Minneapolis Music "Scene" In Crisis: The Fickle Ears Pocket Guide to Donning Your Adult Trousers

When I began to seriously explore my options for leaving Minneapolis, it was not just because I had lived there my whole life, because I felt I had outgrown it, because I had become frustrated with a number of my projects, because I saw little hope of ever earning a respectable living there as a musician, because I felt the need to continue my formal education, or because I got sick of not being able to drive my car because it was literally frozen to the street. There was also a certain amount of writing on the proverbial wall in the form of venues closing or ceasing to host music, and an unmistakable downward trajectory in the interest I felt was being shown in my work. What had once seemed like the bad old days of post-college aimlessness and lessons learned the hard way ca. 2006-08 now appeared as the high point: throughout the mid-to-late 2000s, I had several late-night gigs a year at the Dakota while that series still hosted serious local bands, my teaching studio was steadily expanding, I auditioned my way onto the MN Orch sub list, I landed a 25-hour a week day job with good pay, health benefits, iron-clad scheduling, and no weird hours, and there seemed to be room to grow with most everything I was involved in.

By the time I was sending off grad school applications in the fall of 2010, I had realized that things were not just stagnating but in fact deteriorating. Emails to my contact at the Dakota, an old college friend, started going unanswered; bandmates with ins at other venues had similar trouble; personal relationships, both involving me and not involving me, became strained in a number of my projects. It was time to get the hell off this sinking ship.

The more recent sinkings of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Artists' Quarter make a rather incongruous pairing, except by timing, as well as in some ways by my own relationship to each of them: transformative early listening experiences, close mentorship relationships with members of their respective inner circles, avid participation in all the standard-issue minor-league kiddie shows, courtship of real adult involvement following my graduation from college and emergence into the professional world, and ultimately, after six years of that last step, zero to show for it. How, then, could I of all people possibly squeeze out something despairing, or even matter-of-fact, about the direction of the Twin Cities music scene in the wake of these two dinosaur institutions falling on the hardest of times? I have been proclaiming here for years a sort of Darwinist outlook on such institutions, which have a tendency to divert attention, resources, and butts-in-seats from the more out-of-the-way places where the music of our own time is hammered out. In that sense, I have to say obstinately that had I anticipated the downward spiral progressing quite so quickly, I may not have been so quick to leave town. The kind of work I'm interested in doing needs space, both literally and figuratively. Minneapolis in my heyday there offered neither kind; the city was too small and its institutions too big. It's not farfetched to wonder if a complete wasteland would have presented more opportunities than I had. If that's the way things are headed, color me equanimous.

The problem with this kind of anarcho-utopianism regarding the current situation is, of course, that the core audiences for the institutions under discussion are largely blind (deaf?) to the rest of the scene. They're more likely to disappear altogether than to take the initiative to find out what else has been going on this whole time. They need to know exactly what they're going to get in both musical product and social prestige before they make an appearance at an unfamiliar location, and there are more than a few parts of town which are non-starters from the outset. If anyone reading this back home takes offense to that evaluation, you have exactly one way to prove I'm wrong, and that's to become a seeker rather than a finder of live music. And to bring a friend. I double-dog dare you.

The vitality of a music scene cannot be measured by how many musicians comprise it, what kinds of music they play, how many venues they have to play at, how they compare ability-wise to musicians in other cities, or by measuring any of this per-capita, as Minneapolitans have the blithely irritating tendency to do whether or not it is relevant or constructive. Rather, the audience, that other 50% of the musical transaction, is more like 100% of the indication of a scene's vitality. It matters not whether that audience is comprised of other professional musicians or of people who just wandered in, just that its presence is, in fact, palpable in the air that is to be moved, its impact tangible on the musicians' morale, its proverbial butts firmly planted in all of those would-be empty seats, and it's five dollar bills deposited in hats, jars, and buckets of all manner in large enough quantities to, if not pay the bills, then at least warrant reporting on a federal tax return. And that's why Minneapolis, for all of its musical and extra-musical strong points, just plain stinks for some of us. When horseshit variety bands get called back year after year for the same good paying gigs, drawing raves from the patrons, it doesn't matter who has more of these bands; you just stink. When the same people play the same music at the same venue for the same audience for decades at a time, that presents another instance of stuff starting to smell funny. When the personality cults are built around musicians whose personalities and music alike don't seem to justify it, a foul odor begins to emanate from the "scene."

What, me bitter? It can't be at the institutions themselves, and it's certainly not at anyone I know. Just about everyone I know even haphazardly or once-removed came to hear me, often several times over. It's the people I only ever met in certain venues in certain parts of town when certain musicians were involved; they are the ones who, for obvious reasons, confound me. An overreaction you say? Not quite, if you believe this guy:

“I cut my salary to where there’s nothing left, and I still can’t make the numbers work,” Horst said. “I still have great nights here, but one great night a week doesn’t cut it. People say, ‘The place was packed when I was there.’ The problem is everyone is there on the same night.”

That many of the musical organizations I most wanted to work with could not afford to involve me in their plans is ultimately on the audience, not the organizations. Those organizations are not stupid, nor are the individuals who comprise them. They can't swing and miss six nights a week, and to them, I'm just another forkball in the dirt. I could only hang so many posters, send so many emails, run so many Facebook events, place on so many jazz calendars, do so many interviews, and go to so many horseshit amateur jam sessions without seeing much of a light at the end of a the tunnel before I just had to give up and go somewhere else.

So, Minneapolis, are you going to sit there and cry in your hotdish like a big blonde baby, or is it maybe time to wake up to all the "other" music you've been missing, to take inventory, notice what's missing, and get the hell to work on making it happen? You're not just going to let me go all petty on you in some stupid Nick-Payton-esque blog rant, right? You can't just let a prematurely washed-up malcontent like me be sooooo happy to have left you in my wake, can you? Don't make me proud, make me sorry! I triple-dog dare all y'all to live up to your own regional hype! Starting now! For better or worse, you have more space to do it now than you've had for quite a long time.

Evading The MN Orch Question

The fact that I have not addressed the Minnesota Orchestra situation here says pretty much exactly what I would say without all the trouble of sitting down to write. However, I thought I might share some related stories that ought to be part of the public record about me and my work, and which will inevitably lead to some elaboration upon that opening sentence.

Early in elementary school (I don't remember exactly when, but quite early indeed), principal trumpet Manny Laureano made a visit to my school to give a talk about Pictures at an Exhibition and play the ubiquitous excerpt a few times. I've long since forgotten the content of the talk, but the sound of his trumpet in that gymnasium is something I've never forgotten, even if I'm not so sure it ever informed my own playing or hastened my later inclination towards brass instruments.

My college tuba teacher Ross Tolbert was the long-time principal tubist with the group and used to positively shower us with complimentary tickets. I once ran into him on my way into a rare concert at the St. Paul Cathedral and he insisted on rustling up a free ticket for me. I owe the bulk of my in-person orchestral listening experience to Ross and the orchestra, who, thanks to Osmo's arrival, were really hitting their stride around this time.

To this day, the most glowing classical-music bonafide on my resume is making the finals of the 2005 WAMSO Competition, which is the Minnesota Orchestra's young artist competition. Unfortunately, the aspect of this that has stuck with me the most is the opportunity I didn't have thanks to some good old fashioned U of MN politicking. At this time in history the U of MN Symphony Orchestra played a yearly "side-by-side" concert with many MNOrch players, and as a graduating super-senior and WAMSO finalist, I fully expected to be assigned to it for the first time. Unfortunately for me, my relationship with our orchestra conductor had been fractured years earlier over my involvement with the jazz ensembles when those commitments (made literally a year in advance for a special collaboration with the dance school) came into conflict with an opera to which he had hastily assigned me. When my friend Mike Werner returned from the side-by-side rehearsal, he told me that a group of players from the orchestra who had served as judges for the competition had come over to congratulate him thinking he was me. I felt bad for him to have been put in that situation, but worse that I had missed a significant chance to make some important connections, or at the very least to soak up some praise from some high-level classical players the likes of which I'd never have so good an opportunity to impress again. There's no guarantee that anything substantive would have come of any such connections, but having been denied the mere opportunity out of petty musico-stylistic politicking is one of several grievances for which I'll never forgive my alma mater. The conductor, against whom a resignation petition was once circulated during a rehearsal, didn't last much longer, but in my case, the damage was already done.

In January 2007, I took a sub list audition for MN Orch and several weeks later received a short, generic letter stating that I had been placed on the list. I assume my name can still be found somewhere towards the bitter end of that list, though obviously it hardly matters. Because I had been purchasing bare-bones ticket packages to the SPCO around this time, I would frequently get calls from fundraisers, who would announce themselves as "so-and-so calling from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra." For about 3 seconds I would think it was a gig. Every time. It was miserable. Then again, MN Orch never even called me to ask for money.

I think I earned my way onto the list based on how I played that day, but in all honesty, the thought of performing with either of those groups did and still does frighten me just a bit. I've never known what to make of the fact that I'm the only U of MN tuba graduate I know who was never extended the invitation. I have tried to explain to jazz people many times that flashy bebop chops do not translate to orchestras of this quality, unless they exclusively play Berlioz, in which case I'm their man. I certainly don't have the right instrument to anchor a sizable orchestra by myself, though it is a supreme chamber orchestra axe, lying as it does right in the sweet spot between the big horn and the small horn as orchestra players tend to conceive of them. In other words, there is a role for me in orchestral music, but it's not the one that ever gets subbed out. Actually, I never once had a paying orchestra gig in Minnesota, not even as a ringer in a youth orchestra or anything like that. Conversely, within four months of moving to Southern California, I played two of them, two more than I'd had the rest of my life, without knowing anyone, handing out any business cards, or even having a Facebook page. I'm not sure if that says more about Southern California or the Twin Cities, but it didn't exactly make me sorry for leaving home.

As of today, everything floating around the blogosphere indicates that the Minnesota Orchestra is in dire jeopardy of ceasing to be the institution I knew it as, one which exposed me to the bulk of the live symphonic music I've experienced, and did so, especially after the arrival of Osmo, at an impeccably high level. This is something worth lamenting if it indeed comes to pass. It is, however, difficult for me to view these events in isolation, and in light of the larger national and international musical landscape, I am oddly ambivalent. I will say that I got sick and tired of seeing MN Orch players compete for and win McKnight Fellowships worth a fraction of their salaries while I and many freelance colleagues were passed over while grossing far less than the value of this grant in an entire year. I will also say that having my teaching methods called "crazy" by one MN Orch member with whom I shared a student was uncomfortable, if not entirely predictable. And though the ensemble has a wall full of ASCAP awards for adventurous programming, mainly that just makes it even harder to take the award seriously. Two of the very worst pieces of music I have ever heard in my life were token contemporary pieces on MN Orch programs, placeholder garbage by careerist hacks that, as many have pointed out, merely reinforce the traditionalist biases of rightly-suspicious blue-hairs.

There is now talk of would-be donors revising the Minnesota Orchestra out of their wills. I have yet to read an item detailing the fate for which all that money is now destined. It is without a doubt at this juncture a sum which could make some wonderful musical things happen in the Twin Cities if it were directed to the right places. The real questions, as always, are whether any such extra-institutional projects so much as smell like art to people with enough money to keep a will on file with their attorneys; indeed, whether these people have a nose for art at all, by any definition; and whether anyone at all in the Twin Cities would attend these performances if it meant they had to drive on surface streets, venture outside the Skyway system, or sit next to someone whose hair actually was dyed blue (you know, like in a hipster way).

So, I am ambivalent. I don't like to see people losing their jobs whether they are fellow musicians or not. I also would like to see the entire American orchestra world blown up and rebuilt into something functional and vital. Unfortunately, there's no reconciling those two things, and even more unfortunately, the former is always a much stronger likelihood than the latter. That's all I have to say about this for now. But do come back tomorrow.

Reflections on a 4-Concert Package

Although I was a regular at Minnesota Orchestra concerts throughout my high school and undergraduate years, I recall attending only two concerts by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra during this same time. There are many reasons for this: Downtown Minneapolis was much closer than Downtown St. Paul; my tuba teacher was a member of MNOrch and often offered us free tickets; and all the brass dorks (myself included, at that time) wanted and needed to hear BIG pieces with BIG excerpts played on BIG horns.

Among the backstage attractions at Orchestra Hall during this time was a wall of plaques from ASCAP honoring the orchestra and its then music director Eiji Oue for so-called "adventurous programming." I shudder to think how the less adventurous orchestras were programming their seasons. For the most part, I never was and still am not a big fan of MNOrch's programming, despite the fact that it has allowed me to hear many of the standard orchestral excerpts for tuba live and in person (back when that mattered to me, at least). For a while, it seemed like Mahler 1 was being played twice a year every year. Later, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe slid into that role, once even popping up with no prior warning when a soloist a cancelled at the last minute. Ravel for Prokofiev is not a fair trade in my mind, but that's just my opinion.

The two main problems I have with the way concerts were programmed there 5-10 years ago (and which seems to me to persist to a great extent as we speak) have, I think, already been deconstructed by many more astute observers of orchestras. For one thing, the predictable hodge-podge of old and new pieces is not always as effective as it might seem on paper. While the goal of such programming is to make sure that there is "something for everyone" on each concert, it also ensures that there is something for everyone to dread, making it difficult for anyone to look forward to the entire concert rather than part of it (and sometimes it's an exceedingly small part).

In my humble opinion, it would make more sense to offer at least a few programs throughout the season where the theme is musical or stylistic rather than making a weak attempt to contextualize a token contemporary piece by surrounding it with works to which it is supposed to have some tenuous extramusical connection. If what we really need is context, why not provide musical or aesthetic context by playing other pieces by this composer, by their contemporaries, students, or teachers? After all, are social and historical context not meaningless without an aesthetic context to go with them?

Rather than diluting an already sparce collection of new(er) pieces to be played any given season by presenting them one at a time as a small parts of larger warhorse-laden programs, why not present them together on a couple of modernist blowout concerts presented a couple of months apart? The answer is that managements would rather have patrons detest one-third of every program than all of one of them. If it has been empirically proven that this keeps more butts in seats, then so be it; I for one would rather see it done the other way around. And if you think that my opinion doesn't matter because I am also a trained musician, well...you might as well stop reading here.

My point is not that old and new(er) pieces can never be on the same program; of course they can. However, if the primary concern in pairing them is not aesthetic, one has to wonder what the point is of having a concert in the first place. Furthermore, with purchasers of mere 4-concert packages now being labelled "Season Ticket Holders" (more on that in a moment), there definitely seems to be a framework in place for dispensing with the notion of a monolithic STH bloc that comes to every single concert and demands the same repertoire year after year. Clearly, orchestras are slowly embracing an approach where people simply go to the concerts they want to hear. The ticket policies are starting to change, at least here in the Twin Cities; hopefully the programming is not far behind.

Add to all of this wrangling over what to do with the new(er) piece(s) on any given program the fact that orchestras would often rather commission a new piece from the Sexy Composer du Jour than program an acknowledged 20th century masterwork in the same idiom (or, just as often, commission the SCdJ to write a derivative, backward-looking piece that sounds old but can be labeled new without lying). Obviously, for orchestras to be supporting living composers is, in the abstract, a good idea (let's put aside for now any perceived problems with their actual choices and the mechanisms for making them). Nonetheless, a larger audience for new(er) music cannot be built this way any more than a larger audience for Classical Era music can be built by omitting the works of Mozart and Beethoven and instead commissioning new works written in that style by composers of lesser ability (and that would be most everyone). No one wants to listen to that. Being almost a decade into the 21st century, we've long since passed the point where a living composer can fill the same role on a mixed program as Stravinsky, Bartok, or Debussy. Concerts simply cannot be allowed to stay in the "Music of Mozart, Beethoven, and My Neighbor" format so long that everyone in between is forgotten. Even the most musically conservative of ears would find a few worthy pieces written in the last 70 years were they simply made aware of them. For the rest of us, there may well be too many to count, making it particularly frustrating that they are not performed.

I have many gripes, obviously, but none of this is enough to keep me away entirely. When I do attempt to make plans, one problem I have had with both The SPCO and MNOrch is the way their ticket packages and season schedules are presented. It has become damn near impossible to find a schedule that simply lists all of the concerts in chronological order. Instead, we get a series of mailings every spring and summer featuring series grouped by day of the week, location, time of day, and so on. I can only assume that this is a response to "busy working professionals" who already know what they're doing any given day of the week from now until they retire. Some of us, however, have no idea (and thankfully so). Can we PLEASE start printing schedules from start to finish, the way the rest of the world does?

I mentioned this to the SPCO representative who called me about renewing my subscription a few months ago. They promised to send me one; I still don't have it, though I have received the same barrage of flyers plugging pre-packaged concert series, none of which are comprised entirely of concerts I'm actually excited about attending. Even the SPCO's website does not, as best I could tell, offer a simple PDF schedule that lists all of next season's classical concerts from start to finish. They do allow you to search the schedule by guest artist, composer, or instrument. (come on guys, no concerts featuring tuba?), but this is a rather inefficient way of piecing together a complete schedule.

On the other hand, MNOrch's website seems to have been improved over what I remembered. For starters, there is a reasonably intuitive online calendar with a complete listing of Orchestra Hall events by month. The only drawback here is that the complete program is not listed on the calendar, and that each month is a separate page; hence, to view the season from start to finish, one must navigate to the first month, click on the link to the first concert to view the program, then navigate back to the month, repeat for the rest of that month's concerts, then navigate ahead to the next month, and so on. Better yet, however, there is a downloadable PDF document that includes a complete and chronological classical season schedule with the complete program for each concert given. I never thought I'd see the day. They did an excellent job cramming all of this information on to a single page, and capitalizing the composer's names so that they jump out a bit was a good move, but if you're as much of a modernist sore ass as I am, you surely noticed that where the Schoenberg arrangement of Bach is listed, the composer's name is capitalized but the arranger's is not. Good job guys. We wouldn't want people staying home because they thought a piece by Schoenberg was going to be on the program, would we?

It also appears that MNOrch will allow customers to essentially build their own series rather than only offering certain combinations at discounted rates. If the SPCO offers such a thing, I can't seem to locate it on their site. I can't think of a good argument against offering customers the option to use their 4- or 5- or 6-concert package on the concerts of their choice, and this would certainly help facilitate an increase concerts of exclusively new(er) pieces as it would avoid locking anyone into hearing them who did not want to.

This post has now gotten long enough that I've basically lost sight of the reason I sat down to write it, which is that last year around this time, I finally took the plunge and bought a 4-concert package for the 2007-08 SPCO season. I mainly did it as a way to force myself back into hearing orchestral music, which I had all of abandoned after I was no longer eligible for student rush tickets (the package was also quite a bargain, even by those standards), and also because The SPCO's programming has, for some time now, piqued my interest more so than that of their crosstown colleagues. The last of those 4 concerts was last Friday night; it did not disappoint, nor did any of the other 3. Perhaps the only disappointment (and yes, I know we're all sick of hearing this) was that I was quite possibly the only person under 40 in the entire balcony. I say disappointing not because I subscribe to the theory that this means classical music is over and done with, but because I knew it was only a matter of time before the sheer curiosity of my fellow concertgoers led to some sort of socially awkward exchange (and of course I'm throwing caution to the wind here in assuming that none of those involved will actually read what I'm about to write; after all, people that age usually don't even know how to use computers, right?).

Sure enough, during the intermission, I hear from my right: "Did you get a student rush ticket?" I was in the middle of a sentence when I was presented with another query from several seats to my left: "Are you a musician?" I sat there in confused silence for several seconds trying to decide who to answer first and how. I've never felt more like George Constanza. It was as if these things had been on everyone's minds the entire first half and now that someone had broken the ice, the floor was open (wide open) for questions.

Here I was sitting in the same seat that I had already been in for three and a half concerts over a span of almost nine months, still utterly unable to blend into the middle-aged white-collar bourgeois scenery. I wanted to break into a profanity-laced tirade about how this was "my seat," that I paid good money for it, that I earned that money working a day job like everyone else around me, that I'm not a student any more, I didn't play in the marching band when I was, and that in light of the preceding observations, I ought to command at least enough respect to be allowed to finish my sentence before the next old biddy whose brother's roommate's uncle happened to play the tuba in junior high school interrupts me with more small-talk.

Instead, biting my tongue, I began to cue up all of the standard diplomatic answers I've been conditioned to give to people my parents' age and older so as not to offend them too badly when they inquire about why in god's name I would eschew a comfortable bourgeois academic life to rough it as a freelance jazz tuba player in the Midwest. This was no small task seeing that it had to be projected in two different directions 180 degrees apart. I couldn't help the feeling that somewhere out there on the East Coast, Greg Sandow was laughing his ass off at me for all the times I said I like the vibe of orchestra concerts just fine thank you. This incident, I think, really has nothing to do with any of that. It's just part of growing up (or not). I can only hope that people will still be underestimating my age by 10 years when I'm a senior citizen. Maybe by then I'll be getting complete season schedules in the mail, and maybe I will open them to see the names of Ligeti, Messaien, Lutoslawski, Kernis and friends next to each other rather than Mozart. That'll be the day.