This week’s theme is…Shining Silver! Silver gleams and glistens. It’s gold’s sleek, slick, and stylish cousin. Where gold holds court, silver courts. Silver has driven the history of the world just like gold, and appears in music in many different ways. This week, we look music on which silver has left its dapper lustrous.
Shining Silver, Day 2 – A Waterbird Talk by Dominick Argento
Classical music is an especially tough scene to break into. You may think that it is hard to launch a rock band these days, and I’m sure that is true. Most bands fade into obscurity, their names lost to history. The few and the proud are those that make it big, even in this age of easy publishing and internet access. While it is true that anyone can record and publish their own music today given the inexpensiveness of resources and tools like Garageband, YouTube and the like, the marketplace is consequently that much more crowded with contenders for your attention, affection, and hard-earned money. The gatekeeper has simply shifted locations: if you were trying to make it as a rock band in the 1970s your biggest job would have been to convince a record producer who held some degree of power to grant you access to the very expensive studio recording and mixing process necessary to produce a professional album to give you a shot. But now, literally anyone can be their own producer for an almost infinite fraction of that cost, and so the gatekeeper, or gatekeepers, are no longer the producers (although they certainly still play a role), but the audiences themselves. You are one such example – you posses the power (albeit a very small amount of power, but it is power nonetheless – “many drops can turn a wheel, singly none”) to watch the YouTube videos that you choose. And if enough people like you make the same choice, the owner of that particular video will become wealthy given the fertility of his or her video as placement for advertisements that help to fund the YouTube enterprise. Now, it is simple in principle, but the execution is difficult, requiring inordinate originality, clever execution, and consummate craftsmanship served up to the cognitive expectations of YouTube viewers, like you. When it works, we sometimes call the phenomenon “going viral” and I imagine the process is somewhat akin to “one-hit-wonder”dom, or beyond if a video creator is able to replicate their prior success. In short, the accessibility of internet production and promotional tools may have democratized the creative process, but the market forces which seem to seek out and favor the attributes of entrepreneurial magic and success have not changed. In other words, though many people create content, an inordinately small number will be significantly enriched by their efforts. But the process is different than it used to be, and for this reason I imagine that certain people have been able to find their big break through accessible internet distribution who would have been overlooked by producers a few decades ago.
But, I don’t think classical music has really been touched by this process all that much. I don’t tend to see many artists trying to make their names in starting YouTube channels and trying to promote that way. Granted I could be wrong, to make it into the classical music scene you still need to be performed by orchestras, opera companies, masterful chamber ensembles, and the like. You need to rent expensive halls, and hire very expensive recording technicians. I just get the sense that writing and performing art music today does not have the viral possibility that so many other arts and cultural phenomena seem better-suited to. But that does not mean that it doesn’t happen. Sometimes classical composers still make it big, and succeed in creating their own world, powerfully shaping the world around them. It does not happen often, and a modern classical composer, no matter how good he or she is, will still not compete with the quantity of performances and recordings that Bach or Mozart still receive, but sometimes you do hear success stories.
One such success story is the composer Dominick Argento. An interesting series of events formed his career, and his high level of professional conduct and competence helped him take full advantage of the opportunities that availed themselves. He was trained in East coast institutions, the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore Maryland and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York, and he probably would have tried to make his way in the highly competitive New York musical scene, but he chose instead to respond to an opportunity that came on very short notice (three days, I have read!), and moved to the Midwest to teach theory and composition at the University of Minnesota.
Some might worry that a move like this could be unstimulating, that a figure of great artistic stature would lack challenge in an environment such as this. But Argento realized, perhaps later rather than sooner, that it actually allowed him to develop on his own terms as a musician, not pressured by the fickle movements that come and go so quickly in the competitive, high-pressure environment of somewhere like New York City. Argento was allowed to develop at his own pace, compose prolifically, and even shape the landscape about him by helping to found the Minnesota Opera, which is still a major cultural center.
Argento focused largely on vocal music, especially operas and songs, and the reason for this is also a fortuitous…well, accident is a strong word. But he probably would have become involved more heavily in symphonic writing were it not for the woman he married, an accomplished singer, which motivated him to channel his efforts into vocal music, and it is for this that he has achieved renown.
This confluence allowed Argento to work quietly and steadily, all the while building his oeuvre and reputation as one of the world’s finest living composers. He really did break into the classical music scene successfully, with his operas still performed on international stages, and having had opportunities like accompanying the great Leontyne Price as she sang his songs at the White House:
Argento’s music is thoroughly modern, often even serial, although it does not always come across that way, so lyrical and sensitive is it. And, like so many other composers working today, he delights in humorous twists and unexpected concepts, which are often helpful in bringing attention to new works. Here is a particularly amusing one, a short one-act opera for solo tenor called A Waterbird Talk. In the “story”, based on an idea by Anton Chekhov, the protagonist, roped into delivering a lecture about waterbirds to his wife’s club, ends up stalling, not really interested in giving the talk, and divulges numerous TMI-style personal details. It’s pretty entertaining, and a very apt characterization of marriage dynamics…
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