June 11 & 12, 2012

From the Tapestry website:

“Sung in Ukrainian, Russian and English, this opera vérité with prologue and epilogue uses non-operatic music from various cultures to enhance the composed score and drama. The tragic ménage à trois is a topic as ancient as Greek drama, but in Oksana G. it takes on a life as immediate as today’s headlines, yet honours the ingredients common to all great operas: universality, timelessness and high emotion.”

June 11 & 12, 2012

From the Tapestry website:

“Sung in Ukrainian, Russian and English, this opera vérité with prologue and epilogue uses non-operatic music from various cultures to enhance the composed score and drama. The tragic ménage à trois is a topic as ancient as Greek drama, but in Oksana G. it takes on a life as immediate as today’s headlines, yet honours the ingredients common to all great operas: universality, timelessness and high emotion.”

Rondo Classic is featuring a radio interview with JunctQín, the 3-pianist collective that commissioned my Disney Princess Disasters. You can hear an excerpt of the piece in their interview, which runs on rotation from April 16-19 and 21-22 at 6:40pm.

In Part 1, I talked about some of the economic implications of the indie model increasingly being adopted by classically trained chamber musicians. Here, I want to look at some of the cultural trends involved. While the general economic climate certainly played a role in creating this movement, I think changing cultural shifts are just as important.

The end of the culture wars

Part of the reason I think indie classical has flourished is that the rift between traditionally highbrow (classical, modernist, etc) and lowbrow (pop, folk) genres has essentially disappeared. While highbrow artists from time immemorial have drawn upon popular or folk styles, there has always been the assumption that the purpose was to make something better, somehow more refined.

It’s true that other generations have proposed a kind of contrarian “nobrow” equivalency or reversal of genres but usually as a means to stir up controversy. Indie classical still cherishes the distinction between the highbrow and the lowbrow, but the distinction is no longer stylistically defined, which is a historical first. And not just in theory, but in practice. Alarm Will Sound’s well-known album of Aphex Twin covers is a good example. The Magik*Magik Orchestra regularly records with indie rock bands. The Family Crest describes itself as a orchestral indie rock band with a rotating cast of some 250 musicians. Genre crossing has become an intuitive step for many groups.

Although it’s a cliché, I need to give credit to the Internet for this opening up of genres. When you’re bombarded by a pluralistic musical world that includes not only 700 years of the Western canon but folkloric, classical, and pop music from cultures around the world, it makes sense that you start to question the inherent superiority of one genre over the other.

Audience perception of classical music

Part of the reason indie classical works is that classical music has largely lost its stigma as an entitled, stuck-up affair. I think all the hand-wringing about classical music being too elitist is passé. The people who still think classical music is an elitist waste of time aren’t going to go to cultural events anyway, no matter how “accessible” you try to make them. Besides, people like elite artistic experiences (though they use the positive version of the word: exclusive), that’s how they form communities around them, that’s why they care about art. Accessible art is like riding the bus: there’s absolutely no way to make it sexy.

Elitism has been a big part of the “underground” pop music scene of the last few decades, where 20-somethings pride themselves on their knowledge of obscure bands and deride those who are uninformed. After all, this is the very definition of a hipster (Question: “How does a hipster screw in a lightbulb? Response: “Oh, you mean you don’t know?”). Why do people crave exclusive experiences? Because the purpose of listening to music is to bond with a community. If that community gets too big, it no longer feels special.

It wasn’t cool to like classical music 15 years ago. Today, classical music is no longer an overbearing cultural threat, so it’s no surprise that people are rediscovering the genre (if not necessarily the standard canon). The communities are of a manageable size, and getting into indie classical is no more difficult than getting into shoegaze or mumblecore or 8-bit or dubstep or any of the other indie subgenres floating around.

Thus, what we have is a grassroots cultural movement that reflects a real artistic desire in the general population, or at least those of a certain age group. Indie classical may not be drawing stadium-packing crowds, but there is a steady stream of interest, proving that classical music is, in fact, a living, breathing, 21st-century genre.

Twenty years from now

In indie classical, we have a vibrant cultural movement that, like most cultural movements, isn’t a great fit with 21st-century capitalism and reflects the growing income disparity problem that we see throughout society. It emphasizes the development of a set of entrepreneurial skills that have been absent from classical music for a long time and it encourages innovation, but it doesn’t reward that innovation in a material sense and it hasn’t come up with a clear model for collective action that might allow it to do so.

This leaves me asking myself, what prospects will indie classical musicians have twenty years from now? Presumably, at some point millennial musicians will stop wanting to play for free or next to free because they have families to support or other life goals. Will indie classical music give us a stepping stone into some other, more stable artistic employment, or are we looking at a form of disposable music in which groups can only hope to survive for a few years before disappearing into oblivion, their members no better off than before?

There’s clearly going to be some of both, and I think the musicians that end up succeeding are going to do so either because they have an innate business sense or they recognize the importance of not reinventing every wheel. A certain sense of pride comes from the scrappy, do-everything-yourself model common in indie classical, but all the economic evidence suggests that larger, collective organizations are more viable. We eventually need to work together and with “non-indie” classical organizations in order to succeed in the long run. Great indie classical musicians need to develop models of collective action, partnering with great arts administrators, existing ensembles, publicists, marketing professionals, and patrons of the arts.

It’s maybe not sexy to suggest that the spunky indie classical movement should form strategic alliances with established groups. But I do think the missing piece of the puzzle right now is the connection between the new and the established. There’s a lot of value already in existence in the art world, and to succeed on the long run we need a solution that doesn’t involve every generation rebuilding everything from scratch.

I’m envisioning a scenario where eventually the transition from indie to established will be smoother. Indie groups will collaborate with orchestras or established chamber groups or opera companies to reach new audiences, embark on projects neither could have done alone, and remain relevant to the communities they live in. Entrepreneurial musicians will be rewarded by frameworks that recognize and build upon their contributions. Musicians with different skill sets will be able to find a niche that makes best use of what they have to contribute. And then, as the indie and establishment trends continue to evolve in this way, they’ll engender a diverse scene of rich, interconnected musical experiences.

I’ve noticed that every month or so I run across another article lauding an ambitious group of young chamber musicians for forging their own non-traditional path: playing in nightclubs and bars, using non-standard setups, playing amplified, writing/commissioning all-original repertoire, etc. This is what indie rock bands have done for decades, hence the oft-used labels “indie classical” or “alt classical”. And I think it’s great that classically trained musicians are doing this—what better proof of the vibrancy of chamber music?

But… most of the articles I’ve seen focus either on (1) “Isn’t it great what those kids are doing?” or (2) “Does this qualify as classical music?” I personally think those are two of the least interesting questions to ask about the “indie rock”-ification of chamber music. There’s a lot to learn by taking a critical look at this trend, weighing the pros and cons, and trying to figure out what this means for music and musicians at large.

Everyone loves entrepreneurs right now

Top of my list of pros for the indie classical trend is that young musicians are taking their destinies into their own hands. Gone are the days of secure music gigs (or of job security more generally). Cultural critics of the ‘90s predicted that the trend toward defunding classical music would lead to the death of the genre, and that classical musicians would either find other jobs or jump ship into wholly popular music forms. This hasn’t happened. Instead of giving up, young musicians are innovating, finding new ways to make the music they love. This is entrepreneurialism in its purest form.

In a sense, the entrepreneurial solution isn’t that surprising given the political discourse that surrounds us (or at least Americans, where the indie classical scene is most visible). From the tech bubble of the late ‘90s through the boom years of the early ‘00s and the 2008 crash and subsequent recession, the underlying message is that people should be looking out for themselves: start a company, invest your money (stock market or sub-prime mortgage, depending on the year), support local businesses, use ingenuity and innovation to solve difficult problems. Of course young musicians coming of age in this environment are going to apply these ideas to their music making. And it’s even more to be expected from classically trained musicians, who have already proven they have the discipline and perseverance to make it through the cut-throat world of the conservatory. Not that it’s easy to make your three-chord punk band into an international sensation of course, but it usually doesn’t require 15 years of preparatory training on the guitar.

Indie classical as small business

I think it’s fairly accurate to consider indie classical to be basically a type of small-business model for chamber music. As such, we also need to look at the economic realities of small businesses. Studies have shown that they’re not usually the amazing innovators that the politicians would have us believe. The vast majority fail. Small businesses are also usually less efficient than established competitors. Walmart has lower prices than the corner-store bodega partially because it can create efficiencies of scale that smaller stores can’t (among other reasons, and at other costs). Of course, you might still decide to boycott Walmart (as I do) for very legitimate reasons, and cultural products are not the same as manufactured goods on a fundamental level.

Yet the trend in entrepreneurialism, at least the successful forms of it, has been toward collective efforts for at least the past 100 years. Some 80% of Bangladeshis are independent entrepreneurs, but the vast majority earn under $1/day. Similarly, small indie classical groups have a limited ability to make an impact (and hence earn money) when compared to orchestras or opera companies. Does it matter? I don’t know, but indie classical seems to be largely destined for the small-scale, local scene, except in rare occasions. Classical Revolution, started in the tiny Revolution Café in San Francisco’s Mission district, has become an international movement but its members still play to crowds of 10–20 people at a time. It’s great for the audience, but unless you charge $50 at the door, it’s hard for the musicians to get paid a living wage.

Taken from a purely economic perspective, indie classical is an expansion of the winner-take-all model of mega art events (like the opera or the soloist touring circuit or the Top 100 pop charts) to the local level. Winner-take-all models support a few superstars and leave the rest with next to nothing. Granted, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to music, it’s also appearing in virtually every other sector of human activity and is part of the reason top CEOs keep getting paid more and more (Apple’s CEO Tim Cook received $378 million in compensation in 2011). The indie classical model isn’t bucking the economic trend. That’s not so much a criticism as an observation, as virtually no one in any sector has found a reliable way to do that (because it would require sweeping policy change internationally), but I’m just saying indie classical isn’t exempt from our greater economic problems.

So okay, indie classical is not a great business model in its current form, that’s the downside, but it is helping to spawn a generation of go-getter, DIY chamber musicians. It’s also an innovative cultural movement, and I’ll talk more about that in Part 2.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artists Poor?, which formed an important source in my last two articles. Abbing is an economist and a visual artist, and he tackles the broad question of artist poverty from the perspective of both disciplines, trying to filter out the biases and myths that color traditional interpretations.

As a part of his discussion, Abbing brings up the question of what constitutes a professional artist. According to economists, professionals are people who earn some non-negligible portion of their living via their professional activities. This definition works for a lot of the activities humans do, but it’s problematic in the arts.

Abbing comes up with a range of interesting workarounds, but by the standards of most professions, the vast majority of musicians working in the arts are either amateur or semi-pro. University professors who do not receive monetary commissions for their compositions are amateur composers and professional pedagogues. Pianists who earn most of their money from a piano studio and only earn some money performing are semi-pro performers and professional educators.

Obviously, this kind of pigeonholing is offensive to a lot of artists and to people who care about the arts. The mismatch between artistic quality and income is so obvious to most observers that it’s hard to argue that money is a good measure of professionalism in the arts (or art-like activities like family-run artisan wineries that need to charge a significant premium to be viable).

Money is a human technology and it has strengths and weaknesses like any other technology. The fact that we have defined professionals as people who earn money for performing specialized, skilled work makes me wonder if the term professional is even applicable in the arts. After all, Abbing compares the situation of professional artists to professional sex workers, which is perhaps an apt parallel on levels beyond the economic ones—the whole negative concept of “selling out” is tied to the idea that art is somehow dirtied by money, as is sex. Yet we still hold ourselves to a double standard. I know that my paid commissions stoke my ego more than the freebies.

From what I can tell, the term professional had less importance before money was the major means of transferring value between people. Musicians in Europe were organized into guilds, with apprentices and masters, designations that signify only ability. Others worked as servants of a patron, either the Church or royalty. Only with the rise of the bourgeoisie did professionalism really enter into music. Money became important in music because people with money were becoming more important, and it was assumed that art could be evaluated according to these same terms.

None of this matters to daily music making, of course, but the point I want to make is that art and money are not particularly good fits for each other. Both are byproducts of human interactions, but not parallel types of interactions. We try to make them fit because our society has so strongly focused on money as a means of organizing value. It’s not the only means, though, and we all intrinsically realize that money has a tendency to destroy certain kinds of value even as it creates others. Thus the permanence of the “selling out” stigma. It’s cool to buy an Apple product, but it’s not cool to be the band in the Apple commercial.

I hope eventually we’ll come up with some alternative value-exchange systems that are more representative of human activities as a whole (an interesting model I read about is the equity-based restaurant network, where food is free but your ability to get service at any networked restaurant is dependent on your reputation as a fair payer. And yes, some restaurants are making versions of this work.). In the mean time, we need to recognize the limits of economic professionalism in the arts and act accordingly. There’s no point beating yourself up over the failed grant applications. Conversely though, just because you never get paid doesn’t mean you’re a genius. There are non-monetary ways to measure the value of human activities, and I think it would be interesting to try to come up with a viable non-economic definition of a modern-day professional composer. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s really tried to do that before.