NEC First Monday: Buvant à la Source, Laurence Lesser Explains a ‘French’ Program

T   onight’s program is… ‘French’. Stravinsky? French? Well, yes, at least part of him is.”
  —  Laurence Lesser, cellist, introductory remarks.

T he New England Conservtory ‘First Monday’ program featured, among other things, Belgium-born violist Dimitri Murrath introducing each movement of Couperin’s ‘Le Parnasse’ homage to Arcangelo Corelli by reading aloud the movement’s title and subtext, in impeccable French. Quel réalisme! Quel charme! Vive l’authenticité!

• Couperin – Le Parnasse, ou L’apothéose de Corelli (James Buswell, John Holland, violins; Laura Blustein, cello; John Gibbons, harpsichord)
  
• Stravinsky – Apollo (Masuko Ushioda, Wanzhen Li, violins; Dima Murrath, Sarah Darling, violas; Laurence Lesser, Natasha Brofsky, cellos; Donald Palma, double bass)
  
• Ravel – Piano Trio (Hung-Kuan Chen, piano; James Buswell, violin; Laurence Lesser, cello)

L esser gave a 15-min pre-concert talk, explaining various things to us… about his experiencing the then-elderly Stravinsky’s pungent advice to him first-hand, when he was a young cellist just starting out in the mid-1960s; about how Couperin was enthralled with what was shaping music in Italy in the 17th Century and early 18th… the unifying, glorious transnationally-strategic possibilities of it. Parnassus, the home of the Muses, is where the soul of Corelli is conducted—ascension (‘remerciment’) to join the god, Apollo… who is the subject of the second work on the program by Stravinsky. And the piano trio after that… Ravel, who in his own time meditated upon his musical predecessors and the debt owed to them (‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, etc.).

T he violin cadenza performed by Masuko Ushioda in the Prologue of the Stravinsky was spectacular… indicative of the sonic aggressiveness and beautiful iconoclasm ahead.

I  love that the words ‘analysis’ and ‘performance’ have such wide purviews. The ensemble surely ‘analyzes,’ in preparing and interpreting each work, examining the score and its style including notational idiosyncrasies (e.g., ‘void’ functions, expanded tunings, etc.), music theory, historical practices, and so forth. And ‘performance’ may refer to the live performance, to recordings, to practice, to memorization, to improvisation, and to aesthetic, hermeneutic, social, psychological, cognitive, or motoric/musculoskeletal/neurophysiological aspects of all of these.

U shioda’s cadenza served the rhetorical function of announcing the Apollo character in the story and establishing that figure’s authority. It clarifies which key that character operates in, and transforms the thematic material that has preceded the cadenza. The cadenza provides convincing proof of Ushioda’s violinism prowess. But the supervening ensemble members’ parts reveal that there will be disagreement ahead—Apollo may be a god, but he doesn’t rule the Universe.

T his piece was originally orchestrated by Stravinsky for a 28-piece chamber orchestra. Last night’s performance was arranged for string septet. Both orchestrations have their merits, but I especially liked the septet last night. How clear everything is! How much more intimate, compared to the larger version!

T hought #1: Each of these three pieces is characterized by motives and phrases, repeated and massaged and turned round and round through the whole piece and all the movements and variations... Is this particular delight in variational permutations psychologically an archetypically ‘keyboardist’ thing to do (i.e., composers who are not primarily keyboard artists tend not to do it), or is it in some way idiomatically ‘French’, across these centuries?

T hought #2: Each of these three pieces is ‘cinematic’ in terms of structure and narrative. Is the fondness for the picturesque a distinctively ‘Gallic’ trait, or is this feature more an artifact of what it takes to make a living as a musician/composer in each century, in an exchange-economy, market-driven society?

• First Monday at Jordan Hall (NEC)
  
• Laurence Lesser, President Emeritus, New England Conservatory; Walter Naumburg Chair in Music
  
• Laurence Lesser page at NEC
  
• James Buswell page at NEC
  
• Natasha Brofsky page at NEC
  
• Laura Blustein page at NEC
  
• Dima Murrath page at NEC
  
• John Gibbons page at NEC
  
• Don Palma page at NEC
  
• Masuko Ushioda page at NEC
  
• Hung-Kuan Chen page at NEC
  
• Wanzhen Li page at NEC
  
• Sara Darling page at Arcturus Ensemble
  
• John Holland website
  
• Janof T. Interview with Laurence Lesser. Cello.org, 2001.
  
• Clark J, Connon D. The Mirror of Human Life: Reflections on François Couperin’s ‘Pieces de Clavecin’. 2e. Keyword Publ, 2011.
  
• Tunley D. François Couperin and ‘The Perfection of Music’. Ashgate, 2004.

Performing Arts, Free-Market Failure, and New Institutional Economics

W    alt Whitman was democracy’s poet—who understood that democracy is not just a form of government but a way of life rooted in culture. Bill Ivey is culture’s eloquent advocate who knows that, as democracy needs the arts, the arts need the advocacy of government. His manifesto [Arts, Inc.] is a passionate attack on the commercialization of culture and a plea for a cultural ‘Bill of Rights’ that will restore to all Americans their right to a heritage, to creative expression and to a creative life. This is not just a vital book about the arts, but a vital book about democracy.”
  —  Benjamin Barber, author of ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’ and ‘Consumed’.

A    rts, Inc.’ is the first comprehensive effort to explore the role and potential of a coordinated vision for art, culture, and expression in American public life. Through strands of personal and professional memoir, policy analysis, for-profit and nonprofit industry insights, and personal conviction, Bill Ivey defines a new canvas for more productive and inclusive conversations on the expressive life of our nation and its citizens.”
  —  Andrew Taylor, Bolz Center for Arts Administration, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

T    he boom in music festivals poses a challenge to economists because of the glaring contrast to the financial distress that standing orchestras and opera companies and other performing arts entities find themselves in. Unit costs of production in the performing arts are still steadily increasing while labor productivity in the art is constant. This is the essence of [Baumol’s & Bowen’s] so-called ‘Cost Disease’. As a result, the performing arts ... are faced with a secular threat of survival because of [their] continually increasing cost relative to other consumer goods and services. The relevance of the Cost Disease has been challenged for various reasons. In particular, if demand [for concerts] rises more quickly than that for other goods (income elasticity > 1) and the price elasticity of demand is larger than –1, then prices and revenues can possibly be raised sufficiently to keep pace with the rising costs... The basic idea [of the validity of Cost Disease in the performing arts] has, however, been accepted and [today] provides one of the major building blocks for economic analysis of the arts.”
  —  Bruno Frey, Arts & Economics, p. 73.

Should we change our ticket prices or booking fees this year? How much discounting or comping should we do to get more attendee butts in seats and, if we do more than we’ve done in the past, will that help or hurt sales of regular tickets or subscriptions? If our ensemble does pro bono or deeply-discounted performances in some cities, will that help or hurt our bookings for bigger-margin gigs elsewhere?

These questions are perennial ones, for artists, agents, presenters, governmental and NGO policy makers, and others. For all of these stakeholders, the questions are even more salient during the present economic downturn.

There are several new books that elucidate how to go about making these decisions—both the microeconomic/operational ones, and the macroeconomic/policy ones. The books by Bruno Frey and by Bill Ivey are especially notable.


Frey maintains that people are genetically, evolutionarily disposed to seek status and strive for experiences—it is part of the psychology and ‘economy of happiness’, which is the subject of his new book. The analysis and its logic are, I think, particularly germane to chamber music and other of the performing arts. Frey focuses on ‘taxes on positional externalities’ [not necessarily the ordinary types of taxes; ‘taxes’ can equally well be embodied by specific, differentiated price structures such that not everybody pays the same price]. Economists who advocate ‘taxes on positional externalities’ underestimate the consequence of the innate human drive for status: when one outlet is blocked, individuals aggressively and reflexively seek alternatives to differentiate themselves. All economically-active individuals do this, able-bodied and non-able-bodied alike. Even if taxation of consumption were successful in countering negative positional externalities, people would still try to distinguish themselves. (The only ones who do not are those who are institutionalized or otherwise economically inactive.)

The positional externalities in those other dimensions might be weak, in which case the taxation of consumption differences may be warranted and effective, according to Frey’s theory. But if the negative external effects created by differences in the other dimensions are strong—as they are with performing arts—then taxation of consumption differences will be ineffective and counterproductive. Frey’s highly-readable chapters assess in detail the consequences of substituting other dimensions when positional externalities due to income or consumption are effectively blocked by taxation.

Frey is, in the end, open-minded as regards taxing positional externalities; he takes a pragmatic view, and makes his determinations on the goodness or badness of the consequences of the policies on a context-sensitive, case-by-case basis. For Frey, the answer to the public agency’s or presenter’s or manager’s or ensemble’s question of whether positional externalities due to differences in income and consumption should be taxed depends on the effects of taxation on incentives, on consumer’s buying decisions, and on the resulting net public welfare. If the nonprofit presenter (or government or other agency) tries to reduce prevailing inequalities by setting a ticket price-structure (or discount or comp ticket policies that back-handedly ‘tax’ those who are more able to bear a larger expense) and that price-structure only weakly affects the buying decisions of those market segments who are affected by the top-tier prices, then the taxation is effective and justified in terms of the net public welfare or public good. If, on the other hand, the ‘progressive tax’ on positional externalities in income and consumption causes the top-tier market segments to transfer their drive for status to other consumables or other dimensions, then the pricing/taxation scheme is ineffective and unjustified, on the grounds that it harms the public good.

Under Frey’s rubric, the same could be said of performing artists or ensembles. If an ensemble establishes a ‘progressive taxation’ structure in which engagements have booking fees priced according to the ‘ability-to-pay’ and/or incremental kickers (‘base-plus-percent-of-boxoffice’) and this policy does not deter presenters from booking the ensemble, then the scheme can be said, post facto, to have been effective and justified. By contrast, if many presenters will not accept the price structure and terms, then in hindsight it can be said to have been a failure and unjustified in terms of the net public good, insofar as the pricing will have deprived the public of valuable cultural experiences or in some way diminished the cultural diversity.


Ivey’s book analyzes the consequences of relentless corporatization of the arts and of performing arts outputs in particular. Bill Ivey had served as NEA Chairman from 1998 to mid-2001. While he had prior to that time had a long career as head of the Country Music Foundation and as an advocate for the arts, it was that 3-year term of service that appears to have galvanized his concept of the arts as a collection of public goods—a set of resources as vital as clean air and water and endangered species and wilderness—to which everyone has a basic human right, and to which government and other institutions owe a duty of stewardship. Prior to 2002 he would merely preach; but today in this book his ‘hair is on fire’ as he expounds prophet-like words of alarm and proposes essential elements of public arts policy in his call-to-arms.

V    ery few observers of the contemporary U.S. and global arts worlds have Bill Ivey’s capacity for first-hand examples of how trade representatives, artists, music executives, corporate attorneys, elected officials, non-profit executives and many other participants influence the course of the arts, and in particular, the public’s access to the arts. ‘Arts, Inc.’ is an important work because it asserts, in an urgent manner, that people have a right to a better expressive life.”
  —  John Kreidler, formerly Executive Director, Cultural Initiatives-Silicon Valley.

These recent books are each, in their own ways, emblematic of New Institutional Economics (NIE), an interdisciplinary field that has emerged since about 1995, combining economics, law, organization theory, systems engineering, neuroscience, philosophy, political science, sociology, and anthropology—to understand the institutions of social, political, and commercial life, and to help set policy and perform quantitative program evaluations. The objective is a set of rational frameworks for future developments of regional politics, regulations and protection, infrastructure amenities, finances and taxes so that the public goods are sustainable and can have durable popular support. NIE inevitably entails intensive political re-evaluation. NIE draws upon various social-science disciplines, but its primary language is economics. Its broader goal is to characterize what our societies’ institutions are, what purposes they serve, and how they change and how they might best be improved and changed—all institutions, not just arts organizations. Have a look at the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) and other of the links below to find out more about this.

It’s these days inconceivable that politicians or government agency officials will choose well or support a sufficient diversity of programs or foster robust innovation and creativity. The politics of divisiveness and fear and recrimination is too extensive, and CoverYourAss ‘cartels’ are too strong.

But it’s also lately inconceivable that the illustrious so-called free market will sustainably support diversity in the arts either. The free market has done so well, after all, in messing up such ordinary things like banking. Leaving things to the free market, we end up with ‘McWorld’ lowest-common-denominator populism and commodification of the arts.

So NIE-style approaches and deep re-evaluations of the sort that Bill Ivey and Bruno Frey are advancing are therefore timely. I strongly recommend that you pick up copies of their books. And, imagining that some of you CMT readers may like to contact Bill or Bruno regarding speaking to your group or collaborating on research or other activities, I’ve put their contact coordinates in the links below.

• Vanderbilt Univ Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy
  
• Bill Ivey, Director, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy (+1-615-322-7211), 125 Buttrick Hall, 290 24th Ave South, Vanderbilt Univ, Nashville TN 37240
  
• Bruno Frey, Research Director, Center for Research in Economics, Management & the Arts (CREMA), Institut für Empirische Wirtschaftsforschung (+44-634-37-30), Universität Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 30, CH-8006 Zürich
  
• Bruno Frey website
  
• Center for Research in Economics, Management & the Arts (CREMA)
  
• Columbia Univ Research Center for Arts and Culture (RCAC)
  
• International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE)
  
• Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE)
  
• U.S. National Endowment for the Arts
  
• DSM. Econometrics and the Separation of Music and State. CMT blog, 11-OCT-2008.
  
• DSM. Non-Profit Chamber Music Orgs and the Recession. CMT blog, 17-JUL-2008.
  
• DSM. Perseids, Pärt and Intimate Public Goods. CMT blog, 12-AUG-2007.
  
• Baumol W, Bowen W. Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. MIT, 1966.
  
• Chero J, Stewart R, Wyszomirski M, eds. Understanding the Arts and Creative Sector in the United States. Rutgers Univ, 2008.
  
• Frey B. Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. MIT, 2008.
  
• Frey B. Arts & Economics: Analysis & Cultural Policy. 2e. Springer, 2004.
  
• Frey B, Pommerehne W. Muses and Markets: Explorations in the Economics of the Arts. Blackwell, 1989.
  
• Frey R. Starke Zentren, Starke Alpen. ('Healthy Cities, Healthy Wilderness') NZZ, 2008.
  
• Ivey B. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights. Univ California, 2008.
  
• Martin P. RenGen (Renaissance Generation): The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What It Means to Your Business. Platinum, 2007.
  
• Ménard C, Shirley M, eds. Handbook of New Institutional Economics. Springer, 2008.
  
• Rost K, Inauen E, Osterloh M, Frey B. Corporate governance of Benedictine abbeys: What can stock corporations learn from monasteries? Working Paper No. 374, IEW, UZH, 2008. [1MB pdf]
  
• Salanie B. Microeconomics of Market Failures. MIT, 2000.
  
• Taylor A. The [U.S. Presidential] candidates and the arts. ArtfulManager blog (ArtsJournal), 06-OCT-2008.
  
• Winston C. Government Failure versus Market Failure: Microeconomic Policy Research and Government Performance. Brookings Inst, 2006.
  
• Zerbe R, McCurdy H. The failure of market failure. Univ Washington Graduate School of Public Affairs working paper, 2005. [1MB pdf]

Merge Two Competing Chamber Music Presenter Organizations?

T    he effect of the economic downturn is already pronounced—in terms of our subscription sales and attendance so far this season, and in terms of corporate and foundation money. I wonder whether, if we merged with the other main chamber music organization in our city, we might do better overall. The reason I think the answer may be ‘yes’ is that our respective programs tend time and again to collide with and compete against each other for the same audience. For example, two pianists in one week--the other org’s program on Friday night, ours on Saturday night. Or two early music programs within a fortnight. The ‘supply’ [of chamber music programs] exceeds the ‘demand’ in our market area, or at least exceeds our audience members’ monthly budgets of time and money. CMT sometimes has spreadsheets and math [to illustrate how some process works or to provide a tool to help CMT readers’ decision-making]. Could you do something in Excel to show whether there would be financial advantages or disadvantages if we combined with our competitor? The assumptions would be that we would have the same number of events each season [Presenter P’s events + Rival R’s events]; the prices and expenses would be the same [P + R roll-up]; the staff would be the same [P + R, with executive co-directors and artistic co-directors]; and the corporate and foundation funding would be the same [P + R]. If we merged, we would just coordinate our programs to not compete—to more efficiently and effectively serve the demand in our community. Possible?”
  —  Anonymous.

The performing arts market is tremendously fragmented. That fragmentation inevitably leads to inefficiencies. There are more than 520 presenter entities who are organizational members of Chamber Music America. And one thing that’s clear from examining CMA’s directory of chamber music presenters is that communities in the U.S. that have performing arts markets that are robust enough to have one presenter tend in fact to have two or more chamber music presenters. In many cases, that means that there is relatively intense competition for what is almost certainly a finite market—a finite monthly or quarterly consumer spend per household. Probably the same is also true in cities in Europe and the U.K.

For simplicity and to directly respond to the anonymous emailer’s question, I’ve put together a mathematical model that is for two competitors in a market—a duopoly. It would be far more complex to create an accurate, actionable financial merger model for three or more competitors. Actually, if the proposition were to simultaneously consolidate three or more competitors into one unified presenter organization, then you could still use this Cournot-Nash game-theory model as-is. You would simply put your own figures in as Presenter P, and then sum the figures for all of your competitors and put those sums in the Rival R column.

Basically, you need the ticket sales (earned income) figures for you and your competitor for last season's events—not the ticket drop numbers (with comp tickets and other imponderables) but the cash money taken in. You can exclude the events that each of your orgs produced that did not compete with each other at all—because they were far enough apart (say, more than 4 weeks) so that it’s implausible that a potential audience member would’ve decided to decline to attend your event because they were already attending your competitor’s event, or vice versa. Then you adjust the up-down arrows so that the accomodation figures match your last-season historical values, and so that the Cournot-Nash duopoly figures on the left more or less match the last-season actual average per event period figures on the lower right. (Just click on either of the screen-shot images below to Open or Save_as the Excel spreadsheet.)


Program ‘event periods’ means any interval of time during which the competitors’ programs compete against each other for consumers’ dollars. It doesn’t have to mean conflicting events on the exact same dates. It may be events on adjacent dates, such that attendees who otherwise would like to attend both programs probably will not buy tickets and attend chamber music concerts on two consecutive days. It may be events during the same week or fortnight, with the same criterion that most members of the target market may not attend two or more chamber music events within, say, 10 days of each other.

There are a number of assumptions and limitations of this simple Cournot-Nash model of financial competition:

• It doesn’t take into account the possibility of ‘curvature’ of the elasticity of demand;
  
• It ‘linearizes’ the [possibly non-linear] competitive interaction;
  
• It uses the statistical covariance cov(P,R) between the competitors as the measure of the ‘accomodation’ effect of the sales of one presenter on the competitor’s sales, which, while simple, may be a far-from-ideal metric of the competitive economic interaction between the two;
  
• It doesn't account for potential greater-than-additive ‘synergies’ in terms of induced greater demand or brand-recognition or marketing effectiveness that a merged entity might achieve;

and so on. But for a basic, first-order model it does pretty well. It can give you realistic estimates of how strong or weak the competitive process is in your market. And it can give you reasonably accurate, quantitative guidance regarding how large or small the impact of merging/consolidating would be.


With the insights you glean from playing around with this simple model, perhaps you will try to arrange your programming timing and content so as to minimize the numeric value (covariance) of your own ‘accomodation’ to your competitors—i.e., select your artists and programs so as to make your own ticket sales very insensitive to the programming that your competitors present, while simultaneously maintaining your ‘brand’ and maximizing the demand for the programs you select and book.

This simple model can be used to devise other strategies: to make your organization attractive for a merger or, conversely, to make your organization an unattractive target (by removing any appearance of financial advantage associated with combining and coordinating programming so as not to compete). ‘Accomodation’ values that are large (> 40% for one or both competitors) tend to predict financial gains for a merged entity that are upwards of 30% compared to the total annual sales with each competitor separate. Conversely, ‘accomodation’ values that are low (< 10% for one or both competitors) tend to predict that merging the competitors would not net much income growth for the merged entity—growth of 15% or less.

So please have a look at the model. Send me email or comment on it if you wish. And give us your thoughts in the poll that’s embedded in this post. (Note: Your participation in the online poll does not disclose your own identity or your organization’s identity, nor does it reveal anything about your community. It does not collect information other than which selection you click on.) Thank you!

Online Surveys & Market Research

• Andreff W, Szymanski S, eds. Handbook on the Economics of Sport. Elgar, 2007.
  
• Chen S-H. Evolutionary Computation in Economics and Finance. Physica Verlag, 2002.
  
• Cornuejols G, Tutuncu R. Optimization Methods in Finance. Cambridge Univ, 2007.
  
• Cowan R, Jonard N, eds. Heterogenous Agents, Interactions and Economic Performance. Springer, 2002.
  
• van Damme E. Stability and Perfection of Nash Equilibria. 2e. Springer, 2002.
  
• Fisher T. Managerial Economics: A Game Theoretic Approach. Routledge, 2002.
  
• Kolm S-C, Ythier J, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity, Volume 2: Applications. North Holland, 2006.
  
• Lambertini L, ed. The Economics of Vertically Differentiated Markets. Elgar, 2006.
  
• Neubecker L. Strategic Competition in Oligopolies with Fluctuating Demand. Springer, 2006.
  
• Nowak A, Szajowski K, eds. Advances in Dynamic Games: Applications to Economics, Finance, Optimization, and Stochastic Control. Birkhauser, 2004.
  
• Plott C, Smith V, eds. Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, Volume 1. North Holland, 2008.
  
• Salvatore D. Managerial Economics in a Global Economy. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Smith V. Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms. Cambridge Univ, 2007.
  
• DSM. Non-profit chamber music orgs and the recession. CMT blog, 17-JUL-2008.
  
• DSM. Chamber music economics: Divisibility of time and the Monty Hall problem. CMT blog, 10-APR-2008.
  
• DSM. Few chamber orchestras are too big to fail: Market size, scale and sustainability. CMT blog, 30-MAR-2008.

We Are All Illegal Aliens Now: Ageism in Calls-for-Scores and Competitions as Quasi-Immigration Policy?

P  eople are not equal, partly for the reason that they cannot all be born at the same time.”
  —  Walter Miles, Handbook of Social Psychology, 1935, p. 596.

I  n my first career in I.T./computers, I earned my degrees in Math and then M.S. and part Ph.D. in computer science. So when I decided back in the summer of 2003 to pursue a composing career, I decided to start totally from scratch. … I was almost 52 years old at that time.”
  —  Joel Irwin, post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 01-MAY-2008.

W hat is it about people over 35 (or 15, 25, or 90 for that matter) that should prevent them from competing with their artistic efforts? Is it that they have ‘had their chance’ and now need to get out of the way? For me, that argument does not hold water. With the ‘baby-boomer’ generation, we will see more and more people who are over 40 and at the beginning of their creative careers after having worked in other professions for years, often not by choice. These folks need a chance to show what they can contribute just as much as the person who is also starting out but under a certain age. Why should the older beginner be excluded from participating in publicly held competitions?”
  —  Robert Raines, post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 30-APR-2008.

I  founded Juventas with two other young composers who felt there was a flaw in the ‘system’. Instead of ‘whining’ … we decided to take initiative and form an ensemble that focuses on giving amazing performances of music by primarily young, living composers, and to perform this music as repertoire—meaning more than once. Since that time, we have worked diligently to form a community of supporters for our mission. Juventas, as it stands, is the result. I encourage you all to do the same. If you see a problem with the way ensembles, calls-for-scores, competitions, etc., are run … then create something that supports your ideas.”
  —  Erin Huelskamp, Executive & Artistic Director, Juventas New Music Ensemble (Boston), post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 01-MAR-2008.

Within the last several days there has been a vigorous dialogue about the topic of ‘ageism’ on the Society of Composers listserve, triggered by a new call-for-scores posted by Juventas New Music Ensemble. Ageism has to do with prejudice and injustice based on age. It appears in all sorts of situations and affects people of all ages. The thread on the Society of Composer’s listserve this week concerns the frequent stipulation of rather low upper age limits for composer competitions.

Of course, energy and dynamism and value are not the exclusive monopoly of youth, anymore than they are exclusive attributes of the citizens of a country. It’s not a very profound insight but it is one that has caused a prolific reaction—so much so as to cause some of the SCI listserve members to complain. The reaction has not been about Juventas (whose charter and founding principles are specifically focused on youthful composers). Instead, the reaction has to do with the pervasiveness of the age restrictions on many, many competitions.

In a way, each age bracket is like a different ‘country’. We leave one country and enter another. There is even the expression ‘over the hill’, which is where we go in middle or later life. Those of us who are ‘refugees’ from over the hill leave behind a place that is familiar but problematic, and we progressively acquaint ourselves with a new place. We hope that our reception by the locals will be supportive and friendly, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. We hope that we will rapidly become connected, able to navigate efficiently in the new landscape and form relationships that will nourish us and that we, in turn, can nourish. Composing as a second career (or as an avocation) is like this.

Kyle Gann’s post a couple of years ago on his ArtsJournal blog suggests that the restriction of entries for many competitions to composers under 30 or other youthful limits is not so much a manifestation of the aim to provide aid to needy young people as it is an embodiment of a ‘cult of prodigy’—as if truly stellar composing is, like ballet or theoretical mathematics, somehow only possible when one is very young, as if the ability or potential to do truly new and spectacular things is lost as one enters middle age, or as if discovering and supporting young Mozarts is a goal that trumps all others.

This is more about power—who is able to grant or withhold privileges, and which stakeholders in the status quo stand to benefit from that power—than anything else. It is about civic stratification and welfare policies in the social/political microcosm of music. It is about who is “in” and who is “out”.

Twenty years ago Gary Freeman wrote a famous paper that argued that the welfare state is necessarily ‘bounded’—that national welfare states cannot co-exist with the free, uncontrolled movement of labor. In establishing a principle of distributive justice dependent on membership of a limited community (for example, of people under a certain age) the ‘welfare state’ [the constellation of commissioning and competitions that exist for new composers right now] inherently and unavoidably departs from free-market capitalism.

Welfare provisions serve at least two purposes: (1) to provide for ‘needy’ segments of the population and (2) to indirectly influence or control the dynamics of the labor market. In other words, the setting of assistance benefits and criteria indirectly affect the wages and number of commissions. None of the dialogue on the SCI listserve has suggested that purpose (2) is in-play with the current powers-that-be for supporting new composers, which is why I raise it in this CMT post. In fact, purpose (2) is very often discussed in social economics journals and other scholarly writing that is far afield from the sphere with which musicians and arts administrators/policy-makers are conversant. There, it is not a ‘hypothetical’; welfare provisions to indirectly control a market are an acknowledged reality.

Which is funny. Compared to other “isms” associated with stereotyping or prejudice against a group of people, ageism is unusual. Unlike racism and sexism and homophobia, ageism represents a prejudice against a group that all members of the “in” group will inevitably join if they live long enough. Exclusionary, indirect policy decisions where the ones who make them are never themselves in the “out” group are somehow predictable, understandable; by contrast, exclusionary indirect policies that are against the interest of those who establish or support those policies are paradoxical—perhaps denoting denial, self-deception, or lack of forethought.

In any case, the [eventual] movement of labor across age threshholds exposes the tensions between ‘closed’ welfare states and ‘open’ economies, just as movement of labor across national boundaries expose the same tensions. Such movement reveals that, ultimately, national welfare states are incompatible with the free movement of labor. An effective, just welfare state is supposed to balance the distributive principles of justice and mutual aid against the distributive principle of the marketplace. The welfare state is an imperfect but important (and maybe inadvertent) consequence of capitalism. Foreign workers (in this case, older ‘emerging’ composers) show the extent to which the distributive principle of mutual aid is politically viable and sustainable only so long as it is restricted to members and excludes outsiders. Given the deficiencies of the current ‘system’ and the current plight of the NEA, we needn’t discuss the political viability and sustainability of a just and effective welfare-statist policy supporting categories other than the young. There is no policy and little justice, which is the point of many commenters on the SCI listserve. And, given the NEA’s and other organizations’ tiny budgets to commission new works or fund competitions, one might reasonably assert that, in the U.S., there is no ‘state’ [for composition, as an element of the arts], and there is no ‘territory’.

In modern society, we have borders that are ‘constitutive’ for and only for the political system. Geographical extension (in German, the term for it is ‘Staatsgebiet’) has become a prerequisite to modern statehood. States without territories can hardly be proper states; they couldn’t make collectively binding decisions or exert real power; they couldn’t ‘govern’.

But other organizations in society with different purposes are not at all dependent on ‘fixed bodies’, or so you might think. Business enterprises, for example, are not only multi-national but are also these days substantially ‘virtual’, conducted in the “electronic ether”, from anywhere. But the ‘lightness’ of virtualizable endeavors like composing is, however, constrained by composers’ dependence on functioning arts organizations to commission and perform the works, and this in turn depends on the existence of stable and just ‘states’. Deflecting the responsibility away from the ‘state’ (including not-for-profit NGOs) and fobbing the entirety of it off on the immigrant-aspirant, to raise themselves up by their own bootstraps or find a wealthy private patron for support is contrary to the notion of music and the arts as a public good. The issue is about what constitutes a just and virtuous state.

The political science/public policy and political sociology literature on this topic relatively small. A conventional approach was adopted by Gary Freeman who argued that welfare states are inevitably exclusive, and aim indirectly to protect the privileged citizens more than they aim to provide aid to the needy. Migration and the ‘welfare state’ are separately two very controversial areas: unsurprisingly, their nexus attracts polemics of all camps, with relatively little serious analysis.

Assumptions commonly used in published studies of migration-welfare linkages include:

• that welfare states and immigration policies are independent variables;
  
• that different welfare states have similar modus operandi;
  
• that immigrants are an homogenous group; and
  
• that the raison d’être of welfare states is socio-economic redistribution.

In other words, most of the existing theoretical welfare social policy literature is grounded on false premises.

Recently, research has also been conducted in Sweden and Denmark and Germany and elsewhere within the E.U.

	Reason for Older Composer Immigration
Genre	Family	Labor Import	Refugee
	Reunification	Guest Worker
String Quartets	××	×××	×
Piano Trios	×	×	××
String Sextets	×	××	×
Piano Quintets	×	×	××
Brass Quintets	-	××	×
Cello Sonatas	××	××	×
Fugues, Gigues and Sarabandes	×	×	×
Recorder Sextets	××	×	×
Intermezzi	×	××	×
Festen und Gedenksprüchen	-	×	×××
Accordion Duos	×	×××	×××
Tragic Overtures	-	×	×
Electro-Acoustic	-	×	×
Choral Ensembles	××	××	×
Songs without Words	×	×	×

Brücker et al. (2001) note a clear pattern of strong residual effects is in countries with generous welfare systems, which they suggest indicates a “welfare magnet” attraction for migrants and “reverse discrimination” against the locals. (Hypothetically possible in music, I suppose, but I doubt that the youf composer prodigies’ chances are in serious jeopardy from ‘emerging oldster re-treads’, so strongly stacked is the deck today against late-bloomers.)

Have a look at some of the links below, to see whether you agree that current practices and policies restricting calls-for-scores to composers under a certain age are not discriminatory against ‘emerging’ older composer refugees, in a way that resembles ill-conceived welfare statist policies with regard to political immigrants/refugees. I’m not wingeing, just suggesting that things are currently unjust and might be improved. I don’t disagree with Erin Huelskamp’s statement (blockquote above), but I do think we have every reason to be disappointed with the state of affairs in this country—disappointed with the situation that makes Erin’s statement the only realistic response these days. The solution to every injustice in the U.S. seems still to be privatization: find yourself a wealthy donor to fill the gap; start something yourself to address the need or right the wrong that has been caused by inadequate or unjust infrastructure and public policy. It’s a sorry situation, and no way to live or govern.

• Society of Composers Inc (SCI)
  
• Juventas New Music Ensemble
  
• National Endowment for the Arts
  
• National Institute on Aging
  
• American Geriatrics Society
  
• Gerontological Society of America
  
• OECD page on International Migration
  
• OECD page on Social and Welfare Issues
  
• Bommes M, Geddes A, eds. Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State. Routledge, 2001.
  
• Branine M, Glover I, eds. Ageism in Work and Environment. Ashgate, 2002.
  
• Brücker H, Epstein G, McCormick B, Saint-Paul G, Venturini A, Zimmerman K. Managing migration in the European welfare state. Proc Immigration Policy and the Welfare State, Trieste, 23-JUN-2001,
  
• Freeman G. Modes of immigration politics in liberal democratic states. Int Migration Rev 1995; 29:881-902.
  
• Freeman G. Migration and the political economy of teh welfare state. Ann Amer Acad Pol Social Sci 1986; 485:51-63.
  
• Morris L. Rights Sociological Perspectives. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Morris L. Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants Rights. Routledge, 2002.
  
• Nelson T, ed. Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older Persons. MIT, 2002.
  
• Palmore E. Ageism: Negative and Positive. 2e. Springer, 1999.
  
• Papademetriou D, Hamilton K. Converging Paths to Restriction: French, Italian and British Responses to Immigration, Washington DC: Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 1996.
  
• Sciortino G. Toward a political sociology of entry policies. J Ethnic and Migration Studies 2000; 26: 213-28.
  
• Soysal Y. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Univ Chicago, 1995.