James Levine (music director) and Mark Volpe (managing director) held a press conference at Symphony Hall yesterday for the primary purpose of highlighting the release of the first four Boston Symphony Orchestra/Levine recordings on the in-house BSO Classics label. The line-up:

• Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe (CD and download)
• Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem (CD and download)
• Bolcom: Symphony no. 8/Lyric Concerto (download only)
• Mahler: Symphony no. 6 (download only)

Levine talked about each recording, and also played excerpts through a surround-sound set-up, which resulted in a rare and entertaining glimpse of Levine the itinerant huckster—

“Did you hear the dynamic range?” [pause] “Did you hear the top-to-bottom range?” [pause] “The left-to-right range—and especially the front-to-back range?”

—and so forth. He’s actually quite good at it.

The CD/download duality is, both Levine and Volpe admitted, experimental—it’s designed to see how various releases sell in the various formats. (The download formats are 320 kbs MP3 and WMA Surround HD—no lossless Mac-compatible options as yet.) The all-BSO structure—an in-house label, distributed through the BSO’s own website—is based on 1) maximizing revenue and, Volpe seemed to hint, 2) a belief that the major labels other orchestras have partnered with (New York and Los Angeles, for example, both release digitally through Deutsche Grammophon) might not be around for the long haul. “It’s basically taking our destiny and putting it into our own hands,” Volpe said, “and not relying on media companies, and partnerships with companies that, in their heyday, were significant, but less and less so, given the new world we’re living in.”

All the releases are live, concert recordings. No doubt this reflects the good-news-bad-news combination of the increasing quality of live recording and the increasing cost of studio recording, but for Levine, it was all good, as he repeatedly expressed a preference for live recording over studio recording, capturing the electricity of a concert hall experience over filling in the repertoire. “I watched this when I was George Szell’s assistant,” Levine said. “The record company said, ‘Dr. Szell, we want to come every week and record a Haydn symphony.’ So they did. Meanwhile, he played the Sixth Mahler… the Siegfried Idyll: no recordings. Simply unbelievable performances.” Levine specifically cast the BSO’s lot with concert recordings. “It shouldn’t come from the old aesthetics of studio recording,” he said. “What one always hoped would happen was that the technology would make it possible to get an exciting enough, vivid enough souvenir of that live feeling you get at concerts.” The BSO had recorded every one of Levine’s programs since he took over as music director, but they held off releasing any of them until the technology caught up with that goal. “I thought, what I want is to release a kind of recording that has certain characteristics that are now possible that were not possible this way before, not at this level,” Levine said, “and even if they were possible, they weren’t the aesthetic of the time, maybe.”

Noticeable was an interesting shift in that aesthetic—Levine seemed eager to use recording to build up the BSO as a unique brand, in both sound and repertoire. (Singular was a word that came up a lot.) In the first four releases, you get the BSO’s long association with French music (Daphnis); its initial at-that-time modern German orientation (Brahms); its Koussevitzky-incubated reputation for new music (Bolcom—the symphony was a BSO commission); and the addition of Levine’s own stamp (Mahler). It’s a throwback to the time—not coincidentally, the time that Levine first came into the business—when orchestras cultivated distinct sonic personalities, before the movement towards homogenized versatility in the 70s and 80s. Levine spent a fair amount of time pointing out how big a part the sound of Symphony Hall itself plays in the new recordings. “Even one of the characteristics of the hall that was really fascinating is preserved there,” he said. “You know that tendency for the upper-middle to be the strongest register in the room? It is—it always is. We could artificially change it, but I didn’t want to.”

The orchestra also took the occasion to release Levine’s concert repertoire for next season (guest conductor programs will have to wait until March). Most noticable was an October-November series of all nine Beethoven symphonies—something the BSO apparently has never done. (Levine revealed that he himself has never gotten around to conducting the Fourth.) Levine sold it as a chance to rethink the symphonies from the ground up, rather than simply tack them on to programs as a rehearsal-management technique, which I thought was pretty good spin, at the very least. The BSO is also honoring retiring harpist Ann Hobson Pilot with a John Williams commission and an October farewell. Other premieres include a baritone/orchestra cycle by Peter Lieberson, a violin/cello Double Concerto from John Harbison, and the American premiere of Elliott Carter’s Flute Concerto. No concert opera from Levine next season, although Mendelssohn’s Elijah gets an airing in the spring.

(You can read the BSO’s press release about the new recordings here.)

As promised, even more beard-stroking on the question of arts funding.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (It’s also Charles Darwin’s birthday. It’s also my wife’s birthday. Coincidence? I think not.) Last night, President Obama made these remarks at the rededication of Ford’s Theatre:

We know that Ford’s Theatre will remain a place where Lincoln’s legacy thrives, where his love of the humanities and belief in the power of education have a home, and where his generosity of spirit are reflected in all the work that takes place.

This has been an extraordinarily fitting tribute to Abraham Lincoln that we’ve seen and heard from some of our most celebrated icons of stage and of screen, because Lincoln himself was a great admirer of the arts. [MG: ceremonies included the awarding of the Lincoln Medal to Sidney Poitier and George Lucas. George Lucas? Anyway, back to Lincoln:] It’s said he could even quote portions of Hamlet and Macbeth by heart, as we’ve seen here this evening. And so I somehow think this event captured an essential part of the man whose life we celebrate tonight.
…
Not far from here stands our nation’s capitol, a landmark familiar to us all, but one that looked very different in Lincoln’s time. For it remained unfinished until the end of the war. The laborers who built the dome came to work wondering whether each day would be their last; whether the metal they were using for its frame would be requisitioned for the war and melted down into bullets. But each day went by without any orders to halt construction—so they kept on working and they kept on building.

When President Lincoln was finally told of all the metal being used at the Capitol, his response was short and clear: That is as it should be. The American people needed to be reminded, he believed, that even in a time of war, the work would go on; that even when the nation itself was in doubt, the future was being secured; and that on that distant day when the guns fell silent, a national capitol would stand, with a statue of freedom at its peak, as a symbol of unity in the land still mending its divisions.

There’s your stimulus priorities: education in the lede, construction in the main story. No doubt this is reflective of political realities, and Obama is nothing if not a political realist. (Who knows? Maybe trying to sneak $50 million in arts funding back into the stimulus while doing one’s best not to mention the subject counts as pragmatism.) But let’s bounce something unrealistic off of that.

As part of a proposed transition to a society in which self-organized groups contribute more to what he calls “high-energy democracy,” the legal/political philosopher Robert Unger suggests this:

An example of such a reform would be to reserve part of the tax favor received by tax-protected charitable gifts to independent social trust funds, administered by trustees drawn from different walks of life. Groups in civil society could apply to such funds for grants, as they now do to private foundations. We would have expanded the resource base of voluntary action.

—Roberto Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, from Politics (new edition), p. xcviii

It’s easy to imagine what this would look like in an arts funding context. Donations to arts organizations would still be tax-deductible, but on the receiving end, the NEA would skim off a percentage. Sound like a scam? Actually, it happens all the time—it’s not uncommon in colleges and universities, for example. If I give $100 to my alma mater’s scholarship fund, I’m really only giving a portion of that—maybe $85 to $95. The remainder is taken by the university to cover operating budgets and administrative costs. (In reality, they would levy the assessment on the payout side. But you get the idea.)

According to the the NEA, charitable contributions to United States arts organizations totaled $13.5 billion in 2005 (the last year for which there’s data). A one-percent levy on that almost equals the NEA’s current yearly budget. A five-percent levy—and here’s where things get interesting—would, in six years, collect enough money (just over $4 billion) that the NEA could maintain their current funding level on interest alone, making the Endowment an actual endowment. (I’m assuming a standard four-percent endowment payout.)

I can think of objections aplenty to this plan, though some of them are mitigated:

• It won’t change anyone’s mind in Congress about arts funding. I don’t know, I think you could make a case: it’s money the government wouldn’t get anyway; it rewards private initiative; it could gradually wean the NEA off of budgetary appropriations. Try that one, Tom Coburn: give it six years, and you never have to worry about funding the arts again!
• Donors would be ticked off. Yeah, probably. But that doesn’t stop them from giving to universities and colleges. Stanford levies 8 percent; Yale 12 percent; Harvard varies by school, but tops out at 20 percent. Harvard still raised $651 million last year.
• Private donors would give less. That’s what traditional economics predicts, but as has been noted in this space, the available data suggests the opposite: that increased government spending on the arts creates more private philanthropy.

Here’s the fundamental objection to our funding plan, though. Is it realistic? Are you kidding? It’s not realistic at all. But what arts organizations and advocates should be asking—what they haven’t been asking for far too long—is why something like that is so unrealistic. Why do we take it for granted that such a scheme—any scheme that ambitious—isn’t likely to come to fruition? Because of governments? Markets? Both? Does it go against “human nature”? If so, is that nature unchangeable, or the result of societal structures that we assume are inherent and inevitable? The crucial question: what if they’re not?

Go back to that last point in the list for a minute, which circles back around to Unger, in a way. Traditional economics often seems to malfunction when dealing with the arts; while one might think that there must be some other economic factors at work, Unger raises the possibility that economics itself is coming up short. While we like to think that institutions and their structures are responses to our beliefs, our nature, &c., Unger continually insists on the reverse—that human nature, the “natural” laws governing politics and economics are actually the result of our institutional structures. If the arts don’t follow economic “rules,” that may be because the structures of arts organizations are crucially different. And if that’s true, then economic or political “reality” may be malleable in as much as we make the corresponding institutions malleable.

Here’s what Unger has to say about realism:

Deriding both popular mobilization and ideological contests, this disenchanted idea of politics sees its work to strike compromises with powerful interests, the better to solve disparate practical problems. It imagines the existence of a range of “issues,” each of them calling for sober solutions that respect the constraints of political as well as technical feasibility…. Once established, this conception of politics in turn bestows a halo of realism on the arrangements and practices that made it plausible in the first place.

The votaries of this deflationary view of politics flatter themselves on their own realism. They believe that they have discarded the dangerous romantic illusions of an earlier age. They pride themselves on their practical attitude. Nevertheless, the outcome of their false practicality is to leave politics paralyzed, and the basic recognized problems of each society unsolved.

The reason for this apparent paradox is simple. The fundamental problems of a society—both those it acknowledges and those it does not—are entangled in its organization, and in the ideas that represent and sustain it. We cannot solve such problems until we reorganize some of the established arrangements and revise some of the entrenched assumptions. We do not need to reorganize them altogether, or all at once; in fact, we never can. If, however, we treat politics as no more than an exercise in interest-balancing, devoted to finding discrete solutions to separate problems, we never reach the presuppositions. We remain too captive to the limits of our situation to become true realists. From this captivity, calamity alone can release us.

Unger is, to be sure, embracing those dangerous romantic illusions with both arms—but he’s also reminding us that the basic right of democratic society is not having to take things for granted. If you believe in the importance of the arts to society, then why wouldn’t you think big? I feel like the whole discussion has reached the point of politely ignoring the possible, even the unlikely, in favor of the probable. Theoretically, at least, we have leverage over democracy—and not the other way around. But it takes practice to make that into reality.

OK, enough whining. Back to this month’s Topic of Fun™: government arts funding!

First, an update: according to this summary, courtesy of Talking Points Memo (and seriously, if that crew doesn’t pick up an online-only Pulitzer, you’ll know the fix is in), the $50 million funding boost for the NEA, torpedoed in the Senate, has been restored in conference negotiations. Accurate? We’ll see when the actual bill gets filed….

More later.

Update (2/13): Still there (Title VII, page 11).

Couldn’t call it unexpected, and I never had any real prospect of winning, but solely from an entertainment standpoint, this was totally worth fifty bucks:

Dear Mr. Guerrieri:

Thank you for your interest in the Pulitzer Prizes. We would like to accept your entry but it does not fit within our rules.

Submitted online material must have appeared on a Web site “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories.” In our guidelines, we urge entrants to ask themselves if they “genuinely fit the criteria” and we specify that an entry’s cover letter should provide “ample evidence” of an online-only news organization’s “primary devotion to original news reporting.” We do not find the requirements to have been met.

I am very sorry to disappoint you. Although entry fees are non-refundable, we will make an exception in your case because this is a transitional period for the Pulitzers. In due course, we will return your check.

Sincerely,

Sig Gissler, administrator
Pulitzer Prizes

That turned up in my inbox yesterday, a response to my submitting a spiral-bound exhibit of Soho the Dog posts, seeing as how the Pulitzer board had made such a big deal about allowing “online-only” entries this year. Let’s look at the details, shall we? (Heck, if I was writing for The New York Times, I could do a six-part series, and that Pulitzer would be in the bag.)

Submitted online material must have appeared on a Web site “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories.”

Classical music has over a thousand years of history. That’s not “ongoing” enough for you?

In our guidelines, we urge entrants to ask themselves if they “genuinely fit the criteria”

Hey, self—do you genuinely fit the criteria? No, but my blog does.

and we specify that an entry’s cover letter should provide “ample evidence” of an online-only news organization’s “primary devotion to original news reporting.”

My primary devotion is to my wife. Well, that and plagiarism….

We do not find the requirements to have been met.

By the way, here’s what I submitted as the bulk of my entry: reviews from last summer’s all-Carter Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. Until it was pointed out to me, I thought that I had actually gone out to Tanglewood for a week and reported on what I saw. Now I know I was at home the entire time.

OK, OK, I’m no Seymour Hersh. I’m no Woodward and Bernstein. I’m not even Walter Duranty. But if my focus is criticism (or if it was, say, commentary, to bring up another Pulitzer category), why am I getting penalized for not doing more “original reporting”—when, if I had submitted newspaper reviews, the original reporting done by the paper’s other reporters would be enough to get me in? Here’s what that Duranty-justifying press release says:

a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author’s body of work or for the author’s character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition

And yet the specific pieces I entered in the competition won’t even be considered because apparently I didn’t sufficiently justify my body of work. Guys, warn me when you’re going to unleash that kind of cognitive dissonance—I need time to appropriately pair it with the proper mind-altering chemicals.

Like I said, I didn’t have any expectation of winning. (I figured that if forcing jurors to read my best stuff led to even one bit of freelance work down the line, that pays for the entry fee several times over.) But the Pulitzer Board’s passive-aggressive attitude towards online writing is the comedy gift that keeps on giving.

At least—

In due course, we will return your check.

That’ll pay for a few days of drinking like a reporter, anyway.