Joseph Horowitz's Blog

[The following piece is reprinted from Boston’s ArtsFuse online magazine.]

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has provoked a range of opinion. Among the most cited reviews is a condemnation by Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of Homer’s epic has enjoyed a surge in sales. From Wilson’s perspective, the film crudely fails to honor its source; she juxtaposes it with Homer. I found myself applying a different perspective, one that suggests that contemporary cinema – its vocabulary and resources – simply isn’t up to the task at hand. The Odyssey would play more strongly as a 1920s silent film.

I am hardly the first to suggest that silent film attained a higher genre than film with sound, or film with sound and color, or IMAX film with sound and color, or whatever comes next. A classic formulation of this opinion, by no means eccentric, is Rudolf Arnheim’s concise 1957 study Film as Art.  Citing numerous examples, Arnheim argues that the technical limitations of silent cinema, in its highest embodiment, create a pure artform eschewing naturalistic representation. Formal composition is favored over three-dimensional, colored replication of real life. And the absence of sound inspires ingenious expository strategies.

Silent film was international. The Russians, the Germans, the French, the Americans were all good at it. My favorite silent film director is F. W. Murnau. But the film I couldn’t keep out of my brain, experiencing Nolan’s three-hour adaptation of Homer, is Fritz Lang’s 1924 version of the German saga Die Nibelungen, five hours long in two parts. Nolan’s script clumsily resembles colloquial present-day English. His cinematography is splashed with color. His rendering of the Cyclops is in itself a tour de force of realism: the gigantic creature’s scrambled one-eyed face registers a gamut of human feeling. 

In Lang’s film (co-authored by Thea von Harbou), the dragon is synthetic, and so is the misted forest through which Siegfried embarks on his tragic odyssey. No one speaks. Nothing is colored. The velocity of movement is sometimes accelerated, sometimes not. In short: as in Homer, as in the Niebelungenlied, realism is eschewed. In its place arises a hieratic grandeur. 

Though the stories overlap, the result is wholly distinct from Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. The magnificent visual vocabulary of Die Nibelungen conveys not only the atmospheric romanticism of Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich, but the precise ornamentation of Gustav Klimt and the spare rigor of the Bauhaus: a high German lineage. Wagnerian, however, is Lang’s masterful control of pacing and tone: few films attain climaxes as punishing in their cumulative weight. Rare, too, is the unity of means and ends. The film’s glacial motion – many scenes unfold in real time – is supported by the elegance of its framed imagery, the formal bearing of its actors, and a symphonic score (more Straussian than Wagnerian) by Gottfried Huppertz, superbly calibrated to reinforce the dirgelike dramatic rhythm. 

Epic spectacle is achieved not via DeMille-like masses in motion but via grandeur of tableau. The forest is a haunted still life whose vaporous mists, cloaking or disclosing Siegfried astride his white steed, were produced by fire extinguishers in the presence of wan sunbeams pouring through the glass walls and roof of a studio. (Arnheim, in Film as Art, pertinently comments: “The effect of a bright beam of sunshine falling across a dark space could hardly be obtained with the same success in color.”) Brunhild disembarks in Worms along a bridge of shields whose human pylons are armored warriors standing waist-deep in water. Every set, every movement, was discussed in detail. Shoots could last fourteen hours without a break.

In Lang’s subsequent American films (I am thinking especially of The Woman in the Window [1944] and Scarlet Street[1945]), human destiny would become an implacable backdrop to contemporary human dramas. In Die Nibelungen,  this fate theme assumed its purest, most apocalyptic form. The film’s political overtones have always disturbed – on the right, for ostensibly reducing Germans to a pack of murderers; on the left, for purportedly jingoistic depictions of German strength and honor. Siegfried Kracauer, in 1947, influentially found foreshadowings of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: “an ocean of flags and people artistically arranged . . . absolute authority asserts itself by arranging people under its domination in pleasing design.” 

However experienced, Die Nibelungen epitomizes the epic poetry of the silent cinema; dialogue and color could only diminish its spell. It was a popular success in Weimar Germany. Its slow motion poetics would (alas) prove less spellbinding for audiences today.

I have so far said nothing about what Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey sounds like apart from what the characters say. Mainly, it’s punctuated throughout by a loud succession of realistic grunts, shouts, and screams. There is also a soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson: generic pseudo-music carpeting every scene. Goransson (whose credits also include Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Nolan’s Oppenheimer), here deploys 35 bronze gongs, scrap metal, synthesizers, and reconstructions of such ancient instruments as the lyre and the aulos – as if he has somehow attempted to recreate the music-making of the ancient Greeks. He has not. If the film’s prosaic visual aesthetic makes me savor Die Nibelungen, its all-purpose score counter-reminds me of the bardic symphonic grandeur of Jean Sibelius’s Four Legends from the “Kalevala” (1896). Evoking Finland’s bloody national poem, itself an odyssey, Sibelius resists detailed narration in favor of saturated mood. The most famous of his Legends, “The Swan of Tuonela,” renders the brooding majesty of the island of the dead. “Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari” is a siren song. “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela” corresponds to the cantos in which Lemminkäinen is slain and his body dismembered, only to be reassembled by his mother. “Lemminkäinen’s Return” is a final homecoming. The Legends thrive on Sibelius’s singular gift for evoking a fraught environmental tremor . In fact, this score (which began as part of an operatic project) has the makings of a tremendous soundtrack were someone to attempt a Kalevala film. (I have presented the Four Legends in concert in tandem with extensive Kalevala readings. It works.) A composer of Sibelius’s austere genius (should one somehow materialize today) would immensely enhance any movie version of The Odyssey; they would also ruthlessly challenge the film’s verbal and visual content.

Goransson’s score for The Odyssey seals its lineage as a common-denominator commercial product, a twenty-first century state-of-the-art action picture. 

                                                ***

A beautifully realized restoration of “Die Niebelungen,” with Huppertz’s score newly recorded by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, is readily available. But Lang’s mega-film of course deserves to be experienced in a large auditorium with live orchestra. It is a remarkable oversight that – at least to my knowledge — no American opera company undertaking Wagner’s “Ring” has thought to add a couple of screenings of “Die Nibelungen.” It would be a hot ticket – and the juxtaposition with Wagner’s tetralogy would fascinate and inform. 

You can find the 2012 restoration in excellent sound here.

A couple of excerpts that seal the film’s grandeur – its five hours are undeniably uneven — are 7:50 to 23:00 (Siegfried sets out; Siegfried slays the dragon) and 1:06:30 to 1:17:15 (the jilted Brunhild marries the hapless King Gunther).

I wish I could claim that silent cinema produced a plethora of great film music. It did not. A rare exception – a cinematic tour de force wedded to a master film score (Dmitri Shostakovich’s first) — is The New Babylon (1929).

(The foregoing description of “Die Niebelungen” draws heavily on my discussion of Fritz Lang in “Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts” [2008].)

The current issue of “The New York Review of Books” includes my essay on state of American orchestras – and of Gustavo Dudamel’s “New York Dream.” A linked podcast (above) asks: Do Orchestras Still “Feel It”? How Can We Unleash the Untapped Artistic and Creative Potential of American Orchestral Musicians?

Here’s an excerpt from my “New York Review” article, followed by excerpts from the podcast:

FROM THE ARTICLE:

[Today’s New York Philharmonic] is strikingly young, virtually a new band lacking inter-generational continuity. The players are skilled technicians who respond to their new conductor with alacrity. The Philharmonic’s most individually expressive member is Carter Brey, the principal cellist – who, however, is retiring after 30 seasons of service. In the sublime pas de deux from act two of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, a downward G major scale is introduced by the cellos, then repeated in response by the first violins. Brey’s section eloquently took ownership of Tchaikovsky’s melody. But the Philharmonic’s young first violins played the same scale mechanically. In the Blue Danube, the same group applied no honey to sweeten the tune. In Beethoven’s Fifth, they expressed no anger. In that symphony’s scherzo, where a fugato is vigorously begun in the low strings in counterpoint with the winds, the violins – added on top – were virtually inaudible.

Perhaps Dudamel can do something about this caloric deficiency, which is by no means unique to the Philharmonic. It is partly a product of conservatory training in a bubble, partly a product of “blind” auditions that prioritize accuracy over expression, but mainly a product of temporal dislocation. Beethoven, Strauss, and Stravinsky retreat ever further into the past. To hear robustly expressive string choirs, sample the broadcast recordings of Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony, or the NBC Symphony of Arturo Toscanini, or the sizzling Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of the thirties and forties led by Ettore Panizza and Artur Bodanzky. It’s not just that these conductors inspire and demand; the players inhabit the notes.

The big picture is one of American orchestras in crisis, coping or not. The challenges — aesthetic, administrative, and financial – are obvious. The best music is mainly old and foreign. Audiences are dwindling. Revenue sources are problematically shifting. The traditional administrative model, known in the field as the “three-legged stool,” is often dysfunctional: a “music director” who is mainly absent, a board that may know little about the arts, and a CEO whose mediating or presiding role is ill-defined. A fourth leg, not even attached, is the musicians themselves. Add to that the depredations of social media and cellphones. Symphonies require a considered attention span: the ear must remember what came before. And with box office revenue diminishing in importance, orchestras are increasingly reliant on ever younger Americans of vast wealth – and worried that they may want to call the tune. . . .

[A] possibly prophetic Dudamel event was his final 2025-26 subscription program. The first half, comprising Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and four Latin American compositions, was thinly programed. The second half featured the Spanish Harlem Orchestra – a hot salsa band . . .  Oscar Hernandez, the group’s leader, grabbed a microphone and told the Philharmonic audience that he was born in the south Bronx – “and music saved my life.” Then Dudamel took over. “I grew up in a home where music was part of life,” he began. “My dream was to be a salsa player. Sadly, I became . . . ” – and he gestured to his baton. “But it’s a good job because they have to follow me.” He brought his father onstage to play the trombone. He called the Spanish Harlem Orchestra “part of the identity of this wonderful city.” He referred to the Philharmonic as “my new family.” Even though Johnny Pacheco’s Mi Gente and Willie Colon’s La Banda blew the roof off the hall, this shotgun marriage of two orchestras, with the Philharmonic strings noodling along, did not produce a memorable musical evening. Rather, it produced an infectious socio-cultural experiment. Three nights later, the concert was repeated at the United Palace – the Philharmonic’s first visit to Washington Heights. 

Surely it is only a matter of time until Gustavo Dudamel and Zohran Mamdani occupy the same stage. They share a happy vision. Is it a wishful mirage? We will find out.

FROM THE PODCAST:

The conversation begins (at 5:56) with a torrid sampling of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of 1937 – and asks what happened next and why. Is a new generation of orchestra players presenting a “blank slate”? Are conservatories and blind auditions breeding a generation of young instrumentalists who are less engaged, emotionally and physically, than their predecessors?

Jim Orleans, who played the double bass for the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1983 to 2018, remembers the excitement of Boston Symphony concerts once led by Leonard Bernstein. He ponders “the kind of passion that I’m not seeing in young players coming in” (1:18:40). Referencing the current BSO debacle, he conjectures: “I don’t expect to see anything innovative” (1:06:55).

I add that the New York Philharmonic program book always includes a couple of interviews with members of the orchestra. They are asked a generic set of questions. “And in one of these interviews, a young violinist is asked, ‘What is your favorite piece of music?’ The answer is: ‘Whatever I’m playing at the time.’ I think that’s a red flag.” (1:19:00).

Larry Tamburri, who ran the New Jersey and Pittsburgh Symphonies, prioritizes a “simple question” that must be asked by the musicians, the board, and the music director: “For whom does the orchestra exist?” (1:10:30).

Near the close of the conversation (59:50), Kenneth Woods invites me to remember my “initial call to action” (in the 1980s) and asks: is the situation today more hopeful or less? I answer: “The note of exigency is still not loud enough.” I perceive greater acknowledgement of the crisis at hand, but add: “That’s really disheartening is the lack of [constructive] response.”

SUMMING UP:

As readers of this blog know, I have turned my novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York into a play. Both the actress playing Alma and the director are new to Mahler. As a matter of course, both did some reading. Can you imagine an orchestral musician reading about a Mahler symphony as a matter of course? Most will not even bother to read the sung texts of the Second, Third, and Eighth. Ken Woods, in our previous podcast, pondered this disparity – between the prepared actor and the unprepared musician. And Jim Orleans has commented in this space: “Consider the stage actor who perhaps has had a distracting day, or doesn’t like the director’s blocking, or is not getting along with another actor on the set but who knows once it comes down to showtime that he must get into character and use everything he has learned about acting to convincingly convey his part in the play. No actor worth their reputation would dream of ‘phoning it in’ or reciting his lines just correctly. That actor would not be hired again. And yet orchestra musicians can get away with that.”

Reflecting on it all – the article; the podcast; my previous postings in this series – I am left with two thoughts.

The first is that the conservatory education of instrumentalists needs to be radically re-considered. Too many young players join American orchestras as “blank slates.” As one of them testifies (commenting on a previous blog): “At the conservatory level we are trained to have no opinion, to play the notes on the page to an extreme level of perfection. And that is expected to be maintained . . . awaiting the conductor’s magic touch to awaken musicality.” An expanded pedagogical regime would grasp a bigger picture: What’s an orchestra for and what might I contribute? It would also inquire: What do I need to know about the composer? About the pertinent cultural milieu? About the pertinent performance style? (Why must I kick the second beat when performing a Viennese waltz?)

My second thought is that the audition process must similarly be re-considered to draw a bigger picture. What best prepares an orchestral musician? Or, for that matter, a conductor?

And here’s a postscript: I’ve just completed, in manuscript, a book titled Bearing Witness: The American Odyssey of Leonard Bernstein. It explores Bernstein’s expansive vocation. Bernstein came late to classical music. Before entering the Curtis Institute, he took an undergraduate degree at Harvard. The first formidable stage of his conducting career transpired in Israel – a crucible. Late in life, he was asked to name his “greatest influences.” Off the top of his head, he listed Lau-tzu, Moses, Christ, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare, and Rabelais. Bernstein knew no bubbles.

P.P.S. — I happen to know of a conductor of a major American orchestra who privately confides that he prefers players who are musically unformed – “so I can mold them.” In my book, I call the Bernstein odyssey “a lesson, an inspiration, and a warning.” Thomas Hampson, in a Foreword, adds: “It is in fact an urgent wake-up call for all of us today.”

The most frequent public respondent to my recent blogs about the long brewing crises now afflicting America’s major orchestras, James Orleans writes as a member of the Boston Symphony’s double bass section from 1983 to 2018. As I did on July 29, I am reproducing his comments in the main body of my blog lest they otherwise be overlooked. If our orchestras matter, so do the concerns he voices from within in ranks. He writes:

Regarding the “overworked,” “malaise-ridden,” no longer “music-loving” players in today’s American orchestras: it has always appeared to me that the paradigm of the inspiring conductor and consequently inspired (or not) players has created a system that allows that malaise to come across on the stage.

The notion of professional stage demeanor is absent. It has not been encouraged by teachers and mentors either.

The conductor Kenneth Woods, in the Woods/Horowitz podcast addressing the “orchestra gap” increasingly separating the major American and European orchestras,  mentions the care with which the stage actor prepares a role. I would take that comparison further and add that the stage actor puts his reputation on the line every one of his eight performances a week. He understands that he must dig deeply into what he knows about the character he plays, and how to convincingly convey that to the audience on those nights he is just not into it. Perhaps he’s never liked the director’s blocking, or hates a particular phrase in his script, or has had a bad day. If he were to let his “tired of this play” malaise show in his performance, he would never be offered great roles again.

But American orchestral musicians do not feel this sense of professional responsibility. You will hear them scoff at the idea that they need to “look” more involved. They feel that their routine level of play is high enough to convey the music to their audience. (They are not entirely wrong about that.) If the conductor doesn’t inspire them to greater engagement, it is the fault of the baton.

And yet the conductor William Henry Curry, in a recent response to one of Joe Horowitz’s blogs, says not to blame the baton-wielder.

The simple visual aid to the audience that shows “you mean it” could go a long way in dispelling the “go ahead; make me play” attitude that has infected orchestras in this country. And mostly among the highest paid groups, too, one might observe. We do know that audiences listen with their eyes as much as with their ears.

Conductors want engaged orchestras. I know this for a fact. They don’t want orchestras that offer nothing more than default responses if not asked specifically for every little thing.

Seiji Ozawa once said, in an interview in Japan, that American orchestras are like a department store. Everything is there, but you have to ask or look for it yourself. And that the best European orchestras more often sense that they can take responsibility for the music themselves. The employer/employee orchestral mindset is an American phenomenon.

Regarding Joe’s blog addressing the Ford Foundation grants and our over-supply of orchestras and concerts: at the peak of its support (1992), the NEA was granting $330K per year (close to $800K in today’s dollars) to the topmost orchestras. Since then the grants have been whittled down to virtually nothing per year. The largest orchestra grant last year was apparently $40K.

In fact, all indicators of orchestral support have consistently been pointing in a downward direction for decades. The long overdue culling of orchestras is going to start happening. And it will likely be precipitous.

To revisit Chris Eagle Hawk’s performance criterion in Joe’s New York Times piece: malaise-ridden musicians in the orchestras most able to survive had better start “feeling it” soon.

And here is a comment James Orleans posted on Norman Lebrecht’s slippedisc:

Just as one must look inward for personal happiness and fulfillment, so must an orchestra musician in the face of uninspiring conductors look to their own knowledge of what the music contains, their love of the music, and play to that, not to a tired or mechanical beat. Do not put so much of your musical self in the hands of conductors. Be ready and excited to play for the music and keep adding those unique ideas that you have learned from the more inspiring conductors into your deepening musical understanding and play with your own self-generated involvement.

Every good idea or perceptive musical nuance a fine conductor shows you about a piece you can assimilate into your own understanding of the piece and use it going forward. You can continually build upon your knowledge of how to play the piece and employ all those components when faced with a baton that is not showing you anything more than you already know. You are not a blank slate. You are a widening color palette.

Too many orchestra players have been convinced that they must present a blank slate for the conductor to imprint upon, saying, “well, if he’s not showing anything how can I give anything?” If most of the conductors you are seeing these days are “humdrum” and you find yourself waiting for someone with pizzazz to bring you to life, you have set yourself up for constant disappointment. Don’t allow a conductor do that to your topflight musicianship. The music deserves more than the generic conductor.

A posted response to James Orleans’ comment read:

Your comment about ”blank slate for the conductor to imprint upon” is agonizingly true. At conservatory level we are trained to have no opinion, to play the notes on the page to an extreme level of perfection, and not an ounce of personal expression. And that is expected to be maintained, in a state of neutrality, for the rest of our musical life, simply awaiting the conductor’s magic touch to awaken musicality. Sleeping Beauty in music.

Since filing a New York Times piece on the perilous state of American classical music 250 years since the nation’s founding, I’ve written five follow-up blogs and participated in a podcast with the conductor Kenneth Woods. The response has been voluminous and informative. The most telling responses have come from conductors and orchestral musicians. Practically without exception, they don’t buy the mantra “orchestras are better than ever.” Rather, they ponder and regret that something has gone wrong. The malaise in question takes many forms, including (I have written) “a disposition of diminished motivation afflicting our most prominent orchestras, as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”

The weekends’s emails included one from a notable American conductor now in his seventies: William Henry Curry. He writes: “Don’t blame the conductors for the attitude of tenured players who are over-worked and no longer love music.” In fact, all of us – conductors, players, audiences – are victims in common of the Zeitgeist: a growing erasure of the arts is a function of the times in which we live.

The other day I stumbled upon a youtube link to a live Detroit Symphony performance of Mahler’s Fifth from 1959, when this big symphony still seemed new. The conductor was Paul Paray. I listened to the finale. It is the fastest version I’ve ever encountered – and also the most memorable.

For readers for whom Paray/Detroit (1952-1963) may be unknown – this was an orchestra considered by many the supreme “French orchestra” of its time with a style all its own: tactile diction, lean sonorities, limpid textures, brisk tempos, gunshot attacks. In frothy corners of the French repertoire, it was unapproachable. A prime sample of Paray/Detroit at full throttle is this blistering 1958 rendition of Berlioz’s Corsair Overture. In Germanic repertoire, Paray/Detroit is more an acquired taste.

A glance at the finale of Mahler’s Fifth explains why Paul Paray, of all people, would have thought to undertake this five-movement behemoth at a moment when few others were playing it. The music teems with cuckoo cries and childish gambols, with madcap fugatos and darting melodic feints, with prickly staccatisimos and vertiginous ascents – stacked atop one another. Its exuberance is partly a function of sustained foreground hyperactivity. In Paray’s performance, it’s all spectacularly articulate at breakneck speed.. And I might add that the famous Adagietto, coming right before, is remarkably impassioned. (Mischa Mischakoff, presiding over Paray’s strings, was previously concertmaster of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra and of Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, )

Among the many things that could be said about Paray’s feat, one crowning observation is that a style deeply acquired will prove applicable, and activating, even in music far afield. A supreme example is Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic (“The World’s Greatest Orchestra”), whose style and sonority were based in Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich – and yet proved irresistible in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. But what clinches Paray’s achievement is the hunger of his musicians. They are at all times going for broke.

It occurred to me to ask AI how many concerts the Detroit Symphony typically played under Paul Paray. Answer: the season comprised multiple weekly performances of a given subscription program over a period of 24 to 30 weeks. During the 1970s, a 52-week contract was negotiated. That is one reason the Detroit Symphony under Paul Paray sounds hungrier than what we typically hear today.

Which brings me to the main topic of this essay: the Ford Foundation, which in 1966 initiated an $80.2 million infusion (about $830 million today) for orchestras. A central goal was to insure a “living wage” for orchestral musicians by assuring fulltime employment. The outcome was lengthened symphonic seasons, with contracts for 40 weeks and more. Certainly the musicians deserved the pay raise. They were accustomed to supplementing their salaried income with jobs of various kinds to the side. In retrospect, the Ford money should have been spent to pay musicians more per service. The unintended outcome was a crisis of concert supply outstripping demand. Ever since, orchestras have mainly engaged in fundraising and marketing. And musicians – to again cite William Henry Curry – have become “over-worked.” They “no longer love music.” The broadcasts of the 1930s and forties about which I redundantly write – from New York, from Boston, from Philadelphia, from Minneapolis – document a condition of hyper-engagement once a norm.

Here is some of what I wrote about the Ford Foundation grants in Classical Music in America:

“In combination with pressure from the ranks, the new money steeply increased the number of concerts. In 1960, full-time, twelve-month employment was unknown. By 1970-71, six orchestras had agreed to fifty-two-week contracts, and another five had contracts of forty-five weeks or more. This new frequency of performance was not audience-driven. It may be safely assumed that neither Beethoven nor Brahms, in music-obsessed Vienna, remotely envisioned a diet of three and four symphonic performances per orchestra per week – or up to 171 per year (the New York Philharmonic in 2000-2001) . . .

“Many who played in American orchestras now attained a respectable living wage for the first time. Whether they knew or admitted it, the victory was Pyrrhic. Scrambling to manufacture new “services” promised by new agreements, orchestras created new concerts that could not adequately be planned, prepared, sold, or assimilated. Many were underrehearsed summer programs, children’s programs, or pops programs, or exhausting ‘run-outs’ to high school auditoriums. Boredom and resentment were rife . . .

“Between 1960 and 2000, the New York Philharmonic’s budget grew from $2 million to $34 million, the Boston Symphony’s from $2 million to $55 million. In combination with precipitously rising costs, excess concerts dictated a new orchestral function: marketing . . . a dense scaffold of merchandising activity behind which many an orchestra plotted to standardize its produce. Burdened with an expanding gap between income and expenses, orchestras found themselves thick in the business of fund-raising; the Boston Symphony’s development staff grew from seventeen to twenty -nine in the final decades of the twentieth century. . . . “

Simply put, today’s big American orchestras give too many concerts. Supply outstrips demand. Compared to previous generations, symphonic musicians are run down. Their union representatives typically resist reducing the season. But that’s not the same as reducing the number of “services” an orchestra member performs. As I’ve many times written, the happiest musicians I’ve ever encountered in a professional American orchestra are the nine salaried members of the South Dakota Symphony, comprising a string quartet and woodwind quintet. They furnish 150 services annually, most of which are not symphonic concerts. Among other things, they travel to Indian reservations to teach and make music. And they are largely self-governing – another topic for another time.

The blogs in this series enumerate challenges large and small. The big picture, as drawn by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is “social acceleration.” Every parameter of human existence is changing ever more rapidly. We’re increasingly condemned to live in the moment. We ever more rapidly forget the past. But symphonic performance thrives on style, lineage, and tradition. When the New York Philharmonic, in its program book, profiles a young violinist and asks: “What is your favorite music?”, when she replies: “Whatever I am playing at the moment,” that’s a red flag. The contributing factors, all highlighted in my podcast with Ken Woods, include the audition process, conservatory education, an ageing repertoire, and a failure to promote an American canon sufficient to generate an American style of performance. As Ken points out: when an actor prepares a role, they read about the play and the playwright. If the play is based in history, they read some history. Can today’s young musicians even play a Viennese waltz? Tscho Theissing says: no, not even in Vienna. A faceless “international style” reigns in the conservatory studio.

A story I’ve told before: Decades ago, I briefly taught at the Manhattan School of Music. My course, which proved abortive, was mandatory for graduate students in a two-year “Orchestral Performance” sequence. I shared historic recordings. I lectured on the institutional history of the orchestra. I assigned reading and writing. One day Larry Tamburri visited the class. At the time, he was Executive Director of the New Jersey Symphony. Larry drew two circles on the blackboard, one large and the other small. The small circle, he said, represented the traditional role of the orchestral musician. The big circle represented the enlarged role he wanted his musicians to undertake as full stakeholders in a cultural institution. He wanted them to do more than rehearse and perform. The class responded with a prolonged silence. I said: He’s telling you what I’ve been preaching for the last two months – what do you think? A bassoonist answered: “We are here to hone our instrumental skills and to learn how to win an audition. Everything else can wait.”

But it can’t. One way or another, orchestral musicians need to re-acquire a sense of agency. They need to “feel it.” They need to matter.  

For more on the Ford Foundation orchestra grants and what went wrong, click here.

Since filing a New York Times piece on the perilous state of American classical music 250 years since the nation’s founding, I’ve written five follow-up blogs and participated in a podcast with the conductor Kenneth Woods. The response has been voluminous and informative. The most telling responses have come from conductors and orchestral musicians. Practically without exception, they don’t buy the mantra “orchestras are better than ever.” Rather, they ponder and regret that something has gone wrong. The malaise in question takes many forms, including (I have written) “a disposition of diminished motivation afflicting our most prominent orchestras, as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”

The weekends’s emails included one from a notable American conductor, now in his seventies, arguing: “Don’t blame the conductors for the attitude of tenured players who are over-worked and no longer love music.” In fact, all of us – conductors, players, audiences – are victims in common of the Zeitgeist: a growing erasure of the arts is a function of the times in which we live.

The other day I stumbled upon a youtube link to a live Detroit Symphony performance of Mahler’s Fifth from 1959, when this big symphony still seemed new. The conductor was Paul Paray. I listened to the finale. It is the fastest version I’ve ever encountered – and also the most memorable.

For readers for whom Paray/Detroit (1952-1963) may be unknown – this was an orchestra considered by many the supreme “French orchestra” of its time with a style all its own: tactile diction, lean sonorities, limpid textures, brisk tempos, gunshot attacks. In frothy corners of the French repertoire, it was unapproachable. A prime sample of Paray/Detroit at full throttle is this blistering 1958 rendition of Berlioz’s Corsair Overture. In Germanic repertoire, Paray/Detroit is more an acquired taste.

A glance at the finale of Mahler’s Fifth explains why Paul Paray, of all people, would have thought to undertake this five-movement behemoth at a moment when few others were playing it. The music teems with cuckoo cries and childish gambols, with madcap fugatos and darting melodic feints, with prickly staccatisimos and vertiginous ascents – stacked atop one another. Its exuberance is partly a function of sustained foreground hyperactivity. In Paray’s performance, it’s all spectacularly articulate at breakneck speed.. And I might add that the famous Adagietto, coming right before, is remarkably impassioned. (Mischa Mischakoff, presiding over Paray’s strings, was previously concertmaster of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra and of Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, )

Among the many things that could be said about Paray’s feat, one crowning observation is that a style deeply acquired will prove applicable, and activating, even in music far afield. A supreme example is Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic (“The World’s Greatest Orchestra”), whose style and sonority were based in Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich – and yet proved irresistible in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. But what clinches Paray’s achievement is the hunger of his musicians. They are at all times going for broke.

It occurred to me to ask AI how many concerts the Detroit Symphony typically played under Paul Paray. Answer: the season comprised multiple weekly performances of a given subscription program over a period of 24 to 30 weeks. During the 1970s, a 52-week contract was negotiated. That is one reason the Detroit Symphony under Paul Paray sounds hungrier than what we typically hear today.

Which brings me to the main topic of this essay: the Ford Foundation, which in 1966 initiated an $80.2 million infusion (about $830 million today) for orchestras. A central goal was to insure a “living wage” for orchestral musicians by assuring fulltime employment. The outcome was lengthened symphonic seasons, with contracts for 40 weeks and more. Certainly the musicians deserved the pay raise. They were accustomed to supplementing their salaried income with jobs of various kinds to the side. In retrospect, the Ford money should have been spent to pay musicians more per service. The unintended outcome was a crisis of concert supply outstripping demand. Ever since, orchestras have mainly engaged in fundraising and marketing. And musicians – to again cite the conductor who wrote to me the other day – have become “over-worked.” They “no longer love music.” The broadcasts of the 1930s and forties about which I redundantly write – from New York, from Boston, from Philadelphia, from Minneapolis – document a condition of hyper-engagement once a norm.

Here is some of what I wrote about the Ford Foundation grants in Classical Music in America:

“In combination with pressure from the ranks, the new money steeply increased the number of concerts. In 1960, full-time, twelve-month employment was unknown. By 1970-71, six orchestras had agreed to fifty-two-week contracts, and another five had contracts of forty-five weeks or more. This new frequency of performance was not audience-driven. It may be safely assumed that neither Beethoven nor Brahms, in music-obsessed Vienna, remotely envisioned a diet of three and four symphonic performances per orchestra per week – or up to 171 per year (the New York Philharmonic in 2000-2001) . . .

“Many who played in American orchestras now attained a respectable living wage for the first time. Whether they knew or admitted it, the victory was Pyrrhic. Scrambling to manufacture new “services” promised by new agreements, orchestras created new concerts that could not adequately be planned, prepared, sold, or assimilated. Many were underrehearsed summer programs, children’s programs, or pops programs, or exhausting ‘run-outs’ to high school auditoriums. Boredom and resentment were rife . . .

“Between 1960 and 2000, the New York Philharmonic’s budget grew from $2 million to $34 million, the Boston Symphony’s from $2 million to $55 million. In combination with precipitously rising costs, excess concerts dictated a new orchestral function: marketing . . . a dense scaffold of merchandising activity behind which many an orchestra plotted to standardize its produce. Burdened with an expanding gap between income and expenses, orchestras found themselves thick in the business of fund-raising; the Boston Symphony’s development staff grew from seventeen to twenty -nine in the final decades of the twentieth century. . . . “

Simply put, today’s big American orchestras give too many concerts. Supply outstrips demand. Compared to previous generations, symphonic musicians are run down. Their union representatives typically resist reducing the season. But that’s not the same as reducing the number of “services” an orchestra member performs. As I’ve many times written, the happiest musicians I’ve ever encountered in a professional American orchestra are the nine salaried members of the South Dakota Symphony, comprising a string quartet and woodwind quintet. They furnish 150 services annually, most of which are not symphonic concerts. Among other things, they travel to Indian reservations to teach and make music. And they are largely self-governing – another topic for another time.

The blogs in this series enumerate challenges large and small. The big picture, as drawn by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is “social acceleration.” Every parameter of human existence is changing ever more rapidly. We’re increasingly condemned to live in the moment. We ever more rapidly forget the past. But symphonic performance thrives on style, lineage, and tradition. When the New York Philharmonic, in its program book, profiles a young violinist and asks: “What is your favorite music?”, when she replies: “Whatever I am playing at the moment,” that’s a red flag. The contributing factors, all highlighted in my podcast with Ken Woods, include the audition process, conservatory education, an ageing repertoire, and a failure to promote an American canon sufficient to generate an American style of performance. As Ken points out: when an actor prepares a role, they read about the play and the playwright. If the play is based in history, they read some history. Can today’s young musicians even play a Viennese waltz? Tscho Theissing says: no, not even in Vienna. A faceless “international style” reigns in the conservatory studio.

A story I’ve told before: Decades ago, I briefly taught at the Manhattan School of Music. My course, which proved abortive, was mandatory for graduate students in a two-year “Orchestral Performance” sequence. I shared historic recordings. I lectured on the institutional history of the orchestra. I assigned reading and writing. One day Larry Tamburri visited the class. At the time, he was Executive Director of the New Jersey Symphony. Larry drew two circles on the blackboard, one large and the other small. The small circle, he said, represented the traditional role of the orchestral musician. The big circle represented the enlarged role he wanted his musicians to undertake as full stakeholders in a cultural institution. He wanted them to do more than rehearse and perform. The class responded with a prolonged silence. I said: He’s telling you what I’ve been preaching for the last two months – what do you think? A bassoonist answered: “We are here to hone our instrumental skills and to learn how to win an audition. Everything else can wait.”

But it can’t. One way or another, orchestral musicians need to re-acquire a sense of agency. They need to “feel it.” They need to matter.  

For more on the Ford Foundation orchestra grants and what went wrong, click here.

Beginning with my “New York Times” piece on July 4, this is the fifth in a series of articles pondering the state of classical music in the US on the occasion of our 250th birthday. Above: Peter Bogdanoff’s visual presentation for the Largo and Scherzo of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, premiered by the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1994 and since widely deployed by American orchestras (but never the biggest ones).

Have you ever wondered why American museums engage scholars on staff and orchestras do not? I can offer a number of pertinent observations.

For many years, I regularly attended both the annual national conferences of the Society for American Music and of the League of American Orchestras. Practically no one else did – the only other name that comes to mind being Susan Key, who oversaw the San Francisco Symphony’s “Keeping Score” education series.

I stumbled into my dual career by happenstance. When I ended my tenure as a New York Times music critic in quest of something hands-on, I found myself curating a series of Schubert “symposiums” for New York’s 92nd Street Y. At the same time, I undertook the first of many books – Understanding Toscanini (1987) – studying the institutional history of American orchestras and opera companies in relation to our composers, and to the culture at large. I came to know lots of people in both camps: performers and administrators in classical music; scholars of American music and history. I absorbed with disappointment and frustration that the two camps remained alien to one another.

When I took over the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM, our first festival celebrated the centenary of Dvorak’s New World Symphony (ignored at Lincoln Center by the orchestra that premiered it in 1893). As a budding cultural historian sans pedigree, I happened regularly to read musicological journals and so was keenly aware that Michael Beckerman had discovered something about Dvorak’s symphony that American orchestras needed to know – that many passages, and even an entire movement, were fundamentally indebted to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Given that this is the most beloved symphony ever composed on American soil, setting what was once the most popular work of American literature, Beckerman’s articles on the Largo and Scherzo deserved maximum immediate exposure.

Obviously, I could not undertake a suitable celebration without Mike himself. I also invited Adrienne Fried Block, the biographer of Amy Beach, whose Gaelic Symphony – a response to Dvorak – we also performed. And John Mack Faragher, a distinguished historian of the American West. And Samuel Floyd, who ran Chicago’s Center for Black Music. And Robert Winter, who was creating an interactive Dvorak/America CD-Rom (remember those?) at UCLA. Our performers included a distinguished African-American tenor, Thomas Young, performing and discussing the high achievements (then little acknowledged) of Dvorak’s Black assistant, Harry Burleigh. Supported by the NEH, our “From the New World” festival included a “visual presentation” for the New World Symphony by Peter Bogdanoff, a six-hour Sunday afternoon “Interplay,” and a 57-page program book. (For more on the 1990s BPO festivals and linkage to scholarship, click here.)

I’ve worked closely with scholars ever since, curating festivals for dozens of orchestras. When Larry Tamburri engaged me to create a series of annual three-week thematic “Winter Festival” for the New Jersey Symphony, the many participating scholars (for a Richard Strauss festival exploring Strauss the man) included Hans Vaget and Michael Kater, both of whom shared with New Jersey high school students their memories of growing up in Nazi Germany. During my tenure as Executive Director of DC’s PostClassical Ensemble, our various festivals of Russian music included the pianists Alexander Toradze and Vladimir Feltsman, discussing musical life in Soviet Russia, and the Shostakovich authority Solomon Volkov.

Over the 15-year history of Music Unwound, the orchestral consortium I direct with NEH support, the most frequent topics have been “Dvorak and America,” “Kurt Weill’s America,” “Copland and Mexico“ (a Silvestre Revueltas festival in disguise), and “Charles Ives’ America” – undertakings inconceivable without a battery of experts who know more than I do about the topics at hand. In effect, I’ve acquired a cumulative braintrust whose major participants include the Lou Harrison gamelan scholar Bill Alves, the Ives scholar F. Peter Burkholder, and the Weill scholar Kim Kowalke. Moving outside Music History, I’ve relied on the art historian Tim Barringer (who understands the relationship between Frederic Church and Dvorak’s New World landscapes), the historian John Tutino (who can contextualize Revueltas via the Mexican Revolution), the historians Allen Guelzo and Alan Lessoff, whose knowledge of the Civil War and the Gilded Age invaluably contextualize Ives’s importance.

During the years I advised Klaus Heymann on his indispensable “American Classics” CD series on Naxos, I engaged the music historians Wiley Hitchcock and Wayne Shirley to help out. Naxos’s remarkable commitment to Ives was one outcome of Wiley’s participation. Wayne – who knows more American music than anyone else of my acquaintance – eventually produced a new critical edition of Porgy and Bess. The Metropolitan Opera used it when reviving Gershwin’s opera in 2019. But, for whatever reason, Wayne was not a public presence on that occasion.

It bears stressing that, unlike American orchestras, American musical scholarship got a delayed start. The prime movers were European-born students of European music. Incredibly, the first music historian to exclusively study American music was the late Richard Crawford, whose first book came out in 1968. Rich was one of the prime movers of the Society for American Music, originally the Sonneck Society. He and others stressed maintaining a big tent (I discovered myself invited in without having had to ask). Their collegiality was a signature. They also insisted on maintaining the broadest possible purview of the topic at hand.

All that has changed now. Too many young scholars are ideologues guarding silos. Screens have cheapened inquiry. Too many dissertations and books nowadays amass information with insufficient context – by which I mean: a copious picture of American music, of America itself. And then there is cancel culture. In 2021 I undertook a film about Black classical music (a topic I began pursuing in Brooklyn in the 1990s) and discovered that certain scholars would participate only if certain others did and certain others did not. I don’t remember that kind of insularity in the days of the Sonneck Society. Rich Crawford, Wiley Hitchcock, and others commanding a long view of American music seemingly have no successors today — the very people American orchestras need to employ. Crucially: compared to art museums, our orchestras have failed adequately to curate the American past. Right now, the big discovery in twentieth century symphonic music, it seems to me (and I am not alone), isn’t Florence Price; it’s William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony of 1932, right up there with anything by Aaron Copland or Roy Harris. How is it possible that the New York Philharmonic has yet to program it?

As for the trajectory of orchestras – more than museums, they became “midcult” institutions during the interwar decades. The focus on celebrity conductors and instrumentalists – what I have called the culture of performance” – penalized the creative act. Composers took a back seat. What Virgil Thomson termed the “music appreciation racket,” driven by commercial interests, created a network of popularizing books and pedagogues purposely remote from scholarly discourse. A typical advisory to the lay listener read: “You can enjoy a Beethoven symphony without being able to read notes, without knowing who Beethoven was, when he lived, or what he tried to express.” (See in my Understanding Toscanini for countless such examples.)

In other words: the insularity of our orchestras and musical scholars was and remains mutually reinforcing. Back in the day, I co-curated, with Alan Lessoff, a joint session of the Society for American Music and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The idea was to jump-start a conversation. It led nowhere.

I now find myself Scholar-in-Residence for the South Dakota Symphony – the most innovative American orchestra I know. It was innovative long before I got there. Its signature initiative, driven by Music Director Delta David Gier, is the Lakota Music Project. It links the orchestra to Indian reservations. It pursues music as an instrument for mutual understanding. My contribution has been to seize this achievement and contextualize it. When not engaged in a form of genocide, Americans have notably discovered profound inspiration in Native America. Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Longfellow’s Hiawatha are part of that story. So is Arthur Farwell, who “took up Dvorak’s challenge” and founded an Indianists movement in music. Though Farwell is mainly cancelled, he’s not only a vital historical figure but a formidable composer, the closest thing to an American Bela Bartok. The Dakota String Quartet made the world premiere recording of Farwell’s incandescent Hako Quartet, for Naxos, in 2021. The forthcoming Lakota Music Project festival in Sioux Falls, this November, scans two centuries of American experience and partners four universities.

A previous article in this series investigated the loss of tradition in symphonic performance – something hard to remedy. Recourse to scholarship – a means of expanding the communal footprint of an orchestra, of enhancing institutional impact, of refining institutional identity — is an easier fix.

Beginning with my “New York Times” piece on July 4, this is the fifth in a series of articles pondering the state of classical music in the US on the occasion of our 250th birthday. Above: Peter Bogdanoff’s visual presentation for the Largo and Scherzo of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, premiered by the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1994 and since widely deployed by American orchestras (but never the biggest ones).

Have you ever wondered why American museums engage scholars on staff and orchestras do not? I can offer a number of pertinent observations.

For many years, I regularly attended both the annual national conferences of the Society for American Music and of the League of American Orchestras. Practically no one else did – the only other name that comes to mind being Susan Key, who oversaw the San Francisco Symphony’s “Keeping Score” series.

I stumbled into my dual career by happenstance. When I ended my tenure as a New York Times music critic in quest of something hands-on, I found myself curating a series of Schubert “symposiums” for New York’s 92nd Street Y. At the same time, I undertook the first of many books – Understanding Toscanini (1987) – studying the institutional history of American orchestras and opera companies in relation to our composers, and to the culture at large. I came to know lots of people in both camps: performers and administrators in classical music; scholars of American music and history. I absorbed with disappointment and frustration that the two camps remained alien to one another.

When I took over the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM, our first festival celebrated the centenary of Dvorak’s New World Symphony (ignored at Lincoln Center by the orchestra that premiered it in 1893). As a budding cultural historian sans pedigree, I happened regularly to read musicological journals and so was keenly aware that Michael Beckerman had discovered something about Dvorak’s symphony that American orchestras needed to know – that many passages, and even an entire movement, were fundamentally indebted to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Given that this is the most beloved symphony ever composed on American soil, setting what was once the most popular work of American literature, Beckerman’s articles on the Largo and Scherzo deserved maximum immediate exposure.

Obviously, I could not undertake a suitable celebration without Mike himself. I also invited Adrienne Fried Block, the biographer of Amy Beach, whose Gaelic Symphony – a response to Dvorak – we also performed. And John Mack Faragher, a distinguished historian of the American West. And Samuel Floyd, who ran Chicago’s Center for Black Music. And Robert Winter, who was creating an interactive Dvorak/America CD-Rom (remember those?) at UCLA. Our performers included a distinguished African-American tenor, Thomas Young, performing and discussing the high achievements (then little acknowledged) of Dvorak’s Black assistant, Harry Burleigh. Supported by the NEH, our “From the New World” festival included a “visual presentation” for the New World Symphony by Peter Bogdanoff, a six-hour Sunday afternoon “Interplay,” and a 57-page program book. (For more on the 1990s BPO festivals and linkage to scholarship, click here.)

I’ve worked closely with scholars ever since, curating festivals for dozens of orchestras. When Larry Tamburri engaged me to create a series of annual three-week thematic “Winter Festival” for the New Jersey Symphony, the many participating scholars (for a Richard Strauss festival exploring Strauss the man) included Hans Vaget and Michael Kater, both of whom shared with New Jersey high school students their memories of growing up in Nazi Germany. During my tenure as Executive Director of DC’s PostClassical Ensemble, our various festivals of Russian music included the pianists Alexander Toradze and Vladimir Feltsman, discussing musical life in Soviet Russia, and the Shostakovich authority Solomon Volkov.

Over the 15-year history of Music Unwound, the orchestral consortium I direct with NEH support, the most frequent topics have been “Dvorak and America,” “Kurt Weill’s America,” “Copland and Mexico“ (a Silvestre Revueltas festival in disguise), and “Charles Ives’ America” – undertakings inconceivable without a battery of experts who know more than I do about the topics at hand. In effect, I’ve acquired a cumulative braintrust whose major participants include the Lou Harrison gamelan scholar Bill Alves, the Ives scholar F. Peter Burkholder, and the Weill scholar Kim Kowalke. Moving outside Music History, I’ve relied on the art historian Tim Barringer (who understands the relationship between Frederic Church and Dvorak’s New World landscapes), the historian John Tutino (who can contextualize Revueltas via the Mexican Revolution), the historians Allen Guelzo and Alan Lessoff, whose knowledge of the Civil War and the Gilded Age invaluably contextualize Ives’s importance.

During the years I advised Klaus Heymann on his indispensable “American Classics” CD series on Naxos, I engaged the music historians Wiley Hitchcock and Wayne Shirley to help out. Naxos’s remarkable commitment to Ives was one outcome of Wiley’s participation. Wayne – who knows more American music than anyone else of my acquaintance – eventually produced a new critical edition of Porgy and Bess. The Metropolitan Opera used it when reviving Gershwin’s opera in 2019. But, for whatever reason, Wayne was not a public presence on that occasion.

It bears stressing that, unlike American orchestras, American musical scholarship got a delayed start. The prime movers were European-born students of European music. Incredibly, the first music historian to exclusively study American music was the late Richard Crawford, whose first book came out in 1968. Rich was one of the prime movers of the Society for American Music, originally the Sonneck Society. He and others stressed maintaining a big tent (I discovered myself invited in without having had to ask). Their collegiality was a signature. They also insisted on maintaining the broadest possible purview of the topic at hand.

All that has changed now. Too many young scholars are ideologues guarding silos. Screens have cheapened inquiry. Too many dissertations and books nowadays amass information with insufficient context – by which I mean: a copious picture of American music, of America itself. And then there is cancel culture. In 2021 I undertook a film about Black classical music (a topic I began pursuing in Brooklyn in the 1990s) and discovered that certain scholars would participate only if certain others did and certain others did not. I don’t remember that kind of insularity in the days of the Sonneck Society. Rich Crawford, Wiley Hitchcock, and others commanding a long view of American music seemingly have no successors today — the very people American orchestras need to employ. Crucially: compared to art museums, our orchestras have failed adequately to curate the American past. Right now, the big discovery in twentieth century symphonic music, it seems to me (and I am not alone), isn’t Florence Price; it’s William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony of 1932, right up there with anything by Aaron Copland or Roy Harris. How is it possible that the New York Philharmonic has yet to program it?

As for the trajectory of orchestras – more than museums, they became “midcult” institutions during the interwar decades. The focus on celebrity conductors and instrumentalists – what I have called the culture of performance” – penalized the creative act. Composers took a back seat. What Virgil Thomson termed the “music appreciation racket,” driven by commercial interests, created a network of popularizing books and pedagogues purposely remote from scholarly discourse. A typical advisory to the lay listener read: “You can enjoy a Beethoven symphony without being able to read notes, without knowing who Beethoven was, when he lived, or what he tried to express.” (See in my Understanding Toscanini for countless such examples.)

In other words: the insularity of our orchestras and musical scholars was and remains mutually reinforcing. Back in the day, I co-curated, with Alan Lessoff, a joint session of the Society for American Music and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The idea was to jump-start a conversation. It led nowhere.

I now find myself Scholar-in-Residence for the South Dakota Symphony – the most innovative American orchestra I know. It was innovative long before I got there. Its signature initiative, driven by Music Director Delta David Gier, is the Lakota Music Project. It links the orchestra to Indian reservations. It pursues music as an instrument for mutual understanding. My contribution has been to seize this achievement and contextualize it. When not engaged in a form of genocide, Americans have notably discovered profound inspiration in Native America. Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Longfellow’s Hiawatha are part of that story. So is Arthur Farwell, who “took up Dvorak’s challenge” and founded an Indianists movement in music. Though Farwell is mainly cancelled, he’s not only a vital historical figure but a formidable composer, the closest thing to an American Bela Bartok. The Dakota String Quartet made the world premiere recording of Farwell’s incandescent Hako Quartet, for Naxos, in 2021. The forthcoming Lakota Music Project festival in Sioux Falls, this November, scans two centuries of American experience and partners four universities.

A previous article in this series investigated the loss of tradition in symphonic performance – something hard to remedy. Recourse to scholarship – a means of expanding the communal footprint of an orchestra, of enhancing institutional impact, of refining institutional identity — is an easier fix.

As readers of this blog must be aware – perhaps with interest, perhaps with mounting annoyance – I have become obsessed with the elusive phenomenon of “feeling it.” It’s my impression that orchestras are feeling it less and less. And that the human condition, these days, is less and less susceptible to feeling it.

The responses, both public and private, have been exceptionally thoughtful. A range of opinion is in play. But the responses I receive from orchestral musicians, especially via email, practically without exception confirm that something has gone missing. I tried to define that something a week ago as “diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”

My ruminations have focused on broadcast recordings from the post-World War I decades – in particular, performances conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, by Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia, and by Arturo Toscanini, Ettore Panizza, and Artur Bodanzky in New York. In their different ways, these recordings document a degree of engagement I rarely encounter nowadays.

Some readers have expressed surprise that the name George Szell does not figure in my narrative. Beginning in 1946, Szell famously created and sustained a singularly refined ensemble in Cleveland: a tabula rasa he made his own. He was a conductor who experienced an epiphany when he heard Toscanini’s New York Philharmonic on tour in Prague in 1930. He subsequently wrote: “The clarity of texture; the precision of ensemble; the rightness of balances; the virtuosity of every section, every solo-player of the orchestra – then at its peak – in the service of an interpretative concept of evident self-effacing integrity, enforced with irresistible will power and unflagging ardor, set new, undreamed-of standards literally overnight.”

Szell’s perfectionism was a New World ideal, sidestepping Old World lineage and tradition. Concurrently, under Fritz Reiner, the Chicago Symphony acquired a comparable reputation for precise virtuosity: a perfection not only of notes and intonation, but of calculated balance and timbre. I first heard the Cleveland Orchestra under Lorin Maazel. I first heard the Chicago Symphony under Georg Solti. The deep imprints of Szell and of Reiner remained evident. I found something missing on the inside.

The other day I explored Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra recorded in live performance. I wound up with a tremendous 1968 reading of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with Rudolf Serkin. The opening tutti is precise, intense, and engaged. The entire performance sustains these virtues. And I still find something missing.

There exists a 1960 studio recording (embedded above) of the same concerto with Claudio Arrau, Carlo Maria Giulini, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. It’s all about the inside of things – to a degree that doubtless frustrates and annoys many listeners expecting a more straightforward account. I experience the opening tutti with my gut. When Giulini lands on the big downbeat reprising the first theme (measure 10), my response is physical. (Intensified by an infinitesimal retard, it bears a slight but crucial agogic accent.) When Giulini reaches the second theme (piano, espressivo), we enter another realm of feeling, pierced with pain. A vast emotional landscape has been placed in play.

My first book was a study of Claudio Arrau. The prevailing topic is interiority – of Arrau the man, of Arrau the pianist. It was a capacity that increasingly isolated him. He profoundly remembered, from his pre-World War II Berlin days, the performances of Wilhelm Furtwangler (“all that he touched became gold”) and of Edwin Fischer (“he had this divinatory quality”). A stray comment, about the E minor theme in the first movement of Beethoven’s G major Piano Concerto: “It’s the first time the music goes into a minor key. I’ve performed this concerto hundreds of times, and the only conductor who did it exactly right – with a really deep melancholy – was Eugen Jochum. We didn’t even have to talk about it.”  A “really deep melancholy” is what Giulini finds in the second subject of the first movement of Brahms’s D minor concerto. I remember Arrau using the term herzereisend.

Arrau was a gentle and endearing man whose dapper persona barely cloaked a volcano of feeling the sources of which are a major topic in my book. We made an agreement that I would show him the manuscript when it was finished and invite his comments – but that I could feel free to ignore them. He made a total of three comments. Two had to do with his personal life and I honored them. The third comment had to do with his recordings of the two Brahms concertos with Carlo Maria Giulini. He was painfully disappointed that I found them studio-bound and self-conscious. What he was telling me was that he discovered in Giulini a profound partnership.

In retrospect, I do not know what ears I deployed in 1980, because I now discover in their performance of the First Concerto (not so much the Second) a consummated collaboration.  I would call it a performance deeply felt. Both these artists, Arrau and Giulini, were  mysterious in ways that Szell and Serkin were not. Szell’s rigorous aspirations are evident: “The clarity of texture; the precision of ensemble; the rightness of balances; the virtuosity of every section, every solo-player of the orchestra . . . in the service of an interpretative concept of evident self-effacing integrity, enforced with irresistible will power and unflagging ardor.” He once said of his Cleveland performances: “We calculate the inspiration.” Daniel Majeske, his Cleveland concertmaster from 1969, testified: “He spelled out everything in millimeters and micrograms. He certainly could have been a pharmacist.” Szell was a conductor who spoke of perfecting a rendering of the score, then “adding” interpretation. Giulini and Arrau began with feeling.

Returning to my Arrau book, I discover myself asking him: What happened? He replied: “Artists are afraid. They are scared of any kind of commitment. And the young people are all afraid of emotion.”

I write about George Szell and Rudolf Serkin embodying stripped New World performance templates, imbued with “Werktreue,” in “Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts” (2008).

As readers of this blog must be aware – perhaps with interest, perhaps with mounting annoyance – I have become obsessed with the elusive phenomenon of “feeling it.” It’s my impression that orchestras are feeling it less and less. And that the human condition, these days, is less and less susceptible to feeling it.

The responses, both public and private, have been exceptionally thoughtful. A range of opinion is in play. But the responses I receive from orchestral musicians, especially via email, practically without exception confirm that something has gone missing. I tried to define that something a week ago as “diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”

My ruminations have focused on broadcast recordings from the post-World War I decades – in particular, performances conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, by Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia, and by Arturo Toscanini, Ettore Panizza, and Artur Bodanzky in New York. In their different ways, these recordings document a degree of engagement I rarely encounter nowadays.

Some readers have expressed surprise that the name George Szell does not figure in my narrative. Beginning in 1946, Szell famously created and sustained a singularly refined ensemble in Cleveland: a tabula rasa he made his own. He was a conductor who experienced an epiphany when he heard Toscanini’s New York Philharmonic on tour in Prague in 1930. He subsequently wrote: “The clarity of texture; the precision of ensemble; the rightness of balances; the virtuosity of every section, every solo-player of the orchestra – then at its peak – in the service of an interpretative concept of evident self-effacing integrity, enforced with irresistible will power and unflagging ardor, set new, undreamed-of standards literally overnight.”

Szell’s perfectionism was a New World ideal, sidestepping Old World lineage and tradition. Concurrently, under Fritz Reiner, the Chicago Symphony acquired a comparable reputation for precise virtuosity: a perfection not only of notes and intonation, but of calculated balance and timbre. I first heard the Cleveland Orchestra under Lorin Maazel. I first heard the Chicago Symphony under Georg Solti. The deep imprints of Szell and of Reiner remained evident. I found something missing on the inside.

The other day I explored Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra recorded in live performance. I wound up with a tremendous 1968 reading of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with Rudolf Serkin. The opening tutti is precise, intense, and engaged. The entire performance sustains these virtues. And I still find something missing.

There exists a 1960 studio recording (embedded above) of the same concerto with Claudio Arrau, Carlo Maria Giulini, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. It’s all about the inside of things – to a degree that doubtless frustrates and annoys many listeners expecting a more straightforward account. I experience the opening tutti with my gut. When Giulini lands on the big downbeat reprising the first theme (measure 10), my response is physical. (Intensified by an infinitesimal retard, it bears a slight but crucial agogic accent.) When Giulini reaches the second theme (piano, espressivo), we enter another realm of feeling, pierced with pain. A vast emotional landscape has been placed in play.

My first book was a study of Claudio Arrau. The prevailing topic is interiority – of Arrau the man, of Arrau the pianist. It was a capacity that increasingly isolated him. He profoundly remembered, from his pre-World War II Berlin days, the performances of Wilhelm Furtwangler (“all that he touched became gold”) and of Edwin Fischer (“he had this divinatory quality”). A stray comment, about the E minor theme in the first movement of Beethoven’s G major Piano Concerto: “It’s the first time the music goes into a minor key. I’ve performed this concerto hundreds of times, and the only conductor who did it exactly right – with a really deep melancholy – was Eugen Jochum. We didn’t even have to talk about it.”  A “really deep melancholy” is what Giulini finds in the second subject of the first movement of Brahms’s D minor concerto. I remember Arrau using the term herzereisend.

Arrau was a gentle and endearing man whose dapper persona barely cloaked a volcano of feeling the sources of which are a major topic in my book. We made an agreement that I would show him the manuscript when it was finished and invite his comments – but that I could feel free to ignore them. He made a total of three comments. Two had to do with his personal life and I honored them. The third comment had to do with his recordings of the two Brahms concertos with Carlo Maria Giulini. He was painfully disappointed that I found them studio-bound and self-conscious. What he was telling me was that he discovered in Giulini a profound partnership.

In retrospect, I do not know what ears I deployed in 1980, because I now discover in their performance of the First Concerto (not so much the Second) a consummated collaboration.  I would call it a performance deeply felt. Both these artists, Arrau and Giulini, were  mysterious in ways that Szell and Serkin were not. Szell’s rigorous aspirations are evident: “The clarity of texture; the precision of ensemble; the rightness of balances; the virtuosity of every section, every solo-player of the orchestra . . . in the service of an interpretative concept of evident self-effacing integrity, enforced with irresistible will power and unflagging ardor.” He once said of his Cleveland performances: “We calculate the inspiration.” Daniel Majeske, his Cleveland concertmaster from 1969, testified: “He spelled out everything in millimeters and micrograms. He certainly could have been a pharmacist.” Szell was a conductor who spoke of perfecting a rendering of the score, then “adding” interpretation. Giulini and Arrau began with feeling.

Returning to my Arrau book, I discover myself asking him: What happened? He replied: “Artists are afraid. They are scared of any kind of commitment. And the young people are all afraid of emotion.”

I write about George Szell and Rudolf Serkin embodying stripped New World performance templates, imbued with “Werktreue,” in “Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts” (2008).

I once described Bill McGlaughlin, who has died at the age of 82, as manifesting “a singular combination of gravitas, humor, and informed sincerity.” He began his musical life as a trombonist, later became a conductor and composer — and America’s single best-known classical music radio host.

Classical music radio turned toxic decades ago. It connotes arthritic programing for aged or timid listeners, and an orotund baritone spewing platitudes. Bill’s baritone was never orotund — I would describe it as breathless and excitable, quivering with feeling. That such an original radio presence acquired such popularity goes to show that conventional wisdom is often flawed wisdom.

One of my most remarkable experiences being interviewed about classical music occurred in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on an early morning TV show. I was curating a “Dvorak and America” festival for the North Carolina Symphony, and had been invited to talk about Dvorak on live television. Which I did. Meanwhile, my interlocutor was visibly perturbed by instructions she was receiving via her headset. I couldnt hear the instructions, but I knew the gist: “Get that guy to stop talking.” Which I did not.

Equally remarkable was the experience of being interviewed, years ago, by David Osenberg, who runs a classical music radio station unlike any other: WWFM. Dave’s questions were unpredictable and my answers were long. Shortly after that exchange was aired without mishap, Dave suggested we fashion a regular program based on the thematic concerts I was concocting for PostClassical Ensemble in Washington, D. C. Most took the form of advocacy for underplayed American composers like Bernard Herrmann, Silvestre Revueltas, and Lou Harrison. We knew the program needed Bill McGlaughlin.

On the resulting shows, Bill and I talked more than we listened. Here’s a sample of “PostClassical” as broadcast by WWFM on February 21, 2020. The topic was Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime Berlin broadcasts. This was Bill’s response to a 1942 broadcast of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, movement two:

So that’s BIll counting the extra beats Furtwängler interpolates when Schubert’s juggernaut suddenly stops and yields a cavernous silence. And then he unforgettably says: “This time we broke it, we really broke civilization.” And I concur.

But Bill and I didnt always agree. We had a running battle over Aaron Copland, whose music I find over-praised and over-played. One fine afternoon, Bill’s patience ran out: “So you better get over it, Jack,” he announced. So much for that topic.

Another show dealt with great American orchestras back in the days of Toscanini, Stokowski, and Koussevitzky. The most extreme was Dmitri Mitropoulos’s Minneapolis Symphony, whose stylistic base was Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg. Mitropoulos was especially proud of his 1940 recording of Schumann’s Second Symphony. We auditioned some of that until Bill interrupted. “It makes me really jittery,” he confided. “I can’t understand this Schumann. I know that Schumann was meshugana. This is so crazy-making for me. Help me out!”

Bill admired my recent novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York and eagerly wrote about it. But Bill was about uplift and I savor Mahler’s torment. Bill commented: “The overall trajectory of Mahler’s life in these years could leave a reader despondent. Then, just when we’re about to abandon all hope, Joe gives us the story of the premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Munich, one of he greatest triumphs of Mahler’s life. This chapter is filled with love and music and children and leaves us with the will to go on.” His comments ended: “Mahler is now heard around the world. And this book deepens our experience and satisfaction and love.”

He was one of a kind, irreplaceable.

To audition the entire “PostClassical” broadcast dealing with “Furtwängler in Wartime,” click here.

To hear Furtwangler’s 1942 Schubert performance, click here. The climax in question peaks at 23:07.