Last Thursday, the NEA funding increases survived three hostile amendments in the House and ultimately made it through to approval unscathed.  The most hostile of the amendments, offered by Doub Lamborn (R-CO), would have eliminated funding for the NEA, and was defeated 97-335.  Of those 97 yes votes, 3 were Democrats: Gene Taylor of Mississippi, Ike Skelton of Missouri, and Jim Matheson of Utah.  The Republicans were split roughly 50/50, with 94 ayes and 104 nays.  The closest vote was for the Bishop amendment to move $31.6 Million from the NEA to the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Parks, and the Forest Service.  The 156-270 defeat was a 114 vote margin (i.e. 57 people changing their vote from nay to aye would have resulted in a tie.).

Interestingly, the Bishop amendment was the first offered.  The Brown-Waite amendment to remove the NEA increase outright was offered and defeated by a wider margin (137-285) the following day.  The Lamborn amendment was the second-to-last amendment offered, at a point when one imagines that Lamborn knew it had no chance of passage, which leads me to suspect that it was simple posturing rather than a serious threat.  NEA support seems strong, overall, and I am encouraged for the bill’s prospects in the Senate.  Furthermore, this increase has gotten relatively little media coverage, which probably means that the media doesn’t consider it a controversial or otherwise interesting issue.  Given the extent to which the NEA has historically served as a proxy for conservative frustrations with the government, that the nation seems to see this funding increase as routine and unremarkable is probably a good sign for those of us who support a robust NEA.

Two quick notes:

First, the American Symphony Orchestra League is reporting that the full House Appropriations Committee has approved the major arts funding increases which the Interior Subcommittee had recommended on May 23rd.  InsideHigherEd.com confirms the story, saying that

“The House Appropriations Committee approved legislation Thursday that would increase spending on the National Endowment for the Humanities to $160 million in the 2008 fiscal year, up sharply from the $141.4 million that the agency is receiving this year. The bill, which finances the Interior Department and numerous other agencies such as non gamstop casinos, would also provide $160 million to the National Endowment for the Arts, which would represent a $35 million increase over its 2007 allocation.”

Next stop is the House Floor.  As I said before, there remain many opportunities for this funding proposal to die, but so far it remains unscathed.

Second, our friends Drew McManus of Adaptastration and Frank Oteri of NewMusicBox are going to be on Sound Check on WNYC this afternoon, discussing whether blogs can fill the void left by declining arts coverage in the mainstream media.  The show airs at 2 PM, and you can catch the web stream at wnyc.org if you’re outside of the New York region.  Sound Check also posts its episodes on the website within a few hours of the air time, so you can hear the rerun there.  You tell ’em, Drew and Frank!

According to the American Symphony Orchestra League, which has been coordinating an advocacy campaign on the subject, the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee in the House of Representatives  passed yesterday a $35 Million increase in the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.  According to ASOL, “This increase is significantly higher than the modest $4 million increase proposed by the President and represents a much more substantial restoration of NEA funds than has been proposed by the House committee since the NEA sustained a 40% budget cut more than a decade ago.”  I don’t see any confirmation of this on the committe’s website or on the news wires yet, but ASOL presumably has a reliable source.

The proposed increase is still a long way from becoming law.  If my understanding of the process is correct, the Appropriations Committe has to approve the recommendations of the Interior Committe, and then the budget has to be debated on the House floor and voted on, then debated and voted on in the Senate.  Chances are that different versions will be passed in the House and Senate, so it will then have to go to Conference, where the differences will be ironed out.  Then it goes back to both chambers and gets voted on again.  Then it goes to the President.  And at any point in here, the NEA funding increase could be used as a bargaining chip and get traded away for something else.

ASOL has a brief with background and talking points which you can read here.

UPDATE: The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story too.  The proposed budget seems to be $160 Million for the NEA and $160 Million for the NEH.  The $35 Million increase for the NEA would apparently be the largest increase ever.  The Chronicle also confirms that this proposal hasn’t been approved by the full Appropriations Committe, so it could easily go up in smoke.

Jacob ter Veldhuis might be the best composer you’ve never heard of. Let me explain.

Start with his 1999 piece “Heartbreakers,” which takes recordings of American daytime television talk shows like Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, and Oprah, and sets them within the context of a Jazz ensemble. Ter Veldhuis uses the technique, pioneered by Steve Reich in pieces like “Different Trains,” of playing fragments of speech and doubling the melodic patterns with the instruments. Musically, the result is a sort of post-minimalist jazz jam-fest, complete with improvised solos and speech clips sliced and diced and repeated until the meanings of the words are subsumed by the musical content. The bulk of the source material for the piece is crack addicted prostitutes being confronted by their mothers on Jerry Springer, and ter Veldhuis treats their plight with a fascinating combination of humor and sympathy, and that’s where the comparison with Steve Reich becomes moot. (more…)

Yes, you read that right.  Two men got into a fistfight at the Boston Pops, which apparently knocked over chairs left one of them shirtless.  With the obvious caviat that we should use our words to resolve our differences and that violence is generally bad, this is great news for the classical world.  I wish it had been a regular BSO concert.

Conductor Kieth Lockhard apparently took the fracas in stride.  According to one audience member “he just stood there, you know, quiet.”

Somebody had to do it.  Sorry.[youtube]KRIUYgozCGo[/youtube]

Our pal Frank Oteri has written a contribution for Take A Friend to the Orchestra, and it’s up today.  Frank describes taking his friend Joe Ornstein to the ACO concert at Zankel Hall a few weeks ago.  Ornstein is smart and funny and pulls no punches–it’s a good read.  “People who go to the three-B concerts are snobs generally speaking. And if they aren’t, I don’t know what the hell they’re doing there.”  I actually met Joe at that concert and we had a lovely chat during intermission.

My own essay on the structural differences between the popular music experience and the classical music experience and how those differences make recruiting new audience members difficult can be found here.

Bill Harris, an expert on organizational systems, wrote a fascinating systems analysis of the potential effectiveness of programs like TAFTO.  You can, and should, get your geek on here.

And back on April 4, Leonard Slatkin spun a couple of yarns that illustrate the importance of putting on truly inspirational concerts if you really care about finding new audiences.

That’s just a sampling–there’s other good stuff too.

I’m so glad you asked!  TAFTO is Drew McManus’s “Take a Friend to the Orchestra” month–a month dedicated to bringing new fans into the fold.  As always, Drew is marking TAFTO with a series of essays by hot, industry-savvy writers — how-to guides, analysis of the contemporary situation, and so on.  The first two essays went up yesterday and today, and you should check them out.

Both of my fans (hi mom!) will want to know that my own contribution will be going up on April 12th, and the rest of you will want to know that you can see a list of the other contributors (including the likes of Frank Oteri and Leonard Slatkin) and other timely TAFTO information right here.  Why, I’m reading it right now!

Seriously, this is good stuff and if you’re interested in discussions about the future of the classical music industry these essays will be worth reading.

New York, NY, March 29, 2007.  I’ve been a fan of Evan Ziporyn’s music since six or seven years ago when I first heard his work in a concert of piano music at Dartmouth College. (I think it must have been “Pondok,” in a recital by the fabulous Sarah Cahill, but I can’t seem to find evidence to support that conclusion. Sarah, if you’re out there. . .) Ziporyn is a fixture at Bang On A Can, and a member of the Bang On A Can All Stars where he plays a mean clarinet; he’s also a member of the music faculty at MIT and the founder of Gamelan Galak Tika. Last Thursday, Ziporyn teamed up with cello-percussion duo Odd Appetite (Ha Yang Kim and Nathan Davis) and bassist Robert Black (another Bang On A Can All Stars member) for two sets at The Stone, John Zorn’s Alphabet City new music dive.

Ziporyn opened the set with “Partial Truths” for solo bass clarinet, from his 2001 album “This is Not a Clarinet,” which weaves together percussive sounding tongued notes, cycles of leaping figures that outline lovely contrapuntal lines, melodies sung through the instrument in harmony with the clarinet sounds themselves, and a variety of other extended techniques that pushed at the far edges of the acoustic properties of the instrument. The fullness and richness of the texture was remarkable given the limitations of a single, ordinarily monophonic instrument.

The atmosphere was very relaxed and informal as the remaining three members of the quarter took their places for the remainder of the concert, and Ziporyn explained that while some of the pieces they were about to play had titles, they were really just working titles and so we weren’t going to be told what they were. But they were all good.

The first piece with the quarter, for example, started with a devastatingly beautiful texture of rich descending lines and then slowly went haywire. The consonant harmonies of the beginning slowly went dissonant, and the notes themselves were played with harsh extended techniques. This was to be a common structural feature of the remaining works—clean, organized music that gradually broke down in fascinating and simultaneously beautiful and ugly ways. Talking with Nathan Davis afterward learned that about 30% of the concert was improvised, and most of that improvisation took place in the parts where things “get weird.” I also learned that while the first piece for the quartet was through-composed the performers were instructed to add harmonics and other effects to dirty-up the sound. The cello and bass would essentially play with deliberately sloppy technique in order to introduce the kinds of artifacts that one ordinarily avoids. Ziporyn’s clarinet would make the kinds of shrieks and howls that I remember making by mistake when I was first learning the saxophone in elementary school. But in this context those “ugly” sounds simply added to the character and to the beauty of the music. Other pieces switched seamlessly from one time signature to another, in the same effortlessly disorienting way that the best Philip Glass music does, and layering different time signatures over each other. Following the music by counting becomes impossible, but once you let go you drift above the grid carried by the chaotic beauty of the sounds.

And all that remains is to note that the performers themselves were uniformly excellent. All four have impeccable technique, and Davis and Kim are both skilled composers themselves which presumably enhanced the level of the improvisational components of the evening. I suspect all four will be heard on this summer’s Bang On A Can Marathon, so mark your calendars.

It’s funny how our own personal preferences can make it so difficult to review concerts objectively. Take Monday night’s American Composer’s Orchestra concert, at Zankel Hall in New York – all seven pieces were good, often impressive, sometimes subtle and complex. But the things I want to rave about were not, I suspect, the things that most of the audience would have raved about when they got home.

Min Xiao-Fen’s Blue Pipa, for voice and the lute-like Chinese instrument named in the title, opened the concert effectively. Min performed the piece herself in a pool of light on an otherwise dark stage, and the combined vocal acrobatics and impressively virtuosic pipa playing made for a lovely and exciting piece. One audience member told me during intermission that it could have gone on for another five minutes and still been exciting.

Tania León’s Indigena combined the Cuban carnival music of her youth with quasi-tonal modernism in her trademark style. Her great skill lies in making this marriage organic—not so much seamless as deeply integrated, and never condescending to either tradition.

Speaking of integrative skill, Harold Meltzer’s Virginal performed the same feat with Renaissance stylings in a similarly modernist, quasi-tonal context. The contrapuntal music felt deliberate and rigorous in the same way that a 17^th century fugue or an early 20^th century serialist piece does.

But for all their virtues, and in spite of how well the audience liked them, none of the first three pieces excited me in the way that two sections of Vijay Iyer’s Interventions did. Perhaps a third of the way in, the orchestra drops out and Iyer, who was playing the largely improvised piano part, lets loose with a set of rippling riffs while pre-processed drum and hi-hat loops bounce back and forth in the speakers. I’m not convinced that the section really fit with the rest of the piece, but I have difficulty really minding. The piece’s long, static denouement was, for me, the heart of the piece. Most of the orchestra starts snapping their fingers in a steady slow rhythm, while the piano and strings give a long, droning, steady chord. It’s funny at first—you expect them to break into “boy, boy, crazy boy”–but as it continues the snaps reclaim their independence and provide an unusual sounding grid while the percussionist plays a slow pattern on a suspended cymbal. The cymbal patter sounds regular, but out of sync with the snaps, but if it was truly regular I couldn’t figure out the pattern. The overall effect was gorgeous and entrancing, and I didn’t want it to stop.

After intermission, Andrew McKenna Lee played his solo guitar piece Arabescata, which weaves together rock and classical language. It worked very well as a compliment to Blue Pipa from the first half—again sometimes pretty and sometimes impressively virtuosic. Kurt Rohde’s White Boy/Man Invisible was the least memorable segment of the concert for me, but as I recall the audience response was one of the most enthusiastic of the evening.

Rounding out the theme of integration of different musics, Steven Mackey played guitar for his Deal, a concerto of sorts for electric guitar and orchestra. Much of the first half of the piece didn’t engage me, although Mackey did a remarkably skillful job of combining the guitar with the orchestra in an organic way. As with Vijay Iyer’s piece, however, the final sections made the whole concert worthwhile. Most of the orchestra drops out, and Mackey sets up some looping grooves with his effects pedals against, surprisingly enough, recordings of what sounded to me like chickens, playing slowly evolving chords and countermelodies over it, building gradually over several minutes. By the time the orchestra came back, I was sold, but again it was some of the least spectacular music that did it. Maybe I just like the wrong things.