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.

What’s it going to take to get you people out there to respect musicians? World records or something?

How about an ensemble of 8,000 drummers?
(Not impressed? How about 11,000?)

What about 105 consecutive hours of deejaying?

How about putting on a concert 994 feet below the surface of the North Sea?

230 banjos, anyone?

Alas, the 2,500 harmonicas didn’t quite pan out. But I’m guessing that Bad Brad Wheeler doesn’t give up that easily.

I’m no journalism critic, but this morning’s Globe has a classical review by freelancer David Perkins that reads the way I wish all classical reviews read. The lede is particularly sparkling:

Brünnhilde made a guest appearance Friday night in the middle of J.S. Bach’s joyous Cantata No. 51 (“Jauchzet Gott!”), a piece usually sung by lyric sopranos of the Kathleen Battle mold. On the word “Alleluja,” a remarkable high C came out of the mouth of Barbara Quintiliani and, parting audience members’ hair on the way, blazed out of Faneuil Hall into the night sky.

That might have just made my day.

A few days ago, while thinking over the latest chapter of Greg Sandow’s book-in-progress in performance, I remembered a great comic riff on avant-garde music. It’s from the 1964 movie of “The World of Henry Orient,” featuring Peter Sellers in one of his early Hollywood roles. He portrays a lecherous concert pianist who’s a) having an affair with a married woman, and b) being stalked by two teenage girls who have engineered a rather unlikely crush on him. (It’s actually a pretty innocent and sweet movie—it’s 1964, after all.) The film establishes Henry Orient’s musical bona fides with a set piece in Carnegie Hall: he performs a “modern” piano concerto (during which he gets lost, and only gets through the cadenza with hints from the conductor). If I recall it correctly, the climax of the piece involves an on-stage steam whistle.

Shockingly enough, YouTube, normally reliable for flagrant copyright infringement, was no help in finding this scene online, and nobody else seems to have uploaded it. (A DVD is available, but I’m cheap; you can watch the trailer here.) But you can at least listen to a portion of the concerto on the website of its composer, Ken Lauber. Elmer Bernstein scored the movie, but only after David Raskin was fired from the project, which left the concerto uncomposed at the time of filming. Lauber, a 23-year-old assistant in United Artists’ publishing division, got the nod. As he puts it:

The dialogue went something like this…

Mike Stewart [Lauber’s boss at UA]: “Hey kid. Can you write a 7 min. piano concerto and record it in three days? We need it for playback for a shoot with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.”

KL: “How much do I get paid and do I get credit?”

Mike Stewart: “You’re already getting paid so forget the money. If they use it, I’ll see what I can do to get you credit at the end of the film somewhere.”

I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is the best 3-day, 7-minute avant-garde piano concerto ever written. It’s quite entertaining, and, at least musically, a pretty knowing and affectionate pastiche/parody of “modern music” as it was in the 60’s (visually, I remember the orchestra members being portrayed as rather eye-rollingly jaded about the piece).

Lauber has gone on to have the kind of career I would probably enjoy, never quite breaking through to wide recognition, but keeping busy on an unusually wide range of projects as a composer, arranger, orchestrator, producer, etc. (He also just started a blog.) Any CV that includes studies with Gene Krupa and Vincent Persichetti, arranging backup choirs for Lieber and Stoller, and scoring everything from avant-garde independent films to TV mini-series to Playboy videos is my kind of résumé.

In which musicians do their part in contributing to the climate of fear.

It seems one of the Vercotti brothers has joined the Seattle Symphony. (Via ArtsJournal.) See, my standmate is a little clumsy. It’d be a shame if he were to break something. (I’m happy to see that Seattle is so quiet and peaceful that would-be terrorists can’t find a better cause than Gerard Schwarz. That’s like going after a bakery because their bread isn’t white enough.)

Update (7/22/09): There used to be a link to a story about George Spicka here. However, per this statement from the Maryland Transportation Authority (MdTA):

“The MdTA advises the public that it has no information connecting George F. Spicka with any illegal activity including an alleged event of October 11, 2006, at Thurgood Marshall Baltimore Washington International Airport (“BWI”). MdTA sincerely regrets any damage to Mr. Spicka of Baltimore County, Maryland, which may have been caused by any prior MdTA statement or press release inconsistent with this present statement.

We are requesting that after making this posting, any prior information or records in regard to this specific event about George F. Spicka be removed from your web site and/or search results.”

OK. Anybody actually still reading back this far?

Yeah, those airports can be scary places. Good thing the national no-fly list is on top of noted terrorists like Robert Johnson and John Williams. I suppose Robert Johnson’s alleged dealings with the devil might freak out the current administration, but I really don’t think you can hold John Williams responsible for “Stepmom” just because he wrote the music. (My favorite part of the story? They keep the names of actual terrorists off the no-fly list so terrorists won’t find out that they’re on the no-fly list. Our government has been infiltrated by a secret cabal of Oulipians!)

Of course, any activity can be turned to nefarious purposes. From an article in the USAF’s Air University Review, March-April 1972:

[T]here may be uses of music that might have military applications. To cite a rather grim example, certain frequencies can kill. Specifically, a sound wave at 7 Hz (much too low to hear) can penetrate the soft tissues of the body, cause them to vibrate sympathetically, and if it lasts long enough the result can be death. Another example: a 37-Hz tone, roughly D in the bottom octave of a piano keyboard, can crack a wall if it is loud enough. The military implications of these examples need not be mentioned.

Put your hands in the air, and back away from the accordion.