[In June, 1999, I was asked to visit Chicago, to serve on a panel for the national convention of the American Symphony Orchestra League. This organization, which represents the nation's symphony orchestras, had decided to concentrate on contemporary music during its convention, and asked me to speak on a panel on how contemporary music can be marketed. All told, this was the best panel I've ever spoken on, not for my own contribution (which you can read below), but for the cumulative effect of everyone speaking together. There were marketing people from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the London Sinfonietta (an orchestra that specializes in contemporary works), along with a newspaper writer from Chicago and Derek Bermel, a quirkily distinctive young composer, who also has a rock band. Everyone had sensible, intelligent things to say -- the newspaper writer, for instance, pointed out that her editors were more interested in composers and premieres than in the 1400th performance of a Tchaikovsky symphony.

But if I had to name the highlight of the panel, I'd pick Derek. To illustrate a point, he began singing an Irish song, with near-hypnotic focus and beauty. I spoke just afterward, and started by thanking him -- he'd reminded us of what music was about, or in other words of why we were all there in the first place.

My remarks -- challenging many points of contemporary music orthodoxy -- could have been confrontational. But, thanks partly to Derek, I found what I think was a gentle tone of voice, and ended up building far more bridges than I burned.

Whether I'm right to be as hopeful as I was in these remarks, I don't really know. I felt hopeful that day. My remarks, along with everything everyone else on the panel said, were printed in the September-October 1999 issue of Symphony magazine, the ASOL's publication. I'm grateful to Melinda Whiting, Symphony's very fine editor, for transcribing (and skillfully editing) what we all said.]

When we have discussions about the meaning of contemporary music, or the problems of contemporary music, I often have the feeling that I’m not in the world as it’s supposed to be. I’m living in some kind of a bad dream. This is, historically, for classical music -- for any art -- a weird, peculiar, abnormal, even a sick situation: that contemporary music should be considered a problem. Is this representative of classical music’s history? It is not. Is this what you find in the other arts today? It is not. How did we get this way? I think that in the future, cultural historians are going to be pondering this question with great puzzlement.
Now, in one way, we are in a very hopeful place right now because of the emphasis we are putting on new music. But there’s an important thing to consider: To what extent have today’s composers been hurt by the fact that they didn’t have a really open and fulfilling relationship with the classical music world, and with contemporary culture in general? Are composers of classical music now, in America, in a situation like that of painters in Paris in the first half of this century -- really important and vibrant? Or is it like musical composition in 19th-century England where, for example, poetry emerges starkly as the dominant art and composition is not something that we talk about very much? I don’t have an answer, but it’s not much talked about and I think it’s worth considering. As we come before the rest of America offering contemporary classical music, how strong, really, is the music we are offering?
Very often in this industry, we talk about new music as if new music, in itself, were a good thing. And for that reason, when we put out a piece of new music, it’s just a piece of new music: "How great that we’re doing new music; let’s inform the world about this piece of new music." But new music is not undifferentiated. Pieces vary quite greatly from one another. When I defected from classical music for a time and put in a stint as a critic in the pop music world, I learned that pop publicity talks about the specific quality of every artist and every record album. What is the album saying? What is the artist saying this time that he or she didn’t say last time?
How often have we looked at season brochures from orchestras and seen "Sarah Chang plays Tchaikovsky"? What is she doing, playing Tchaikovsky? What’s she saying? What does she have in mind? What did Tchaikovsky have in mind? What does the conductor have in mind? What does the orchestra have in mind? What are the personal and unique qualities of their performance and, if it doesn’t have any, why are you doing it? With new music, at least, it’s a lot easier because you have a composer who wrote a piece and the composer presumably has something to say. So I urge you, when you have a piece of new music to promote, to lead with the composer saying, "This piece of music is about...This piece of music says..."

On the subject of the sound of a lot of 20th-century music -- the dissonances, or what somebody once called "the screech" -- l would ask, what century have we been living in? The 20th century has been the century of Auschwitz, of Kosovo, of Eduard Munch’s painting "The Scream," of Picasso’s "Guernica." In other words, it’s not surprising that a lot of 20th-century music reflects the quality of our time, and doesn’t sound "pleasant."
It’s also true that music of today comes in many different styles, and those styles should be talked about. Many of the composers who write new music hate each other and hate each other’s music. This is very healthy. It shows they care. It shows they feel their music is about something. It’s a sign of commitment. So we should be talking about that when we put the music on the stage.
When Carnegie Hall announced that Pierre Boulez was going to be its composer-in-residence, and that Boulez and Daniel Barenboim and Maurizio Pollini were going to collaborate on what looks to be very much like a retrospective of the high modernism of the first part of the postwar era -- the 1950s and 1960s -- I was very disappointed that they didn’t bill it as such. I wish they’d taken the opportunity to say, "Well, this is one kind of contemporary music. It’s a kind, in fact, that people have disliked, and that has therefore been neglected in its right to another look." Certainly when Carnegie moved from having Ellen Taaffe Zwilich as its composer-in-residence to having Pierre Boulez, they made a huge switch of aesthetic gears, and somehow this passes by unnoticed. They don’t talk about why they did that. I don’t think any art museum would ever proceed in that fashion.

So I urge you, when your orchestras perform a piece of new music, to state where this piece fits on the spectrum of possible styles -- and, over time, to try to perform music in all of these styles, so your audience really gets a feeling for the range of music and therefore comes to better understand any one piece that you’re performing. Surely the Chicago Symphony is doing that when it features Boulez as conductor and composer for a few weeks every year, but they also have John Adams in for a residency as composer and conductor. That kind of diversity is really necessary.
On the subject of the audience and how the audience is reached, how many people in our industry have read any substantial part of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? How many know the writing of Theodor Adorno, one of the most important philosophers of the modernist era and, I might add, also a close friend of Berg and Webern and Schoenberg? How many people have read plays or novels by Samuel Beckett? How many people have a real feeling for the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni? These are touchstones of a modernist culture that relates very strongly to the music of people like Boulez and Elliott Carter. It doesn’t surprise me that it’s a minority of people who respond "yes" when I ask these questions. I’m not being critical; it’s not a question of, "you’re bad if you don’t read these books or see these films." But if this is representative of the classical music world as a whole, then the classical music world would appear to be a place where there is not a great relationship to contemporary, modernist culture. Therefore it’s not surprising that when pieces by Boulez and Carter come into our world, that they are not immediately received rapturously. There’s a big gap between the kind of cultural preconceptions you find with them and those you find in the classical music world. And I think that’s what some of the oddness and difficulty of talking about new music may come down to.
It’s possible to do extraordinary work marketing new music to a mainstream classical music audience, and the successes speak for themselves. I have a feeling, though, that this can only go so far in the classical music world as it presently exists. And so, at some point, since all of us are interested in finding a new audience, we have to think about the new audience that is interested in contemporary art, that would seem to be a natural audience for contemporary music. Now, this is probably a younger audience, and their cultural touchstones are probably more pop culture-oriented than some of those I mentioned a moment ago. It’s probably a more informal audience than the classical music audience, is probably not attuned to classical music of the concert hall, and -- ever since rock, from the 1960s on -- it has developed its own art music. This audience has reason not to pay attention to classical music, in that its art-music needs are being satisfied elsewhere. And so, probably, the classical musical world has to make big changes to attract these people.
Two groups that I know have managed to attract them are Present Music in Milwaukee and Bang on a Can in New York. Present Music attracts six or seven hundred people to new-music concerts and has more than 200 subscribers -- which I think is really impressive for Milwaukee. Kevin Stalheim, the director of Present Music, says that to him personally, and to the people in his audience, Ligeti is more accessible than Brahms. Brahms just seems distant and too much of the past, but Ligeti is "now"; people like it. When I talked to somebody at Bang on a Can about marketing what they do, she stressed to me that their audience are people who are familiar with downtown New York culture: painting, dance, theater. So, being a hard-nosed journalist, I challenged her: "How do you know that? Come on, prove that this is true. Just because you say it doesn’t make it true." Her answer really stuck in my mind. She said, "But that’s the kind of people we are." So, she recognizes them when they come to the concert.
That’s what I want to leave you with. If, someday, when the scales fall away from our eyes and the abnormal situation we’re in now ends, we get to a situation where we in the classical music world, as people comfortable with contemporary art and contemporary music, are talking about it to other people like ourselves -- that’s where we really want to be. And we might move in that direction through discussions like this.