Yesterday, Randy Nordschow had a fine rant (that’s sincere, by the way; a good rant is not as easy as it looks) over at NewMusicBox about the relative pretentiousness of classical and rock music. Go read it; it’ll get you thinking about comparisons between the two genres. Of course, me being me, after a few hours, my brain settled on the most tangential comparison possible:

What’s the classical equivalent of a one-hit wonder?

Which is not as trivial a question as it might seem. Let’s define terms: I’m calling a one-hit wonder a singer/act/composer that comes up with one piece that makes a big enough splash to become part of the common culture, after which he/she/they never do much of anything again. We have to be careful: there are plenty of composers who are only remembered for one piece, but that doesn’t mean they were one-hit wonders in their own time: as a quick example, Fromental Halévy is known today solely for his opera La Juive, but the man actually had over 30 others staged in Paris. We won’t count composers who died young, and those cut down on the cusp of fame by madness (I’m thinking of Hans Rott and his amazing Symphony in e minor) rate only an honorable mention.

Which leaves—who? The only viable example I could come up with was Paul Dukas, who wrote one honest-to-god brilliant, astonishing, magical, all-time masterpiece, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and only fourteen other published works, none of which gained any real foothold in the repertoire. (Apologies in advance to all the Ariane and La Péri fans out there, but in objective terms, it’s true.)

I’m sure I’m forgetting some obvious candidates, but the point is, they’re comparatively rare. One reason springs to mind immediately: popular music is far more beholden to market forces than classical music, which means the business is far more cutthroat. A past hit isn’t going to get you very far with your record company if your current effort isn’t selling. And given the relatively low overhead for producing a single, there’s far more incentive to try somebody new. The pop music industry is based more around product than people: the personality of the artist may be a marketing tool, but the popularity of the song is the bottom line.

It’s easy to see why, at one time, the classical music industry would have been based more around the composer than the music itself. Before recordings, there was much more effort required to sample a composer’s wares. After an initial hit or two, the composer’s name would have functioned much like a brand, a signal to the concertgoer or music purchaser of a certain expectation of quality. The real question is, why has this system persisted?

Partially it’s because the classical/”new music” community is small and powered by personal relationships. Partially it’s because classical marketing departments have no idea how to market new music, so they market the composer instead (leading to a situation very similar to the old days). But one reason is not so obvious: the fact that most classical concerts are planned at least a year in advance, and usually much farther out than that. You need to pin down your conductor and your soloists, and you need to have the program decided in time to appeal to your subscribers. And I think that’s killing the market for classical one-hit wonders.

Let’s think about the Pulitzer prizes for a minute. Supposedly, it’s given to the best new piece of the year. In reality, that hardly ever happens; it’s much more of a distinguished career award. (Ned Rorem certainly deserves a Pulitzer, but does anybody ever play Air Music? Same thing with say, Harbison and The Flight Into Egypt.) Nevertheless, once a year, the Pulitzers are dished out, and, for a bit, a particular piece of contemporary classical music has some buzz attached to it. But by the time any classical organization gets around to fitting said piece into their schedule, that buzz is long gone. Neither Adams’ Transmigration of Souls nor Stucky’s Second Concerto have made it to Boston yet, and I would bet last year’s Boston-premiered winner (Wyner’s Chiavi in mano, which I missed, but which all the reviews made out to be that modern rarity, a highbrow crowd-pleaser) won’t show up anywhere else for two or three seasons. By that point, the buzz around the piece will be forgotten, which leaves the marketing department to fall back on their standby, promoting the composer.

I know that the idea of an apprenticeship is more important in the classical world, that you should build up a solid career bit by bit, rather than aim for sudden, one-time success. There’s something to that, but I think the lack of any possible flashes-in-the-pans does classical music a disservice. The great thing about one-hit wonders is their very unpredictability; think of all those killer singles by obscure bands that became everybody’s favorite song for a particular summer. Isn’t there some classical equivalent for that?

(P.S.: I thought this post up this morning while walking through the woods with critic-at-large Moe. We get back to the car, flip on the radio, and guess what’s playing? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Freaky.)

One of my favorite ways to procrastinate is to use the power and breadth of the Internet to dredge up ephemera. (As if you hadn’t noticed.) But I have to say, the Internet is letting me down on at least one search: pianists with more than ten fingers. I’ve been looking into every dusty corner of this worldwide web for any evidence of such a phenomenon. And I’m more than a little surprised to come up empty-handed.

Mind you, there’s no shortage of fictional extra digits out there. There’s the 12-fingered fellow from the movie Gattaca. There’s this journalistically suspect 14-fingered prodigy. The Marvel comic The New Defenders (an X-Men spin-off) briefly featured a 12-fingered mutant pianist named—wait for it—Adrian Leverkuhn Castorp (why they didn’t just throw “Krull” and “Aschenbach” in there while they were at it, I’ll never know). On a more serious note, there’s Ben Fountain’s haunting short story “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers,” which features two eponymously polydactyl characters.

But nary a real pianist to be had. I found a guitarist (the marvelous “Hound Dog” Taylor), and there’s at least a couple of references to violinist Giuseppe Tartini’s alleged supernumerary appendages (his Wikipedia entry mentions the possibility).

Again, no pianists. Why not? Polydactyly is not that uncommon: most web sources (like this one) estimate that it occurs in 1 out of every 500 children. Now, most of those extra fingers are non-functional, lacking adequate bone and muscle structure, but not always. Given those odds, I would expect at least a handful of examples in the five centuries or so of western keyboard music. So what’s going on?

There’s the very real possibility that most poor polydactyl children had their extra fingers hacked off before they had a chance to crack open their Hanon. Today, the standard medical recommendation still seems to be surgical removal, even in cases of functional digits. You can probably imagine how much more pressure there would have been back in the day, when people could still get irrationally worked up about witchcraft and satanic possession. (Yes, “back in the day.” So I’m an optimist.)

But more than that, while most people would assume that hands that go to “11” would be a boon in playing the piano, I’m not so sure. The piano repertoire is specifically designed for ten fingers. It’s comfortable for ten fingers. When it’s not comfortable, there’s centuries of tradition on how to get around the trouble spots—using ten fingers. This all goes back to something I’ve frequently pondered—the fact that human physicality is so intricately worked into the fabric of the music we have that we don’t even think about it. Fiction writers might think that eleven or twelve fingers would make piano technique easier (and it sure makes for a great metaphor), but seeing as how that technique is nothing more that the collective wisdom of countless boringly ten-fingered pianists, it’s just as possible that the extra digits might make playing our idiosyncratically engineered piano terribly awkward.

Actually, when I said I couldn’t find a single pianist? I lied: I did track down one. Unfortunately, I don’t know his name. He was a German-born machinist living in Boston sometime in the 19th century.

[He had] one index finger, two middle fingers, two ring fingers, and two pinkies. … [T]his rare genetic malformation is called a mirror hand. The lower arm beneath the elbow is also symmetric. Whereas a normal lower arm is composed of two bones, a radius and an ulna, this lower arm has two ulnae and no radius. While this impeded the turning motion of the man’s lower arm, he did not let it stop him from enjoying his favorite hobby—piano playing!

That’s from the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard University. That’s right, they still have this man’s hand. And heck, yeah, there’s a picture. (WARNING: above link contains image that may seriously gross you out, unless you’re an 11-year-old boy, in which case it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.)

Still, I’m convinced he can’t be the only one out there. Anybody else? Just stop playing for a minute and raise your hand. I can count.

A quick one: Alex Ross points to the latest from “Weird Al” Yankovic (whose MySpace page is always a source of myriad delights).

Remind me again why this guy isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

How many conceptual links does it take to get from Charles Darwin to the father of chance music to my old hometown of Chicago? Would you believe one?

From Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary: Darwin discovers the origin of graphic notation.

[June 7^th, 1835; Guasco]

I called in the evening at the house of the “Governador”; the Signora was a Limerian & affected blue-stockingism & superiority over her neighbours. Yet this learned lady never could have seen a Map. M^r Hardy told me that one day a coloured Atlas was lying on a Pianoforte & this lady seeing it exclaimed, “Esta es contradanca”. This is a country dance! “que bonita” how pretty!

Which is pretty much exactly what John Cage did 143 years later with his piece A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity. (Cage had already done a similar piece about New York; hey, we wear that “Second City” badge with pride.) From the description in the online Cage catalog:

The concept of this work is to go to the places (in Chicago or any other city, by assembling a chance determined list of 427 addresses, grouping them in 10 groups of 2, 61 groups of 3 and 56 groups of 4) and either listen to, perform at and/or make a recording of the sounds at those locations.

(Hence the dances: quicksteps in 2, waltzes in 3, and marches in 4.) This is Cage’s map, from the website of Peter Gena, who produced the first realization of the piece for the 1982 New Music America festival:


Between 2001 and 2003, Robert Pleshar did a new realization of A Dip in the Lake, which you can listen to over at UbuWeb. The waltzes are my favorite, but only because they boast the greatest concentration of sites in Niles, where I grew up. The whole thing is typically Cagean, that is to say, totally unassuming, yet at the same time, completely and unexpectedly absorbing.

Extra bonus material! Charles Darwin, music critic:

[June 14^th, 1832; Rio de Janiero]

Dined with M^r Aston; a very merry pleasant party; in the evening went with M^r Scott (the Attache) to hear a celebrated pianoforte player. – He said Mozarts overtures were too easy. I suppose in the same proportion as the music which he played was too hard for me to enjoy.

Ouch.

Update (10/26/06): By sheer coincidence, Marc Geelhoed reports that Peter Gena was just awarded the Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government in recognition of his distinguished career in arts education. Félicitations!

In other churches, having lost every vestige of sanctity, music is regarded outright as one of those forms of moral amusement in which men may indulge without sin, in the church, and on the Sabbath; and they plunge their hands into their pockets and pay for professional singing. Then King David finds himself in the hands of the Philistines. The unwashed lips that all the week sang the disgustful words of glorious music in the operas, now sing the rapture of the old Hebrew bard, or the passion of the suffering Redeemer, with all the inspiration of vanity and brandy….

… And thus music, that should nurse hymns upon its bosom, abuses them, like a cruel step-mother, and thrusts them away. Hundreds of hymns have been served worse than Herod served the innocents—for he killed them outright; but a hymn cursed by musical associations, cannot die, but creeps along like a crippled bird…
…
Are trouble and music twin brothers? Is there no way of edification through music, or must we regard and endure it as a necessary evil?

—Henry Ward Beecher,
New Star Papers; or Views and
Experiences of Religious Subjects
(1859)

I hear and read this (or some variation) a lot coming from venerable classical performance organizations: We have a strong commitment to new music. Here’s the New York Philharmonic’s version:

Placing newer compositions alongside established classics has historically been one of the Philharmonic’s responsibilities to its community.

This season, the Philharmonic has two world premieres and one American premiere. The National Symphony::

By adding new works to the repertoire, the National Symphony Orchestra insures a legacy for future generations.

How are they doing? Five world premieres this season. Not bad by comparison, but that’s still out of over 100 programmed pieces. How about the home team?

Continuing the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s proud and longstanding tradition of introducing new music from the world’s most important composers, the 2006-07 season will feature the world premieres of four new works…

As you can tell, the standard commitment to new music consists of four or five new pieces a season (if that many) and a few old-school “modern” works tucked into programs as preludes to standard fare. If you mention the rather paltry smorgasbord of contemporary sounds, the usual response involves money, more specifically, its scarcity.

So what would it cost to make a real commitment to new music? I’m talking about an ensemble-commissioned piece on each concert. Sound daunting? Not really.

Let’s take the Boston Symphony, for example (since I have their schedule handy). They do about 30 concert programs a year. So here’s what you do: commission ten pieces a year. Let’s say each commission is $15,000. That might be a little cheap for the BSO, but throw in a promise to perform the piece once more within the next three seasons. So if we call the first-year commissions Y₁, this is how we start off:

Year 1: 10Y₁
Year 2: 4Y₁
Year 3: 3Y₁
Year 4: 3Y₁

But then you’ll have ten second-year commissions (Y₂):

Year 1: 10Y₁
Year 2: 10Y₂+4Y₁
Year 3: 4Y₂+3Y₁
Year 4: 3Y₂+3Y₁
Year 5: 3Y₂

See where this is going? Starting in the fourth season, you have 20 pieces getting their first or second performance:

Year 4: 10Y₄+4Y₃+3Y₂+3Y₁=20 concerts

What about the other ten? Well, a contractual obligation with each commission will be that, after the program’s been running for seven or eight seasons, the other ten concerts have to include a piece commissioned under the program. (You have to put it in the contracts, otherwise the marketing people will weasel out of it.) Music director’s choice: this lets you re-visit commissions that have been particularly successful or interesting or popular. We’ll call these Y_wc (wild cards). So Year X looks like this:

10Y_x+4Y_x-1+3Y_x-2+3Y_x-3+10Y_wc=30 concerts

So what’s this going to cost? Each year’s commissions will total $150,000. Assuming a 4% rate of return, that would require an endowed fund of $3,750,000. Let’s round it up to a cool $4 million until we see whether Bernanke has any clue about this whole inflation thing. So there you are: $4 million to have a commissioned piece on every concert. In perpetuity.

Four million dollars is a lot of money. But remember, it’s a one-time expense. And that’s for the BSO, which has an annual operating budget of around $70 million and an endowment of over $300 million. So in that case, we’re talking about a capital campaign to increase their endowment by a little over one percent. The smaller the ensemble and/or season, the smaller the capital you’d need to raise. Let’s say you’re a chamber group that does a 12-concert season. You’d need four new works every season. To commission four pieces a year at $5,000 per piece:

$20,000/0.04=$500,000 endowment

How about a community chorus that does three concerts every year? You’d only need one new piece per season:

$1,000/0.04=$25,000 endowment

Now, heaven knows there’s enough composers in the world to fill out even the largest iteration of this scheme. And it would give enough freedom so that every school and idiom and persuasion would get their innings. But it’s still a quantum leap from any current big-ticket classical (as opposed to specifically “new music”) organization’s programming. Do I think any of the old-line ensembles are going to take me up on this? I’m not holding my breath. But it’s at least a way to put commissions and premieres in financial perspective: the next time you hear sombody touting their commitment to new music, you’ll know just how much money they’d need to put where their mouth is.

Apparently, this blog has generated enough traffic that today, the first bit of spam showed up in the comments. Thank you for your support! In honor of the milestone, here’s a special weekend episode.

Last week, Phil over at “Dial M” had a great post about the tricky business of trying to bend one’s critical mind around the whole idea of sampling, and he expressed proper skepticism about the tenuous theory that hip-hop artists choose their beats and samples with a sense of “ironic distance.” I always assumed that it was pretty much the same thing we all do when we find a really wicked piece of music and immediately begin pestering everyone we know to listen to it. You have to hear this. And the more I thought about it, the more I decided that the whole concept of “ironic distance” was dissing hip-hop musicianship. Because real musicians are hardly ever ironic.

Phil illustrated his his post with a neat video of the Beastie Boys’ Mixmaster Mike doing his thing. (If this is all new to you, watch this video of Mixmaster Mike and Q-Bert tossing off a string of object lessons in old-school scratching.) The Beastie Boys have always been my favorite hip-hop group. Why? Because they’re nerds like me, essentially.

Actually, no. I doubt they’re anywhere near as nerdy as I have been and still am. But there’s still nerdiness there, in the best sense of the word. Take my favorite album of theirs, Paul’s Boutique. Throughout the album, there’s a recurrent riff on the common trope of rappers’ boasts, a series of variations on the formula:

I’m as/more [attribute] as/than [cultural reference]

Now a couple of these are hip-hop references, like:

I seen him get stabbed I watched the blood spill out
He had more cuts than my man Chuck Chillout

But for the most part, they seem to have taken particular delight in making the cultural references as esoteric and off-the-wall as possible. For example:

Bum cheese on rye with ham and prosciutto
Got more Louie than Philip Rizzuto

Or then there’s this string:

Got more stories than J.D.’s got Salinger
I hold the title and you are the challenger
I’ve got money like Charles Dickens
Got the girlies in the Coupe like the Colonel’s got the chickens
Always go out dapper like the Harry S Truman
And I’m madder than Mad’s Alfred E. Neuman

And my favorite:

There’s more to me than you’ll ever know
And I’ve got more hits than Sadaharu Oh

This is transcendent nerdiness. In order to get the joke, you have to be enough of a baseball trivia junkie as I am. But the reference is so far out that, if you don’t get it, you’re not even aware of what you’re missing. If they were trying to be smarter or more hip than their audience, the Boys would have had to drop a name that the listener wouldn’t have thought of, but nevertheless could recognize once presented with it. But Sadaharu Oh? That’s just a nice piece of candy tossed out to fellow baseball nerds.

The great thing about being a nerd is, you’re guilelessly generous and enthusiastic about whatever it is you’re a nerd about. Irony doesn’t even enter into it. In his post, Phil includes this quote, from Prince Paul, asked whether he was being ironic in his sampling of a Hall and Oates song:

PP: Wow. That’s pretty deep. But I think the bottom line is just: that was a good song! . . . We didn’t consciously think of “Hall and Oates,” “Resurrecting,” you know, “Postmodern.” We was just like, “Wow. Remember that song? That’s hot!”

Non-musicians may see irony in music, but musicians? We’re all music nerds. We keep pestering you to listen to whatever piece we happen to have just discovered, and we don’t give two hoots about whether other people think it’s cool or corny or what. I’m forever grateful to the fellow musicians who got me hooked on Viennese operetta, Myron Floren, Whitney Houston, western swing, and Sammy Davis, Jr.’s cover of the theme from “Shaft.” (Especially that last one. Thanks, Jim.) Let’s call it Guerrieri’s Law of True Musicianship: real musicians can be identified by their temperamental inability to keep their guilty pleasures to themselves. In fact, they’re not even all that guilty about it. Their eyes light up, and they get this big smile on their face, because they know that they’re about to play you something that’ll make your life just a little more dazzling. You have to hear this.

Anna Russell, R.I.P.

You can aurally bask in the presence of genius here.

So now two of the singers I’m accompanying this semester are singing Samuel Barber’s “Sea-Snatch,” which means I’ve been working it up again. (I swear, repertoire leaves my fingers in a matter of minutes.) You can hear Leontyne Price sing it here; it’s only thirty seconds long, so the entire song fits within most online retailers’ sound clips.

“Sea-Snatch” isn’t technically that difficult, but it’s tricky for me, because I have to turn my accuracy monitor off when I perform it. If I start to listen for right and wrong notes, it’s all over, because the piece goes by so fast. So I have to figure out how to psych myself up to just plunge in and hope for the best. The way I do this is to pretend that what Barber was really doing was writing a rock and roll song. Now, I don’t know that Barber even knew what rock and roll was (he probably must have heard some of it at some point), and I certainly have no evidence whatsoever to claim that “Sea-Snatch” was written with that sound in his ear. But in this case, a completely unfounded stylistic assumption makes the piece work for me.

I don’t know if other performers do this, but I do it a lot. And often the stylistic choices are wildly off-base. The easiest way for me to get the phrasing right in “Parto! ma tu ben mio,” Sesto’s aria from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, is to imagine that it’s gospel music. I finally started to get the hang of Joseph Marx’s “Marienlied” by playing it like a Cole Porter ballad. For me, baroque music and bebop have an odd affinity. (It works in chronological reverse, too: I often think Stephen Sondheim to be Schubert reincarnated.) And the list goes on and on.

I think I first started doing this when I was an undergrad. I remember playing Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock” for a clarinetist friend’s recital. At the time, I had been listening to a lot of Schubert on the fortepiano, and I thought it would be neat to try and emulate that delicacy and transparency on a modern instrument. We had a coaching with my friend’s teacher, John Bruce Yeh. John would have none of it. “Play it like Wagner,” he said. He was right.

And then there’s Exhibit A in why I think musicians need to know as much music as they possibly can (not to mention how I often miss the painfully obvious). I had the good fortune to study piano with Dmitry Paperno, who studied with Alexander Goldenweiser, who studied with Alexander Siloti, who studied with Rubenstein and Liszt (making me by far the most unlikely and wayward pianist of the great Russian tradition ever). Paperno was no slouch when it came to contemporary music; he had played Shostakovich for Shostakovich, he was friends with Shchedrin, and he knew brilliant Ukranian atonalists I had never heard of. But he had never played or taught Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke when I brought it in one day. I had been fascinated with Schoenberg since high school, but I had never quite figured out how to get the notes from the page into my fingers in a convincing way. Paperno figured it out in about ten seconds: it’s Romantic music. Play it like Brahms.

Well, duh. Not the first or the last time I’ve walked through a room without seeing the elephant in it. But what if I hadn’t known anything about Romantic style? (Not unlikely; given my teenage preferences, if it hadn’t been for the piano, I wouldn’t have learned about that repertoire until much later.) What if no one had come along with the patience to prod my dense self into seeing the connection? What if I had stubbornly insisted that Schoenberg was Schoenberg, and to interpret his music in light of an “outdated” tradition was anachronistic and heretical?

I’ve become convinced that, after a certain point, a big part of music education just becomes a daily effort to apply what you already know. (Every time I do a Chopin piece, I still hear Professor Paperno scolding me into a legato line: “All your friends are singers. How can you play this so badly?”) With all the stylistic balkanization going on in the classical world, all the specialization, all the concern with performance practice, I run into a lot of performers who think they “don’t know how to do” early music, or Baroque music, or (especially) contemporary music. Yes, you do. If you know Bach, and it reminds you of Bach, play it like Bach. If you know Broadway, and it reminds you of Broadway, play it like Broadway. If people tell you it’s inappropriate, screw ’em. I’ve heard far too many concerts in which the performers were so concerned about being stylistically “appropriate” that they forgot to make music. If you’re convinced, the audience will be convinced, at least for the duration of the piece. Maybe they’ll pick apart your choices after the concert. But that’s infinitely better then them falling asleep while it’s going on.

I have an article over at NewMusicBox today on musical accompaniments to the decline and fall of everything. If you’ve never read NewMusicBox, stop wasting your time with me and start patronizing them (in the good way) immediately! If you do read them, you can spend the rest of the day wondering how I got in there.