Sunday, June 24, 2007

what's in a name

One of my summer jobs is booking a chamber concert series for Jersey City. I'm on the payroll of City Hall! There's something about it that's very... I want to say Mr. Chips goes to Washington, but I know that's not right. Anyway, the series I had started a few years ago was called Music From Blue Hill, a name I liked for its graphic possibilities: posters had a little row of mountains sitting behind a skyscrapered city, with the name cascading down from one to the other. I called it that because the starting point was Blue Hill, Maine, where I'd met most of the folksI was playing with at Kneisel Hall. Well,I can't call it that anymore. For one thing, there's a restaurant called Blue Hill that seems to have gotten much more famous since I lived in Israel. For another, it seems like the name should be more site-specific. I want this thing to eventually turn into a non-profit foundation providing free concerts for Jersey City. And City Hall wants me to put these shows on all over the town. Not to be lacking in civic pride, but having Jersey City in the title is kind of unappealing to me. I'm thinking "Gazebo Music" since we've been playing in the gazebo in my park, and I think every park in town has one.I looked it up and it has a strange,possibly bastardized etymology, which is cool. Any other suggestions?
And speaking of what do we call it, check out this article from today's NY Times. Actually it's one of those "duh" pieces they periodically put out on the shrinking/changing audience of classical music. This time it's on chamber music, and I can sum up the piece for you with its last two sentences: "Chamber music is dead. Long live chamber music." Zinger. I'm sorry, but it's always seemed a no-brainer to me that improv or jazz groups are also chamber music. Who cares about the purists? Anyway, here's the link. Enjoy. Or don't.

p.s. This morning I saw another NYT article relating to this whole audience issue: about the Welsh tenor who won "Britain's Got Talent." I always thought what the classical world needed was a big teen romantic comedy movie. Isn't a music camp or youth orchestra so perfect for that? All the gossip and dating mixed in with talent and competition? Instead we get Hilary and Jackie, Shine, The Pianist... I have to admit I've only seen the last one of those 3, and I love it. But these movies seem to portray the choice to be a professional musician as a choice to remove oneself from the company of everyone and everything "normal" in the world. So to see a tenor on reality television, where "normal" people can compete to show they're extraordinary, and hear the audience applaud in the middle- gasp!- of an aria, like it's a jazz solo, and then to hear Puccini absolutely bring the house down. It's like, yes, this is the medium to bring it out there. I don't pay attention to those shows at all- until I watched "Dancing with the Stars" with my Great Aunt Dot last month, and had a blast! It was awesome. Before that, were there ballroom dancing critics bemoaning the decline of the art, or audience? Are there any amazing cellists or clarinetists or harpists trying out for America's Got Talent? Am I cheapening the art form by asking?

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