The big classical music story in the naughts was technological. The tremendous expansion of the Internet in the late 1990s set the stage for a revolution in the recording industry that sent tremors throughout the classical music world. While we can’t fully assess changes that are still in the making, the emergence of Internet radio, classical downloads, and live streaming from Web sites not only has challenged the primacy of the compact disc (which has had its 30 years of dominance, just like the LP before it), it has also helped myriad classical organizations to put themselves “out there,” wherever “there” is. Over at the Web site of the American Bach Soloists you can take advantage of their 24/7 music player, featuring their incredible catalog of great recordings. YouTube and Vimeo and many other Web sites are becoming treasure troves of classical music.
Has this development compromised the classical recording industry? Certainly it has caused concern and copyright issues. And the major studios have radically reoriented their strategies on classical music. Yet recording goes on unabated, and now more decentralized. The San Francisco Symphony, for instance, has recorded its Mahler cycle on its own label, and the recent New Century Chamber Orchestra recording came out on Artistic Director Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg’s own NSS label. Smaller companies like Linn Records in Glasgow, Scotland, are aggressively filling holes in the catalog. The major companies are still out there, but in the coming decade you can make way for the minors.
Clicking the Alt-Class Key
Along with this development comes the emergence of “alt-classical” (alternative classical, an abbreviation with all the cachet of a computer key): This world of music existed for decades, but in the naughts (the decade of 2000–2009) it became newly visible thanks to decentralization and the lack of a dominant “mainstream” style in classical music. Imperfectly named, as is always the case with descriptive terms for large artistic phenomena, alt-classical represents the merging of genres of music, as well as the undermining of distinctions between “high” and “low,” classical and popular, along with an infusion of music formerly on the margins. I’ll let Berkeley Ph.D. Tom Swafford, now a composer and performer in New York, describe it:
One night I play with a punk band in a dingy bar where the audience throws beer to show their appreciation; the next night I play string quartets in a church sanctuary. I certainly do not believe in the supremacy of any one genre of music any more than I believe one type of person is better than another.
The alternative classical world has led to other classical musicians’ invading popular music spheres — pubs, clubs, and other nonclassical hubs. Classical Revolution does this weekly in San Francisco, and cellist Johannes Moser shows up in a few days for his version of “bringing music to the people.” (See preview.) So far, “the people” are fine with it.
Without a musical mainstream, composers have been free to hare off in a number of directions, sometimes all at once. One striking facet of contemporary composition has been an eagerness to bring music from the margins directly into classical discourse. For most of the history of Western classical music, Western European nations have been economically and militarily powerful, centers of large overseas empires. When, inevitably, contact with music from other parts of the empire caused Western musicians to incorporate that influence into classical music, the results have usually been paternalistic — “Let me take this ‘raw material’ and fashion it into something great and lasting,” they seem to say.
In the 20th century, as recording began to turn music that had previously been “low” (of the people) into art, this dynamic was challenged. And you could argue that the parts of the “postmodern” sound of the last few decades that seem most startling to the ears of traditionalist listeners are the parts that directly incorporate other musics into the classical tradition without a makeover. That phenomenon is now widely spread — witness Evan Ziporyn’s use of gamelan in A House in Bali (read the article); Osvaldo Golijov’s Passion setting; and Golijov’s incredible Ayre, which takes a wide view of Spanish/Mediterranean folk traditions. As New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross wrote of the piece, “Many people, on first encountering its rasping sonorities, hurtling rhythms, and welters of lament, will be unsure whether they are listening to pop music or to classical music or to some folk ritual of indeterminate origin.” And that’s exactly the point.
Barriers to Dismantle
Nevertheless, the Internet has not facilitated the emergence of cultures on the margins of the old colonial empires. In fact, the dominance of English on the Internet has meant that smaller, more-local languages are disappearing, which worries many local observers and is far more real than the disappearance of the symphony orchestra. So is there a new world order, a cause for hope, or just the same old/same old? One thing is certain: The interest in breaking down barriers is a vital presence in the classical world and in much of its audience. That’s part of what explains hotshot conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s supersonic career arc.
There’s a dissertation waiting to be written on all the ways that “minimalist” techniques and ideology have influenced classical music in the naughts. When Steve Reich predicted that small, nontraditional ensembles were becoming the drivers of contemporary composition, he was right on, to use the venerable phrase. The Adorno Ensemble, the choral group Volti, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, So Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can All Stars — these and many other groups have managed, on relatively small budgets, to give huge numbers of composers an arena to create and be listened to.
Along these lines, the naughts saw the reemergence, on a grand scale, of the composer/performer, a development that has been brewing since the 1960s, but that the changes discussed so far helped to turn into a noticeable phenomenon.
Do all these changes indicate the irrelevance of orchestras, operas, and traditional repertoire? Of course not. The San Francisco Symphony has been media savvy throughout the decade, and in Michael Tilson Thomas it has a music director who can clearly lay claim to Bernstein’s music-education mantle. If you haven’t seen the Symphony’s Keeping Score programs on PBS Television and its Web site, you ought to look them up.
Sure, orchestras and operas are expensive, the economic downturn has taken its toll, and the tremors are still rumbling. But really, most of America’s (and the world’s) big institutions seem to be standing upright fairly well on sometimes shaky ground. And as for the orchestra’s relevance — I think the Angelenos might have something to say about that. Esa Pekka Salonen’s Tristan Project for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with video by Bill Viola, was a decade’s highlight, showing that older repertoire and new ideas can get along just fine together.