Agenda -- introduce the class, introduce myself, and then ask the students to tell me about themselves, and about why they're taking the course. The most important part, for me, is hearing what the students have to say. As I said in class, it's a way for me to start to get to know them. And it helps me teach. I learn what questions the students have -- about music, the music business, and their careers -- and that helps me focus the course. About Me No point in repeating what I said. You can read my bio or my resume.Though I did make fun of my encounter in St. Louis with one of my old friends from the pop music business, a publicist with Geffen Records. We were staying in the same hotel, it turned out, and when he saw me he asked, "What are you doing here?" "I'm writing about the St. Louis Symphony," I answered. "And I'm on tour with a band called Snot," he said. Snot and the St. Louis Symphony -- my two worlds! About the Class Much of what I said here you can read in the course overview and the list of assignments. Though I did add some background.. The course, I said, grows out of the crisis in classical music -- or the "so-called" crisis, as some people would term it. At the heart of the perceived crisis (so much discussed in the field these days) is the aging audience. Will anyone still listen to classical music in the next generation? Some people, of course, look at the classical audience, and say its age -- which averages 50 or so -- isn't a problem. The classical audience has always been 50, they'll argue, so new 50 year-olds will take the place of people buying classical tickets and CDs now. The reason not to believe this is simple enough. Maybe the baby boom generation is different. Maybe we're more strongly tied into rock and popular culture, and won't follow their parent into the classical music audience. There's not much evidence one way or the other, I said, though there are a few things you can say: Classical radio stations are in big trouble. Younger people aren't listening. Some stations are going out of business, and others are adopting a softer, more pop-like format. Opera, on the other hand, is attracting younger ticket-buyers, maybe because it's dramatic, visual, or simply romantic. Classical record labels are in trouble because they can't sell new recordings of standard classical repertoire. Other aspects of the crisis: Classical music institutions are looking for a new audience. Hottest target -- people in their 30s and 40s. (As I should have noted, but forgot to, this is happening less in New York than in other places. New York still has a strong core classical audience, which might not exist in other cities.For more on this, read my two-years-ago Village Voice piece on classical music marketing, "Behind the Tuxedo Curtain.") There's endless talk about how classical concerts are presented. Should musicians dress less formally? Should concerts have theatrical lighting? Should musicians talk to the audience, as pop musicians do? What music should classical musicians play? Should they play more newer music? And how should they play the older works? Should there be some kind of modern performing style, in order to give the music some of the impact it had when it was new? (For more on this, read my essay "Beethoven Howls.") How should classical music be marketed? Should it be sold like a commercial product? Should classical music advertising look like ads for Coke or Nike? (A personal note here. I think classical music advertising -- in actual ads, and in the brochures classical music organizations print -- rarely says anything. It's blank. Too much of it relies on empty words like "acclaimed," "distinguished," "exciting," "virtuoso," and "masterpiece." If an orchestra has two violin soloists appearing, you'd never learn how they might differ. Are we to assume they both play the same way? People outside the classical music world who read these brochures can be forgiven if they get the idea that nothing of any interest is going on.) There's lots of pressure for classical music organizations to reach out to the community, and especially to groups that aren't usually part of the classical audience, especially minorities. Much of this pressure comes from funders, especially government funders. Some composers write -- or want to write -- in a freer style than classical music usually allows. Some of them want to incorporate pop elements -- pop instruments (like the sax or electric guitar), pop sounds, pop rhythms, or concepts from pop culture. (I've written about this in a piece soon to appear in Symphony magazine, the magazine of the American Symphony Orchestra League. In it, I talk about three composers who've incorporated pop culture or rock elements in their work. By chance I ran into one of them, Christopher Rouse, in the Juilliard lobby after I'd finished teaching. What a great guy, as well as a fine composer -- and almost alone among composers of his stature in using rock references in his music. You have to wonder, too, what the role of a classical musician should be. A generation ago, that wasn't a problem. If you were good enough, you found work as a soloist or as a member of an orchestra. Now, there's some doubt about that. Will you get a job at all? Will you have to reach out to the community as part of your work? (I might have added a little detail -- some people in the orchestra business are starting to ask whether an interest in community outreach should be required of any musician looking for an orchestral job.) And here's a related question. Should classical musicians play other kinds of music? Or, maybe more to the point, if they want to play other kinds of music, should they be encouraged to? If they love pop, as many of the younger ones do, how does that love fit in with their professional work? One last point. Nobody, in my experience, talks about this. But classical music -- while supposedly an exalted art -- has lost any artistic audience it ever had. Artists and intellectuals aren't interested in it. Or, if they are, they love it just as everyday fans do. I saw this first hand on Cape Cod this summer, when I visited a painter friend, and spend time with a heady artistic and intellectual crowd. These people, on the whole, knew the history of visual art. But most of them knew nothing about classical music. And when it came to 20th century classical music, they barely knew the main composers' names. Compare that to their knowledge of painting! They could, at the very least, name the principal art movements of the postwar era, from abstract expressionism onwards. They couldn't begin to do that with music. All of this was a lot ot say, but I stressed that the course isn't only about my ideas. Nobody at this point knows the answers; nobody knows what the future of classical music will be. So the course is about discussion, about what the students think, about what they need to know, about finding approaches to these questions, without expecting to find any final solution. In fact, I added, the answers are going to be found, eventually, by the students and by others of their generation. I encouraged the students to ask me questions, and I want to repeat that, in case any are reading this. Ask me anything, no matter how silly you might think it sounds. If you don't know what I'm talking about, ask me to explain. Make comments when something occurs to you. That's what this class is about! When I described the formal curriculum (again, see the course overview), I stressed one point. I've had many conversations-- in print, informally, on panels in public discussions --about the topics that come up in this course. In those conversations, I often feel that there's not enough historical background. Many people, for instance, talk as if classical music is, in its essence, an art, and pop music, in its essence, nothing but music created to make money. Neither of these statements, in my view, is completely true. Plenty of classical music has been commercial, and plenty of pop has been created with no regard for money. That's why I teach some of the history on both sides of the fence. And I try to go beyond the simple statements I just made: "Classical music CAN SO be commercial! Pop music CAN SO be art!" In fact, the relation of art and commerce gets very complicated, and nobody, on either side of the pop-classical fence, is likely to find him- or herself in an ideal situation. Here's something we should never forget: Every kind of music, including such elite forms as, let's say, the 12-tone stuff written by Milton Babbitt and his circle, has some kind of market. Or, more specifically, some group of people who like it, support it, and, most crucially, provide money for it. Hardly anyone makes music in total isolation. (Well, maybe Conlon Nancarrow, with his player pianos, or Charles Ives. But it's rare.) I apologized for the silly idea of assigning 50 or so songs that would somehow encapsulate the history of rock. (I also explained that by "rock" I really mean the whole constellation of rock-related styles, including R&B and hiphop.) Maybe informed rock fans could agree on a few artists who'd have to be in any such survey -- Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, James Brown, R.E.M. (And I might have added Elvis and the Sex Pistols.) But who could agree on which songs? I could think of only one song that, maybe, everyone would put on their list -- Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti," an explosion inseparable from the earliest days of rock. (And, just maybe, "The Message," the Grandfather Flash single that was the first rap song to find a wide audience.) Why are we studying rock? Here are some of the reasons I gave.Rock, first, is the soundtrack of contemporary America. If this is a course in classical music in an age of pop, this is the pop we're talking about. Second, rock is instructively different from classical music: It has a different aesthetic. I mentioned an entry in the Spin Alternative Record Guide (for which, by the way, I wrote a few items, which I'll post here soon enough). "Pop music can be attractively ordinary," arock critic wrote. "It can also be perversely weird." Neither of this comments, needless to say, would be made about classical music. ("Classical music ordinary? Oh, no! This is the highest art!" Barf.) It's as if classical music and rock inhabit different worlds, where people think in entirely different ways. Classical music takes itself very seriously; rock tends to look at itself and life with much more humor, and much more irony. (This, by the way, is one reason younger people don't quite know what to make of classical music, but on the other hand, the seriousness of classical music could also be an attraction.) Rock reflects the history around it, the great events of postwar America. And no, I don't mean that people write songs about them. I mean that they creep into the substance of the music; the development of the music reflects the development of the culture. (Most obvious example: when rock first appeared in 1954, it was an eruption of black music into the white pop mainstream. At the same time, black lawyers were challenging school segregation, and the Supreme Court would decide in their favor, stirring the Civil Rights movement into motion. I don't think the convergence of the two events is a coincidence.) Rock empowers people who aren't in the classical audience -- African-Americans, most notably, and working-class white people. It empowers them, quite literally, to make their own music, to make careers with it, and sometimes to make huge changes in the music business. Rock criticism talks about what the music means -- who it speaks for, and what it says. Classical music almost never talks about such things. The assumption, somehow, is that the music is transcendently, eternally valuable, and that this value doesn't need to be explained. Finally, rock is music of our own time. It's music history, taking place right in front of us. We can watch it evolve -- and seeing how that happens might tell us something about how classical music evolved in past centuries. About the Students There were 22 students on my original course list. One had to miss the first day.of class. Nineteen showed up. In one way the list was similar to last year's -- no composers. I wonder if that's a coincidence, or a pattern. Are composers less imaginative (and more traditionally classical) than singers or instrumentalists? One eminent composer I know, pondering his students, thinks that might be true. At least, he thinks, they're less likely to stick their necks outside of classical music. To soften the thought just a little, could student composers simply be happy with the traditional definition of their roles? I went around the room, and asked each student why he or she was taking the course. One main theme emerged. As one student put it, it's "alarming" that young people don't like classical music. Not everyone used such strong language. One, for instance, simply said that he wants to be a performer, but knows he has to do more than perform -- he has to actively bring people to classical music. Several students said something similar. They feel they need to know why people don't listen to classical music, and how new listeners can be brought to it. They think this will be part of their jobs as classical musicians. That led me, later in the discussion, to make one point that, in the past, has surprised people in the classical world. And it's this -- there's very little hostility to classical music out there in the big bad world. Certainly there isn't much in the pop music business, where, if anything, people have exaggerated respect for classical music. (The bass player in a popular-ten-years-ago metal band, Kingdom Come, told me he thought that classical music had no ego or careerism! As if!) So it's rare to find people hostile to classical music. When they hear it, they like it -- and that, increasingly, extends even to dissonant contemporary scores, which younger non-classical listeners seem to have very little trouble with. If there's any problem, it's with classical music institutions. People feel that classical music is inaccessible, or stuffy, or that nothing seems to be happening during a performance. Several students talked about how much they love pop. One described herself as a "total pophead." "I never listen to classical music," she said. Several others echoed that; they get so much classical music in school that the last thing they want, at home, is to hear more of it. (Which did make me wonder. I don't mean to doubt them, but I'm curious. How deep does their classical music culture go?) One woman said: "I watch MTV all the time. I love all the crap. The stupider it is, the better it is." There's one version of the rock & roll aesthetic! Classical music has barely acknowledged the existence of pop culture (except, of course, as an enemy, and with the stunning exception of Michael Daugherty, a composer whose works -- Superman symphonies, chamber works about Liberace and Elvis -- are completely about pop culture). Here's at least one classical musician who, like many other Americans, is in love with it. (And, apparently, thinks of it with the kind of irony I'm used to finding in the rock world.) Several students said they were especially interested in classical music marketing, which made me happy that I'd decided to devote a full class to it, later in the term. This, of course, was part of their interest in helping find a new classical audience. One student had a specific goal -- he wanted to make classical music videos. (We talked about some that have already been made, especially one -- directed by someone who's directed videos for R.E.M -- that shows Gil Shaham and Orpheus playing a movement from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, with intercut scenes of New York in winter. We agreed that the New York scenes, artistic as they were, didn't have much to do with Vivaldi.) One woman raised a crucial question about marketing. In another Juilliard program, she'd done some work in the public schools, and had to "try to convince a 6th grade boy that playing the bassoon was cool." She had no success. She wonders, then, how you do such a thing, and more generally how you make classical music attractive. Do you lure people with spectacle? Do you sell glitz or music? Where do you draw the line between doing something new and maintaining the classical tradition? (I mentioned that I'd been involved in a marketing project, with Lincoln Center, helping to develop a new brochure for the Great Performances series, where the goal was both to be flashier and to be more faithful to the music -- to meet my objections to other classical music marketing by describing the music more responsibly, and really making distinctions between one artist and another.) The "total pophead" (mentioned earlier) said she thought there should be a distinction between classical music and pop, that classical music was by nature more "snobbish and elitist." I wish I'd asked her more about that when we talked a bit after class, though I can't blame myself for pursuing something else. She'd said she'd taken up her instrument completely by accident, when she was encouraged to do so in high school. Now, she said, she was completely committed to it (as she'd better be, in the intense competitive atmosphere at Juilliard). But I was curious to know more about how classical music struck her, coming to it so late, and which composers she liked. (The big romantic ones, she said. But then they write more interesting bass parts.) There will be plenty of time later to discuss the differences between pop and classical. Most of the students seemed to think, as I do, that the barrier between pop and classical is largely artificial. There are differences, I stressed. Barriers don't just arise from nothing; classical and pop music have become very different enterprises. But at the same time, there are too many people who listen to both -- including both pop and classical professionals -- for the barrier to be as strong as it is. There's even a strong move within pop to be attracted by classical music; witness Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Michael Bolton, and many others, who've written or performed classical music, or otherwise expressed interest. (How about Aretha Franklin singing "Nessun Dorma" at the Grammys?) One student made a provocative comment -- that pop music was attractive for its rhythm, and that classical music also had strong rhythm, but that people were discouraged from expressing it. You're not supposed to move your body or tap your feet during a classical concert! I noted that concerts weren't always that way -- people applauded during the music in Mozart's time, and in 19th century Italy, the audience at times vociferously participated in performances. (In a 1955 performance of Norma that's available on CD, you can hear a splatter of applause from the Italian audience during one of Callas's high notes. Maybe I'll play that for the class next week.) One final note. There are a couple of oboists in the class, and one of them talked about music teaching at her high school. That led me to ask her about something I've often wondered about. Were fewer people studying the oboe these days? Behind that question is something important. The less popular orchestral instruments, like the oboe, viola, and bassoon -- instruments with not much solo literature, and not much use outside classical music -- might function as an early warning system, like the canaries coal miners used to keep. If the canary died, that meant some poisonous gas was in the air, though not yet enough to kill a human. This would warn the miners to get their butts out of the mine. Similarly, I thought, oboe students might be an early warning system for classical music. If people stop studying the oboe, at the very least that might mean there won't be enough oboe players to staff orchestras in the future. At the worst, it would mean that interest in classical music -- or at least in being a classical musician -- was dying out across the board. Some students laughed at the thought. There were plenty of oboists at orchestra auditions, they said. But the oboist I'd asked had a different answer. She said her high school (somewhere in Connecticut) had stopped teaching oboe, bassoon, and viola, because students weren't interested. (But I'm not jumping to any conclusions. One high school doesn't prove a trend.) Next week: the class defines classical music, and we talk about Handel's commercial opera companies in 18th century London.