Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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)

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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Trombone-
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)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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)

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
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>
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> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
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_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

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Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Trombone-
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)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
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Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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)
In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

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Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
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Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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How about a few more:  Victor Herbert, Paul Whiteman, Paul Dresser..... and a really apt one 2nd Rhapsody, Ge rshwin.  Great listening.



beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "beldon wade" <>
To: "Dennis Clason" <>
Cc: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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Trombone-
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Trombone-
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Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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How about a few more:  Victor Herbert, Paul Whiteman, Paul Dresser..... and a really apt one 2nd Rhapsody, Ge rshwin.  Great listening.



beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "beldon wade" <>
To: "Dennis Clason" <>
Cc: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Be careful of gimmicks to increase the audience. A 3-D Screen would dive me crazy as I have only one eye that works. Can some of thehigh price soloists and spotlight the Orcestra,
Joe L Norcross


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Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
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Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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)


Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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How about a few more:  Victor Herbert, Paul Whiteman, Paul Dresser..... and a really apt one 2nd Rhapsody, Ge rshwin.  Great listening.



beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "beldon wade" <>
To: "Dennis Clason" <>
Cc: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
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Be careful of gimmicks to increase the audience. A 3-D Screen would dive me crazy as I have only one eye that works. Can some of thehigh price soloists and spotlight the Orcestra,
Joe L Norcross


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)


The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring "pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual, with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works; however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
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Trombone-
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)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)


Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l



How about a few more:  Victor Herbert, Paul Whiteman, Paul Dresser..... and a really apt one 2nd Rhapsody, Ge rshwin.  Great listening.



beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "beldon wade" <>
To: "Dennis Clason" <>
Cc: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


Be careful of gimmicks to increase the audience. A 3-D Screen would dive me crazy as I have only one eye that works. Can some of thehigh price soloists and spotlight the Orcestra,
Joe L Norcross


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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)


The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring "pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual, with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works; however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Food for thought from a weekend warrior:

Consider the cities/towns/demographics (ethnic, not racial) where this
country's oldest and most thriving orchestras exist (Boston, NYC, Philly,
Cleveland, Chicago, Cincy...). Generally, wouldn't that be older cities
and/or places where people whose musical 'heritage' is indeed classical?
If this is a reasonable generality, it explains why younger cities,
developed through a migration of very diverse people (contrasted to the
homogenous waves of the 1800s and 1900s), most of which do NOT have a
classical tradition, struggle to have a financially sound orchestra. I'm
thinking of the struggles that my own town, Atlanta, had years ago, when
folks simply didn't respond to the 'this music (modern & obscure older
classical) is too important not to be heard,' so the programming was very
'art form' and most folks simply did not know or relate to it. Hence,
attendance was very low and financial struggles ensued. The ASO has done a
fine job of turning this around in a town that is predominantly
southern/classic rock, C&W and urban.

My 0.02

Bob Devine


-----Original Message-----
From: trombone-l- [mailto:trombone-l-]
On Behalf Of Ann E. Argodale
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2011 12:09 AM
To: Robert Holland
Cc: Trb. List
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing
intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one
of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the
damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring
"pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has
evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not
orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they
contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much
orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so
attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music
in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual,
with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that
orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works;
however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all
that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods
and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form
without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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)
In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)


Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l



How about a few more:  Victor Herbert, Paul Whiteman, Paul Dresser..... and a really apt one 2nd Rhapsody, Ge rshwin.  Great listening.



beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "beldon wade" <>
To: "Dennis Clason" <>
Cc: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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Be careful of gimmicks to increase the audience. A 3-D Screen would dive me crazy as I have only one eye that works. Can some of thehigh price soloists and spotlight the Orcestra,
Joe L Norcross


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The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring "pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual, with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works; however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
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Food for thought from a weekend warrior:

Consider the cities/towns/demographics (ethnic, not racial) where this
country's oldest and most thriving orchestras exist (Boston, NYC, Philly,
Cleveland, Chicago, Cincy...). Generally, wouldn't that be older cities
and/or places where people whose musical 'heritage' is indeed classical?
If this is a reasonable generality, it explains why younger cities,
developed through a migration of very diverse people (contrasted to the
homogenous waves of the 1800s and 1900s), most of which do NOT have a
classical tradition, struggle to have a financially sound orchestra. I'm
thinking of the struggles that my own town, Atlanta, had years ago, when
folks simply didn't respond to the 'this music (modern & obscure older
classical) is too important not to be heard,' so the programming was very
'art form' and most folks simply did not know or relate to it. Hence,
attendance was very low and financial struggles ensued. The ASO has done a
fine job of turning this around in a town that is predominantly
southern/classic rock, C&W and urban.

My 0.02

Bob Devine


-----Original Message-----
From: trombone-l- [mailto:trombone-l-]
On Behalf Of Ann E. Argodale
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2011 12:09 AM
To: Robert Holland
Cc: Trb. List
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing
intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one
of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the
damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring
"pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has
evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not
orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they
contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much
orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so
attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music
in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual,
with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that
orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works;
however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all
that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods
and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form
without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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)
...umm... What he said...

In all seriousness, I had this long response ready for the original email but Mr. Tall said everything I would've said.

To quote my good friend and colleague Steve Kostyniak, associate principal horn of the Pittsburgh symphony, after reading Mr. Lebrechts reckless article,"Well, by Mr. Lebrechts logic of an orchestra musician works 20 hours a week, if this article is approximately 5000 words and if he types well, say 100 words a minute, that article took him under an hour. Bravo for his efficiency! Nice weeks work!"

These reckless articles by people who know nothing of the demands of a symphony musician are disgusting. Its like saying a football player plays only a dozen or so games a year.

I read many years ago about a study done on stress levels of a principal oboe player in a major orchestra. The equipment used for the study registered his stress levels before a solo in a concert. They were the same as a pilot making a crash landing! How would you like to crash land planes 20 hours a week?

My first season in Pittsburgh, while still in my probation period, I played the Tuba Mirum solo in the Mozart Requiem. But our music director did it very differently than normal. All I played in the performance was the solo, from the first balcony, with spotlights on me. The music director wanted a real "voice of God" visual affect...crash landing a plane would've felt easier.

Apparently on a European tour that's planned for our orchestra October 2012 we're scheduled to play 2 Mozart Requiems in Vienna at the Musikverein...better get my crash helmet ready...even Viennese toddlers know how the Mozart Requiem goes!

Enough post hijacking...

Bravo to Mr. Tall for a great response. You have my 100% support.


Jim Nova
Trombone-Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra






-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Tall <>
Sender: trombone-l-
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2011 01:22:05
To:
Reply-To:
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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Trombone-
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)

Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:



Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.

Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.

Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.

In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.

The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.

And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.

Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.

Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.

In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.

In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.

Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.

In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.

Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?

The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).

In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.

The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.

Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.

Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.

Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.

And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.

But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
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On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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Trombone-
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)

OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?

Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you

And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.

Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.

Pliskin

On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:

>
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>
>
>
> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>
> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>
> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>
> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>
> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>
> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>
> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>
> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>
> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>
> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>
> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>
> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>
> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>
> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>
> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>
> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>
> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>
> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>
> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>
> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>
> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>
> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>
> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>
> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>
> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>
> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>
> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Well said. Gotta make it engaging, not intimidating!

On Jul 9, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:

>
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin
>
> On Jul 8, 2011, at 10:21 PM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>>
>>
>>
>> Like a condemned man on a guillotine that jams in mid-fall, the symphony orchestra appears to survive on a whim and a prayer. The past year has been a testing one, the most parlous in memory, and few orchestras go into the summer festival whirl feeling entirely secure about what lies beyond.
>>
>> Take a look at the 2011 toll so far. An incoming Dutch government pledged eight months ago to abolish all radio orchestras. They are still talking about it and a vote is due in parliament some time soon, but a country that once discussed culture with somber reverence is now resorting to the rhetoric of Sarah Palin and the Governor of Kansas, who recently eliminated all state funding for the arts. Culture is no longer a sacred cow. Climate change in the political arena has heated up a tide of public resentment towards arts subsidy.
>>
>> Elsewhere, Spain and Portugal, growth markets for symphonic music, have frozen over with economic fear. The orchestra in Seville has taken a 40 per cent funding cut, par for the course, and has called on the state to stop funding Daniel Barenboim's showcase East-West Divan. It's dog-eat-dog in Iberia.
>>
>> In South America, the orchestras of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires are locked out by their bosses and have not been paid for months. In Rio, the business-backed Brazil ian Symphony Orchestra has sacked half its musicians and is being boycotted as a result by the country's top soloists, Nelson Freire and Cristina Ortiz.
>>
>> The United States sustains half the world's 500 or so professional orchestras. After decades of conservatism, the floodgates finally broke last winter. Symphony orchestras in Honolulu, Syracuse (NY) and Bellevue (WA) went into liquidation. Detroit toughed out a six-month strike before musicians finally accepted a 22 per cent pay cut; some of the best players have since left town. Louisville went into bankruptcy protection with a view to cutting the orchestra to chamber size; Columbus, Ohio, has halved its band.
>>
>> And then came the bombshell. In March, Philadelphia, the first US orchestra to earn world fame in the 1920s when Leopold Stokowski conducted and Rachmaninov gave premieres, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to fend off its creditors. Philadelphia is — with Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York — one of America's big five orchestras, so designated for the power of their playing and the depth of their financial endowment, built over a century. The Philadelphia sound was once held to be the acme of musical perfection, a symbol of what musicians could achieve in a free society. The conductor Klaus Tennstedt wept at his first rehearsal, telling the musicians how he and his father would crawl under the bedclothes in Nazi Germany to hear their contraband message. Philadelphia was the pride of American orchestras. Now the orchestra says it cannot meet the rent at the over-bright new Verizon Hall, or feed the musicians' pension pot. Unless someone pumps in a few spare millions, the Fabulous Philadelphians are finished. "What would Philadelphia be without its orchestra?" cry traditionalists. Good question, but it's not the only one. Realists are demanding to know exactly what a city of six million wrestling with post-industrial decline gains from having a costly and cumbersome musical pantechnicon. Who needs a symphony orchestra? That's what they are asking, the world over.
>>
>> Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.
>>
>> The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.
>>
>> Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement , a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself .
>>
>> What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.In America, GIs returning from war to a free college education and a small-town life demanded orchestral concerts of the kind they had heard abroad. The late Russell Johnson, who became the world's foremost concert hall acoustician, told me that he first heard an orchestra when he was in khaki fatigues in Manila and knew instantly that he would never go back to join his father in a blue-collar job. A symphony concert represented aspiration for postwar millions.
>>
>> Soon, however, the audience grew confused. Modernism introduced a complexity to the concert diet that was beyond the reach of the "ordinary" listener and often painful to the ear. At the onslaught of Webern, Cage, Stockhausen and late Stravinsky, Mr Smeeth and his kind came to feel belittled and unwanted and orchestras struggled with conflicting demands to renew the repertoire and not alienate the audience.
>>
>> In Europe, supported by growing amounts of state funding — the London Symphony Orchestra went from a £2,000 annual grant in 1949 to more than £2 million today — they could afford a measure of experiment, the occasional half-empty house. Many adapted artistic obligation to social opportunity and cultivated an elite audience, acquiring an unheralded role in the intellectual life of city and society. On to this base they added elements of public education and social outreach, which pleased the politicians and strengthened their appeal to big business.
>>
>> In 2011 the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra receives a record 15 million euros in city subventions, almost half its 34 million euro budget (and more than double the total grant to four London orchestras). Berlin's business is augmented by a 6 million euro grant from Deutsche Bank for education and digital outreach. It is also an aggressive player for record fees from tour and festival organizers. A residency in London is now so costly that the rival South Bank and Barbican centers had to collaborate in procuring it. In May, the Berlin Philharmonic announced it was leaving the Salzburg Easter Festival after receiving a bigger offer from Baden-Baden.
>>
>> Such is life at the top for the privileged few. Lower down the leagues, with the collapse of record income and the onset of unforeseen demographic change, orchestras found themselves in a fight for survival. Germany, after unification, managed the decline rather well, reducing the number of symphony and chamber orchestras from 170 to 133 by quiet attrition. The number of ensemble jobs for musicians has fallen from 12,159 in 1992 to 9,992 in 2010. The ructions triggered in Holland were consensually avoided.
>>
>> In Britain, one chamber orchestra has come within days of going under. Nevertheless, contrary to predictions, audiences have grown in two years of economic recession, and in some instances diversified. Cool young artists like Lang Lang, Gustavo Dudamel and the American composer Nico Muhly attract a significantly different audience to mainstream venues and a sensation of generational renewal. Not in America, however. Deborah Borda, who signed Dudamel at 26 as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, told me last summer that she expected two of the Big Five to go under. Too stuck in their ways, was her view. Her Dude has Hispanic street cred and the music he plays often swings. Hollywood is sitting up and taking interest.
>>
>> Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.
>>
>> Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.
>>
>> Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.
>>
>> Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena. So, let me repeat the question. Who needs the symphony orchestra, and can it survive?
>>
>> The core requirements are unchanged. Musicians need orchestras for their livelihoods in the city. It may not be much of a living. Many in London earn less than £30,000 a year, some are reduced to driving cabs. Yet they persist with an arduous vocation because it is what they enjoy, what they believe in and what they were trained for in state education (whether we are maintaining too many music colleges is an argument that has wittered on in government for nigh on 30 years).
>>
>> In Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, musicians earn rather less than £30,000 but a couple who both play in an orchestra can raise a family quite comfortably on a double salary and will obtain a higher quality of life than they could in the Big Smoke. They also enjoy higher social status and recognition, as well as richer possibilities of private tuition and playing chamber music. All in all, it's not a bad life and the bonus of local pride puts a spring in the step of regional musicians that I seldom encounter in capitals. When Liverpool goes on tour, it takes along a char banc of supporters.
>>
>> The value of an orchestra to a city is a matter of pride and self-worth. If Philadelphia were to lose its sound, the metropolis risks fading to blank. Whether that threat is enough to winkle extra millions from its richest citizens remains to be seen.
>>
>> Beyond civic self-interest lies the potential for social cohesion. What the twinkle-eyed chorus master Gareth Malone has shown in several television series is that music has the capacity to change the lives of those who feel abandoned by every other social organization. Starting from an East End community project at LSO St Luke's, the orchestra's music education centre, Malone has rallied people of all ages in sink estates, youth clubs and army barracks to come together and find themselves in a musical activity. It is an initiative that could not have flourished without the bedrock of an orchestra to give it life. The LSO has led the way in offering its players opportunities outside the concert hall — in hospital visits, prison rehab work, small ensembles and remedial teaching. The players have richer working lives than ever before and the city benefits enormously.
>>
>> Simon Rattle's projects with immigrant communities in unified Berlin have had similar resonance. Dudamel in Los Angeles is a symbol of social inclusion in a deeply schismatic city. An orchestra in the 21st century is more than the sum of its parts, more than the ear beholds. It is woven deep into the social fabric, so deep that its abolition becomes almost impossible.
>>
>> Louisville, as I write, is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Syracuse, which I visited in deep doldrums last winter, is trying to form a new part-time orchestra. The sacked musicians of Rio have regrouped as an independent ensemble. You can shut a theatre but you cannot keep a good orchestra down. There will always be an audience for what it has to offer.
>>
>> And why is that? Because in a lifestyle of wall-to-wall wi-fi and instant tweets, the concert hall is one of the few places where we become reachable, where we can switch off our lifelines and surrender to a form that will not let us go for an hour or more. The symphony orchestra is our relief from the communicative addiction. It forces us, willy-nilly, to resist the responsive urge. It is a cold-turkey cure for our reactive insanity, our self-destroying restlessness. The more concerts I attend, the more I see how they restore balance to over-busy lives. It may well be that we, as a society, need the symphony orchestra now more than ever before. How we pay for it will have to be reconfigured over the next two or three difficult years, amid challenges from rival art forms and digital distractions. There has never been such heated competition for every nanosecond of our supposed leisure time.
>>
>> But after 30 years' close observation of orchestral ups and downs and half a century after the Arts Council pronounced that London needed just one super-orchestra, I have reached the irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive — not on the weary old argument that it is somehow "good for you" to listen to "good music", nor on any cod theories that classical music breeds clever kids and better citizens, but simply because there is a cogent human need for what an orchestra adds to the relief of city life. That need becomes ever clearer as the world speeds up.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Trombone-l mailing list
>> Trombone-
>> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said. I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs. This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Trombone-l mailing list
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)
I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century framework.

Ann E. Argodale
Musician


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 3:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l
)
In my opinion, young though I am, I don't think the symphony orchestra has to do exclusively one or the other. I doubt (or at least hope not) that people are recommending that we infuse ALL our orchestra's performances with these things that you call buzzwords. I think that they need to be accepted as a *different* aspect to orchestral music to be used to infuse new life into the orchestral seasons as a whole. To be sure, I believe that the historical form of the symphony orchestra should stand alone at times. However at others, there's no reason we could not open our arms to other tastes. After all, every major musical shift in history has been a shift against something else. Still, the older forms have not died off, nor do they need to. I believe (note that this comes from a 25 year old's background) that we can both embrace new forms of music–and yes, that includes technological marvels and movie music– while simultaneously maintaining the historical heritage that we hold dear.

I for one enjoy movie music, as well as some of these tech 'buzzwords' you reference, however I enjoy them in different ways, and for different reasons. No, none of them will take the place of Mahler or Beethoven or Brahms for me, but they don't need to. Just as I enjoy folk music, blues, jazz and rock; I feel that I can enjoy–and perform in these mediums without surrendering the others.

I agree that the current proclivity for what you define as "vulgar" is sad. That said, I disagree with calling other folks' tastes vulgar. Sure, they don't match yours, but that doesn't mean they're vulgar. There is an art to composing music to film. It is not the SAME type of art as a symphony, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily an inferior art.

I guess my main point, is that I believe that a symphony can be both. They can maintain a firm tradition of symphony concerts, while at the same time including some of the most recent "fad's" of film music, video game music, multimedia, etc. They don't need to necessarily even occur on the same concert. But once you get people to a concert of film music, it puts the thought in their head to return for perhaps a more traditional concert.

Finally, I don't think anyone would be suggesting these practices if the Symphony on it's own were working well financially, but the sad fact is that there just aren't enough people who have heard enough traditional orchestral music to even contemplate buying a ticket to go see a symphony. Just as soon traditional movie theatres will be unable to compete without offering 3D movies, and software companies will be unable to compete without offering mac compatible software, so orchestras will probably be unable to survive.

My two cents…

Cheers, Josh



On Jul 9, 2011, at 8:36 PM, Robert Holland wrote:

> Ann Argodale wrote:
>
>> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.
>> Add a big screen with movie scenes. Or, how about 3-D big-screen
>> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?
>> Make the audience jump out of their seats! There is great new
>> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century
>> framework.
>
> Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got
> them?
>
> If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as
> an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without
> needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in
> the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,
> multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the
> empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in
> fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far
> eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the
> symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's
> being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to
> youth hollows out its reason for being.
>
> I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't
> think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the
> Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if
> the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,
> well, then it deserves to be forgotten.
>
> Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just
> happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar
> approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.
>
> Robert Holland, Publisher
> Briar Music Press
>
> http://www.briarmusic.com
> _______________________________________________
> Trombone-l mailing list
> Trombone-
> http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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How about a few more:  Victor Herbert, Paul Whiteman, Paul Dresser..... and a really apt one 2nd Rhapsody, Ge rshwin.  Great listening.



beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "beldon wade" <>
To: "Dennis Clason" <>
Cc: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 9:25:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



Any one remember the music of M ischa Bakalinikov?





beldon wade



----- Original Message -----


From: "Dennis Clason" <>
To: trombone-
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 4:56:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 2011-07-09 2:42 PM, Daniel Pliskin wrote:
> OK. An orchestra has most of the cool sounding instruments, music that has stood the test of time, amazing musicians...so what else could they need?
>
> Mostly, I think that the audience doesn't identify with the music  or the musicians. For music, I'd suggest movie sound tracks. People who weren't raised listening to classical music aren't going to suddenly yearn to listen to it now. You should be able to introduce them to classical, but you first have to get them to listen to you
>
> And you've got to stop dressing like penguins and start exuding your personalities. No youngster is going to identify
> With you when you dress like that. None of them wear ties, let alone black suits and dresses.
>
> Do more to encourage youngsters to come to practice sessions. They're affordable. They're during the day. And they show outsiders that even though something sounds fabulous, fabulous needs improvements. ...you can also sit wherever you want.
>
> Pliskin


What Dan said.  I'll even do some of the programming for your MDs.  This
is heavy on John Williams film music, because he's such a chameleon as a
composer:

(1) Play cuts from Star Wars for the first half of the concert, follow
it with Holst's Planets for the second half.

(2) Play cues from Superman the Movie, do Tod und Verklarung for the
second half, maybe toss in Till Eulenspiegel for grins.

(3) Play cues from one of the swashbucklers Erich Korngold scored, do
the Korngold Violin Concerto in the second half.

(4) Play a whole concert of Miklos Rosza's music.

(5) Do William's suite from Schindler's List, and follow it with music
played in the Theresienstadt camp: Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

--
--
Dennis L. Clason
Department of Economics, Applied Statistics and Int'l Business
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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Be careful of gimmicks to increase the audience. A 3-D Screen would dive me crazy as I have only one eye that works. Can some of thehigh price soloists and spotlight the Orcestra,
Joe L Norcross


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The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring "pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual, with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works; however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


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Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l

Food for thought from a weekend warrior:

Consider the cities/towns/demographics (ethnic, not racial) where this
country's oldest and most thriving orchestras exist (Boston, NYC, Philly,
Cleveland, Chicago, Cincy...). Generally, wouldn't that be older cities
and/or places where people whose musical 'heritage' is indeed classical?
If this is a reasonable generality, it explains why younger cities,
developed through a migration of very diverse people (contrasted to the
homogenous waves of the 1800s and 1900s), most of which do NOT have a
classical tradition, struggle to have a financially sound orchestra. I'm
thinking of the struggles that my own town, Atlanta, had years ago, when
folks simply didn't respond to the 'this music (modern & obscure older
classical) is too important not to be heard,' so the programming was very
'art form' and most folks simply did not know or relate to it. Hence,
attendance was very low and financial struggles ensued. The ASO has done a
fine job of turning this around in a town that is predominantly
southern/classic rock, C&W and urban.

My 0.02

Bob Devine


-----Original Message-----
From: trombone-l- [mailto:trombone-l-]
On Behalf Of Ann E. Argodale
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2011 12:09 AM
To: Robert Holland
Cc: Trb. List
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?



The symphony orchestra  is an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing
intrinsic value, and it needs to have an audience.  I used to work for one
of the majors (by its budget) and they tried both approaches: to be the
damnedest best they could be in performances and recordings, and bring
"pops" to the masses. It just seems to me that every other art form has
evolved over time: theatre, dance, literature, film, etc.; why not
orchestral performance?  This is not to say that William Shakespeare,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Ford cannot still be appreciated for what they
contributed to culture, but their art forms continue to evolve. Much
orchestral music is evolving beyond the capacity of its audiences, so
attendance decreases.  I'm just suggesting that we present orchestral music
in ways that most audiences will voluntarily attend performances: visual,
with modern effects, like other arts today. I am not suggesting that
orchestras discontinue performances of historically significant works;
however, if people won't attend concerts, orchestras won't survive, and all
that wonderful new music will be for naught. If a tree falls in the woods
and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does an art form
without an audience have merit? Is it even art?  



Ann E. Argodale
Musician



----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Holland" <>
To: "Trb. List"
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:36:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

Ann Argodale wrote:

> I'd like to add a dimension to Dennis' suggestions: multi-media.  
> Add a big screen with movie scenes.  Or, how about 3-D big-screen  
> movie scenes with assisted surround sound of the live orchestra?  
> Make the audience jump out of their seats!  There is great new  
> music, but orchestras continue to present it within a 19th-century  
> framework.

Orchestras have already been doing these things, and what has it got  
them?

If no one else will rise to the defense of the symphony orchestra as  
an artistic form/medium of its own, possessing intrinsic value without  
needing to be enslaved to other purposes as recommended above and in  
the article cited earlier in this thread, I will. Interactive,  
multimedia, and other technophilic terms are just buzzwords, and the  
empty values they signify do not combine well with what is, yes, in  
fact, a historical form with hundreds of years of tradition that far  
eclipse the merely novel and titillating. The expressive power of the  
symphony orchestra in the 21st century derives in part out of it's  
being an anachronism, so to abandon its essence in a whorish appeal to  
youth hollows out its reason for being.

I'll admit orchestral music is not for everyone, but then, I don't  
think it needs to be. The popularity and profitability of, say, the  
Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises may satisfy some tastes, but if  
the symphony orchestra sinks to those vulgar levels just to survive,  
well, then it deserves to be forgotten.

Disclaimer: I'm not picking on Ann Argodale in particular. Hers just  
happens to be the last in a string of posts that all recommend similar  
approaches to the orchestra not being an orchestra anymore.

Robert Holland, Publisher
Briar Music Press

http://www.briarmusic.com
_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
http://maillists.samford.edu/mailman/listinfo/trombone-l


_______________________________________________
Trombone-l mailing list
Trombone-
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)
...umm... What he said...

In all seriousness, I had this long response ready for the original email but Mr. Tall said everything I would've said.

To quote my good friend and colleague Steve Kostyniak, associate principal horn of the Pittsburgh symphony, after reading Mr. Lebrechts reckless article,"Well, by Mr. Lebrechts logic of an orchestra musician works 20 hours a week, if this article is approximately 5000 words and if he types well, say 100 words a minute, that article took him under an hour. Bravo for his efficiency! Nice weeks work!"

These reckless articles by people who know nothing of the demands of a symphony musician are disgusting. Its like saying a football player plays only a dozen or so games a year.

I read many years ago about a study done on stress levels of a principal oboe player in a major orchestra. The equipment used for the study registered his stress levels before a solo in a concert. They were the same as a pilot making a crash landing! How would you like to crash land planes 20 hours a week?

My first season in Pittsburgh, while still in my probation period, I played the Tuba Mirum solo in the Mozart Requiem. But our music director did it very differently than normal. All I played in the performance was the solo, from the first balcony, with spotlights on me. The music director wanted a real "voice of God" visual affect...crash landing a plane would've felt easier.

Apparently on a European tour that's planned for our orchestra October 2012 we're scheduled to play 2 Mozart Requiems in Vienna at the Musikverein...better get my crash helmet ready...even Viennese toddlers know how the Mozart Requiem goes!

Enough post hijacking...

Bravo to Mr. Tall for a great response. You have my 100% support.


Jim Nova
Trombone-Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra






-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Tall <>
Sender: trombone-l-
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2011 01:22:05
To:
Reply-To:
Subject: Re: [Trombone-l] End of the Symphony Orchestra?

On 7/8/2011 11:21 PM, wrote:
>
> Interesting article by Norman Lebrecht:
>

Here's a link to the article:
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3985/full?page=1

Norman writes so purty. He sounds so authoritative.

Whenever I read something which claims that the players in Big Five
orchestras, or any full-time orchestra, put in a "20-hour week", I know
pretty much all I need to know about the worldview and rhetoric of the
writer. I am certain that the writer has never held a symphony
position. If the writer further claims that "Only in American
orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as
"management", I know instantly that the writer has an agenda, and
furthermore has never worked in or perhaps never talked to anyone who
works in pretty much any corporation anywhere.

The Fabulous Philadelphians are not finished, or even bankrupt. At
least not the sort of bankruptcy which my former employer filed for,
where liabilities were over twice assets, the employees were 3+ months
behind in salary, and the music and instruments are being disposed of in
a bankruptcy auction. The Fabulous Philadelphians "well-meaning
executives" have declared a strategic bankruptcy with assets multiple
times liabilities, a current cash flow problem, and a desire to abrogate
contracts with their employees and suppliers. According to Peter Dobrin
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Well-Meaning Philadelphians have spent
over $1.6 million on this bankruptcy filing as of June 30, and their
strategic plan anticipates total expenditures of $8.4 million for the
bankruptcy. That's the sort of bankrupt I wish I was.

A claim of 250 professional orchestras in the US bears examining. I
assume his definition of "professional" is that their players receive
money when they play, not that the players can make a living from their
wages. Using this definition and considering the number of golf bets,
fantasy leagues, and bracket sheets run in the US every year, there are
perhaps 100 million professional golfers and gamblers in the US.

He does end on his usual positive note after his usual prediction of
Ragnarok, so there's that. And he seems to still enjoy attending concerts.

Disclaimer: I own and read Norman's "Who Killed Classical Music?" and
"The Maestro Myth", and I enjoyed them. Also, he has predicted 10 of
the last 3 calamities in the orchestra business.

Dave Tall
Bass Trombonist
Dead-as-a-parrot New Mexico Symphony Orchestra




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I wonder if a few factors other than age aren't influencing this. I don't
have any numbers to support this but I'm thinking about:

Regarding the younger generation and less exposure to symphonic music...

- Less funding for music programs in primary and secondary school
- Less focus on Arts in general while focusing completely on standardized
testing (in the U.S. at least)
- More expectation from parents that "the school" will tell there children
what to do and when, i.e. practice, practice, practice
- A greater focus on wrote memorization of names and dates and less on
understanding and experience

I also wonder how many people will sit down to listen to a recording. I
still like to sit in my office or sit with good head phones and listen to
music - even though music is blaring every where else. I also try to make
listening to music interesting for my kids. I don't know many other people
that just sit and listen. Even the teenagers I know only watch youtube
video's of there favorite artists and seem to skip half of the song...

For those few people who have studied an instrument or play in the
community bands, we still go to concerts when we can afford it.

Recently, the Pacific Symphony had an interesting program where they
allowed community band members to join the orchestra for a rehearsal /
concert. They had to audition and pay $50 to help cover the costs to the
symphony. I hadn't heard of it until one of my bandmates told me she was
playing oboe and bassoon for the program. When that comes up again next
year I will try and get in. This kind of thing completely engages us. We
need more of it.

Sable
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