By now I'm guessing just about everyone has seen this dismal piece in today's New York Times. The gist of it is that, at least in the greater New York metropolitan area, freelance musicians are finding themselves suddenly without work or the future prospect thereof. New York City, the wildest melting pot of cultures this country (and maybe the world) has ever seen, can't find jobs for musicians. My friends, just what in the hell is going on here?
According to the article, as well as hearsay from my friends and colleagues, a large part of the issue in NYC is the fact that Broadway musicals, formerly the NY freelancer's biggest meal ticket, are by and large switching from having live orchestras in the pit to having nothing but synthesizers and recorded tracks accompanying the singers. Presumably, the theatre managers are doing this so they can save money and not have to worry about paying those pesky fiddlers and trumpeters.
Gentle Readers, I beg your pardon for my strong language today, but I as a musician find such practices to be nothing less than immoral. Obviously, worst of all is that it deprives musicians of work and can force them into desperate financial situations. But it also deprives the show's singers and actors the privilege of working with an orchestra of real live human beings and a real live conductor, where tempos, dynamics, colors etc can be adjusted "on the fly" if necessary, and where there can be an actual rapport between stage and pit, creating a more unified and organic performance. And it deprives the audience of the pleasure of hearing live music at the show they have paid good money to attend. NO ONE benefits here except the theatre managers who get to line their own pockets a bit more.
The other problem, as mentioned in the article, is that many part-time and community orchestras are simply ceasing to exist. The root of the evil is money, again--in these harsh economic times, these privately-funded orchestras are completely losing their cash inflow. Apparently no one cares much to support the fine arts.
I must wade into politics a bit here, for which I again beg your forgiveness, dear readers.
The United States of America spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military. The States accounts for nearly half of ALL military spending for the entire world. With this kind of money just sitting around to throw away for the purposes of killing people, is it really too much to ask that the state spare just a little, a handful of change, to keep the fine arts afloat in this country that is supposedly the world's lone superpower?
Whenever I bring up the subject of government support of the arts, my American friends and colleagues tend to get nervous. It will lead to censorship, many think, artists becoming paid mouthpieces of politicians and government interests. But plenty of countries in Europe have survived having their arts organizations well-funded by their governments without excessive ill effects. (The recent Dutch meltdown notwithstanding.)I don't know of any cases of government interfering in artistic pursuits since the fall of Communism. What I do know of are better-funded and more-secure orchestras, opera companies and conservatories, and (this may be just a cultural difference based on history, and may also be my own biased opinion) a greater society-wide appreciation of the place of fine arts and music in a person's life.
But again, for me it seems to be a question of morality as much as anything else. In my humble opinion, there is something very wrong with a country that spends extraordinarily huge sums of money building tanks, guns and bombs--funding the lowest and most base of all human pursuits, destruction--but thinks it somehow superfluous or inappropriate to spend more than a few token pennies to keep some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit and mind alive.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Après un rêve, or, Why Hello There.
Last night I dreamed I was driving down an overgrown country road at the height of a sun-drenched summer. I don't know where I was going or where I was coming from, but suddenly the car’s radio crackled to life and out came an old Ruthenian song. It was the kind of piece you’d expect to hear in a smoky bar on Brighton Beach full of shady post-Soviet itinerants playing cards. The bass player has to hold his instrument at an odd angle to fit it under the low-hanging ceiling, the cimbalist is trapped behind his cimbalom, backed into a three-sided corner, the violinists must be careful not to impale one another on their bows, the accordionist sits sideways on a stool with a dreamy expression on his face, singing the sentimental songs of the old country…play on, gypsies, play on…
And it was that same old song that was going through my head as I awoke in a half-dreaming haze of nostalgia. I’d played that song too once, at the very end of the summer in a strange little neighborhood in Queens. Those days are gone, as are the ones before it and the ones before those, as I’m always reminded in this time of year when the leaves are falling and the sun seems to be giving up on life.
But Proust had his madeleines and I have my songs. Putting my iPod on shuffle is the next best thing to having a time machine, and I can travel half the world without going more than three blocks in any direction from my apartment.
Just today, when I went to the laundromat, the place’s Chinese owners were listening to some Bollywood-sounding music on their radio. Three notes of that and I was instantly transported back to my freshman year of college and the strange long nights hanging out with my friend across the hall, listening to Pakistani rock and gossiping about our latest Model United Nations meeting. Ten minutes after putting in my laundry, I was eating a muffin at the bakery across the street, where they were inexplicably playing German pop songs from the 80s and 90s. And there I was back in my childhood briefly spent in Scandinavia, where any time you turned on the radio out came either ABBA or whatever was topping the charts in Berlin.
Music has always had a power over me that nothing else, not even any other of the arts, can claim. Poetry comes close, but in the final estimation there is something unexplainable and unearthly about music that, the more I think about it, the more it bewilders me. What is it about certain combinations of longer or shorter sounds at different frequencies, vaguely approximating certain natural laws, that can evoke faraway places, stir intense emotions, and preserve, in a way, a composer’s living soul? Why does music even exist, where does it come from? Whether God or Nature or some combination of the two created humankind, you just have to wonder where, when and why the instinct for music got thrown in.
So here I am, at some unknown point after midnight, listening to the rain outside my windows briefly make me forget that I live in the middle of Manhattan. And for some reason, I’ve decided to start a blog, writing about music. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into. This could go one of several ways, two of the more unfortunate possible scenarios being I post one more entry and give up, or I accidentally become a critic.
But, as any composer knows, the hardest thing about writing anything is the first three lines, and deciding what to write for my First Blog Post was no different. Next time, I’ll actually have something to say, or a nice YouTube find to post, or anything. But for now, my mind is fogged like the windowpane and it’s just raining.
And it was that same old song that was going through my head as I awoke in a half-dreaming haze of nostalgia. I’d played that song too once, at the very end of the summer in a strange little neighborhood in Queens. Those days are gone, as are the ones before it and the ones before those, as I’m always reminded in this time of year when the leaves are falling and the sun seems to be giving up on life.
But Proust had his madeleines and I have my songs. Putting my iPod on shuffle is the next best thing to having a time machine, and I can travel half the world without going more than three blocks in any direction from my apartment.
Just today, when I went to the laundromat, the place’s Chinese owners were listening to some Bollywood-sounding music on their radio. Three notes of that and I was instantly transported back to my freshman year of college and the strange long nights hanging out with my friend across the hall, listening to Pakistani rock and gossiping about our latest Model United Nations meeting. Ten minutes after putting in my laundry, I was eating a muffin at the bakery across the street, where they were inexplicably playing German pop songs from the 80s and 90s. And there I was back in my childhood briefly spent in Scandinavia, where any time you turned on the radio out came either ABBA or whatever was topping the charts in Berlin.
Music has always had a power over me that nothing else, not even any other of the arts, can claim. Poetry comes close, but in the final estimation there is something unexplainable and unearthly about music that, the more I think about it, the more it bewilders me. What is it about certain combinations of longer or shorter sounds at different frequencies, vaguely approximating certain natural laws, that can evoke faraway places, stir intense emotions, and preserve, in a way, a composer’s living soul? Why does music even exist, where does it come from? Whether God or Nature or some combination of the two created humankind, you just have to wonder where, when and why the instinct for music got thrown in.
So here I am, at some unknown point after midnight, listening to the rain outside my windows briefly make me forget that I live in the middle of Manhattan. And for some reason, I’ve decided to start a blog, writing about music. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into. This could go one of several ways, two of the more unfortunate possible scenarios being I post one more entry and give up, or I accidentally become a critic.
But, as any composer knows, the hardest thing about writing anything is the first three lines, and deciding what to write for my First Blog Post was no different. Next time, I’ll actually have something to say, or a nice YouTube find to post, or anything. But for now, my mind is fogged like the windowpane and it’s just raining.
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