Alex Ross

Keynote Address:
Chamber Music America National Conference
January, 2005

Thank you all for asking me here to speak. I’d like to begin by quoting from Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Before I do, I want to reassure you about my use of the word "collapse." This is not going to be one of those death-of-classical-music lamentations, a woe-betide-us, the-end-is-nigh, the-sky-is falling-this-year-too, Norman Lebrecht affair. I am going to strike a generally optimistic note. I tend to usually, because it’s more fun to be an optimist than a pessimist. Optimists are never pleasantly surprised, they say. Well, pessimists are never pleasant. In any case, while I do think that the future of classical music, so called, is, if not exactly bright, then something other than bleak, I do admit that the possibility of failure, of an eventual and complete end to everything we hold dear, is perfectly real. And, as Diamond’s book suggests, in reference to societies and civilizations that have bit the dust of history, we will fail if we choose to fail, if we want to fail. There are hundreds of passages in this book that have an eerie relevance to the situation in which we find ourselves. For example: "It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live?" Diamond gives the example of the Greenland Norse people who refused to adopt the ways of the Inuit, who knew how to survive the Greenland climate. "In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit." He goes on: "Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change." Among the most damaging of those values, Diamond finds, are religious ones, such as those espoused by the Norse in Greenland, which prevented them from adapting to their new climate. And there are secular equivalents of religious values, quasi-religious notions that we cling to even after the conditions that created them no longer exist. These are values dictated by "wooden-headedness, persistence in error, mental standstill or stagnation," to quote from another book on a similar subject, Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. These self-destructively high-minded values are often rooted in a deep fear of what the world might be like without the accustomed way of doing things — a fear of losing one’s identity. It can also come from simple close-minded pride, from a contempt for the unfamiliar and the other and the unknown.

Now, who chooses to fail, who wants to fail? No one consciously, I suppose, but there is an attitude which amounts to the same thing, and it can be detected in some corners of the classical world. It’s the attitude of, well, things seem to be going down hill, so the best thing to do is to hold on to one’s dignity at all costs. Sort of like Mr. and Mrs. Astor on the Titanic, or Victor Garber’s character in the movie of the same name, holding his head high as the water laps about his feet, his chest, his chin. There can be a certain excitement, even elation, in bearing witness to disaster, in being the last man standing. Call it, with apologies to Axl Rose, an appetite for destruction. But the music refuses to die according to the schedules that doomsayers have devised for it. And, in any case, the death of a great institution or of a genre or of a style is not the same thing as the death of an art. It can feel like death, but it is only change and evolution. The Titanic was one ship that sank: human transportation went forward. Consider another apocalyptic metaphor, the extinction of the dinosaurs. The death of one set of species was not the end of life on earth. It cleared room for a new host of species. When the age of the dinosaurs came to an end, the age of the mammals began. Perhaps I don’t need to spell out for you where exactly this metaphor might be heading, and why I feel more comfortable using it in front of a gathering of chamber musicians, instead of, say, a gathering of symphony orchestra musicians or administrators. But I’ll go ahead and spell it out anyway. All the major symphony orchestras in America could collapse tomorrow, and life would go on, musical life would go on. The symphony orchestra in its modern form has existed for about a century and a half. We had hundreds of years of musical history before that, an endless catalogue of masterpieces and legendary musicians. We functioned without the orchestra then, and we’d be able to function without it in the future. I’m not in any way hoping for the collapse of the orchestra. I’d be deeply disheartened by such a turn of events. It might mean among other things that I’d be out of a job, as would many music critics around the country. But I’d be very interested to see what happened next. The point is, I wish that for every story in the media about troubled orchestras there was a matching story about a new composer-led ensemble, a new chamber series, a new program of musicians working in schools. There are more professional musicians than ever before. More people are going to live concerts than ever before. There are far more composers writing music — ten, maybe twenty times as many as a hundred years ago. But musical life lacks a center. It exists off the radar screen of the major media. It’s actually kind of exciting when you think about it. If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I’d make a virtue of it. Classical music is the new underground.

What are the core values that are essential to our continuing existence, and what are the ones that we can safely jettison? If we look over the thousand-year history of classical music, we can see that already a series of sweeping changes and adaptations have taken place. The world of Hildegard von Bingen was radically different from the world of Monteverdi, likewise the world of George Frederick Handel was very different from the world of Gustav Mahler, not to mention the worlds of Steve Reich, Thomas Adès, Chen Yi, and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh. What do they have in common? Practically nothing, other than the survival of a notion of writing down music for oneself or others to play. That’s it. In terms of audience behavior, concert dress, makeup of audience, age or nationality or class or literacy, there is not much of a common thread. What survives is the figure of the composer, or the musician who composes. So, what are the encumbering values we can get rid of, to increase our chances of a successful adaptation to modern life? Here are four ideas. Feel free to substitute your own; the basic idea is to be open to change.

1. The assumption that classical music is innately superior to other kinds of music. I wrote about this attitude at length in a long piece I wrote last year for the New Yorker. Judging from the responses I received, some people within classical music had trouble with it, I heard people say, the word "elitist" has become such a bad word, but that is what we are, we are an elitist art. This is not music for the masses, but for smaller groups of connoisseurs. If we chase after mass appeal, we will vulgarize ourselves beyond recognition. Etcetera. Now this kind of talk sounds very good among a group of like-minded people who already agree on the value of classical music. But what does it sound like to those on the outside? I suppose there are some people who might be won over by the argument — the music you’re listening to is trash, you should stop listening to it and come listen to our music. I got into an argument with some people on the internet about this, in the fascinating new community of classical music blogs. Someone said, if you’re selling a BMW, you can come right out and say, this is a better car than a Chevrolet, it’s a superior luxury automobile. Why can’t we say the same about classical music? Well, the problem here is that we’re not selling a product, we’re selling a way of life. We want people to join our community. And to take that prideful attitude is to create the impression that we’re a community of insufferable snobs and scolds, and it’s not surprising there hasn’t been a stampede to join us. We can take pride in our music — we can say, yes, it’s great — without creating some hierarchy of values saying that it’s greater than everything else. Because most people don’t listen to music in order to raise their status in the world. They listen to get out of themselves, to encounter charismatic personalities, to have deep, powerful, somewhat indescribable experiences. Which is what we’re doing too, no matter what kind of self-important adolescent chatter we engage in about our automatic artistic superiority. We have to show people why the music is great, what it makes us think and what it makes us feel, how it changes us and lifts us up.

Value 2: The assumption that certain nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century rituals involving concert dress, concert behavior, and silence during performances, are integral to the musical experience and that the experience ceases to be serious without them. The informal or sometimes not so informal ban on applauding after movements of a long-form piece has become a particular bugbear of mine. All the studies done of non-attenders show that this is one thing that makes neophytes nervous, the idea that they might be shushed and scolded if they applaud at the wrong time. Maybe we on the inside need to simply drop the no-applause ritual once and for all. Consider what Pierre Monteux, a very serious musician, once said: "I do have one big complaint about audiences in all countries, and that is their artificial restraint from applause between movements or a concerto or symphony. I don’t know where the habit started, but it certainly does not fit in with the composers’ intentions." If you agree, you can, as musicians, signal to the audience that it’s OK to applaud after a long first movement. Now some may argue that applause disturbs the integrated greatness of those large-scale constructions of Beethoven and Brahms. Why, then, did Beethoven and Brahms themselves welcome this applause, take it as an index that the audience was interested and listening and approving? Brahms knew that his First Piano Concerto was going down in flames at its Leipzig premiere in 1859 when he heard dead silence after the first two movements. Do we know something that Beethoven and Brahms did not? Are we more serious than Beethoven and Brahms? All those who consider themselves more serious than Brahms have every right to shush their applauding neighbors after the first movement of the D-minor concerto. I’ve been doing research into how this ban on applause got started. I date it back to the premiere performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1882, where, misinterpreting a remark that Wagner made beforehand, listeners decided that the entire opera had to be heard in rapt silence uninterrupted by applause. Wagner himself called out "Bravo!" after the flower maidens scene, and he was hushed. Here is the exact point at which classical culture began taking itself too seriously, when it hushed Wagner.

Value 3 is related to the last. It is the idea that seriousness is itself a governing or defining value. That classical music defines itself by the degree to which it is not entertainment, not popular music, not the sort of concert at which people make noise and have a good time. This plays out often in the assumption that every program has to contain a late Beethoven quartet or a Bruckner symphony, and that there’s something suspect about programming Souvenir de Florence or Marche Slav. How heavy and humorless programs have become. What happened to the casual, wildly diverse programs of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where an aria landed next to a symphony, or popular songs brushed up against oratorios? Again, I ask, are we more cultured, more serious, than audiences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Is it an irony that so much great music was written against the backdrop of these misbehaving audiences and crazy-quilt programs? Or was their an interrelationship? Did the eagerness, the unruliness, the enthusiasm of those audiences in fact help to create this music that we celebrate so solemnly? I think musicians themselves can take the initiative in promoting a more informal, a more comfortable concert experience. You can be informal and serious at the same time. It’s pure superficiality to think that just because you dress in a certain way and act in a certain way you will necessarily deliver a more significant performance, or have a more significant listening experience. Solemnity is indeed often a cover for mediocrity.

The final value that I propose be dropped is the notion that popular music is the enemy, rather than a potential ally. I happen to love great swaths of so-called popular music, some of which is very strange and difficult and unpopular, and I’ve written about it for the New Yorker. I object to the habit of treating classical music as innately superior not only because I think it’s a terrible, counterproductive way of bringing people into our community but also because it simply doesn’t ring true to me. I can’t honestly say that Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet is by any meaningful measure "better" than, say, Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday as sung by Mahalia Jackson. What I feel listening to the latter is too deep and powerful to allow any kind of hierarchy. And there are so many people in the popular world who are curious about classical music, who want to know more about it, or who know more than you guess. When I did profiles of Björk and Radiohead for the New Yorker, I was amazed at the depth of knowledge that these musicians displayed when it came to twentieth-century music. Like a good classical snob I was constantly underestimating them. A great many popular musicians in fact had some degree of classical education early on. You’ll find that a lot of them, like Björk, drifted away — not because they weren’t serious about music but because they found the atmosphere of classical music constricting, stuffy, repressive. We must think very deeply about what we can do to change that impression, because we are losing extraordinary talent left and right. Classical music should really present itself as the grandfather, the godfather, to all different kinds of music. It is the music that came before all the rest and can embrace all the rest— not the enemy or the Other. And we should be making alliances with these lapsed classical types rather than holding ourselves aloof. There are so many opportunities to be capitalized on. Followers of electronic music who are very aware of minimalist and the fifties-sixties avant-garde, who might be very interested in a program that makes connections between minimalism and DJ music. Followers of some the new punk bands that are basically playing free-noise atonal music, who might be interested in the fact that Schoenberg did all this a hundred years ago. The manifold connections between jazz and classical composers, going back to the nineteen twenties. A few weeks ago the New York Times published an interview with the contemporary jazz great Wayne Shorter, in which the critic Ben Ratliff asked Shorter to listen to and comment on a CD of his choosing, and what he chose, surprisingly enough, or not, was the complete symphonies of Vaughan Williams conducted by Adrian Boult. I immediately thought: There’s a great program in there somewhere.

Modern American popular culture, often lazily characterized as simple and stupid, is in fact mind-numbingly complex. A friend of mine, the writer Steven Johnson, has written on this topic, about the delirious intricacy of video games for which people write five-hundred page instruction manuals, about the plots of shows like 24 and Alias, with layer upon layer of double-crosses and betrayals and conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. The really interesting question is how that taste for complexity in pop culture might be exploited by advocates of the older art forms. We need to be imagining all the different ways we can insert ourselves into that buzzing world of networks, connections, links, interfaces, simultaneities. We need to think of unexpected gateways and doorways, discover new pathways in and out of our world. Consider, for example, of the random forking paths of links on the internet: if you have a website, how can you take advantage of the endless networks of links that people follow around, how can you take advantage of the Google searches that may land people on your site by accident? What can you give to the web surfer who lands on your site by serendipity? I’ve discovered blogging as a way of carrying on conversations with intelligent listeners outside the usual circles: it gives the classical voice a new accent. In terms of programming, what associations can you make between genres, bonds you can forge with the community outside? In terms of advertising, what unexpected groups of words can catch people’s eyes? Every casual contact is an opportunity for a link. Think of the conversations that happen in the course of the day, what happens when you meet strangers and tell what you do. That look of fear or uncertainty that crosses their face when you mention classical music: you all know it well. Much hinges on how you exactly answer the inevitable confession of ignorance — "Oh, I don’t know anything about that." Do you respond with innocent enthusiasm or with an impatient sneer? Do you put down other kinds of music or raise up your own? All the examples I’ve been giving are typical of what people involved in grassroots politics concentrate on — working from the ground up, in small cadres, winning people over one at a time, not waiting for some grand solution to come down from the top. It’s humbling, because if you pursue this path you have to admit that classical music is no longer at the center. A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that some perfect solution to all these problems will be found, or that one fine day modern Americans will suddenly come to their senses and embrace classical music again. They are like those Russian princes who drove taxicabs in Paris in the twenties, assuming that the telegram would come from Moscow informing them that the Revolution was over and that their reign could resume. Once and for all we have to stop being aristocrats and start being democrats.

The title you’ve chosen for this Conference is "Found in the Shuffle." The Shuffle, as many of you know, is the feature on the iPod player that randomly moves from one track to another, jumping, say, from a Duke Ellington track to a movement of a Beethoven quartet, and then on from there. It’s a startlingly new and revealing way of listening to music. It may sound like the ultimate postmodern nightmare of culture being atomized into little bits, people cocooned in their private electronic worlds, Of course, a lot of the work we have to do, in terms of getting people excited again about classical music, is prying them away from their electronic devices and into the electronically unaided concert hall, which is where the music really takes flight. But Shuffle is different, because it actually undermines people’s desire to coat their lives with musical wallpaper. It constantly surprises you and sometimes puts an individual piece in bold relief by the unexpected juxtapositions it brings about. The other day I was walking around thinking I wanted to listen to something moody and electronic, but suddenly the final movement of La Mer came on, in the great Jean Martinon recording, and it just put a hook in me that made stop what I was doing and listen until it was over and then listen again. Suddenly I was all excited about La Mer. I got out the score, I started thinking about the piece. This is what should be happening in a larger sense with classical music in this culture. Our music should grip people of the blue — not trumpeted by any ideology, not dressed up in the garb of a certain class or a certain intellectual elite, but as the thing that’s playing now, the music that cannot be ignored, real and immediate and sensuous and deep.

I’d like to close by quoting a letter than Debussy wrote to Paul Dukas in 1901. The premiere of the first two movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes had just taken place, and Dukas had written a generally very enthusiastic review in which he nonetheless worried at a certain point whether Debussy’s music had become too programmatic, too pictorial, possibly not quite "serious" enough. Debussy responded as follows: "To you, possessed of a brain of steel and a cold, blue, unbending will (guarantees of your influence on the twentieth century, both now and later), to you I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun. And then, overshadowing everything, there’s the desire to amaze one’s colleagues with arresting harmonies, quite unnecessary for the most part. In short, these days especially, music is devoid of emotional impact. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen, despite themselves and despite their petty mundane troubles, and never mind if they’re incapable of expressing anything resembling an opinion. It would be enough if they could no longer recognize their own grey, dull faces, if they felt that for a moment they had been dreaming of an imaginary country, that’s to say one that can’t be found on the map."