Updated Aug. 25
Some unrepentant but respectable highbrow had to say it eventually.
Writing about the demise of the Mostly Mozart festival at New York’s Lincoln Center, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross pushes back on the center management’s new emphasis on non-classical summer programming, such as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop and “the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mariachi group.”
“Although the traditional performing arts have abiding issues with élitism and exclusivity,” Ross writes, “a swerve toward pop hardly compensates for the profound societal inequalities that are embedded in our celebrity-driven culture.”
While welcoming Jonathan Heyward, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, “a serious musician with a broad repertory” who will lead the series replacing Mostly Mozart, Ross worries that “Lincoln Center now radiates disdain for those who wish simply to listen to music they love in a comfortable hall.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/requiem-for-mostly-mozart
(via http://www.artsjournal.com)
As Ross observes, venues such as Lincoln Center were built for opera, ballet, symphonic and chamber music, not for pop and other amplified music and “alternative” performance. “Unless all [its] buildings are torn down and replaced by a stadium,” he writes, “Lincoln Center will always be best suited to events of the sit-down-and-listen variety.”
Sit-down-and-listen art forms extend well beyond the Western classical canon, to include jazz, modern dance, folk/ethnic and “world” music and dance, non-Western classical forms from India, China and elsewhere, and a wide range of avant-garde and multimedia performances. A room built for Beethoven piano sonatas is just as suitable for piano music of Thelonious Monk.
Force-fitting genres better experienced in other venues doesn’t serve the artists, their audiences or, ultimately, the places that feel obliged to do the force-fitting.
If that’s an “elitist” sentiment, so be it.
UPDATE: David Niethamer, the retired University of Richmond professor and former principal clarinetist of the Richmond Symphony, offers his take on the demise of Mostly Mozart and increasing musical diversity:
“I started going to Mostly Mozart in the early/mid 1970s, in the infancy of the festival. It was informal, and inexpensive, so that even a poor NYC grad student could afford it. In the intervening 50+ years, it has morphed into more of a ‘normal’ music series for NYC, with serious ticket prices, etc. So it doesn’t surprise me that the festival has come to the end of its useful life. It’s sad, because the original idea was to make classical music accessible to ordinary people, who couldn’t afford Metropolitan Opera prices. I’d guess that the current ticket prices mean that the original idea is no longer the current MO. And after all, the musicians should be paid for their efforts.
“I don’t listen to hip-hop as a regular part of my musical diet. Over the years, I’ve heard it a few times, but it doesn’t speak to me, at least not enough to cause me to purchase any recordings. But at 50 years, making a parallel to jazz, hip-hop seems to be becoming a historical art form, with all of the tension between the historical past and the creative present that affected the jazz world after WWII. (Think Wynton Marsalis vs. Free Jazz.) So maybe hip-hop is slowly becoming ‘sit-down-and-listen’ music. Jazz wasn’t ‘sit-down-and-listen’ music until Norman Granz started promoting ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ in the late 1940s, and that was somewhat controversial among the players who had spent their lives playing jazz in clubs, brothels, and the ‘second line’ at New Orleans funerals.
“Whatever its name, I hope that classical programming, appealing to ordinary people, will continue to be a part of summer programming at Lincoln Center. Inclusion doesn’t mean kicking out the ‘old guys’ – it just means making room for everyone who has something interesting to say.”
Letter V 