences, the following year or the year after they’re not going to do any more commissions. And that’s one of the reasons why I think a lot of us write about new pieces in a somewhat more positive vein than the inner heart is telling us because we realize that these arts organizations are going to be intimidated and not spending the money on commissions in the future if they keep getting bad reviews.

JOHN KENNEDY: To answer David’s question, there actually is a young American conductor whose programming, if you look at the orchestra’s schedule, for the past 3 years now has reflected what has been written about in the Sunday Times without fail. And you know, to his credit, he’s reading the Sunday Times, but on the other hand do you want your only source to be Paul Griffiths, for instance? And so, I do think that there is the opportunity to help change the perception of what’s out there. Performers read the media. Performers try to find all the sources they can and, you know, the publishing houses just want to send you PR and you want to find other perspectives that aren’t part of the industry.

MARC GEELHOED: I think that one way that might increase the reaction and potential for a positive effect in new music is writing up previews of when a world premiere is coming and we’re talking a lot about reviewing the piece and everything like that but I think that one really positive way would be to say, you know, there’s a premiere coming, I’ve seen the score. It looks like it might be really great… I had a chance to see the score and listen to a recording of an American premiere by the Swedish composer named Sven-David Sandström who teaches at IU. They were doing his High Mass there and after I heard the recording, I was like: “This is going to be a really great thing!” So I wrote up a very positive preview of the thing and there was a packed house that showed up for the thing and people loved it. So, I think that that might be even more effective for getting repeat performances than a positive review.

NANCY LANG: In Washington, we have the Hechingers who provide funds for new works that are done regularly with the National Symphony. I think you have to recall that the Ford Foundation years ago gave grants for new works. I think what we need to do, if it’s possible somehow, is get corporations, if possible, to fund new works, more so than what is being done currently. Recordings are fine, radio is fine, but I think you need more money and I think that maybe that’s the source where we should go.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to respond to something that Marc said which I thought was really interesting. The quotes that I read at the very beginning of the session are from a very interesting collection that the University of Nebraska Press just put out of critiques of Beethoven by his German contemporaries. It’s a whole collection of responses to the world premieres of these pieces. It was fas
cinating reading in preparation for this discussion because not only were they reviewing the performances, but often times they were reviewing the publications as they were published. If a score got released of a piano four-hand version of a symphony, there’d be a review of it. Now the world has changed a great deal. [laughter] Could you imagine coming to your editor and saying this new score has come out from Boosey & Hawkes or Schirmer or Presser or what have you and you would love to review this publication! You know, “I sat at the piano and I worked through it and the typography on this was inadequate at measure 54!” But this Beethoven book has articles by people saying this stuff! And I’m reading this thinking, wow, why am I not living then? (Well, you know, living conditions weren’t so great, but…) But, how do we deal with this so that music isn’t as new to us in approaching it and the preview idea is a very good one. Something that got raised at the end of the last session, which spiraled into our lunch conversation that I want to raise here… Often, when we’re covering something, especially in smaller cities, in smaller markets, we might be the only person at one paper covering that artistic beat, so what we say about that event is the only piece of documentation for that event and for a premiere this is particularly terrible. What could we do in terms of funding? I would say, yeah, it’s great to fund more performances of new music, but how about getting people and getting organizations to fund multiple reviews of performances so that we can engage the audience in a dialogue so that the audience isn’t just reading this as though it was word from on high, but so the audience would actually begin to listen critically as well and engage in the debate.

WILLIAM LITTLER: Well, I think we are coming up against a space problem in the realities of contemporary journalism. Anytime you do something, it means you’re not doing something else. Anytime you take the time to go a rehearsal as well as a performance, you’ve avoided going to another performance and what the critic finds himself or herself doing, is trying to be fair about the coverage of the field. And it means inevitably that what takes more time, which is the preparation to review new music, gets cut short because we have the other responsibilities as well. And I don’t see that changing if we’re dealing with the general press. Now what we really need is a scholarly musical press of consequence. The trouble is the funding for that sort of thing, given the number of readers that there are, is very hard to come by. And likewise, corporations sponsoring the new music, they’re interested in numbers and new music does not represent by and large, large numbers.

FRANK J. OTERI: Classical music in total doesn’t represent large numbers.

WILLIAM LITTLER: That’s right. So we have to be realistic, once again, in terms of our expectations. These things are desiderata but are they practical realities? Not likely.

BARBARA JEPSON: I actually think one of the best things that you can do to encourage repeat performances is to write a piece that has legs. I’ve now been covering new music long enough to see that there are some pieces that have legs and that there are some pieces that fall by the wayside justly. And I think that a sphere where this seems to happen more often than most is when a composer is commissioned to write a piece for a particular member of an orchestra and then if that piece–if it has those legs–is picked up by other orchestra members who bring it to the attention of their conductors and say, “Hey, there’s this great percussion concerto by Joe Schwantner, and Chris Lamb premiered it at the New York Philharmonic and you know, it’s been recorded by so-and-so and I’d like to do it here.” And there’s a certain politics in major orchestras where they try to feature their principal players, a few of them a season. And just as an example of that, Sofia Gubaidulina wrote a piece for two violas for Cynthia Phelps and Rebecca Young at the Philharmonic and that piece, I think, the Philharmonic itself has already performed at least 7 times, I think more. They’ve toured with it, they’ve repeated it in New York and I’m sure that other orchestras are picking it up as well.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it’s on the Masur set, so it’s recorded.

BARBARA JEPSON: Yeah, that’s right.

JOHN KENNEDY: I just wanted to say I think, you know, we don’t give our audiences enough credit sometimes. It’s like sometimes…we’ve been a little concerned with the whole subject a little bit and talking about audience reception of new pieces, and I tell you, I’ve done some very radical repertoire over the years and very rarely have people gotten up and walked out of a concert. It’s not the scenario that we had in Chautauqua some years ago. I just find that peoples’ ears are more open. Maybe I would feel differently if I was music director of an orchestra and I had to be concerned about those issues, but I think we can push the envelope and I don’t think we have to look at audiences with this sort of trepidation. It’s just music. It happens to be new. We were talking about funding for performances and composers. I’ve got a quote and we can guess when it was and who said it.

“The shifting scenes of our social and economic environments are so fluctuating, so crowded with heterogeneous influences, such a helter-skelter race of commercial jockeying, that it is very difficult to strike any bedrock economic or human relationships. Our economic system has fostered the productive psychology with such narrow limitations that no allowance is made for the leisure which is necessary for productivity in the arts. The problem of social and economic adjustment is doing more to destroy talented American composers than any other problems and of course its only solution will come when enough American individuals recognize that we cannot buy musical culture any more than we can buy a home environment.”

Roy Harris, 1933.

WILLIAM DUNNING: Yeah, I was thinking about–and I think perhaps it’s worth putting it in here–something called Asimov’s Corollary, which Isaac Asimov came up with several years ago at a science fiction convention, not unlike this [laughter]…

WILLIAM LITTLER: I’ve always wondered whether you knew where you wer
e, Bill!

WILLIAM DUNNING: I know where I am. I’m right here, where are you? [laughter] Ted Sturgeon is said to have said, “Ike, do you realize that 90 percent of the science fiction that is written” (and you may substitute if you want new music) “is crap.” And without missing a beat, Asimov snapped back and said, “Ted, 90 percent of everything in the entire universe is crap.” And that applies to music in that the crap of two centuries ago has been forgotten and tossed out.

FRANK J. OTERI: Except on classical radio!

DAVID STOCK: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! It’s all back on public radio. Oh, no! Oh, no!

[laughter]

JOHN KENNEDY: It’s those little pieces by the famous composers.

WILLIAM DUNNING: Except for the recent rediscoveries of music by PDQ Bach. No, if it hasn’t been, it should be perhaps. But the new music that’s coming out today, includes the 10 percent and the 90 percent and somebody has to sort them out. Now, to a large extent, that’s going to be history’s job and in 200 years the decision will have been made, but to some extent it’s our job. We have to point the fingers and say this is the good stuff, this is not the good stuff, and it’s a terrible responsibility, but we do have to do it.

STEVEN SWARTZ: I’m from Boosey & Hawkes and I’m here with the kind permission of Frank to be at this session. I’ve been the publicity person at Boosey for 12 years and one thing I’ve seen is the collapsing of outlets for criticism involving major markets from 3 papers to 2 papers; now you have 1 paper in most markets plus an alternative weekly and if we’re talking about getting a multiplicity of views, if we’re talking about getting different perspectives and a dialogue going, that’s obviously one of the biggest problems. Unfortunately, I don’t even know if there’s anything that can be done. The Examiner and Chronicle out in San Francisco…It’s been a problem for the future of new music simply because this last word thing is even more pronounced than it had been before, when there are fewer and fewer places to read about a new piece of music.

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to respond to something that Bill Littler said a little while ago that got left hanging: If you’re covering one thing, then you’re not covering something else. And this session’s called “How to cover a premiere,” but one of the interesting things in the new music world that I see from the several hats that I wear is that a premiere is somehow journalistically sexy, whereas the second or third or fourth performance isn’t. So an organization will commission a new piece knowing that they will get the coverage, whereas if they play a piece that is really good that was done 2 seasons ago, they might not get covered at all. There’s very interesting music group that was formed in New York City that’s sort of teetering, their concert attendance hasn’t been great and they haven’t been reviewed at all yet. American Accent… There’s also, Second Helpings… Anyway, the goal of American Accent was to do only pieces that were already performed. Nobody covered their opening concert. Nobody did advances or reviews. They asked me to give a talk at this thing and I did this Q & A with Ned Rorem and he got up there and said, “Why am I even here?” That’s Ned, but there was hardly anybody there. A great concert, with fantastic performances… It begs the question: Is our obligation to new music beyond the premiere? How do we engender that in our writing and in our coverage and how do we determine what kinds of pieces get covered when they are premiered? What kind of pieces get covered the second time around, the third time around? Where do we make that judgment call?

WILLIAM LITTLER: Well, we have two problems here. First of all, a newspaper is a news paper. What’s new immediately is what gets attention and so the premiere is what is new and that’s what we have to deal with, so I don’t–I think that’s a reality that has to be faced and it might be an unfortunate one but it’s there. But the other thing I’m thinking about is the title of Erich Leinsdorf‘s book The Composer’s Advocate. Now he’s speaking from the point of view of a conductor as being a composer’s advocate, but historically, music critics have been advocates for the composers they care for and they’ve been a kind of champion. It’s not so fashionable today. Most of our publications want us to be fair-minded. This is an objective that is hanging up there without anyway of being tangibly performed. But nonetheless we have largely given up this advocate’s role of standing behind a composer and saying: “Pay attention to this person and these are the reasons why…,” because it’s a kind of polemical exercise and some of us are afraid of being polemicists. We want to be fair-minded judges of the situation, but look through musical history and commentary and you’ll find that it’s full of the polemic and that the polemic is very exciting. Once again, passion, the word that was mentioned earlier today… Shaw said, “A review that is written without passion isn’t worth reading.” And we have to write from a point of view of belief. And the trouble is in our fair-mindedness, we’ll go to concert after concert of contemporary music and give a little attention to everybody in this democratic way and so we don’t stand behind a few and ignore the others, we try to distribute our attention. And the consequence is there isn’t a critical mass of attention given those who really stand out that perhaps ought to be given.

BARBARA JEPSON: May I speak to that?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes.

BARBARA JEPSON: I agree with you that we should write with passion. I’m very frustrated with reading reviews that describe new music without evaluating it. I think that’s a must. I think there’s a little distinction. I think one can be fair and still be passionate or one can be fair and still say it stinks or it’s wonderful and I think the fairness comes in, for me, it comes in in not prejudging works according to their style but being open to the idea that there is good and bad in every style, whether it’s our favorite style or our least favorite. There are people who are writing in an excellent way in a style that may not be my favorite. And I actually had an example of that a year ago when I was asked to do something on a composer and the things that I had heard by that composer I thought were rather bland but I agreed to do the piece and I ended up really liking the premiere. So in the review, I mentioned that X, Y, and Z were accomplished but bland, but the piece that I heard I thought was really, really excellent. I discussed why I thought it was good even though it wasn’t my preferred harmonic language and, Frank, just to go back to your original question of how do you engender assignments or space for things that hav
e already been performed and are being given a second hearing? One of the ways I do it is if a recording comes out which is often two years after a premiere, that gives an opportunity to revisit the piece, and what I try to do is define something current that is going on and then in the same piece, not only talk about the current piece but also talk about the previous piece which I may or may not have covered. You can also do that if there is no recording. In the context of a piece on a particular composer–just give the context and single out, you know, these are so-and-so’s strongest works or just discuss the works that you have been taken by that have been performed once and never heard of again and at least you’re letting people know about it, whether or not it leads to anything.

FRANK J. OTERI: Once again this question of advocacy for specific composers, I would argue that there are composers that are on the radar of everyone in this room who have risen above this area–you know, certainly a John Adams or an Elliott Carter or a John Harbison. These are people whose every work gets covered. They have reached a certain level of critical mass where that coverage happens. I guess the question for everybody at the table, and I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say the people who are at this table who are composers, the two who are primarily known as composers, neither of you are at that level of national critical mass where anything you write will get covered and I guess I’d like to have you speak to that question of what you feel when you write a piece. What do you feel you should be getting in terms journalistic coverage for what you’re doing and why?

DAVID STOCK: Again it depends on what you mean by journalistic coverage. The only time that anything I had written didn’t get written about, it got bumped–an important New York premiere–it got bumped by a pop review or something. I never had the chutzpah to write to the critic, “Look, not for me, but for the soloist, could you please just send me a copy of what you wrote?” Because this was an important soloist who was really looking forward to this and it then disappeared. But I guess what I would really like would be–it has nothing to do with me personally–but what I said before, critical studies. They don’t have to be complex. They don’t have to go into every note the composer ever wrote or what she had for breakfast last Thursday, but just something that puts things in some larger context. We have wonderful composers out there who aren’t quite so well-known and somehow some of them rise above that level of “Well, we’ve sort of heard of him or her…” to the next level. And nobody quite knows how these things happen. One thing for example, one project I’ve been threatening to do for years and years and probably someday I actually will get around to, which is a much more important question and it’s the long-range one, or at least the medium-range one: I want to write to a lot of composers and I’d probably write to some of you as well and say, “Look, I want you to pretend we’re doing a time capsule and I want you to write, give me the names of 10 pieces or 10 composers or something that you are reasonably sure, that you’re willing to bet are gonna stick around for the next 50 years.” You know, when all is said and done, if we’re looking beyond tomorrow. That’s all that counts. If we’re not, if there’s no ongoing repertoire, then what’s it all about? All the composers might as well pack up and go home. I believe it is, you see, but I mean to ask people to sort of stake their reputations on it, I think might…We just went through an exercise like this in Pittsburgh which unfortunately I triggered because of overhearing a conversation with a friend in a restaurant. We were going to the symphony and I happened to hear my friend who was not even sitting at my table say to his friend, “I think that the Shostakovich 8th Symphony is the greatest post-modern symphony.” And I turned around and said, “What are you talking about? It isn’t!” And he said, “Well, name some.” I started naming–bing, bing, bing, bing, bing! And then I started thinking about it. So anyway, that led to a whole bunch of lists, which then led to one of your colleagues, Andrew Druckenbrod, asking all of us composers in Pittsburgh, just to pick out our favorite three pieces, whatever they were, of the last ten years which was many, many too few. It was hell! It was also very interesting to see how many correspondences there were that we all sort of agreed on some of the people who were, you know, the real thing. When…you’re talking about two different things. One is the immediate. What I really want, of course, is my work becomes well-enough known that it gets played all over and everything I write is a commission. Now, close to everything–does somebody want to commission my 5th Symphony out there that I finished a year and two weeks ago and I’m just waiting… [laughter] Anyway, so in the short run, that’s what we want, but in the long run, true critical judgment would be really nice and, of course, a lot of them are going to be wrong! Who cares? But to say this is what I think is going to make it and what’s worth sticking around. That’s what’s really interesting.

JOHN KENNEDY: I would just add that no matter what hat we wear or our profession in the field, we love music and we all have to be advocates of music at some level. I was thinking about this discussion of where we are in terms of writing about young composers. I forget what year John Rockwell‘s book All American Music came out, maybe late ’70s, early ’80s, but those were a collection of essays about contemporary composers. I think it did help the careers of some of those who were included. They became the BAM artists… And that kind of writing is more than just about music, it’s like cultural studies of where music fits into the way culture is changing and that kind of thinking is very, very valuable for performers and writers alike.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I want to throw this in because I’m in a privileged position to be exposed to new music on an ongoing basis, with what I do on a daily basis. I always had this chip on my shoulder about advocating for new music, even before I got to the American Music Center. I knew a lot about new music and I knew all these pieces that were recorded and I went to all of these premieres in New York City, which has all of this activity. But then I got to the Center and I was like, “Yikes!” you know, the flood gates opened. There is so much stuff, more than 5000 composers that I had never heard of, a lot of whom were as exciting as the big name composers who do get the coverage all the time, who are on the radar all the time and I guess the last question I want to throw out, because we are kind of running toward the end of this thing, is how do we seek out those people who might not normally be on our radar; who aren’t always getting presented at the equivalent of Heinz Hall or Verizon Hall in Philadelphia or Carnegie Hall in New York, the folks who are bei
ng performed in the small galleries somewhere a little bit out of the way? How do we stay open to that, when we’re so busy–if we’re covering that, we’re missing something else?

WILLIAM LITTLER: The first thing that has to be said is that the decision isn’t always ours. It’s an editor’s decision, quite often, as to what is covered. So help me–if Pavarotti comes to town and there’s a concert of new music in a small gallery, the choice is taken away from me.

FRANK J. OTERI: He’s retired now, apparently…

[laughter]

WILLIAM LITTLER: You know what I mean and that’s the difficult situation that we have. And if we are to discover the new and the young emerging talents it very often means that we are not sitting in front a major recital by Ashkenazy that night. Those are the ongoing choices we have to make, and depending on the nature of our publication, they may be difficult or easy choices. If we are an alternative publication and the editor doesn’t care about what we write about fine; we’ll go out and forget Ashkenazy. I don’t have to hear another performance by Ashkenazy, fine as he is. But the point is if we’re dealing with a newspaper that deals in mass circulation, then we have to be aware of the mass. The editors certainly are if we’re not. So there is going to be that constant tension. It’s a misunderstanding on the part of the public by and large. Most critics would rather be listening to something new. It’s more stimulating. And yet we have other responsibilities that we can’t ignore. We are agents of publications that address large numbers of people and large numbers of people are often not interested in those small concerts that interest us. We can be selfish, we can be enlightened–it depends on how you define that act–but from the newspaper’s point of view we have to be responsible to their objectives at the same time and that’s a constant balancing act that’s not easy.

PAUL HERTELENDY: I think that’s kind of a misconception. Some quarters of the public feel that if we feature a performance of, let’s say, graduate students’ composition class given in a small hall at the university, we will discover the next Igor Stravinsky or BartÛk or whoever we care to name, and this is generally not the case. So the critic with the limited amount of resources and time and space in the newspaper is very dependent on performing arts organizations for seeking out talents or organizations which give commissions, which may not even be performing groups at all, to recognize certain people. And then in a venue which is reasonably presentable and reasonably professional or has a reasonable audience, it’s a viable venue and there we can look–I mean, you’re asking us to go through a haystack and find the one needle in there. Well, there may be one needle, there may be none, and we need help finding a lead.

JOHN KENNEDY: And so do the performing organizations often. Most of them are not very proactive about really making the base broad, you know.

BARBARA JEPSON: It seems like somebody should do a big commercial for NewMusicBox because that’s one way to…

FRANK J. OTERI: I’ll let somebody else do it! Conflict of interest…

DAVID STOCK: It’s wonderful. Everybody needs to read it every month. Was that good enough?

JAMES REEL: It’s really great. And they pay on time!

[laughter]

 

JAMES REEL: If I can just inject another pessimism here, I think that this whole effort is doomed with the egalitization of newspapers in the United States. Just take what you face in Toronto, what you face in Cleveland, and you’re lucky to have that. You’re lucky to have any problems at all because in the newspapers in the mid-sized and smaller markets, as the classical critics move on for one reason or another, they’re not being replaced. They may not even be replaced with freelancers from the university. I live in Tucson, which has a population of 800,000 or so right now, two daily newspapers there. Neither one right now has a full-time classical music critic or has any intention of hiring one. If they have anybody cover anything at all, it’s going to be what the editors there who don’t know anything about music of any kind, popular or classical, think will have the highest reader interest and that means, well, we’re obligated to go cover the symphony this month. So they send somebody who they know maybe to be an amateur cellist, who doesn’t know that much about music, doesn’t know how to write about music, certainly. And they go back, they go to the concert and to them Bartók is new music and they come back with a snide remark about how dissonant the Bartok was. And if they face music like that with such a low degree of sophistication, there’s no way that they’re going to be equipped to understand anything that’s truly new. And our problem here is the de-professionalization of our profession.

BARBARA JEPSON: I wonder if there is something that the Music Critics’ Association can do to reach those newspaper publishers and editors and change their minds?

DAVID STOCK: Coercion. [laughter] Can I one up you on that one if you don’t mind? I hate to say anything pessimistic but Don Rosenberg’s predecessor at the Pittsburgh Press got his job because–this is in the late ’50s or early ’60s–the previous music critic had died or retired or something and they said, “O.K., who here knows anything about music?” And so, a gentleman, a very nice guy whose name I will not mention, said, “Well, I played the violin in high school.” (He was writing for sports or something.) They said, “Ok, you’re the new music critic!” So he went to the symphony the first time and they were–remember this was 1960 give or take a couple years–and they were playing Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2 and he reviewed it as though it were a premiere and he didn’t like it, so it’s exactly what you’re talking about. Exactly, word for word. And that’s already 45 years ago, 35?

FRANK J. OTERI: I don’t want to end this on that note.

DAVID STOCK: No, no, no.

FRANK J. OTERI: Can we have a voice with a positive story somebody who hasn’t spoken? Well, you’ve spoken but you can speak again.

MARC GEELHOED: Well, I think that all music is new music to somebody out there and that if you present that in all of your reviews, that fresh, exciting aspect whether or not it’s fresh or exciting to you at this point, I think that that would even reverse the trend and might even raise interest in new music.

FRANK J. OTERI: Here, here.

WILLIAM LITTLER: You’d rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

[laughter]

FRANK J. OTERI: On that note, I hope we’ve raised more questions than given answers!