July 18, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

Music: Vivian Freyre Zoakos

How Pop Is Destroying Our Orchestras

The Musicians of the Orchestra, detail of a painting by Edgar Degas.

The New York Times ran an article in its music section last year describing the "pressures" on American symphony orchestras to introduce gimmicks like Star Wars concerts, and pop music generally, into their regular seasons. Many orchestras are in financial difficulty, the Times observed, noting that such concertsheld in a football stadium for exampleand programming could help increase the ticket-sales component of income. The article also asserted that the time was not ripe for the European system of extensive state and municipal support for symphony orchestras. As for

reversing the decline in popular appreciation of classical music by various means, the Times spoke approvingly of the trend already citedadulterating the symphony schedule with pop music. Destruction of a System In so saying, the Times was, by implication, endorsing the destruction of the American symphony orchestra as the core institution of a musical system designed to promote the mental powers of the populationwhat the symphony orchestra once was in the United States, Germany, and other countries. No matter how much it is protested that a symphony is still playing 90 percent non-pop repertoire, the orchestra will be destroyed by the processes set in motion by this trend toward pop music, and the further unsavory maneuvers by the factions that are promoting this very trend. What are these processes? First, within the orchestra itself, one sees the decline in the musical intelligence of the players. From personal experience inside a major orchestra, this author can testify that in pop music 95 percent of the orchestra is playing notes that have no meaning whatsoever. These notes are merely part of a sound effect, a background noise, if you will. The remaining 5 percent is playing banal tunes. Fewer Instruments If the musician had been trained on such material, he would never have developed the physical and mental command of his instrument needed for orchestral repertoire in the first place. Playing such material undermines everything, technically and musically, that the player has learned since childhood. Likewise for the conductor, assuming that he was taught about music to begin with. Secondarily, one also sees the gradual reduction of the orchestral instruments in terms of diversity and numbers (except for percussion), although the modern orchestra has incredible possibilities for differentiated dialogue for the mindful composer. In pop music amplifiers are substituted for instruments and the computerized sounds and synthetic sounds used are defective, incomplete, or otherwise incongruous with the human mind. Both the physical apparatus and the mental properties of the orchestra have come under attack. The outcome is that the orchestra itself is no longer able

to play a great classical composition. The most elementary errors in phrasing or articulation are committed. Everything becomes flat (affectively speaking) and very boring. The tradition has been lost. "It's All 'Art' " Ironically, most of the musicians will insist that nothing has gone wrong. The younger ones, trained in an American conservatory like Julliard or the New England Conservatory, have received less education in the "humanities" than a technical school graduate, and consequently have no idea that music is anything other than a matter of style or technique. The older ones insist that it is illiberal, if not downright authoritarian, to claim that some music is better than others"it's all art," they say. But no matter what they say, they do not play a Beethoven symphony well after having just done Gershwin's American in Paris. They do not even play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture well when it follows Williams's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. The memory of a Mozart symphony is obliterated when it is followed by Stravinsky's bestial Rite of Spring. So what happens to the audience? Beyond the percentage of people who will not attend a pop concert or, what is worse in their view, a mixed pop/classical concert, classical programs are being boycotted by an audience that cannot understand or be moved by boring performances of, say, Haydn or-not uncommonlyBeethoven, and hence, believes that there is something wrong with the music. So the classical audience declines and the pop audience increases. But since the symphony orchestra in its origins, growth, and constitution is actually superfluous to pop music; since it can no longer play classical music the way it once was played; and since its audience has faded away, the orchestra necessarily becomes a relic for the museum, just as Leonard Bernstein predicted it would. Thanks to John Howard, violinist with the New Jersey Symphony and director of the New York Humanist Academy orchestra, for this column.