The Business of Music

Reading Norman Lebrecht's blog this morning--the place to go for the latest music news--I see an item about the fate of EMI. This gets me thinking about the intersection of music and business. I wrote one post about the economics of composition here. But there are other interesting questions. Why, for example, do so many musicians have so much trouble with the business side of things? Leonard Cohen is a well-known example. He has had a successful and multi-faceted career for many decades. He retired in 1994 to a Zen monastery in California where he spent the next five years. In 2005 the story broke that his management had allegedly misappropriated nearly all the money from his retirement account. Cohen says this is why he went back on the road for his 2008-2010 world tour. Many famous musicians have ended up broke.

Here is why I think that the business world and the music don't co-exist very well. It actually relates a bit to my last post on the interrupted Mahler adagio. The modern world, which is pretty much the world of business, is interrupt-driven. You have to respond to investors, clients, partners, suppliers, employees and so on and do so in a timely fashion. The world of music, which is a time-art, requires focus. In order to do musical work, you need time and a space where you will not be interrupted. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius gives us an example. On the website associated with his home Ainola, now a museum, we read this comment on his working environment:

Daily life at Ainola revolved in all respects around the composing and other work of Jean Sibelius. Silence was an absolute necessity for this work, upon which Sibelius often focused at his writing desk. It was only at the finishing stages that he would take his manuscript to the grand piano, and so for much of the time Ainola remained a place of great silence.

Piano practice was a source of problems at Ainola. When Katarina received permission to practice for a couple of hours at home, Jean Sibelius made a special note of this in his diary. Often the girls would go to a neighbour’s home to play...

Musicians of all kinds seem to seek out a secluded environment where they can work free from interruption. In the 19th century the possibilities of interruption were a lot less than they are now. But even then Wagner complained that with his rented apartment being across the street from an iron-monger he didn't see how he could finish an opera. The multitude of electronic devices we have now makes the 19th century seem like a peaceful time. In order to shield themselves from the constant interruptions of the business of music musicians like Leonard Cohen rely on management. This, of course, leaves them open to being taken advantage of by their management.

But the alternative, closely monitoring your own career and being responsive in all the ways this requires, seems problematic. Not for everyone, perhaps, but for many. I suspect that there are certain kinds of work, ones that delve deeply into certain kinds of aesthetic problems, that absolutely require isolation. The great pianist Arthur Rubenstein withdrew from concert life for several months in 1932 when he felt the need to completely rebuild his technique. As for composers, as every important new piece is, in a sense, a rebuilding, a delving down to the foundations, it may also require real isolation.

Music that is transcendent in some way, that tries to evoke the sensations of eternity (and, ironically, does this by shaping and manipulating time) is crafted in silence and tranquility. The full reception of this music may also require a silent backdrop, as, for example, the Mahler adagio that was interrupted by the iPhone alarm.

So that's why I think many musicians have trouble with the business world: their most important work, the music itself, often requires that they separate themselves from the usual interactions of daily life in order to focus completely on the music. But business requires instant responsiveness and communication. The two worlds are really at odds with one another.

Here is whole of the 2nd Symphony of Sibelius. Imagine, if you will, the kind of concentration it took to assemble this composition:

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The Case of Sibelius

Continuing on from my previous post, let's have a closer look at Sibelius' 4th Symphony. A lengthy analysis would be tiresome and, uh, lengthy, not to mention unbloggy! But we can look at just the opening of the 4th Symphony. Alex Ross, in his excellent book The Rest Is Noise writes as follows:

Sibelius finished his first two symphonies in 1899 and 1902 respectively. On the surface, these were typical orchestral dramas of the heroic soul, although Sibelius' habit of breaking down themes into murmuring textures sounded strange to many listeners... In [ ] the Fourth, Sibelius presented his listeners with music as forbidding as anything from the European continent at the time ... The first few bars of the symphony extrapolate a new dimension in musical time. The opening notes, scored darkly for cellos, basses and bassoons, are C, D, F-sharp and E--a harmonically ambiguous whole-tone collection.

"A new dimension in musical time"... wait, doesn't that sound familiar? Haven't some other composers been doing that more recently? Here are those opening bars in my reduction:

(click to enlarge) 

Hmm, what do we have here? A pedal that decelerates, moving between the dominant and the raised sixth degrees; rhythmically displaced outlining of the tonic and then dominant minor chords; strong modal feel. You know, these techniques of modified modal harmonies combined with repetitive rhythmic structures sound a lot like what the minimalist composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams evolved into after a while. They got tired of the excessively simple harmonies of the early pieces and started writing music that isn't so terribly different from this. Here is the Sibelius 4th Symphony again:

And here is some music by Philip Glass:

I think the main difference between the two is that the Sibelius is more interesting. Here is the opening of Shaker Loops by John Adams:

What do you think? Did composers steer a wide berth around this kind of harmonic writing only to return to it in the 1970s? Was Sibelius doing interesting things rhythmically that would be echoed in music several decades later?

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Classical Music Criticism

Alex Ross has a post about the disappearance of one of the last classical music critics from the Toronto Star. The Globe and Mail and La Presse still have classical music critics, but that's a small number for a big country. In fact, the situation is possibly even worse than it seems. Music criticism as it is practiced in newspapers and magazines these days seems to consist largely of news about orchestra budget problems, news about programming, news about artists--mainly celebrity artists--and reviews of performances. This is all useful and necessary information. But it is not what I would really call "music criticism" which I naively think should involve criticism of music. Yes, of course there is some of this. I just read an article discussing the fortunes of the music of Jean Sibelius as they rose, fell and possibly are going to rise again over the last 100 years. But even in that article there was mostly peripheral discussion of biographical and other details and virtually no discussion of the actual music. In this blog I focus on the music.

Speaking of Sibelius, on whom I will do a more extended post soon, I recall a day in my 20th century theory undergraduate class. We had spent several classes doing a fairly thorough analysis of the string quartet op 28 by Webern:

After this a rather talented violinist in the class asked "why can't we spend some time studying the Sibelius violin concerto?" The answer: "it's derivative." The professor, a composer (at that time all the theory courses were taught by composers, not theorists) had been a student of Milton Babbitt at Princeton. While not a serial composer himself any longer, he certainly shared the aesthetic. So is that evaluation, 'derivative' both true and, as lawyers say, dispositive?

Sibelius is primarily a composer of symphonies and other music for orchestra, including that violin concerto. He was hugely popular in the first half of the century, but stopped composing in the mid-1920s, just about the time the atonalists such as Webern were coming into their own. He was certainly influenced by composers such as Wagner and Tchaikovsky, but he has very much his own style. Webern is influenced by the contrapuntal techniques of 15th and 16th century composers, but we don't call his music 'derivative'. There are virtually no composers whose music is so experimental that we can say they derive little or nothing from previous music. Even composers like Steve Reich have influences. So I think that the accusation 'derivative' is an empty one, even if true. Now is it dispositive? In other words, is Sibelius' music so obviously a copy of things that have been done before that it is not worth our time? Here is the first movement of his 4th Symphony:

What do you think? I'll just leave you with that and soon I will delve into Sibelius a bit more.

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