Classical Economics
Dreck", "Mindles H.
"Classical Economics" MUSIC By "Mindles H. Dreck" Classical Economics important messages to and fro. For that matter, Clinton himself was a cloud on Talbott's horizon. The author politely praises the...
...The author politely praises the president's knowledge and intuition, but it is clear from The Russia Hand that Clinton's grasp of policy—so far as Talbott was aware of things—was facile, intermittent and overly reliant on human relations...
...Labels like Chandos and Hyperion put out records of less explored works and differentiate themselves by offering great production values, such as (terrific sound) audiophile-quality recording...
...and The American Spectator's movie critic...
...There are already some signs of new life, much bemoaned by the competing establishment, attacking the classical establishment from the periphery...
...We learn a great deal about shuttle diplomacy, bureaucratic chains of command, telephone negotiations over the removal of missiles from Ukraine, the civil war in Kosovo, the status of the Russian Orthodox Church, NATO expansion and the fight for Pristina's airport...
...It is the Cadillac of the music business, in the sense that it refuses to evolve from catering to an aging but wealthy demographic, for whom the music is often secondary...
...Barber's Adagio for Strings was made wildly popular by the movie Platoon, even showing up on the pop charts...
...You realize, when listening to these labels, how many great artists are out there and how had a Deutsche Grammophone recording can sound by cornparison.The definitive recording does not have to be Barenboim or Zuckerman...
...If we want classical recordings to survive, we may just have to embrace it...
...That Samantha must learn it the hard way—and that with-out any of the obviously really bad things that can happen to people who don't know it—strikes me as being too trivial a matter for treatment at feature length, a demonstration of the obvious...
...But another reason why this once-famous retort may be fading in the folk memory is that Miss Fuller's proto-feminist assumption of alternative universes to be had for the asking or at least to be reinvented with each new ideological advance—is now one that we all share...
...It happened to Stravinsky...
...We see the same organizational phenomenon here as else-where, namely that big companies are good at delivering products the marketplace tells you specifically it wants, in a survey or marketing study or box office results...
...And, as Tommasini points out, we don't need a 6th or 7th recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...
...For me the problem with this movie was the need to believe that, even today, there is a sufficiently large body of opinion among thirtyish single women that it is a good idea to be sexually promiscuous, to get paralytically drunk and sleep with whomever can be bothered to take you home, to drink and do drugs and go to bars and parties for casual sex...
...A large portion of the audience is in it for social prestige, not music...
...Courtship was supposed to take place—and for the most part did so—on a continuum leading from casual acquaintance through deepening love and friendship to marriage, because marriage and its sexual consummation were seen as the culmination of that process, a terminus ad quern which alone could give meaning to everything leading up to it...
...Also, vital artists such asYo-Yo Ma are using their appeal to draw in more listeners,"crossing over" and experimenting with new forms...
...Chamber music literally was played in one's living room, and amateur musicians were a big part of the art form...
...I say, let the market evolve...
...At roughly 40 years old, we are bringing the average age down substantially...
...The latter approach creating demand—is riskier, but economically more explosive and certainly more fun...
...The classical repertoire can inspire deep feelings...
...For instance, instead of stocking 60,000 titles, an online retailer might offer custom-mixed CDs, or titles may just be "burnt-to-order...
...Many of my friends who also love classical music find this a tragedy.Tommasini ends his article with a seeming shake of his head and a suggestion that "the Internet is here to stay...
...Alternate means of distribution sure can shake up an industry...
...Or watch what ugliness follows in a film like Some Body, directed by Henry Barrial from a screenplay he co-wrote with his star, Stephanie Bennett...
...There we will find the people who capitalized on the form's innate appeal (rather than its establishment fund-raising powers appeal) of this art form, using all the new media, technology and marketing avail-able to them...
...We were living in trees when they met us.They showed us each in turn...
...It doesn't just make you wish you had gone to the bathroom during the intermission.While the recording industry may downsize or fragment first, we will some day read about the "renaissance of classical music...
...My wife and I subscribe to several series at Carnegie Hall and other venues...
...No wonder the artists sometimes have trouble getting inspired for a performance...
...Classical music's demise is the fault of the listeners, the artists and the concert venues...
...In this sense, we are all Marxists now...
...Classical's share of the CD market has dropped from 7 percent in the late 1980s (when consumers were replacing their classical LP library) to about 3 percent currently...
...76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 I t used to be quite a familiar quotation—although it is not, I believe, to be found in Bartlett's anymore...
...But Samantha is just a ninny who thinks that playing the slut will make her happy and then finds that it won't...
...Only the big names and recognized "warhorse" pro-grams sell out...
...M U S 1 C By "Mindles H. Dreck" Classical Economics w important messages to and fro...
...But it is not the sweep of history we witness so much as the vacuum cleaning...
...Classical music isn't threatened by dramatic change in the pre-production of James Bowman is American editor of new CDs—only our present, half-hearted The Times Literary Supplement way of consuming it...
...Clinton was scarcely the first president to personalize foreign policy...
...It might also shake that industry back to life...
...Then they will look for the "safest" series next year...
...Or at least all but a few irrelevant curmudgeons such as myself who are haunted by Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings...
...It isn't the music...
...See sidebar...
...he Neu, York Times' redoubtable music critic Anthony Tommasini devoted a column last fall ("Classical Recording: Spinning Into Oblivion...
...If I had to guess, I would say that the reason for the omission is that we wish nowadays to think better of the pioneering American feminist and transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, than as a butt for the wit of Thomas Carlyle who, when told that she had said, "I accept the universe, ' replied:"Gad...
...But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind...
...Classical labels are downsizing right and left, simply because they aren't making money with the vast majority of their catalogue, because bricks-and-mortar retailers refuse to stock the genre's 60,000 titles and because, as Tommasini says, large labels no longer consider "recording classical music a cultural service, a prestige operation...
...The problem, from Talbott's point of view, is that Clinton seems to have arrived at this conclusion with no discernible assistance from the Russia Hand: The president, for reasons we cannot discern, felt affectionate toward "ol' Boris," and it was Talbott's job to grease the machinery of the partnership...
...If we did, there are 100 or so to choose from...
...Everything has to be...
...Go (please...
...But he was also correct to discern that Boris Yeltsin, for all his manifold flaws and quirks, was the best among innumerable undesirable choices in Moscow...
...But the point about such people is that their splendidly awful personal authenticity, which is what is admirable about them (if anything is), is chosen...
...That this is a common point of view among women would seem to be the mini-mum requirement for us to sympathize with one such as Miss Bennett's character, Samantha, who only learns from bitter experience that it is a bad idea to do these things...
...She'd better...
...It can be rebellious, soothing, tragic or thought-provoking...
...Our fellow concert-goers noisily unwrap cough drops and contract 30-second cases of tuberculosis between movements.We are all jammed too close together...
...In the old days, if they didn't like something, they booed it off stage...
...We make Wimbledon spectators look like soccer hooligans...
...In no area of human life has this forget-fulness been more apparent—at least in the nearly 40 years since the sexual revolution of the 1960s—than love and courtship...
...It's true that movies have for some time offered us portraits of sociopaths of one kind or another for whom we are meant to feel, if not sympathy exactly, at least a kind of admiration—like Hannibal Lecter, say, or Angelina Jolie's character in Girl, Interrupted...
...Untune that string, as Shakespeare's Ulysses said about "degree" in Troilus and Cressida, and hark what discord follows...
...Who doesn't know this...
...They are not an involved or youthful market...
...Well, duh...
...The burden of silence weighs heavily on everyone...
...In other words, in pursuing the sort of Higher Thoughts that commonly occupy the minds of artists and philosophers, we may forget such basic and unalterable—also useful—data as that water wets and fire burns...
...You remember them...
...In some sense they like being like this...
...to a concert and look around you...
...As a marketplace, too many of us are asleep...
...Here there are no Gods of the Copybook Headings because there is no copybook...
...And no wonder, as Tommasini "Mind/es H.Dreck," a pseudonym, is a managing director of a New York money management firm...
...Once among the principles too obvious even to need copybook expression was the under-standing that sexual promiscuity was bad for men and much worse for women...
...We have to remember this is not how classical music originally gained popularity...
...After Amadeus, Mozart's symphonies were heard every-where...
...be deeply moving and is rewarding to the repeat listener...
...This leaves Talbott, in the end, with not much to say...
...Classical repertoire often seeps into the mass consciousness...
...Well, yes...
...His training at Time serves him well in minor vignettes—"Larry [Summers'] brain was like a tank powered by a Lotus engine: It purred as it rolled over any-thing in its way"—or petty disdain: "I had interviewed [Richard] Nixon a number of times in the '80s, so I knew what to expect: an encounter that was awkward bordering on weird...
...to the sad state of the classical recording industry...
...It was not, as now, just a rarified prop for the elite, a place to see the best of the best, be seen and to have your credentials taken...
...He is author of the weblog www..MoreThanZeroSum.com, where a version of this article first appeared...
...That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn...
...Smaller organizations are better at stimulating demand for newer concepts (although Sony broke the mold with the Walkman...
...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 E K By James Bowman Teaching the Gorillas points out, the labels are stuck in the rut of issuing a 101't recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...
...Today, if a young composer with the right sponsorship flung cow dung into the audience while blowing a kazoo in his pants, the audience would clap politely and roll their eyes over dinner at the Russian Tea Room afterward...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
