Musicking. Christopher Small G.
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to the big time without having been taken up by a major agency, and no major agency will touch a young artist who has not gained at least a second place in a major competition. As the number of competitions is limited, so also is the number of winners; and since competitions are a zero- sum game, for every winner there have to be losers. Those losers, unless they undergo some miraculous stroke of good fortune, are consigned to the minor circuits—although those today are rapidly shrinking because of the dominance of megabuck agencies that are interested only in stars—or to teaching, arts administration, criticism and other such fallback occupations. For every young artist who makes it to the big time there must be dozens at least who are just as good or who, since success breeds success, would be just as good if they were to receive the encouragement and experience that working in the big time brings.
As an aside, we note also that competitions by their nature favor those who are at their best in a highly competitive situation. The reticent pianistic genius Clifford Curzon once remarked in an interview that he would not have got to first base if he had been required to enter a competition; fortunately for us he belonged to the precompetition era. On the other hand, I remember hearing some years ago the winner of a BBC young conductors’ competition, when interviewed on TV in the first flush of his success, announcing, rather truculently I thought, “Up to now I’ve been competing with others. From now on I’m competing with myself.” It is in this way that the culture gets the artists it deserves.
There is plenty of evidence of manipulation by major agencies of the market in virtuosi. Over the past few years there has been a series of takeovers of of artists’ agencies by megabuck operators, resulting in a small number of superagents who virtually control the market. This has resulted in an outrageous inflation of fees for a few star conductors and soloists while the orchestras they conduct and with which they play frequently teeter on the edge of bankruptcy—a process in which the stars themselves have for the most part cheerfully colluded.
In addition, a conductor’s agency will often put pressure on him to employ as soloists artists who are on their books, to the point that those agencies have some of the world’s major orchestras and opera houses virtually sewn up, not only for live performance but also for recordings and videos. In view of the fact that these orchestras are generally subsidized by public money, the channeling of so much of that money into the pockets of these stars, and of course of their handlers, might seem morally questionable, but it is no more than normal business practice in the contemporary world of unregulated “market values.” It does emphasize the extent to which concert halls partake of the nature of that world and do not exist in isolation from it. Here, as elsewhere in the modern world, it is the passing of money that mediates relationships.
Putting together programs for a concert season is also subject to a number of constraints. The first is that most concert artists today, and to some extent conductors, have at the tips of their fingers, vocal cords or batons, ready to play or sing or even to conduct at any one time, only a relatively small repertory, and they are reluctant to spend time learning anything outside it, especially if it is to be for only one or a few performances. In addition, for many artists the choice of works is to a large extent dictated by their own management, which is naturally interested in having them please as large a public as possible.
The second is that the repertory of works that will today attract a sizable audience virtually froze around the time of the First World War, and little that has appeared since then carries the appeal for the average audience that earlier works do. There is thus only a finite number of pieces to be shared by a large number of virtuosi and orchestras, and the hall’s management naturally does not want a series of performers all playing the same works night after night. The number of performances of even, say, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that can be accommodated in a season is limited.
Third, there is the question of the availability of scores and sets of orchestral parts. With the great warhorses there is no problem; most orchestral managements either have their own or rent them on a permanent loan basis. But with less often played works, publishers are usually prepared to print only a limited number of copies for their hire library; and with symphony concerts an international business extending over every continent no orchestra can afford to program a work from a publisher’s hire library without checking well beforehand—and that may mean months or even years ahead—that the score and orchestral parts will be available for rehearsals and performance.
All this means that who plays and what is played at each concert is the result of extensive negotiation, in which those who actually attend the concert and pay for tickets are hardly, if at all, represented. With star performers jet-setting over the face of the globe, computers as well as telephones, faxes, and E-mail are essential management tools.
Then there is the question of publicity. The potential audience has not only to be informed about the concert—about what is to be played and who is playing it—but has to be made to want to attend. Concert halls, and orchestras, are businesses like any other, and like all businesses they have a product to sell, namely, performances. The fact that most concert halls and orchestras receive a degree of state, municipal or private subsidy does not alter this fact; what counts is, as they say, bums on seats. Concert halls and orchestras stand in relation to their audiences as producers to consumers, and like all other producers they tailor their products to the assumed preferences of their consumers, while at the same time manipulating those preferences as best they can by deploying techniques of advertising and marketing similar to those that are used for other products.
Concert advertisements in newspapers used to confine themselves to a simple announcement of venue, date, time, performers and works. But as the competition has heated up in recent years (not so much between orchestras, since most cities have only one, but between symphony concerts and other urban entertainments), we find extensive use made of more sophisticated advertising techniques. The style of the advertising is interesting, for it often uses language and images that are similar to those used to sell high-class goods such as expensive perfumes, watches and luxury cars. It is clearly aimed at the same kind of public, or at least at a public that likes to identify itself with the buyers of such items.
I treasure a full-page advertisement that appeared on November 28, 1989 in the New York Times, for a series of concerts in which all of the string quartets of Beethoven were to be played. Under a large “artistic” representation of the head of the composer and a facsimile of his signature, both of them familiar icons to classical music lovers, was this text, printed in an elegant Roman typeface: “The greatest music of the greatest composer the world has known, distilled into a rare and unforgettable experience for each privileged listener by the supreme mastery of the world’s greatest string quartet . . . the whole-souled dedication and devotion to the master’s work of this unique ensemble has earned clamorous ovations and paeans of press praise in performance after performance the world over . . . one of the rare unforgettable experiences of a lifetime, a spiritual renewal for those who return year after year, an indescribable revelation for anyone encountering this marvelous music for the first time.” And so on, with at the end the salesman’s pitch: “Subscribe now and Save $15 on 6 Concerts.”
Such advertisements reinforce the idea that musicians and their performances are as much a part of the modern world and its commerce as is the field of popular music, and indeed as are expensive perfumes and luxury cars and that they are equally governed by its imperatives. What one might find irritating, even a touch hypocritical, is the pretense often encountered, and clearly implied in the above advertisement, that the musicians are doing what they do for pure love of music without a thought for worldly ambition or financial gain—in contrast to rock groups and other popular performers who, of course, are only in it for the money.
Another important functionary of the modern concert world is the critic. The profession of critic developed over the nineteenth century, contemporaneously with the growth of public concerts and concert halls to which one paid for admission, and with the takeover of public performance by professional musicians. As active amateur participation in public music making declined, so did the confidence of many people in their own musical judgment. Today, with so many virtuosi, so many composers and so many orchestras and conductors vying for public attention and offering their performances as commodities for sale, it is not surprising that