[Dixielandjazz] Where is Music Going?

[Stephen G Barbone]

This article is not for everyone. So if after the 2nd paragraph, it  
does not interest you delete it.
While the talk is mostly about classical music, it applies with equal  
truth to jazz.

Club Kids Are Storming Music Museums

NY Times - Dec 9, 2011 - By Allan Kozin

We critics have long argued vehemently that if major musical  
institutions hope to be regarded as vital, modern institutions, they  
must keep their listeners (and performers) in touch with the ideas,  
trendy or otherwise, that excite the composers of their time. But  
truth be told, we are a little bipolar on that subject. Though we  
criticize the big organizations for fostering a museum culture, we  
actually value the museums they have become.

Our attitude toward the classical canon, after all — and this  
increasingly applies also to older forms of jazz and pop — is that  
great music transcends time. If the New York Philharmonic did not  
regularly give us Beethoven, Brahms and symphonies, we would complain  
that it had abandoned the conservationist aspect of its charter and  
lament the disappearance of works that had moved people for decades or  
centuries.

That tension is not easily resolved. Even a model in which orchestras,  
chamber groups and opera companies present themselves as museums with  
substantial contemporary wings has almost insurmountable limitations  
circumscribing the possibility of hearing much new music. Consider  
that within the last 50 years Mahler, Shostakovich, Bartok, Sibelius  
and Copland have all moved from the periphery of the orchestral canon  
to its center, yet Beethoven, Brahms and company have not fallen out  
of fashion; and Bach, Haydn and Mozart, long ceded to period- 
instrument bands, are returning to the modern orchestra repertory. All  
this at a time when the world of young, inventive and often populist  
composers is exploding.

These young composers may hold the key to classical music’s future,  
and the future they create might not be what you expect. Increasingly  
they have come to consider the machinations of the big-ticket musical  
organizations — and debates about how to get them to accommodate new  
music — as beside the point.

Instead of waiting for established ensembles to give them a hearing,  
they have built an alternative musical universe. Its complex ecology  
and hierarchy of coolness includes webs of composer-performer  
collaborations, circuits of preferred concert spaces and an expanding  
number of record labels: among them, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe and  
Tzadik, all composer run and stylistically freewheeling.

This world is centered in New York, though it has counterparts  
elsewhere. (Reykjavik, Iceland, seems unusually influential at the  
moment.) It thrives in concert spaces that make a point of  
informality. Some, like Le Poisson Rouge and the Cornelia Street Café  
in Greenwich Village and Galapagos in Brooklyn, are like jazz clubs:  
you can nurse a drink while listening to a performance, but the  
atmosphere is quiet and focused. Others are hole-in-the-wall funky: on  
summer nights at the Stone, in the East Village, performers debate  
whether to turn on a noisy fan or stifle with their listeners. Lately  
new-music haunts like the Issue Project Room and Roulette have found  
larger spaces (both in Brooklyn) and the money to pay for them.

Just as crucial, emerging composers have built an enthusiastic,  
growing audience that, while mostly young, is expanding across age and  
demographic lines. Perhaps because the music these composers produce  
is wildly eclectic, dogma free and more likely to have undercurrents  
of humor than doctrinaire earnestness, it is attracting older music  
fans who, it turns out, were seeking composers to champion all along  
but were left cold by the harshness of the serialists and bored by the  
repetitiveness of the minimalists, and found too few havens between  
those extremes.

It would be wrong to suggest that the young composers who have created  
this burgeoning alternative world have no interest in the big  
institutions. Nor do they disdain the standard repertory. Most would  
love to have their works performed by major orchestras, and some get  
lucky: Anna Clyne and Mason Bates were appointed composers in  
residence at the Chicago Symphony; Nico Muhly will have a work  
performed at the Metropolitan Opera.

But they have other models too. They attended conservatories and went  
through the same rigorous training as their predecessors, but they  
have not inherited their teachers’ battles. For them serialism and  
Minimalism are equally useful tools in a gestural language that draws  
on rock, jazz, hip-hop, world music and every reconfiguration of  
classical language from medieval times through Romanticism. And though  
there was a time when classical-music students played little but  
classical music, these musicians have played it all. Today you can  
hardly find a composer under 40 who did not play in rock bands as a  
teenager.

Some still have them, but now they include orchestral instruments and  
computers alongside electric guitars and basses, drums and electronic  
keyboards. In all this music the timbres, the textures and, often, the  
energy are those of rock, but the structures, substance and time  
scales are rooted in classical music. Electric guitars may simmer or  
wail, and drums may pound, but this is not the stuff of pop hits. When  
you listen to the Now Ensemble or the amplified, heavily processed  
string quartet Ethel or groups led by the composers Missy Mazzoli, Du  
Yun, Judd Greenstein, Caleb Burhans or Bryce Dessner, you inevitably  
wonder whether you’re hearing a rock band or a chamber group, and  
whether it matters.

A polished composer like Jefferson Friedman can have it both ways.  
Having poured his stylistically wide-ranging thoughts into his string  
quartets, he happily allowed the electronica group Matmos to remix  
them, adding beats and other sounds, and cutting and pasting musical  
lines. Several of these composers have the D.J.-remix-mash-up culture  
of post-1980s pop in their blood.

This scene was not suddenly created from nothing. If you pick at its  
fabric, you will find strands stretching back to the late 1960s, when  
Minimalists and avant-gardists began forming bands and giving loft  
concerts, and when European art-rock bands like Tangerine Dream, Gong,  
Faust and Henry Cow began exploring unusual (for rock) meters,  
harmonies, textures and structures.

You see its origins in the late 1970s, when the Kronos Quartet began  
its long, iconoclastic run in San Francisco, while in New York, Rhys  
Chatham began writing serious pieces for electric guitars, and Glenn  
Branca became better known for his guitar symphonies than for his work  
with his No Wave rock band, the Theoretical Girls. Its early rumblings  
inspired a blossoming of lively avant-garde festivals in the late  
1980s and early 1990s: among them, the composer-run Bang on a Can and  
MATA festivals, as well as Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music  
and Serious Fun! at Lincoln Center.

This movement — still nameless, though it is sometimes called alt- 
classical — has really reached critical mass only in the last five  
years or so. Its economic muscle remains untested: packing a few  
hundred listeners into a club is one thing, but could that audience  
fill Avery Fisher Hall night after night? Does it want to? Part of  
this world’s charm, after all, is its intimacy and informality, and  
its inexpensive tickets.

Yet when Carnegie Hall has presented concerts aimed at this crowd’s  
tastes, usually in the small but technologically up-to-date Zankel  
Hall, the seats have been filled. Seats were also filled when Alarm  
Will Sound and other groups played at Alice Tully Hall recently and  
when Adrian Utley, of the British band Portishead, and Will Gregory,  
of the electronica duo Goldfrapp, performed a new chamber-rock film  
score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” as part of  
the White Light Festival last month, in the same hall.

That Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are hoping to tap this market  
suggests that the mainstream musical world sees its potential. So do  
the conventional classical ensembles (the Emerson Quartet, Orpheus)  
and soloists (the pianist Hélène Grimaud, the operatic tenor Joseph  
Calleja) who have recently migrated to clubs for record-release  
parties — a practice borrowed from the pop world by way of labels like  
New Amsterdam — or simply to trawl for a new audience.

The major institutions would no doubt love to tap into this world’s  
energy, audience and of-the-moment cachet. But to do so they would  
have to rethink their repertories, ticket prices and performance  
styles radically, and it seems unlikely that their existing audiences  
and donors would stand for that.

That said, some organizations have nothing to lose. New York City  
Opera, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra,  
all venerable institutions that have fallen on hard times, are  
experimenting with genre-crossing orchestras and seeking new  
performance spaces. Whether they survive will tell us a lot about the  
power of this new approach and what it can mean for classical music  
generally.

But it may mean nothing for classical music. Perhaps instead of being  
a shot in the arm, this movement will lead to an epochal splintering  
in which composers in the new style continue doing what they are doing  
now: making artistic choices that draw as much on nonclassical  
influences as on classical ones and writing for ensembles that use  
computers, amplification, sound processing and non-Western  
instruments. This world may break away from traditional classical  
music much the way jazz split from blues in the 1920s; rock blossomed  
from rhythm and blues, country and soul in the 1950s; and hip-hop  
arose from within pop in the 1980s.

There is no reason the two worlds could not remain porous. But in that  
case today’s orchestras would embrace their museum aspect  
wholeheartedly and become extensions of the period-instrument world,  
specializing in music written during the 19th and 20th centuries.  
Composers receiving their training now, and listening to jazz, rock,  
hip-hop and world music in their spare time, would write for new,  
amplified or partly electronic ensembles.

It is not a matter of whether this is a good development or a bad one;  
it is evolution in action. And if nothing else, it should afford a  
respite of several decades before we read hand-wringing reports about  
the graying of the Issue Project Room audience.