We hear now all over the Classical Music blogdom and trade journals of a 'modern' crisis in Classical music; I've been reading Murray Ginsberg's history of Canadian music in the twentieth century, and you'll never guess what I've found --- it may well be that the popularity of Classical music is the anomaly!
Ok, the brutal bad news: in the early industrially enlightened age of American Prosperity the entertainment and education of the New World did not include the great classics; the ticket-buying norm was vaudeville, music halls, even to some extent, and even in Canada, it was that Jass music. So much so that the first incarnation of the Toronto Symphony in 1908 went bankrupt within five years!
No one added dazzle and sizzle or marketing departments. No one staged extravaganzas or decked themselves out in shock-value. There wasn't even any great disrespect paid to their ordinary day-job music. What changed was only the musicians. It was our musicians, and not the public, who so wanted to play and hear the beloved grand master achievements of the Classical tradition, that they did it themselves, regardless whether or not they were going to be paid; they did it for the music, for the sheer joy of doing it.They did it because in their soul, they needed it. Such a different world it was back then.
[Luigi] von Kunits was confident that, especially with his students in tow, Toronto had enough skilled players for the New Symphony Orchestra. But all its musicians actually earned their living playing afternoon and evening performances in the theatre pits,. The only time the orchestra could present concerts was between theatre performances, from 5:15 to 6:15pm (after which the musicians would return to their respective theatres).
The musicians were assembled in late 1922 and rehearsals began. For the players it was a joyous time: at last they were able to play their beloved Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.
Playing accompaniment to vaudeville acts or music to the flickering images on the silent screen seemed less onerous, as long as they could spend some happy hours with von Kunits and the New Symphony Orchestra.
Von Kunits rehearsed them well, On April 23, 1923, the sixty-musicians aggregation, with the maestro on the podium, made its debut in Massey Hall (erected in 1892 as a gift to the people of Toronto from its famous family of agricultural machinery manufacturers). Playing to a half-filled auditorium, the orchestra offered a program consisting of Weber, Dvorak, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. According to Arnold Edinborough, the critics were impressed ... though responsive, the early audiences were not large, but by its fifth season the orchestra had finally found its patrons. During the 1926-27 season, the name Toronto Symphony Orchestra became the official title of the growing organization.
Which now begs the question: at what point did the need for this music become the right to budgets, managers, halls and the associated funding? Looking at the timeline, we have 400 some years where the musicians play because they want to play, then a tiny blip of a few decades where suddenly there is a great ballywhoo and strikes and demands for rights to be paid for doing what, history shows, they themselves needed to do for their own sanity. Where did the flip happen? With the Unions? No, sorry, there again, if we examine the history, the union in Toronto was started in 1887 with the Toronto Orchestral Association simply to standardize on the rates payed for the requisite day-job mundane musical provisions, for the music that the buyer needed, but to which the musicans were largely indifferent.
Hence the expression, "You'd have to pay me to do that" -- the organization was called 'Orchestral' but only because the trained musicians of the day were called upon to play the pop music of the day, which in 1887 was largely church and classical repertoire. The name was changed before the turn of the century to reflect the changing popular interests, but remember: the actual Orchestra would not exist for another two decades.
But getting back to that timeslot, that 5:15 to 6:15 pm, the only timeslot available to the musicians to assemble to rehearse and perform the works they felt would do the most benefit to themselves and to their audiences, a conviction so strong they would persist for five seasons slowly educating and expanding their audiences until they reached a break-even sustainability, at which point, one would think, everyone would be happy.
So what went so horribly wrong? I no longer see classical players in any of the cafes, there are no Debussys and Saties exploring the limits of parlour composition, there are no Jose Broca exploring the reach of the guitar, building upon the tone science that had gone before, cognizant of every twist of the story to date, studiously applied and explored. Outside of perhaps a very few of the jazz-parlours where there still lurk those who dare chance an explorative cadenza (tho most often mechanically just payin' dues), I see instead grunge guitars and off-minor rumblings, I see pop-song duets with strummed chords first-position, imagined solo and fill lines and dr-um ma-chi-nes, we were better off with barrelhouse and vaudeville! So what happened? Hundreds, possibly thousands of years of traditional contact between the people and their musicians, where did it go?
And more to the point, how do we get it back? I think that is a rhetorical question really, given the example of our forebearers: We need a reprise, a new New Symphony Orchestra, a new commitment to the medicinal shamanism of the profession that looks beyond petty costs. Sell insurance if you must make a buck, but how about let's keep our humanity.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.