Searching for Alternatives to Esa-Pekka Salonen

(Part II of “Alex Ross and the Future of Classical Music“. Part I | Part III )

In one of his best moments ever, Alex Ross writes, “Salonen cherishes the symphony-orchestra tradition, and sees no need for it to be transformed beyond recognition or junked altogether.” By 2020, it would already become necessary to address both possibilities, for quite different reasons than Ross anticipated. “This period [2020] has shone light on an unbelievable amount of baked-in inequality and rotten practices rooted in the foundation of everything we do,” as Ross quotes composer Nico Muhly saying. Seldom in American history has classical music achieved more attention than when Critical Race Theorists, many without a shred of prior interest in it, saw the opportunity to expose its so-called racist antecedents.

In the article “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music“, we find Alex Ross uneasily responding to this astonishingly rapid encroachment upon the domain of his livelihood. “[T]he field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism” reads the subtitle, as though everyone in every field is not reading that everywhere. An illuminating study could be made of the undo history on Ross’s word processor. Clearly conflicted over his topic, he bravely admits “I am a white American who grew up with the classics, and I am troubled by the presumption that they are stamped with whiteness — and are even aligned with white supremacy, as some scholars have lately argued.” Yet he trudges on dutifully. Fluent in all the reusable social justice jargon (“honoring individual experiences”, “problematic past”, “implicit prejudice”, “identities”, “disruption”, “solidarity”, capitalizing the word “Black” but not “white”, and so on), Ross proves himself both hip and demur, submissive yet determined to retain his perceived position as white male cultural authority. Everyone is walking such a fine line these days

A mishmash of oddities that suddenly captivated Ross’s mind appeared in his article “Musicians and Composers Respond to a Chaotic Moment“. When considered outside their socio-political context stealthily furnished by Ross, and without the 18-point Caslon Pro font of The New Yorker, it is hard not to notice some of these are truly harebrained in their musical vacuity.

Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic had been searching for a way to “respond” to George Floyd’s killing, over which half of America appears to require a moment of public exhibitionism. But nobody, Alex Ross thinks, has landed a more original statement than to play a major patriotic tune in a minor key. McGill’s YouTube performance represents the sort of extracurricular labor to which professional orchestra musicians are notoriously loathe to acquiesce, spending enormous effort to contractually prohibit it from their job demands.

Were any orchestra administration in America to actually pay a black member to perform an American patriotic piece, alone, in a minor key, then kneel as if shackled by his or her instrument like a slave inside his or her own home, film it, post it on YouTube with the hashtag “CareAboutBlackLives”, and then link to it from their official website, lawsuits would be filed, executive heads would roll, funding would be withdrawn, and Alex Ross would scramble to his computer to write an article. But when McGill provided the act for free, the New York Philharmonic performatively pounced in full support. The ripple effect reached NPR, Twitter, and music and news radio and websites nationwide. All of this is so beneath the dignity of a musician of McGill’s caliber as to defy explanation. But Alex Ross says McGill “found his message”, and the YouTube video “has the weight of a symphonic statement.”

---

Listening to Ash Fure’s composition “Interior Listening Protocol 01” will require two Mason jars. An affiliate marketing opportunity was missed, since many people don’t just have these lying around in surplus. If Hobby Lobby is out of stock and you cannot wait for your Mason jars to arrive from UPS, the composer’s instructions permit you to use two tall glasses, provided they are large enough to cover your ears. Utilizing the “video piece” online, move the jars toward and away from your ears, mirroring the composer as she stares back as though auditioning for a Stanley Kubrick film. She mastered her craft at Harvard University and amassed a number of lesser honors, commissions, and premieres before hitting on the Mason jar breakthrough. This piece is not for the faint of heart. Alex Ross “almost felt the need to lie down afterward.” He sounds like a fragile soul. I hope he is not reading this. But he remained upright long enough to finish his article. There was a Zoom performance by a solo trombonist in Belgium that fooled him into thinking he was “attending a global music event”, while actually just wandering around his neighborhood on his phone. There was an online festival featuring projects that “conjure sonic otherness.” If that terminology is unclear, get yourself up to date by clicking on the linked recordings of golf balls inside a washing machine, a piano amplified by central heating, and finally one that “especially haunted” Ross: recorded hymns played backwards inside a bathroom.

Having neglected black composers for two full paragraphs, Ross makes good by describing a piece by Tomeka Reid packed with letters of the alphabet abbreviating assorted racial injustices. For the grand finale, he trots out the “titan” Roscoe Mitchell. Here Ross goes the extra mile and calls Mitchell a “great” artist, words he assiduously withholds from all actual great artists. Though Ross sounds disappointed the appearance “had no explicit political message”, he is relieved it “carried immense weight all the same”.

Lest the Native Americans now feel excluded, it is most recently the South Dakota Symphony that has Ross all aglow. That the nine full-time members and the sea of area freelancers “struggled in spots” did not spoil for Alex their premiere of a John Luther Adams piece. He even “flew in for the occasion”. What a keeper. One wonders whether some busybody stakeholder paid to import Ross’s unique talents, or whether Ross footed his own bill out of interest in some esoteric aspect of these proceedings. It’s difficult to say which would be a more desperate groping for self-significance.

Ross describes the premiere with crushing sympathy: “never less than creditable, and the focussed energy of the playing overrode any worries about precision.” The message is clear: in a mercy blow, Ross is covering the orchestra’s programming, not their performance. Though one concert of the season was “given over” to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, this was more than compensated by premieres of composers Ross lists in order from least to most obscure, dribbling off finally with “student composers from the Lakota and Dakota tribes” whose actual names are not even printed.

The South Dakota Symphony’s conductor, Delta David Gier, recently won an award from Columbia University for his advocacy of American composers. Here Ross spins a riveting tale of behind-the-scenes drama of orchestra administration, the salaried theatre where almost all decisions in American orchestras are now made, amidst an ever-conflicted tangle of fears, compromises, and ineptitudes. Gier telephoned the Los Angeles Philharmonic, not for attention, but for advice, when a donor threatened to pull money. The LA Philharmonic responded in the focus-group-speak that now dominates arts administration: “make sure that the staff and the orchestra [are] speaking the same persuasive language.”

This is all lavishly praised as though Gier is breaking new ground, and that no conductor in history ever challenged audience or donor support by programming American works. In fact the Ditson Conductor’s Award was established in 1945, when its present advisory committee’s parents were in diapers. Leonard Bernstein won it in 1958, while barely getting started on a career that would champion one American composer after another throughout the world (though never in Sioux Falls).

More than the performance or even the programming, though, Ross was moved by the announcements from the stage. These he says could never have happened in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, or, one supposes, anywhere except in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Announcements from the stage strain even the most seasoned orchestra presidents, you know. Audience members even stood up to be recognized — not to be taken for granted among today’s audience demographic, it must be admitted.^[1]It turns out that in Sioux Falls, Alex Ross writing an article is itself worthy of an article. The website Siouxfalls.Business ran the article “The New Yorker features success of South Dakota … Continue reading

> Part III: “The Persnickety Classical Music Critic Caves”