Gail, (and Charles) As an aside, Charles have you looked at the work of David Throsby at Macquarie University? He has written a wonderful recent book on Economics and Culture. But back to the idea of a Magic Circle Chamber Opera Network.
Gail, I agree with both of you about the importance of local control. Think of this. An eleven dollar stimulus for secondary businesses for every dollar invested in the primary opera structure. That is not a bad payback for a municipal investment. It has been done before in the 18th century in the US when every small town had an opera house and many of them within the Court House were the auditorium could be multi-use. The aesthetics of the architecture fitted the ethnicity of the group that founded the town and was a point of great pride. Henry Ford and the assembly line lured the children away from these communities and the community purpose for these structures failed leaving only the churches as repositories of what had originally been a secular cultural community. Today you can still find every kind of music represented in these churches although the bulk of it is the kind of Country Western that people feel the most comfortable with. But they have brought back instruments and music from every tradition available in their congregations. This religious archive is wonderful and diverse all across the nation but great secular music brings the whole community together in fine gatherings that strengthen unity in their diversity and provide rituals for all of the community events that build cohesion and family affection. They provide an adult version of the types of social events that students attend in public school and college. In this kind of community all of the religious traditions are valued as well as the non-conformist individuals. All belong to the whole community with each group being the keeper of those traditions. It is the leg of the secular that binds all of these groups in one big community together. But we are a long ways from such communities and there are difficulties to be overcome. Opera is a multi-media dramatic event. In the history of America the "Opera House" was not just used for what the Europeans called "Opera." America was a great deal closer to the meaning of the word "Opera" which comes from Work or a "Work". The word "operator" comes from the same root. Opera Houses are multi-media dramatic halls, concert halls, meeting places for community groups and serve as festival halls for special community ceremonies. They also serve as Arts schools to supplement the private and group instruction that is necessary for the development of fine public school performing arts programs. Today, the problems are: 1. The issue of values: Why should people support a profession that is perceived as attended only by the elite and the wealthy? The musical forms of the opera and concert hall were once the realm of all of the people. This stopped with the great crash in 1929 and has never recovered for secular music. However the old egalitarian intellectual musical forms still exist. Today they still are found in the churches spread on many street corners across America that have choral, vocal and even instrumental musical programs that begin at pre-K and stretch into adulthood. Thousands of "First Churches" across America have choral programs that include up to sixteen performing units. The musical variety is 100%. Not only is the great "Absolute" music of the past found in the churches but so are the most recent popular song forms in the culture of Christian Rock and Christian Pop. It is also not uncommon to see modern dances and ballets performed in the Television ministries across America. Twenty Years ago the LA Chamber Symphony was formed by two Jews, Gerard Schwartz and Samuel Lipman in a Fundamentalist Christian Temple in L.A. The New York Chamber Symphony was started by the same two artists in the Jewish 92nd Street YMHA and was subsidized for many years by Jewish Philanthropy grounded in Jewish Religious organizations. It is also not unusual to find that music programs in synagogues across America shelter what remains of much of the great secular musical treasures of the past. They hire ensembles and give concert series. The problem with secular music is that outside of the church and synagogue it is un-subsidized and suffers from a "productivity lag." It also gets very poor press in the Corporate driven Media which has a conflict of interest built in to their own commercial music products aimed at the young. 2. The issue of productivity: In every current opera house in America ticket sales cover only 60% of the costs of production. As a result the funding for America's secular Opera Houses is bad to intermittent at best. With such bad press as the elitist nonsense above and the loss of decent music and art programs in the public schools over the last half century as well as the Neo-classical economics that has little use for or room for Public Goods in their Darwinian economic theories, Free Readership in the arts has progressed at such a rate that it is now impossible to give an opera enough times to make the cost come down and make it produce in the ways that Broadway Shows are able to break even and make a profit. Broadway shows are wonderful performing art but on the compositional level are as simple and formulaic as is the commercial musical market. We could call it the 2+2=4 level of musical sophistication. 3. The issue of an ongoing audience: Movies, television and other current art forms do not encourage multiple experiences of artistic works. The complexity level of TV and most movies is very low. Entertainment is meant to be experienced like fast food. Almost all popular music forms are drawn from a single musical form, the song endlessly repeated. A Bright Light: Video stores and libraries are changing that as the young and old watch favorite movies multiple times. This is changing the atmosphere and offers hope. Also, the Rap and Hip-Hop music is beginning to show a complexity missing in earlier popular songs with cross cultural fusions and references to older forms like Sprechstimme (chanted speech) and Counterpoint as well as complex textural mixings as technology makes dense structures easier to achieve. e.g. many instrumental sounds like tuned snare drums are impossible acoustically but are easy to achieve on today's Music Stations. Such easy availability makes compositional play more attractive to commercial composers who would "seek to satisfy their desires with the least creative exertion." The patronizing point can be made that just because a pop composer can create dense combinations of textures, timbres, rhythms and word forms with the mere flip of a switch or the reversal of a record turntable does not mean that they understand what they have done, and it doesn't. However, as these complex patterns grow more common in the experience of the young they will have sound backgrounds to stimulate desires that they would never have if they didn't have it available in the music they listen, dance and surround themselves with. It is not a great step from knowing something aurally, kinesthetically and kinetically to learning how to perform or even recreate it in a new circumstance. 4. That old complicated Labor Problem: Operas, concerts and other secular art forms are performed for the public by experts who have long years of practice behind them before they ever deserve the title Artist. So Artistic Labor can never be paid by the hour. But economists try anyway. A sonata on a piano recital would on a $10,000 fee (dream on) make in the neighborhood of $4.96 an hour if he played the concert one time. On the other hand, if he played it 100 times at that fee, he would do considerably better. But that is just one player on a concert. A soloist on a major concert can make a fee that will be twice to five times that fee if they are a part of the International ensemble of 300 or so artists. But the average number of graduate pianists per year in the US is several thousand, all vying for that 300 or so concert positions. But if you are sitting in an orchestra your practice is the same amount but the highest pay for the most prestigious orchestra in America is around the $100,000 salary. Regular American Orchestras will pay for a principle player around $36,000. Compare that to the local lawyer, doctor or even public school teacher not to mention Enron employees before the crash. Here's the crunch, you can run Sony on fewer secretaries but you can't play a Beethoven symphony without the flute player. Let me tell you a story. When Toscanini was given the NBC Symphony, he got the best musicians in the world. Just to train the orchestra for him they hired another top flight conductor Artur Rodzinski to prepare the orchestra for the great Maestro. Rodzinski was known, however for another "little thing." He always carried a pistol in the back pocket of his Tuxedo for good luck. But that is another story. Rodzinski was told to prepare a Symphonic work that dictated nine Trombones. Rodzinski put in a budget for 9 Trombones and the accountant said "how many trombone parts are there?" Rodzinski said there were three and the accountant said "I will pay for three trombones and no more." Since Toscanini wanted the piece, Rodzinski opted to go with three trombones rather than cut the piece. So he conducted the concert to great success with audience and even the critics the next day. Perhaps they were impressed with the imprint in his back pocket or maybe they just didn't miss SIX TROMBONES! As Rodzinski was greeting his public in the Green Room Maestro Toscanini came in and walked directly over to Rodzinski. He said three words and left and never spoke to Rodzinski again. He said "You're no Artist." Today we have to make those same decisions constantly. We fight to get our work on stage and I believe that one of the answers is Chamber Opera. In Chamber Opera you have a house small enough for a small labor pool to make a mighty sound. It is Chamber Opera, not Grand Opera. It will never be Grand Opera, indeed the closeness of the audience makes for a power that is rarely possible in Grand Opera or in the Philharmonic Symphonies. The Opera Houses are about the size of a moderate Broadway House which does pay for itself if it plays long enough. The smaller ensemble allows for higher pay and if you have enough Opera Houses across the nation with the exact same technology, the best on the market, you can hire the best designers and directors to make productions that by both travel and multiple performances, make a profit. But in order to do it you must have volume of performances and a standardization of production techniques and a consistent ensemble in each city nationwide. With a Chamber Opera Center that has two perfect auditoriums you can use the multiple use formula that served the nation well up until the depression hit. You can also serve the community by having a world class private music school, K-12 that learns on stage and with a college apprentice program that rivals the exceptional programs in the old Soviet system or the Lincoln Kirsten/George Balanchine program developed by the NYCity Ballet in New York. So Gail and Charles, I know that it is real work and I believe that it can also be real employment. Amateur work must always suffer from too little time and resources. You can only have real professional work if you are sure that the time, finances and resource availability is there. I believe that the future with the labor glut that you point out, offers a real opportunity as long as we stay away from the easiest path and keep our eyes on what this is about. Free Riding is addictive and is the beginning of the death of marriages, companies, societies, nations and cultures. Everyone must give up the desire to be a pilot fish swimming on the back of the great Sting Ray. Why should we do this? Because we all have a great heritage, and it is our heritage, our history and secular music in the future will shape our children. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Stewart To: Ray Evans Harrell Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 5:39 PM Subject: Re: Work and the economy Ray, You wrote: "I long for a conversation where we can discuss how to get those Chamber Opera Companies up and working in every city in North America of 100,000 people are more." I am with you in this, as I am with Charles in his notion of work in local communities. Indeed I even have a number of suggestions to make as to how we can move in those directions. Such movement though seems to me crucially dependent on our recognizing that "employment" -- paid waged labour -- does not circumscribe and define the extent of "work." We need to look at the whole field of work because it is only (in my view) by going "outside the box" of employment that we will find the fulcrum, the pivotal point, for change. So let us talk a little longer about the work that is done outside of jobs -- the kind, for example, that your students are doing when they come to you for a lesson. In my perspective much if not most of the work of the world takes place outside employment and it is time we recognized and conjured with this. A second point. You write, "Perhaps we might say the Entertainment is to Music and Art as Employment is to work." But you also write: "The Arts in NYCity are a 14 Billion dollar business." (The "cultural industries" as we, regrettably, are beginning to call the arts in Canada.) Your second sentence here, to me, puts at risk your first sentence -- in practice, threatens to elevate Entertainment at the expense of Music and Art and paid labour over other ways of working. It panders to our unfortunate proclivity to rationalize the worth of activities in terms of the monetized economy of trade and employment rather than to recognize the worth of work throughout the whole economy -- or (even broader) the whole society itself. I think it is best to disentangle the two different lines of thought in your two sentences. I'm sorry to be hanging in on this issue in so many posts (we'll soon have Arthur labelling me "religious" unless he withdraws that paragraph too as I hope he will). I'll cease soon if it seems that there are not many on this list seriously interested in working on this different perspective but I've wanted to see it have a fair chance on FW. I (and others) have raised it often enough (I used to make an annual posting each New Year of a essay on the topic -- now available on request) but don't recall ever having tried so vigorously to foster a dialogue on the subject. With thanks to all Gail Gail Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Evans Harrell To: futurework Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 3:11 PM Subject: Re: Work and the economy Sorry Gail, The context of that is my fight, since conducting lead and zinc miners on the Indian Reservation from the age of 14, to understand that music is real work. This is a constant fight and having just passed sixty, I'm getting discouraged. Music is work just like any other and it is as necessary for life as is eating or knowing how to swim in a flood. You caught the brunt of that and for that I apologize. Music and the Arts should recieve the same stimulus from the community that all work recieves. We should ask what kind of world we want to live in and what environment our children should have available to them. That was what I meant in the post that I wrote before the one where I was abrupt. I certainly enjoy your conversations including the current one. Perhaps we might say the Entertainment is to Music and Art as Employment is to work. But without money we don't have time to do Music and Art and if we only do sitcoms for products on TV we don't do Art. Garbage in, garbage out. I long for a conversation where we can discuss how to get those Chamber Opera Companies up and working in every city in North America of 100,000 people are more. The Arts in NYCity are a 14 Billion dollar business. 9/11 cut into the Arts and the whole city has suffered as the people in the businesses that service the Arts lose their way as well. We simply have to realize that Tourism and the Arts is not the poor cousin to a factory or a speculative bank. The Wall Street Journal considers the Arts to be an area where they write criticisms, not stimulate business, in fact they depress the business. It is a depressing world and when I encounter what feels like that old lead and zinc miner hierarchy it makes me seriously depressed at this age. So forgive my rudeness but I really do need help with this. Thank you Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
