by natchaitkin | Dec 1, 2014 | Uncategorized
Last week’s post was about Mark O’Connor’s attack on the Suzuki method, which I (and many others) found quite harsh, mean-spirited and a huge waste of energy. This week’s example of unnecessary squabbling in the string world is a similarly strident (and questionable) attack on El Sistema, the Venezuelan method of community building through youth music education, which has received tremendous attention in recent years and has inspired many new programs in countries around the world.
The father of El Sistema is Jose Antonio Abreu, who began working with 11 children in a Caracas garage in 1975. Since then, upwards of two million children have gone through the program, including Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the LA Philharmonic. The program is praised for paying both musical and social dividends, and is the hot trend in both education and community engagement efforts across the music world these days.
With such popularity, I suppose a backlash was inevitable, and it comes from a British academic. In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Geoffrey Baker, a music lecturer at Royal Holloway University who has just written a book on El Sistema, to be published by Oxford University Press, claimed that far from being the “beacon of social justice” as it is portrayed all over the world, in Venezuela it is viewed as “a cult, a mafia and a corporation.”
Full disclosure, round two: I am not trained in the ways of El Sistema, but I have done a lot of teaching at Cincinnati’s incarnation, MYCincinnati, a wonderful program run by the amazing Laura Jekel. Here’s a video about the collaboration between the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and MYCincinnati, which is my favorite part about being a member of that ensemble:
http://youtu.be/wkM5_5Aei2g&w=320&h=240&start=15
In the Guardian article, Baker complains about El Sistema’s “lack of rigorous evaluation to quantify its claims of ‘miraculous social transformation.’ ”
“I found many Sistema musicians unconvinced by claims that the project was aimed at Venezuela’s most vulnerable children,” he writes. “Pointing to a lack of mechanisms for consistently targeting this demographic, they suggested most musicians come from the middle levels of society.”
The article also offers a countering point of view: “Reynaldo Trombetta, a Venezuelan musician and writer who has worked with El Sistema, in his home country and then assisting (cellist Julian) Lloyd-Webber, set up the programme in the UK, rejected Baker’s allegations.
“He said: ‘I’m not really sure who Mr Baker spoke to and I have my doubts about the reach of his research. I have to wonder if he spoke to any of the parents of the kids from the barrios, the slums, who are desperate to get their kids into El Sistema because for them the alternative is these kids getting involved in drugs or crime. You would have to ask them if they think El Sistema is a mafia or a tyranny. More than two million kids have been involved and we still see huge queues, all the time, of parents desperate to get their children into one of the 300 nucleos [community music schools]. Most of the people involved are not aspiring to be musicians, they are just in a country where you don’t learn much about excellence, you don’t learn much about teamwork, you don’t really learn what you can achieve when you work hard and El Sistema is absolutely still a beacon of light benefitting a lot of people, even in things like educational literacy and maths skills.’ ”
Baker’s main complaint seems to be that there is a lack of data to support El Sistema’s claims of community building and personal enrichment for the kids who pass through it. Anyone who’s paid attention to education knows how hard it is to show that sort of thing in numbers, but let’s allow him that one, and say that there could be some better number crunching done. In fact, Trombetta agrees, suggesting that it would be very helpful.
The Guardian also points out that Baker doesn’t offer numbers to back up his claims either:
“Marshall Marcus, former head of music at the Southbank centre and now the chair of Sistema Europe, also cast doubt on Baker’s allegations.
‘My experience over many years is that El Sistema certainly is mainly involved with children and young people from economically challenged circumstances,’ he said. ‘If it is thought by someone that El Sistema has become more skewed towards middle class students rather than helping those living in poverty then I would be interested to see any figures that show that. I have not seen any to date.’ ”
The article also adds: “Argentinian pianist Alberto Portugheis, who was responsible for bringing El Sistema over to play in Britain for the first time almost a decade ago added: ‘El Sistema has had a fantastic effect on education in general in Venezuela. But you cannot expect a musical education to make all the problems of poverty in the country disappear.’ ”
This is a crucial point, I think – learning to play the violin may give someone a great deal to help them deal with the difficulties in their life, but it does not make those difficulties disappear!
So, why am I writing about this? Like O’Connor, Baker seems intent on tearing down something that is very popular and does a great deal of good. Is El Sistema perfect? Of course not – no system is. And as someone who spent eight years working for the Pentagon, I can tell you that anything operating on a large scale has all sorts of problems! Most importantly, like the Suzuki method, for El Sistema to be successful, IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE TEACHER!
In any case, both O’Connor and Baker are doing more harm than good. As I said last week, music education is viewed by many as a luxury, and both the Suzuki method and El Sistema have convinced millions otherwise. We don’t have time for circular firing squads in our business – let’s leave that to others with less important work to do!
by natchaitkin | Nov 26, 2014 | Uncategorized
In the rush of preparation for a holiday devoted to being grateful, I’ve been thinking a lot about the great gift of being a musician and getting to share it with others. In the midst of all that, two recent stories of less than salutary behavior in the music world have caught my attention, and I’d like to share them as a reminder that we all need to keep our eye on the ball and not get caught up in less productive efforts.
Most people view classical musicians as pretty well-mannered, especially the string players (the brass section is a whole other story, believe me!). Early childhood educators are also are pretty good about minding their manners. Lately, however, the intersection of these two seemingly polite groups has seemed like a war zone. Two major figures in the beginning education of string players have recently come under fierce attack.
First, Mark O’Connor, the well-known fiddler, has accused Shinichi Suzuki, father of the ubiquitous method that bears his name, of having falsified his credentials and endorsements from well-known musicians of his time. The Suzuki Association of the Americas has fired back, and many teachers have weighed in, mostly to rebuke O’Connor for his rather nasty comments. You can hear an NPR story about this whole thing here.
O’Connor has a method of his own, and is quite up front about his frustration with the Suzuki method’s popularity and its effect on his own market share – reading O’Connor’s posts, it’s nearly impossible not to connect his business ambitions with his attacks on Suzuki.
There are a couple of big problems here – first of all, O’Connor looks really hypocritical for suggesting that Suzuki behaved less than honorably in promoting himself. As a good friend of mine loves to say: “One finger pointing out, three fingers pointing back.”
Secondly, O’Connor’s criticisms of Suzuki’s methods, many of which have merit and are shared by others in the string world (myself included), have been lost in the fuss over O’Connor’s ad hominem attack on someone who can’t defend himself.
Full disclosure: I was not a Suzuki student, but got excellent training in playing chamber music at the School for Strings, a Suzuki school in New York. I am also not a Suzuki teacher, but I use the early books with my beginning and intermediate students – for the most part, they are put together well, and do a good job. I do use other materials to supplement them, though.
I do share some of the popular misgivings about the method itself, the biggest being the note reading weakness of many Suzuki students. I have former Suzuki students who struggle with this and it is a big problem. However, I also have had former Suzuki students who read very well. And this brings us to a critical point.
O’Connor, to his credit, shares an excellent article on his blog by Melissa Tatreau, a violin teacher who hits the nail on the head: with any method, Suzuki or otherwise, IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE TEACHER. As with any subject, there are good and bad teachers, and results vary widely.
If you are interested in the details of all this, read Tatreau’s piece – it’s first rate.
My main point here is that this whole thing is a really bad waste of energy – for those of us working in a field wrongly viewed by far too many people as a luxury, we can’t afford to be seen as petty. If you truly believe that making music is a life-changing and enriching experience, and that everyone should have the chance to do it, as I do, picking fights with dead people is not a good use of your time.
I’ve long respected Mark O’Connor as a great fiddler, and his attempts to broaden the options for teaching string playing should be welcomed by all of us who do it. However, he should not be using ad hominem attacks to promote himself. And I have to say, having not yet explored the O’Connor method, I’m less inclined to at the moment, because of this whole thing – it leaves a sour taste in my mouth (one which I will ease with cranberry sauce tomorrow!).
Next week I will turn to El Sistema, the Venezuelan method of community building through youth string education, which has received tremendous attention in recent years, and has inspired many new programs in countries around the world, but is also currently under attack.
In the meantime, count your blessings, and stay focused on what really matters – good intonation and pumpkin pie. Happy Thanksgiving!
by natchaitkin | Oct 24, 2014 | cincinnati, economy
This post grew out of an issue where I live – Cincinnati, Ohio. If you live here too, I’m asking for your help. If you don’t, please read it anyway and see if there is something like this program where you live. If there is – please support it, vocally! If there isn’t, think about helping to start one!
Two years ago, I was one of seven fortunate artists to receive the City’s first Artist Ambassador Fellowships, which allowed us to bring our work to underserved communities across the city. The program has been cut from this year’s budget, and, in support of yesterday’s opinion piece in the Cincinnati Enquirer by the program’s creator, former City Councilmember Laure Quinlivan, I’m asking you to help get it back in.
My experience as a CAAF fellow shows how big an impact the program has, both culturally and economically. It was a life-changing year for me – it helped me realize a dream I’ve had for more than 20 years, and I got to share the music I love with audiences from Price Hill to Evanston to Mt. Washington. The grant money enabled me to start my own business, Bach and Boombox, and nearly all of it created work for local small businesses, including MartensArt, Mean Key Video and Seemless Printing.
So, with my grant of $6,000, the city reached hundreds of people with great music, invested in the local economy by creating a small business and providing work for others, and furthered Cincinnati’s reputation as a city that both sings and innovates – if you ask me, that’s a bargain!
The cost of the fellowships is $50,000, less than 1/10th of 1% of the city’s annual budget. The city found funding for this program in leaner times with Laure on council as its champion – surely with the recent news of an $18 million surplus, Council can restore the program. It will give the residents the gift of art while also giving another group of Cincinnati artists the same great opportunity I had.
If you live in Cincinnati, please e-mail all the members of City Council and Mayor John Cranley (addresses are below) and urge them to restore funding for this great program. Please take five minutes to write a few sentences to send to all of them, and forward this to your friends in the city! Feel free to take language from this message and, even better, from Laure’s piece in the Enquirer – she makes a great case for the program and its importance. Thank you – together we can keep Cincinnati “The City that Sings!”
Mayor John Cranley, 352-3250, [email protected]
Vice- Mayor David Mann, 352-4610, [email protected]
Councilmember Kevin Flynn, 352-4550, [email protected]
Councilmember Amy Murray, 352-3640, [email protected]
Councilmember Chris Seelbach, 352-5210, [email protected]
Councilmember Yvette Simpson, 352-5260, [email protected]
Councilmember P.G. Sittenfeld, 352-5270 [email protected]
Councilmember Chris Smitherman, 352-3464, [email protected]
Councilmember Charlie Winburn, 352-5354, [email protected]
Councilmember Wendell Young, 352-3466, [email protected]
by natchaitkin | Oct 20, 2014 | music philosophy, Uncategorized
My previous post was about the recent musical protest at the St. Louis Symphony performance of the Brahms Requiem. I’ve been thinking about other ways that protest and music intersect a lot since I first heard about that incident – this post will address two very different examples.
There was another concert that same week which got some attention – a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall which included the American premiere of a work by Georg Friedrich Haas.
The following is from Anthony Tommasini’s review in the New York Times: “Mr. Haas received a warm ovation, though some lusty boos were mixed amid the bravos. In my experience, new pieces are not often booed. I hope Mr. Haas feels that he was doing something right to arouse such a reaction.”
Mr. Tommasini is right – new pieces are not generally booed nowadays. The sign of disapproval most audiences give now is by walking out during a piece, or by not clapping much when it’s over. But music used to provoke all kinds of extreme reactions – the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring (depicted in the caricature above) is the most famous example, but there have been many others – some of them are listed here.
At both the St. Louis and Carnegie Hall concerts, the normally passive concert audience was transformed, however briefly, into active participants, something that is so rare nowadays that it made the papers.
Many people feel the concert hall should be a place of refuge, free from (you should excuse the expression) discord. I disagree completely – great art must challenge us in some way. I think the folks who booed at Carnegie Hall were fully engaged with what they heard, and felt compelled to say, forcefully, that they didn’t like it. Good for them – at least they cared.
These are examples of disturbances in the concert hall which made news outside of it – here’s another kind – the controversy surrounding tonight’s Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Adams’s “The Death of Kinghoffer,” an opera set on the Achille Lauro, a cruise ship hijacked by Palestinian terrorists in 1985.
Since the work’s debut, there has been controversy over Adams’s portrayal of the hijackers – many feel that he grants them too much sympathy. Some of the current protestors have vowed to continue “until the set is burned to the ground,” and have called the performers “fascists.” You can read an excellent article in Sunday’s New York Times by Zachary Woolfe about the current debate over Klinghoffer, and the long history of the problem of mixing art and current events.
If you think I’m wading into this debate, you’re out of your mind. Like most people (including many of those either protesting or championing it), I haven’t seen the opera, and my only point in bringing it up is to give a current example of a piece of music being controversial – something that used to be much more common. Some more examples from the opera world: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Strauss’s Salome, Berg’s Lulu, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (please add your own examples in the comments).
On a lighter note, there was another recent opera-related controversy last week, regarding a production of Carmen in Australia, which was briefly canceled (and then reinstated) over concerns that it glamorized smoking, which seemed to me an odd thing to be agitated about, given all the of the other bad behavior in that opera. But I digress.
The protests in St. Louis and at the Met are very different in tone, purpose and execution from one another, but very similar in one important way – they depend (and draw) on the great power of music.
The protest in St. Louis was designed to relate closely to the performance at which it took place, and was planned to be only disruptive enough to add context to it (whether you think that was appropriate or achieved is another matter). Had the protestors been outside the concert hall, the impact of their efforts would have been far smaller, I’m sure.
The protestors outside the Met, by contrast, are hoping to be as disruptive as possible – their goal is to get the production canceled entirely. What’s notable is how important the protestors feel the symbolic power of the opera is – to produce it, in their view, is to give something they object to far greater significance than it would otherwise have.
The St. Louis and Met protestors (and the Carnegie Hall ones too, for that matter) understand the great power of what happens in a performance, and for that fact alone, at least, I’m glad. However you feel about any of these protests, if you worry about the demise of classical music, the fact that it still means this much to some people keeps me hopeful for the future. I hope you are one of those who care that much – please post your comments!
by natchaitkin | Oct 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
Reading about two recent concerts got me thinking again about the “sanctity” of the concert hall and the role of the audience. In one, the performance was “interrupted” by a musical protest by members of the audience, while in the other, the applause after a premiere was mixed with boos, something the review found noteworthy. Today’s post is about the first one – I’ll look at the second later this week, along with some thoughts about my recent experience performing Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, a piece which is all about disturbances, musical and otherwise.
You may have already heard about the first concert – a performance of the Brahms Requiem by the St. Louis Symphony which featured a surprise protest of the death of Mike Brown, the young man whose death galvanized Ferguson, Missouri and drew national attention in August. As the second half was about to begin, members of the audience began singing the protest song “Which side are you on friend, which side are you on?” and “Justice for Mike Brown is justice for all,” while unfurling banners and tossing pamphlets from the balcony.
Can’t see the video? Watch it here.
The demonstration was peaceful and over quickly. There was some applause from the audience and some of the performers on stage, as well as some boos. The protestors then left the hall, and the performance continued.
There’s so much to talk about here – I’m not going to discuss the reason the protestors were there, though. Whatever one thinks about Mike Brown, what happened to him and what followed in Ferguson is not really the point here, though it is without question an important topic – for this forum, I’m interested in the protest itself – its form, and its setting.
Much ink has already been spilled about whether the protest was “appropriate” – I think it was. The performance was not underway, so the music wasn’t disturbed. The singing of the protestors was quite good – clearly, they had practiced. And most important, I think – these folks were protesting a death by singing at a performance of a requiem!
“When we discovered that Brahms’ ‘Requiem’ would be on the calendar, for Mike Brown, it was a beautiful connection that seemed fated,” protest organizer Sarah Griesbach told a local TV station. “A requiem is a song for the dead.”
So the protestors knew their audience and the setting, found the right moment and prepared accordingly. They knew just how far they could go, too – had they actually interrupted the performance or confronted anyone directly, I suspect that very few people would have supported their actions.
I wonder about the protestors’ decision to leave the hall after singing – I think they missed a chance to connect with those they were trying to reach. St. Louis Symphony publicist Erika Ebsworth-Goold puts it well: “Brahms’ ‘Requiem’ was a beautiful piece that was written to really console the people who were left behind during a loss,” Ebsworth-Goold told the TV station. “I think if they would’ve stayed, it would have been healing and cathartic for them.”
Maybe the protestors didn’t want to be asked to leave – surely that would have made more of an incident than they wanted, and undercut the message they hoped to send. There may have been some in the audience who thought they should have been ejected, though I’m not sure that would have happened, and surely would have looked pretty bad. Still, part of me wonders what kinds of conversations might have followed the Brahms had they stayed to hear the rest.
The concert hall is seen as a place of refuge by many in the audience – going to a performance is a chance to escape the world’s unpleasant realities. Though I certainly understand the feeling, I’m not sure this always is a good thing. For those of us who play it, great music feels like life and death – if our audience is not engaged on that level, we’re not doing our jobs, and they are missing out. Classical music’s being completely walled off from the world as a whole does no one any favors, in my opinion.
In St. Louis, the protestors may have helped remind the rest of the audience (and the performers) what the point of Brahms’ Requiem is, and what the goal of any performance should be – to connect with people on the deepest level possible.
So what do you think of all this? Were the protestors in St. Louis right to interject a performance of their own? Was Brahms harmed, or enhanced? Did the audience have a right to a protest-free evening, or is the concert hall a place where real life can intrude? I’m not sure there are easy answers to any of these questions, but they’re worth wrestling with! Please post your comments!
