California Festival

I've only blogged once before about the California Festival, but it is upon us, starting this Friday, November 3. I'm not going to be able to get out of the Bay Area in the first two weeks of the month, owing to reviews the next two weeks and looming work deadlines, so it took until today for me to take a look at the Festival's web site. That was with prompting from a friend, who mentioned that he "was hoping [I'd] tell [him] there was some obvious way of sorting the California Festival events by location on their website."

Well, I looked, and I was appalled by what I saw. Let me count, er, bullet-list the issues: 

• There's no way to sort the events by location. This is a real problem with a festival that stretches from Fort Bragg to somewhere south of San Diego. (I think - the map to the left of the concert list is of dubious usefulness because you can't click on a location and see what's being performed there or when.)
• The address for each participating organization in the chronological listing bears no resemblance to the concert locations and in some cases to the physical location of the organization. I am highly dubious that 15 Van Ness Avenue is the, or a, correct address for the San Francisco Symphony, one of the three orchestras that organized the festival. That's not the address of Davies Symphony Hall, and in fact it's south of Market Street! What's with the Nordhoff St. address of the Colburn School of Music in LA? The school is across the street and down the block from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Nordhoff Street seems to be...in "Sherwood Forest"?
• You can't copy/paste from the concert list page.
• You can't do an effective search on the concert list page because the page doesn't scroll in response to a search in your browser.
• The site is slow, even on my M2 Mac Mini. Transitions from page to page don't actually take forever, but it seems that way: I'm counting between two and three seconds when you navigate from a details page to the list page. Whoever designed the site seems not to have tested on older computers.
• It's...ugly. Somehow there's enough contrast on the concert listing page even though I think that it features green type on a cream background. 
• All those exploding graphics do nothing for usability; they slow down the site; there are two of them every time you navigate from concert details to the concert listing.
• There is no persistence! If you view a particular listing, when you click Back, you are taken back to listings for November 3. That's right: view a listing for November 17, try to get back to the list page, and you'll be looking at listings for November 3.

Folks, web sites are about 30 years old. I created my person web site in 1996, with a copy of Laura LeMay's Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week. That web site is still posted, though I rarely update it. It is much faster to navigate than the California Festival web site, because it's as basic as you can get. Regardless, there is no damn excuse for a festival sponsored by three of the biggest performing arts organizations in the state to have such a very terrible web site.

Some Ranting and the Ciociara Media Round-Up

Republished with a small Update below.

My review is posted.

• Joshua Kosman, Chron
• Anne Midgette, Washington Post
• Stephen Smoliar, Examiner.com 
• Zachary Wolfe, NYTimes  
• David Wright, Classical Review 
• Michael Ferguson in For All Events 
• Georgia Rowe, Mercury News
• Allan Ulrich, Financial Times (paywall)
• Lawrence Johnson, Musical America (paywall)
• Janos Gereben, SF Examiner
• Susan Brodie, CVNA
• Paul Selar, Bachtrack 
• Greg Freed, Parterre Box
• SF Mike, SF Civic Center
• Heidi Waleson, WSJ
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Opera Tattler
• Thomas May, Memeteria

Also, Nicola Luisotti interviewed by Jason Victor Serinus.

So if you read through all of the above, you'll see that Joshua Kosman and I are scarily on the same page, although as usual he is sharper and more elegant than I am. I swear that this is the only exchange we had about Ciociara before I filed my review, although I did see the URL of his story on Facebook:

[Several of us - Joshua, me, Anne Midgette, Georgia Rowe,Paul Selar, and Zachary Woolfe - are on the same page. I am sure that Allan Ulrich is too, but paywall.]

Now, ranting a bit. I cheered when I saw Joshua's comments about Tutino's esthetic stance. What he isn't quite telling you is that at the Ciociara press conference last month - and you can see streamed video on the SFO web site, right here - Tutino, David Gockley, and Francesca Zambello all found ways to pound on modernist opera.

I was frankly appalled. I don't believe in denouncing musical styles wholesale, and the modernist styles have been central in the development of Western art music in the last century or so. To hear powerful figures such as Gockley and Zambello talking about music that makes audiences flee (yes, those were the words used) was especially appalling.

Zambello got pretty specific, too, referring to German operas she had directed at Santa Fe in the 90s. Well, gosh, Santa Fe Opera just happens to have an online archive, so I looked up the operas in question. I presume she was talking about Wolfgang Rihm's Oedipus and Hans-Jurgen von Bose's The Sorrows of Young Werther. I will have to look them up some time.

I'm also appalled because it's not as though American opera houses are swimming in that awful modernist opera. San Francisco last performed anything I'd call modernist decades ago, with Henze's Das Verratene Meer (1991) and Reimann's Lear (1981, 1985). Related: check out the New York Philharmonic's repertory during the Boulez years, and it's not all Le marteau sans maitre and Schoenberg, not by a long shot.

[Update, 6/22: What was I thinking? SFOpera has produced those awful serialist operas by Alban Berg within living memory. Lulu, 1965, 1971, 1989, 1998; Wozzeck, 1960, 1962, 1968, 1981, 1990, 1999. Yes, it has been 16 years since we saw one of these masterpieces at SFO! Thank goodness for Opera Parallele, which did a fine job with Wozzeck a few years back; the Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen, which performed Wozzeck more or less in concert; West Edge Opera, which puts on Lulu in Oakland in just a few weeks.]

Lastly, you don't pound on a style that has actually got an audience, even if it's a smaller audience than that for Madama Butterfly. The opera audience is fragmented in exactly the way that the general audience for classical music is fragmented. Some people won't go to Lulu, some people won't go to Poppea, some people won't go to Verdi, some people won't go to Wagner, some people won't go to Nozze. Yes, I know that you think everybody loves Mozart, but I have friends who hear his works as nothing but "diddly music." They'll go see Janacek, though!

And then there are people like me, who just want to see the good stuff, in any style and from any era. Monteverdi, Mozart, Lully; Handel, Verdi, Donizetti; Wagner, Berg, Strauss; Martinu, Schreker; Shostakovich, Britten, Adams; Janacek, Birtwistle, Saariaho. We'll take them all, and we don't want to hear operatic leaders denouncing any of them.

Why We Need to Think About Women Composers

Some weeks ago, an article was published over at New Music Box proclaiming that women composers were dead. No, actually, it claimed the term "woman composer" is dead. We are sufficiently advanced that we don't need the term any longer.

A number of people took issue with this in the comments, which are well worth reading. I asked whether that much had actually changed since my 2008 article, "Lend Me a Pick Ax," was published in NMB.

Here's some evidence that things just aren't changing as fast as you might think.

• Ojai Music Festival, 2010: works by Saed Haddad, George Benjamin, Steve Potter, Schoenberg, Strauss, Varese, Zappa, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Purcell, Boulez, Knussen, Ligeti
• Ojai Music Festival, 2011: works by Purcell, Faure, Messiaen, Szymanowski, Copland, Britten, Berio, and Grainger, David Bruce, Crumb, Janacek, Prokofiev, Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Tognetti, Schoenberg, Bach, Crumb, Webern, Maria Schneider, Bartok, Grieg,  
• Ojai Music Festival, 2012: works by John Luther Adams, Dmitri Shostakovich, Charles Ives, Leos Janacek,  Reinbert de Leeuw, Richard Wagner, Alban Berg, Beethoven, Haflidi Hallgrímsson, Bent Sørensen, Mozart, Kurtag, Bartok, Grieg, Bolcom, Copland, Debussy, the other John Adams, Stravinsky
• Ojai Music Festival, 2013: works by Lou Harrison, John Luther Adams, Samuel Barber, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, Igor Stravinsky, William Walton

The Ojai Festival is a major West Coast festival of 20th and 21st century music, and four years of programming, from 2010 to 2013, include one work by a woman.

There's just no excuse for this.

Contest Reactions, Here and There

Time to start tracking the reactions around the blogosphere (watch this posting for updates):

• Anne Midgette throws down a gauntlet that I am looking at squinty-eyed.
• Elaine Fine at Musical Assumptions is "taken aback;" not entering but answering the first question anyway.
• Patrick Vaz at Reverberate Hills is in high dudgeon. In the comments SFMike makes his disdain known. (I like Amanda, Mike!)
• Brian at Out West Arts rightly uses the tag rant for his posting. I need one of those.
• Mr. CKDH at All is Yar was going to ignore the whole thing.
• Zerbinetta, of Likely Impossibilities, rolls her eyes, writes great stuff about how getting to Carnegie Hall didn't help her local orchestra, but may enter! [Update: and she has entered!]
• Douglas McLennan, founder/editor of ArtsJournal and one of the judges of the contest, weighs in, quoting me, Patrick, Brian, and Anne. Are ArtsJournal bloggers allowed to enter? Apparently so, given the loose eligibility rules.
• Seated Ovation is participating.
• Musical Perceptions is participating.
• Opera Tattler entered.
• Omniscient Mussel registered, but seems to have missed the first essay deadline.
• Drew McManus weighs in, skeptically.
• Linda Essig entered, then thought the better of it.
• I'm sputtering. Yes, that was fun to write. Why do you ask? By the way, my answer to the question is "It depends." Alex Ross counted 50 new music groups in NYC a few years back, during the heat of the Death of Classical Music Debate, round 1. I doubt there's another city in the country with that density of new music performance. As for all other aspects of that pointless question, I roll my eyes.
  I also can't shut up:
• Statistics and a Note
• Bloggers, Critics, and Presenters
• The Contest
• The Culture Games

No Contest

Dear Spring for Music:

You are a great organization, and I admire the orchestral programming that has come out of your sponsorship. But....really? Finding the best arts blogger in North America? You have got to be kidding...well, okay, the $2500 prize suggests that you are not.

But you should think about this a little more. Because the more I think about it, the higher my blood pressure gets, for so many reasons.

Let's start with the idea that it is somehow possible to name the best arts blogger in North American, or even in the classical music blogosphere. I currently read or link to a rather large number of music blogs; see link list just to the right of this posting. I know of dozens more that are undoubtedly worth reading; see Alex Ross's ginormous link list. I'm going to guess that there are at least 250 classical music blogs worth reading. Multiply that by the number of good blogs on rock/pop/folk music, jazz, theater, modern dance, ballet, film, sculpture, painting, literature, and we're talking about a minimum of 2500 arts blogs worth reading.

If you think you can name one of those the best with any credibility at all, and based on just four essays written to your specifications, you're wrong. You can't.

Bloggers get credibility by posting intelligently and with some kind of consistency over a period of months or years. I've been at this for seven years; my blog postings have ranged from one sentence to almost-essay-length. I don't write on a schedule, and because I am a full-time professional writer - not in the arts - I value the freedom to write or not write, as time and energy allow. Entering your contest, and even winning it, wouldn't do much for my credibility.

And let's look at who the entrants will be competing against. Why, they could be competing against Alex Ross and Terry Teachout - because your rules do not exclude bloggers who have full-time gigs writing about the arts.

Now, I don't think either Terry or Alex will be entering. They have jobs and book contracts and little to gain by entering. $2500 is a nice chunk of change, but not next to the royalties on books that sell well....or a MacArthur Fellowship. And they're right there in NYC...and if they call you up, you'll give them comps! I mean, you're not going to refuse comps to The New Yorker's classical music writer  or the author of several arts biographies, are you? (If I just showed up in NYC, on my own dime and with no paid review lined up, would you give me comps?)

They're probably not the kinds of entrants you have in mind. You probably also don't have in mind musicologist Jonathan Bellman or John Adams. You probably have in mind people like me: yeah, I have a degree in music, yeah, I get paid for writing a small number of reviews a year for SFCV, but I'm not a full time pro. What you're doing is asking me to compete against my friends, people like Mr. CKDH at All is Yar, or Patrick at The Reverberate Hills, or Zerbinetta at Likely Impossibilities, or Brian at Out West Arts.

Really? I would not hold myself up in any circumstances as a better blogger than those four, and you know, what I really want is for all of us to have bigger readerships.

Also, I see that the essays/blog postings won't be anonymous! Are you telling me that your judges and the voters - the anonymous hordes of the internet - don't already have favorites? That there aren't thousands of opera lovers ready to vote for Parterre Box, if La Cieca chooses to enter?

And you're actually encouraging campaigns on behalf of different bloggers? HONESTLY. That is so junior high! Are you also encouraging campaigns to try to decide the best classical music critic in North America? Maybe not, because, sadly, there are so few paid full-time critic positions left. And anyway - they're pros! They don't need this!

Seriously - either you take bloggers serious as critics and writers, or you don't. Dear Spring for Music, you are sending mighty mixed signals. And I'm not gonna play.

Yours,

Lisa
http://irontongue.blogspot.com/

P. S. That first round question? Seriously, why would I even want to discuss the subject, in the absolute and given the ridiculous way you frame the non-issue?