I’m working in a coffee shop this morning, and they’re piping in some odd smooth-jazz/Muzak version of “Good Vibrations,” and a clarinet has the melody, and darned if it doesn’t make the song into a convincing klezmer hora/freilach pairing. Brian Wilson is G—d!

It seems like a good time to check in on that alleged Death of Classical Music. But first, let’s talk a little bit about non-functional demand curves.

The what now? Hey, you’re smarter than you think—even if you’ve never cracked an economics textbook, you probably have an intuitive sense for the traditional, functional demand curve: all other things remaining equal, as the price of a good goes down, demand goes up, and vice versa. But there are also non-functional demand curves, when the relationship between price and demand isn’t so well-behaved.

The classic paper on non-functional demand is economist Harvey Liebenstein’s “Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumer Demand” (JSTOR link), published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May, 1950. As Liebenstein puts it:

[T]he proposed analysis is designed to take account the desire of people to wear, buy, do, consume, and behave like their fellows; the desire to join the crowd, be “one of the boys,” etc.—phenomena of mob motivations and mass psychology either in their grosser or more delicate aspects. This is the type of behaviour involved in what we shall call the “bandwagon effect.” On the other hand, we shall also attempt to take account of the search for exclusiveness by individuals through the purchase of distinctive clothing, foods, automobiles, houses, or anything else that individuals may believe will in some way set them off from the mass of mankind—or add to their prestige, dignity, and social status.

The bandwagon effect is the most familiar: makers of trendy goods can charge more for them, even if there’s no danger of a supply shortage—demand goes up even though the price doesn’t go down. Liebenstein, as he hints in the above passage, divides the second category in two: a “snob effect,” where a good becomes desirable simply because most people don’t have it; and a “Veblen effect” (named for the originator of the concept of conspicuous consumption), where a decrease in the price of a high-status good decreases its perceived status, and thus its demand.

I’m not trying to argue that classical music falls into one or the other of these categories—one of the great misguided assumptions in most reports of classical music’s “death” is that classical music itself is a single product, rather than an umbrella categorization of a host of varying (and sometimes competing) goods. But I do propose that where one’s opinion falls on the health of classical music has a lot to do with how one imagines its demand curve, and what kind of a curve one would like it to be.

Basically: people who say classical music is dying are doing so, in large part, because they don’t think that classical music generates enough of a bandwagon effect. (Some will often go further, charging classical-music organizations with actively promoting a snob effect in their marketing.) A lot of this arises from a comparison with pop, and is usually follwed by a prescription to present and market classical music more like pop culture. Pop culture dominates the market because it generates lots of bandwagon effect—it’s designed to. (Think of the way Hollywood blockbusters are marketed, and the way they open in thousands of theaters to maximize the return on their short-lived bandwagons.) Unless it can follow suit, it’s claimed, classical music will be left hopelessly in the dust. Not that classical music doesn’t have its own bandwagon effects—Peter Gelb, for example, has shown a fair talent for generating buzz at the Met—but it’s never enough in this kind of analysis.

There’s almost always an accompanying argument that classical music must be dying because it’s lost the competition for mindshare/media attention/cultural relevance. The concept is similar to another economic idea, a close relative of bandwagons. It’s called a network effect. The best example of this is a telephone: the value of a telephone to a potential buyer has a lot to do with how many other people are within the same telephone network. The fanciest phone in the world doesn’t do you a whole lot of good if it’ll only connect you to two or three other numbers. In the same vein, critics will say that classical music doesn’t really matter anymore, because only a small portion of the potential audience listens to it.

So when people ask if classical music is dying, in economic language, what they’re really asking is some combination of these two questions:

1. Are current benefits from non-functional demand sufficient for classical music organizations to remain economically viable?

2. Is the ultimate value of an artistic pursuit necessarily dependent on its ability to generate network effects?

I would answer those questions “yes” and “no”; thus, I do not think that classical music is dying.

I admit that my answer to the first question is based on anecdotal evidence; enough organizations, ensembles, and recording companies seem to be making enough money to be hanging in there, still doing what they’re doing. And enough musicians seem to come along, generation after generation, finding a way to make a living. It might actually be possible to collect enough relevant data to settle this question one way or another. I think that both the non-utilitarian and fragmented natures of the product would make such data pretty slippery; still, at least in theory, it’s a testable hypothesis.

But the second question, in reality, isn’t economic at all. It’s philosophical. And this is why this argument has gone on, and will go on, for so, so long. There’s no way to prove that question one way or another—either you believe that art has an intrinsic value regardless of the size of its audience, or you don’t.

Rudolf Serkin, infamously, once played the entirety of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as an encore. “When I finished,” he remembered, “there were only four people left in the hall—Adolph Busch, Artur Schnabel, Alfred Einstein and myself.” Did the value of Serkin’s recital dwindle along with the number listening? Hardly. My sanguine view of the survival of classical music is reflected in that illustrious trio staying in their seats. There will always be an audience whose demand for the music will remain purely functional, immune to fads, buzz, trends, what have you. Will it be smaller than the audience for this month’s pop sensation? Probably. Does that matter? Nope.

In honor of Leo Fender‘s birthday, Buddy Guy and his Stratocaster accompanying Big Mama Thornton in a 1965 rendition of her biggest hit, “Hound Dog”—a 180 from Elvis’s cover.

Here’s a pending patent application with the World Intellectual Property Organization. The inventor is Michinobu Suzuki, working for a company called the Faith 21 Corporation. What, exactly, is this new product?

A musical instrument having a substance, which obtained by blending microparticles of a natural mineral such as graphite-silica emitting far-infrared radiation or minus ions with various coatings, applied and/or deposited in a definite part of the instrument body. Since this instrument can emit the far-infrared radiation or minus ions by itself or in the tone range thereof during musical performance, it can soothe the heart of the musician or listeners around her/him. At the same time, attempts are made to improve the physiological effects of the far-infrared radiation or minus ions on the human body to thereby enhance natural healing ability and preventive effects against diseases.

I should find a Japanese speaker to translate the full description, although I doubt it would make a whole lot more sense. In the meantime, somewhere out there, Scriabin is updating his Christmas list.

When I was in grade school, there was a brief period of time when one of the nuns decided that I and another girl should learn how to read and transcribe braille. Why? I can only think of two reasons, both valid: 1) it would use up time I would have otherwise spent disrupting the classroom, or 2) they figured it was likelier than not that I would foolishly blind myself someday, and I might as well get a head start. Anyway, I was never very good at it—both my stylus work and my reading were painfully slow—but just for fun, I looked it up today, and it turns out that I still remembered most of the alphabet. (Puzzle for the day: figure out which English letter breaks the otherwise consistent pattern.)

Now here’s a little diversion. Braille can also be used in a rather intricate way to notate music—and most of the symbols overlap. Using the letter names of notes to translate words and names into music is an old trick, the most famous being the BACH motive (Bb-A-C-B-natural). But using braille as an intermediary, you get a whole new set of text-to-music translations. Here’s one:


(Notice that “the” gets its own symbol, one of the many contractions that make braille a challenge to learn—and a breeze to use once you get good at it.) You can already see a lot of the characteristics that would be common using text-to-braille-to-music. Accidentals don’t overlap with any letters, so everything’s diatonic. And since each symbol is both a pitch and a duration, you end up with these odd-meter, non-symmetric rhythms.

Not everything works. BACH actually fails because both B and A are fingering indications, which make no sense without a note to attach them to. The C symbol translates into a slur, though, so as long as it’s between two notes, it fits. Shostakovich’s DSCH adaptation is ironically hopeful:


Arnold Schoenberg becomes a jaunty little alphorn tune (complete with a suggested fingering, brought to you by the letter B):


This is just an idle game, but one that would have been appreciated by the inventor. Louis Braille, son of a saddlemaker, accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with one of his father’s awls at the age of three; the resulting infection spread to both eyes and he was permanently blind within the year. As a teenager, expanding on the work of Charles Barbier, who intended his raised dots as a military code, Braille codified the six-dot system for embossing wet paper with, yes, an awl—the tool that cost him his sight would also, in a symmetry too unlikely for fiction, land him in the Pantheon (literally: he was reinterred there in 1952). But Braille was also well-known as an organist and cellist, gaining compliments from the likes of Felix Mendelssohn. The transcription of music evolved side-by-side with that for text—Braille’s 1829 handbook, which introduced the new method, covered both. In a way, braille music is a lovely closed circle: touch to mind to ear and back to touch.

Transcribing music into braille by hand is a time-consuming process, but the computer can make it easier, for a price: programs such as GoodFeel and Toccata can translate from MIDI files, or piggyback on the music scanning software SharpEye—GoodFeel also works with Finale and Sibelius. Frustratingly, my attempts to render the graphics for this post in a useful way for visually-impaired computer users came to naught—apologies.

Off-topic: two months is still plenty of time for the Sophoclean inevitability to play out, but in the meantime, my brother Danny gets a worthy birthday present—by a single percentage point.

It is notoriously easier to write about things and people one does not really know very well. One has fewer doubts. But to write about one’s own country was a tortured enterprise. I knew too much. I saw too many trees. I sometimes could prove one thing or its contrary, with equal ease. I was embarrassed by the exceptions. I questioned every idea and watched every word. In my younger days sentimental patriotism was the fashion. In my anxiety to correct such prejudices, was I too eager to demolish sound and durable notions? I was afraid to be too conservative and, at almost the same time, too ready to follow new intellectual fashions, the rage among contemporary intelligentsia, to embrace seductive new theories which might be obsolete before the book appeared in print.

—Luigi Barzini, The Italians, 1964

Here’s a tantalizing might-have-been. At some point in the early 1960s, Leonard Bernstein asked Robert Lowell to write the text for what would eventually become Bernstein’s Symphony no. 3, Kaddish. Lowell mentioned it in a Christmas Eve 1962 letter to Elizabeth Bishop:

I’ve had the worse experience, 1 of grinding out like a machine things I’ll never use. Ten sonnets of Nerval, that vanish to nothing in English, words for a symphony for the dead, that Leonard Bernstein wanted me to try and have so far produced a bilge of declamation.

In the end, of course, Bernstein rather infamously wrote his own text for the symphony. How and when Lowell’s part in the project came to an end isn’t clear—but Lowell’s “Three Poems for Kaddish” did eventually turn up, posthumously, in a 1979 issue of Ploughshares. They were reprinted in the 2003 edition of Lowell’s Collected Poems.

Like Bernstein, Lowell uses his text to address God directly, but in place of Bernstein’s defiance is a wry empathy: twice, Lowell calls the almighty “poor little Father.” Lowell seems to imply a division into seasons (suggesting that there may have been a planned fourth poem). The first is summer, images of light and heat hinting at environmental and nuclear holocausts.

[W]e think the sun draws nearer day by day.
…
[W]e bake our hearts out on the sands.
We worship thee, Oh bathers’ sun,
and in our terror ask if Solomon
in all his beauty was arrayed like thee.
…
Because we were forgetful of God’s ways,
will he rejoice and watch our planet run
like a black coffin round the sun
with frigid repetitions of his praise?

Then an allusion to Psalm 137: “How can I sing a new song,/ rolled stem and blossom/ in this strange land?/ Can God destroy us in the act of praise?”

The second poem shifts to spring, in the form of the Deluge of Noah:

Was God sure
that our extinction was our only cure?

Men saw the heavens’ open windows pour
destruction on the land for forty days;
from sun to sun, they filled the earth with praise,
but now we know the Lord of Hosts is poor.
…
Look in our fallible and foolish glass,
your own face stares at you like withered grass!

This sets up the third poem, where winter descends like an ice age. While fisherman cut holes in the frozen river, Lowell hears echoes of “the saber-tooth and mastodon… they rule with shaggy, crushing stubbornness.” The impersonal machinery of technology gives way to the savage machinery of nature.

… The clock-
maker has no surprises for the clock.
…
Our hands have turned creation on its head.
Oh Father, do not bite your lip and frown;
it hardly matters now if we made God,
or God made us. Both suffer and exist.

A Bernstein-Lowell collaboration, in theory, seems like a dream: both volatile forces, voracious reworkers of the culture, creators of uncomfortably personal art whose “confessional” personas were as carefully constructed and invented as any of their works. There’s a possibility that Bernstein decided the stage wasn’t big enough for both of them. But comparing Lowell’s poems with Bernstein’s own texts, there’s also a sense that Bernstein may have found Lowell’s contributions too polished, too “traditional” in their intricate rhyme and meter. Maybe the poems weren’t raw enough or brazen enough—Bernstein’s speaker seems a rebellious child, finally grown up enough to challenge the father as an equal. Lowell, who had ample experience as the rebellious child, instead opted to portray a God brought down to our level, afflicted with an all-too-human disappointment. (Our Father, who wert in heaven, welcome to the club.)

For me, the really interesting wild-card in this story is Allen Ginsberg. Because I think parts of Lowell’s Kaddish seem to be consciously or subconsciously picking up on themes from Ginsberg’s Kaddish. Ginsberg wrote his Kaddish, a long poem on the death of his mother Naomi, between 1957 and 1959. Ginsberg frames the recitation of his mother’s life with visions of sunlight:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon….

And then:

Toward the Key in the window—and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk—in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty

We learn later that the sunlight “key” is from a letter Ginsburg’s mother wrote to him, which he quotes: “The key is in the window, the key is the sunlight at the window—Get married Allen don’t take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight at the window.” Ginsberg contrasts this with his mother dying in the hospital:

But that the key should be left behind—at the window—the key in the sunlight—to the living—that can take
that slice of light in hand—and turn the door—and look back see
Creation glistening backwards to the same grave, size of universe,
size of the tick of the hospital’s clock on the archway over the white door—

This is all similar to the sun imagery in the first of Lowell’s poems, especially when he says:

I think our little span has reached its end,
that henceforth only ruin will regard
the breathless planets and the sun descend
aeons around an earth whose crust is hard.

Lowell’s Psalm 137 allusion, the futility of his song, also has a counterpart in Ginsberg:

Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death

Lowell knew Ginsberg. In 1959, Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso visited Lowell at his house. Lowell didn’t think much of the whole movement; after the visit, he would write to Bishop:

They are phony in [a] way because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent. But in another way, they are pathetic and doomed. How can you make a go for long by reciting so-so verse to half-jeering swarms of college students? However, they are trying, I guess to write poetry.

But Lowell liked Kaddish. After the visit, he wrote to Ginsberg:

Well, I enjoy Kaddish much more. It’s really melodious, nostalgic, moving, liturgical. Maybe it ought to be shorter—the manner sometimes almost writes itself—probably there’s too much Whitman. And I do find it a bit too conventional, eloquent and liturgical. Well, it’s well done, felt and a good poem.

Presented with Bernstein’s scheme, did Lowell see an opportunity to rewrite Ginsberg’s Kaddish in his own manner? Certainly the results are wildly different, Ginsberg’s stream-of-consciousness reminiscences a long way from Lowell’s lofty detachment. But many of Lowell’s poems, in their early drafts, are at least a little closer to Ginsberg’s style. Lowell often would write blank verse at first, imposing rhyme and meter as he revised. And as he rewrote, personal, autobiographical details often became more abstract, more universal. Interestingly, the formality of Lowell’s Kaddish poems is closer to his early 1940s style than the rhythmically looser experimentation of his successful, controversial breakthrough 1959 volume, Life Studies. It might seem contradictory for Lowell to call Ginsberg’s eloquence conventional—but not in the light of Lowell’s own style, where he tends to utilize the strictest formal discipline for the most shocking and disjointed of his visions.

If Bernstein really was after a more “far-out” text for the symphony, it would be a little bit of irony that, if Lowell was indeed echoing Ginsberg, the result wasn’t, well, Ginsberg-like enough for Bernstein. Bernstein never collaborated with Ginsberg, either—that would have been some pairing. And it’s intriguing to try and imagine how Lowell’s unsentimental, tightly-controlled power would have interacted with Bernstein’s sprawling symphonic ambitions. But that could be why it failed—you always assume that the collaboration of two potent personalities will produce a critical mass, but maybe the result is destined to be fission rather than fusion.

Special thanks to Jodi and Patrick, and my lovely wife, for the Lowellian birthday swag.

Don’t miss Geoff Edgers’ fine muckraking smackdown of the Citi Performing Arts Center in this morning’s Globe. It seems the awfully lawyer-heavy board of trustees voted to give the CEO a $1.2 million bonus at the same time* they were running a deficit, cutting their summer outdoor Shakespeare productions from three weeks to one, etc., etc.

In a phone interview on July 18, board chairman [John William] Poduska [Sr.] said the bonus was created to keep [CEO Josiah] Spaulding [Jr.] at the center. “Was it justified or not? Boy, I’ll tell you it was,” he said. “Joe was being courted by everyone under the sun. . . . He stayed and did a heck of a job.”

The millennium’s most ringing endorsement! At the rate they’re going, the place’ll be a Citibank branch office before “Riverdance” swings through town again.

*Update (8/21): Citi Center board chairman John Poduska, Sr. has sent a letter to supporters and donors in which he states that the decision to give Spaulding the bonus was made in 2001, just before a run of deficit years, although the expense was spread over the five years of his contract ($200K per year, plus accrued interest), which means that they were, in fact, setting aside money for the bonus at the same time they were cutting their support of other programs.

Head over to the BBC website, and you can listen to streaming audio of the past week’s worth of Proms. Thanks to a tip from Ear Trumpet, I just caught up with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s new Piano Concerto, played earlier today by Yefim Bronfman and the BBC Symphony, Salonen conducting, and a fun Brass Day concert featuring new pieces by Judith Bingham and Peter Wiegold, along with HK Gruber’s trumpet concerto Aerial (played by Håkan Hardenberger).

I think Salonen’s Concerto needs the spatial experience of live performance for its full effect; through radio, its non-stop activity, even in the slow movement, comes across like an overstuffed Victorian museum, every corner crammed with bric-a-brac to the point where your senses are inured to the relative quality of each object. This is my second go-round with the Gruber, but critic-at-large Moe’s first: the atmospheric opening movement made him quite serene, while the modernist bump-and-grind finale stimulated his appetite. (That’s a beef short-rib bone he’s chewing on, a souvenir of a Korean barbeque outing with my in-laws.)