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Matter/Antimatter: "The Sounds of the Future" Symposium

Monday, February 11, 2008

By GAVIN BORCHERT
SEATTLE WEEKLY

Daring was organizer Jennifer McCausland’s decision to launch "Sounds of the Future," a seminar on what’s ahead for the world of classical music, held yesterday at Seattle University. But what showed real cojones on her part was to invite both Gerard Schwarz, to introduce the morning speakers, and Greg Sandow, the former Wall Street Journal writer who’s been his most outspoken critic since Schwarz’s tenure running NYC’s Mostly Mozart festival, to keynote. A blistering WSJ review was the first shot, fired about 10 years ago, and since that Sandow has made reference now and then to Schwarz on his blog (www.artsjournal.com/sandow) with the word "worst" usually figuring prominently.

Of course everyone at the event (to which I’d been invited to participate in a panel discussion) knew this backstory, and of course no one brought it up. But the matter/antimatter disturbance did not, in fact, create a black hole that engulfed and destroyed the universe. In his opening talk, Schwarz set an optimistic tone by reminding us that recently, for the first time he could recall, a presidential candidate (who was it, anyone know? I’m thinking Huckabee) mentioned the importance of arts education, and that the recently approved NEA budget was the highest in 20 years. He shared some surprising facts:

—His "Musically Speaking" presentations have gotten around 100,000 downloads on iTunes.

—He’s organizing a community performance of Beethoven’s Ninth for the Dalai Lama’s April 15 visit, for which he hopes to recruit an orchestra of 300-500 and a choir of 500.

—He recently judged a competition for KZOK in which area marching bands, 46 in all, created and performed their own arrangements of classic rock (or "classic-rock") songs.

Most of the morning presentations centered around education. Reps from the L.A. Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, Juilliard, and Seattle Opera spoke of their outreach programs, most inspiringly Leni Boorstin, who told us about L.A.’s program based on Venezuela’s El Sistema, the project that’s put instruments in the hands of 250,000 underclass kids—anyone who wants one—and which has been the classical hot-buzz topic for some months. Considering the industry’s recent malaise, the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra’s effervescent conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, who’s like 25 or something, has been regarded as a sort of combination of Bernstein, Mozart, Elvis, Gandhi, Michael Jordan, and Jesus. And SO’s Perry Lorenzo, who is probably this city’s best public speaker on music (he’s brisk, funny, highly knowledgeable, and doesn’t need a mike), introduced a scene from the abridgement of Das Rheingold—The Theft of the Gold—which they perform in public schools, and which is great fun.

Sandow, whose persona is somewhere between counterculture sage and favorite uncle, brought up some gratifyingly necessary points after lunch, questioning with perfect affability most of the morning presenters’ assumptions. Is feeding people with knowledge about classical music really going to increase their enjoyment and participation? Can we really attribute the "graying of the audience" to the fact that people’s income and free time increase as they age, and that’s why they don’t take up classical concertgoing in their 20s and 30s (the usual and to me plausible excuse)? His main point was to encourage a broadening of the performing repertory—to include more new music, for example from the classical/pop gray area of musicians like Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. (With his recent acclaimed score for There Will Be Blood and an encomium by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, he’s also getting the savior-of-classical-music treatment.)

I shared a panel with the Times’ Melinda Bargreen, KUOW’s Dave Beck, KING-FM’s Steve Reeder, WXQR’s Elliott Forrest, and the Washington Post’s Anne Midgette. Three newspaper, three radio, and we discussed our industries’ own problems too; Midgette said she sometimes felt as though she were "on board two sinking ships." Is it a critic’s job, Forrest asked, to "put butts in seats"? Midgette said, and I agreed, that it’s our job to stimulate, not end or replace, discussion. We become advocates for the art by showing that it’s worth taking seriously, and that includes writing negative reviews or calling bullshit on things when needed. Frankly, what was said is mostly a blur: Ross and his widely and deservedly praised book The Rest Was Noise was mentioned, as was sports (a world in which extraordinary achievement earns mass adulation, not accusations of "elitism") and my disdain for and Melinda’s defense of tuxedos. (I have nothing against sartorial uniformity, but why does it have to be the uniformity of 1880?)

Midgette, too, in her closing remarks, guarded against letting the words "classical" and "education" get too snuggly, as if education were the point of music, rather than just a way into it. Having your mind blown is the point, she reminded us. Which cellist Joshua Roman (by playing Ginastera, Ligeti, and a piece by the Turtle Island String Quartet’s cellist) proceeded to do to wrap up the day.