jwilzewske

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Niches & Long-Tailed Culture

CMT: Jacob Hale Russell, in the Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2006, Page P1, has a thought-provoking and disturbing essay on the growing tension in philanthropy— ‘Hunger vs. the Arts’, as he calls it. Today's philanthropists prefer to fight disease and poverty instead of—not in addition to or balanced with—supporting cultural causes. It's a rising concern for many potential donors to the arts: “We get the ‘ask’ from every charity and non-profit. What is the justification for donating to chamber music when the money could help stamp out malaria?”

DSM: The issue has been a factor in philanthropy for a long time. But it’s more prominent now as some of the world's wealthiest people have directed large gifts recently to address humanitarian crises—think, for example, of Warren Buffett’s $30 billion donation to causes like AIDS and tuberculosis initiatives through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And this type of donation symbolically sets the agenda for other donors: it defines what’s fashionable, what’s “in”. But if people insist that spending on cultural activities is only morally acceptable after all hunger and homelessness and illness have been solved, the community will be much the poorer for it. A diversity of experience is fundamental to a stable and vibrant society, and you must not hold that dignity and diversity of experience hostage to the bottomless pit of human suffering. The world will always have malaria, disasters will continue happening, children will continue to be homeless and hungry and die. Those have been a part of the human condition since time immemorial. What’s new is the implication we see more and more in the U.S.—the implication that those humanitarian needs trump all others; that somehow other values are morally inferior, comparatively speaking; and that giving to other causes is somehow not as commendable as a gift to mitigate hunger or poverty or disease.

CMT: I agree with your notion of diversity of cultural experience as a common good or a utility. It's up a notch or two on Maslow’s triangle, admittedly. But cultural experiences are essential for both personal and community development, and for the maintenance of a free and humane civil society. You get a sense of this when you witness the re-emergence of the arts after genocide or civil conflict or natural catastrophes—Rwanda in the late Nineties or today, for example. The arts and sport and so on—they spontaneously reappear soon after destructive events, in part because they are addressing an elemental human need. The dignity you refer to—it isn’t so far up Maslow’s triangle at all. So the arts should be regarded as a public right, not unlike basic health services or education. By the way, it’s characterized that way in the enabling legislation of public arts subsidies and governmental agencies and NGOs. In other words, earlier generations’ public leaders held the same beliefs as the two of us have just been discussing, and they enacted laws and policies based on those beliefs. But we need more than restoring or re-examining the public ‘right’ to the arts, or support of the arts as a public good or utility by the government. We need to get private donors and philanthropists to think of the arts in this same way. It is a ‘public good’ and it adds value to the fabric of the community, every bit as much as, say, a new community soccer complex for kids' athletics.

DSM: In this era of the "long tail" new-economy business and cultural pluralism, we should also look at segments of cultural life that happen not to have big market share. Not everything is as popular as kids' soccer or Mozart. If we don’t do this, cultural policy regresses to nothing but a coercive and “colonizing” popularity contest—whether it is a high-brow elitist popularity or a low-brow, mass-market, lowest-common-denominator popularity. There is today a sort of unhealthy detent or pseudo-peace found in hi-tech democracies—North America and Europe, anyhow; the places we two have direct experience with. Is this cultural pseudo-peace not a de facto type of imperialism or exceptionalism? Today, the nonprofit sector remains a creative, vibrant and unique feature of American life, with thousands of organizations, both large and small, working together to create a better world. Unlike its commercial for-profit counterpart, the public good, rather than personal gain, is at the core of its activities. And any effort to address issues within the nonprofit sector must take into account the sector’s diversity and complexity and avoid the unintended consequence of stifling its vitality. Further, any policy changes must be aimed at strengthening the great American traditions of giving to, volunteering in—and serving as leaders, directors and trustees of—our charitable organizations, including chamber and classical music organizations. You have to have more diversity; you have to engage the strength of the constituencies in the long tail. To get back to Jacob Hale Russell's WSJ essay, I think that an exceptionalism that privileges a few dimensions of human experience (disease, poverty, health, hunger, housing, social exclusion) and disenfranchises other dimensions (culture, arts, sport) undervalues the contributions to human dignity and to cultural sensitivity and peace and understanding and other benefits that are associated with the arts in civil society. It drives toward a monoculture—not enough species, nothing but corn in the fields, nothing but white pines in the forest, not healthy. Do you think so too?

CMT: Yes. As some donors have diverted their giving to other humanitarian social causes, arts organizations have continued, I think, to depend overly much on their traditional base, people who deeply interested in the arts and old money and wealthy philanthropists—bigger donations from fewer donors. As more of the traditional donors allocate more of their giving (or in some cases all of it) to humanitarian causes, arts groups need to enlist the support of the next generation. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has done this reasonably well. Under Peter Brooke, the BSO has overtly tried to appeal to new donor types. It's brought in more celebrities, put on glamorous gala benefits, created task forces to target executives in specific industries including life sciences and investment banking, and positioned itself as an organization that is strategically related to the city's economic development. In February, the BSO invited doctors to an afternoon reception and private chamber-music performance before an evening concert. It was the third event organized by a committee of doctors that includes Robert Mayer, a trustee who's also an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a dean of admissions for Harvard Medical School. At the reception, about 100 physicians talked with each other and with other attendees/guests about trends in healthcare, as much as they did about the afternoon's lecture on Schoenberg's music. Dr. Mayer says they're following up with the guests to encourage them to subscribe or donate. I’m not sure how many chamber music presenters (as opposed to standing chamber orchestras) have things like done this. But it seems like a promising avenue to try.

DSM: It isn’t that old money has to be substituted with new money. It’s really has to do with diversity and sustainability—and cultivating additional new donors whose larger numbers and whose diverse motivations will diminish the organizations’ cashflow variability and “lumpiness”. There is nothing you are going to do that will stem the tide of fashion—whatever the traditional large donors elect to do, patterned after the Gates or Buffet or not. You are still going to seek the big gifts and endowments and so on from the deep pockets, as always. But offering more product, more programs and series, and more experience types to more diverse audiences and donor constituencies—is one way for chamber music presenters to reduce their vulnerability.

CMT: The vulnerability isn’t just the dependency upon a handful of big private donors. The National Endowment for the Arts' budget is $124.4 million this year, down 23% from 1995. And state funding has fallen 27% from 2001 to 2006 according to Americans for the Arts. The vulnerability is the tandem dependency on flagging public-sector funding.

DSM: So what we need, probably, is more corporate sponsorship. And corporate donors are being more parsimonious about their giving—many prefer to support branded programming these days, where they are the exclusive sponsor and can leverage the promotional aspect of that. They prefer to sponsor a particular concert or series, rather than give a contribution to the chamber organization’s general fund, where it gets mingled with the contributions of several dozen other companies in the community. They’re disinclined to give when the gift is a “me too” gesture; they want exclusivity and the visibility that goes with it. We didn’t see this as often 10 years ago.

CMT: One of the challenges for arts groups is to convince potential donors of the benefit that their gift will deliver. If you're a healthcare institution, you show the donor a sick child who was helped, and it's easy. Selling donors on the cultural benefits of chamber music is a lot harder, more abstract. For prospective donors who are business leaders concerned with economic growth of the community, you need to show them objective facts about the relation of your programs to hiring and retention in their industry, in addition to softer things—cultural amenities that enhance the the community’s rank as a desirable place to live and work. Arts & Economic Prosperity: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts Organizations and Their Audiences, released in 2002, reveals that America's nonprofit arts industry generates $134 billion in economic activity every year, including $24.4 billion in Federal, state, and local tax revenues. The $134 billion total includes $53.2 billion in spending by arts organizations and $80.8 billion in event-related spending by arts audiences. The $53.2 billion represents a 45 percent increase (from $36.8 billion) since 1992, when Americans for the Arts last studied spending by arts organizations. The $134 billion in total economic activity has a significant national impact, generating the following:

4.9 million full-time equivalent jobs
$89 billion in household income
$6.6 billion in local government tax revenues
$7.3 billion in state government tax revenues
$10.5 billion in Federal income tax revenues

DSM: Those facts are helpful. But to grow those numbers, and specifically to grow them with new corporate donations and groups of individuals, I believe you need to expand the diversity of the programs. There's always fear among classical music artistic directors and executive directors, about the risk of offending their traditional donors by diverging too much from the frequently-played parts of the canon. To please one or a few individuals is to alienate 10 times as many others—who would have found a more diverse repertoire (or specific portions of it) more exciting—more intellectually or emotionally engaging, more stylish, more “cool”. To survive and thrive, chamber music presenters—all classical music organizations, really—need to be producing programming for the “long tail”, and adjust the pricing and marketing of each of the program lines or series to match the needs and capabilities and preferences of the “niche” in the long tail that that audience segment has.

Concerning these cultural policy and arts marketing and long-tail topics we’re exploring, here are a few of the online sources that I like:

To be an artist is to suffer for your art—to be a bit tortured, at least by questions and doubts. The questions about relative value never let up—Is it beautiful? Is it moving? Is it relevant? Here are some books on different dimensions of that, and how to communicate about value with donors and with cultural policy-makers:

August 24

Bugs

The bottom of the window at the back of the cell opens at the level of the ground. Lots of bugs, especially ants, spill in. When I'm writing, the ants crawl on my paperwork. I have to stop what I'm doing in order to flick them out of the window. It's hard to detect all of what the inmates call "piss ants" because they are so small.

The mosquitoes get more aggresive at night. It's so hot that I only wear shorts in the cell, giving the mosquitoes a large area to strike. I sleep wrapped in a sheet and I often wake up with bite marks on my head and neck. Some of them steal our blood and fly straight into the fan. They leave bloodstains on the wall from which their corpses dangle.

Last night a dragonfly whizzed in, and zigzagged all over the place. I was trying to read, but it kept ramming my face. Eventually, it descended to the bottom bunk and buzzed in Midnight's ear. He stood up, grabbed a shower sandal, and beat it to death.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

August 19 06

Minimised (Part 2)

The blood splattered on the floor, ceiling, walls, bunks, windows, toilet, sink, door, table, shelves, and corkboard in my new cell would likely cause a practitioner of feng shui some concern.

"There was a fight," Piggie said.
"The cops half-assed cleaned the blood. Dude's cheek got bitten off. It ripped his face wide open. The other dude was talented with his fists, elbows and head buttin'."
"It looks like the guy who lost all this blood must have needed a transfusion afterwards," I said.
"I'm a porter. I'll getcha some cleaning supplies," Piggie said.

At least it's a single cell, I thought. I can clean the blood up. But there's no mattress, lightbulb, trashcan or chair. How's a writer supposed to function with no chair? I'd better go and get permission to get my mattress from Yard 4.

Thirty minutes later I returned with my mattress and discovered my new cellmate, Midnight, throwing up blood in the toilet.
"Shouldn't you be at hospital," I said. "That's a lot of blood."
"I just spent four days at the hospital," Midnight said. "Morphine IVs. A CAT scan. A GI tube down my throat. A cancer biopsy. They said there's a cancerous lump closin' one of my intestines. After I drink fluid it all comes up bright red like this."
"That's rough. Did they give you anything for it?"
"I'm on Vicodin, Elavil, Omeprazole, Acetaminophen, and stomach-nausea pills." Midnight faced me. He displayed a chin covered in blood.
A wood entered the cell and said,"Jon, can I speak to you outside?"
"Yeah, sure," I said, and exited."What's the matter?"
"Look, your new celly just got beat up. I've been asked to tell you not to get involved."
"Beat up?"
"Yeah, he owes money. Stay out of it, OK? He might have to move off this yard."
"If he owes money, I'd rather not be involved."
I went back inside and said,"Someone here beat you up?"
"Yeah, I've had two fights today. One on Yard 2 before I left and another one just now."
"In this cell?"
"Yeah, some dude just came inside, asked me for the time, and sucker-punched me."
"That's a lot of drama. Will there be more problems like that coming to this cell?"
"I think it's squashed now."

What have I got into? I thought. They say Yard 1 is mellow yet a guy just got his cheek bitten off and my celly got beat up as soon as he arrived. All this blood is a bad sign. And no chair. A writer with no chair. Calm down. Would Marcus Aurelius be phased by some blood? Try not to be affected by what is happening externally. This is good stuff to write about. Whatever will happen next?

"I gotta tellya upfront, celly," Midnight said.
"What's that," I said.
"'Cause of my medical problems, I hafta pee through the night. Wouldja rather I flush the toilet and make noise or just leave my pee in the can?"
"The flushing will wake me up," I said. "Let's leave it in the can."

Midnight and I spent hours cleaning up the blood. We still find spots of it here and there.

Coming soon: How an accident led to Midnight losing his family, home and job as a heavy-machine operator. And the cocaine, crack and meth addicitions that led to his imprisonment.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Spooky Piano Tableaux

DSM: I was invited to a Halloween party the other day, an intimate gathering of about 10 people, and the people hosting it asked if I could come up with a suitably spooky piece to play after dessert.

CMT: Brother. Surely you begged off.

DSM: Well, the couple have been friends of mine for more than 10 years. And they’re not obtuse people. In fact, the request was posed as a question, “What is the scariest, the most seriously disturbing piece of music you’ve ever played?” And off-hand, I couldn’t really say. I’d never thought about it. I tend to stay away from overtly programmatic pieces. And it seems to me that trying to pigeon-hole the meaning and mood of a given work is naïve (in the case where a piece is first-rate, and the attempted categorization over-simplifies it and does violence to the expressive scope of it). Or else the piece in question is in fact second-rate and really does admit of a simplistic (and therefore aesthetically inferior) interpretation. Uggh.

CMT: So—you can be suckered by a throw-down challenge, is that it? What did you do—wrack your brain trying to recall especially sinister and diabolical motifs?

DSM: No—too tedious. But the typology of horror is pretty broad—there are many sub-types in the genre. So I started thinking of creepy movies—genuinely scary movies I've seen over the years—and then I took inventory of the composers whose biographies strike me as sufficiently unhinged—deviant in a way that is undeniably fright-o-genic.

CMT: Liszt has always impressed me as having an Anthony Perkins-like Psycho Norman Bates-ish quality. If you were looking for a satanic schizoid personality—an abject psychopath—Liszt in full bloom would be hard to beat, don’t you think? Late in life, didn’t he buy himself a bishopric or arrange for himself to be ordained as an Abbé or something? A rich man with a maniacal piety about him—now that’s scary!

DSM: Liszt definitely made it on my list! In fact, I think the Sonata in B minor is one of the spookiest things ever written.

CMT: Well, Charles Rosen considers the Sonata in B minor scary for its odd mix of dramatic bombast and preacherly sentimentality. (Charles Rosen. The Romantic Generation. Harvard Univ, 1998.)

DSM: Claudio Arrau, interviewed by Joseph Horowitz, clearly thought that the B minor Sonata was constructed by Liszt as a piece of programmatic drama—as a rendering of the Faust legend. (Joseph Horowitz. Conversations with Arrau. Knopf, 1992.) Brendel has thought so, too. (Alfred Brendel. Music Sounded Out. Robson, 1990.)

CMT: Let’s look at the score. It begins with these ominous, muffled groans. There is this eerie hallucinatory motif, in the Phrygian mode, that inexorably slouches down and down and down. If you play it very legato, dispassionately, the effect can be something like a a zombie, insensate and unstoppable—or vegetal and corrupt, like a fungus.

A ritenuto in m3 may be done in a heavy-handed, hokey way. But for the occasion you're invited to, I think it’s better left understated—to evoke death; a sad poling of Charon’s boat.

DSM: The exposition really takes the better part of the first 300 measures. There are the dead G’s in the first few bars, followed by dangerous and surprising leaping G’s (octaves) in m7-8. Then there is this cackling that begins in the LH in m15 and an agitato beginning in m18. We get the demented cackling again in m30-32, and the tonic B minor hits us with a vengeance.

CMT: You really need to keep a cool head to play this piece effectively. The arpeggi in m40-44 are so easy to rush. And the sense of urgency inhibits the player from reducing the sound enough by m44. If it is too loud you fail to evoke the whispering of fallen angels.

DSM: There is that hideous wailing in m18-22! The musical texture feels like a doomed Gustav Doré engraving. There are more deconstructions later on, notably in m113-119. Back and forth whispering and thundering, desperate pleading to be spared—from what we're not sure.

CMT: Trying to un-do the deal with the Devil, I imagine, if we believe that the Faust-Mephistopheles legend was behind some explicit program Liszt had in mind here when he composed the B minor Sonata. Then in m197 the agitato dissipates—like waking from a nightmare. Look too at m239 and beyond—the weird swirling effects. The key is a paradoxical D major, but, like a tight-shot in a movie, you know something bad is about to happen. The sunniness you wouldn’t trust as far as you could throw it!

DSM: Oh, and look at the reprise of the original theme, beginning in m277. What chaos! The house is haunted! The humans are on their own, completely without protection. The passage in m286-300 sounds like the Devil himself is there, complete with flames.

Then the recitative at m302: I like the mortified effect of putting the pedal down before the first note of the recitative begins.

CMT: Yes, but guard against playing too softly there, or the effect will be a cheap, fakey, stagey gasping "Goodbye, cruel world"—a bad movie. What you want the pedal to do is emulate the persisting pulse of a person who is in a coma. While it may be true that they may be mortally injured, they are unconscious. They don't participate in the scene as agents who have plans or intentions. Instead, their cognition is gone—they're inert and don't respond. The heart and noisy breathing, the brainstem and some low-level reflexes—elemental and tenacious—are the source of what you see and hear. To keep from being stagey at m302, you just need to remember that you’re in a coma.

CMT: The ghostly-cold C minor in m311 is another feature that convinces me that this Sonata is one of the scariest pieces ever. And in m415-433 we are apparitions, floating out in some black void.

Here are a few representative recordings to guide you, as you revise your decisions on how to handle this piece (or your scary excerpt from it) for your friends' party:

And for a fine survey of the philosophy of horror, consistent with some of the musical ideas we’ve shared above, try Julia Kristeva’s excellent little book:

Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror. Columbia Univ, 1982.

I take it you're going to go to the party dressed up as Liszt then?