Not For Us, Not By Us

It's time for institutions to do the right thing

Saxophonist Jess Gillam, conductor Jonathan Heyward, and the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, July 22, David Geffen Hall. Photo by Lawrence Sumulong.

There’s probably a German word for the feeling of respecting something and also being disappointed with it. That would be a succinct way to wrap up my experience at Lincoln Center the past two summers. Under Chief Artistic Officer Shanta Thake, the past two summers have been skillful presentations and performances of mostly ordinary ideas that sit comfortably in the aesthetic bell curve between dull and innovative.

Thake’s first move was to replace conductor Louis Langrée with Jonathan Heyward, and drop the Mostly Mozart Festival title and orchestra name and replace those with Summer for the City and the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. On the classical side, nothing has changed. It’s the same ensemble with a different name, and the repertoire is pretty much the same. Pretty much.

Heyward is a good musician and the orchestra continues to crisply play the classical-to-mid-romantic era German symphonies. Langrée cultivated a lusher sound, the Bruno Walter school, while Heyward has hit that contemporary sweet spot of modern instruments and the early music approach to things like phrasing and vibrato. They also play some contemporary music: this month, Anna Clyne’s Glasslands saxophone concerto and Iman Habibi’s Jeder Baum spricht were both superb. The former was imaginative and communicative, with a fantastic performance from Jess Gillam, the latter was full of intricate, fascinating ideas and was if anything too short.

For the standard rep, opening night had the Faust Overture by obscure romantic era composer Emilie Mayer, and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. The second concert I caught on July 29 also had Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and Symphony No. 7, with Louise Farrenc’s Overture No. 1 slipped in. And here was the polished disappointment, programming full of obligations and without surprises, played well enough but with nothing new to say. Brahms’ turgid First is a pretty tough listen in the hot months—and not a great work—and Beethoven’s fantastic Seventh was fine, agile but and energetic but a shade light in the Aellegretto. Mayer’s overture was innocuous second-hand Schumann, Farrenc is a composer whose work is derivative and mostly uninteresting.

The combination of old and new, now, is appreciably less than it used to be. The Mostly Mozart festival didn’t just present old and new, it presented classical and non-classical, which may seem like a subtle distinction but is musically and culturally profound. I’m pretty sure that the administrators at Lincoln Center can’t see or hear this. To put it another way, under Langrée I remember Conrad Tao playing “Lush Life” and a substantial new work from Amir ElSaffar that had classical form, improvisation, and traditional Iraqi music. New in fact and new in context, not just recent. Intellectually, that’s exciting, and it’s also simply music that people who come to LC in the summer—a different audience than during the regular season—enjoy hearing.

Outside of the mainstream, this year had the Run AMOC* festival bringing contemporary works from George Lewis and Matthew Aucoin, a welcome performance of Canto Ostinato, and proof that the Julius Eastman bandwagon is strong enough for Lincoln Center to climb aboard. These were all safe choices that left me nostalgic for the times when I saw the complete works of Varèse, and Salvatore Sciarrino’s mind-rattling La porta della legge, John Luther Adams’ Sila: The Breath of the World, and Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail for 200 electric guitarists.

The institution used to not worry about failure, because it really is too big to fail, and so was more relevant and engaged with the public. Those previous years were fresh, jarring, illuminating, and inspiring.

Now’s The Time

The last two years have been comfortable, and it feels like a squandered opportunity. There are choose-what-you-pay (with a $5 minimum) prices to main events, and to their credit this is absolutely great, and clearly brings people in. This is no small thing, and essential to attracting new audiences. To keep them, you have to show them stuff that leaves them wanting more. That is the programming, and that has been business as usual.

See that this is a different audience, give them something exciting and fulfilling. But the past two years have been productions directed toward the standard socio-economic C-suite concertgoer and captured by the herd-like timorous thinking of mainstream cultural institutions. It’s always weird, and always dispiriting when places like Lincoln Center hire people like Thake and tell the world how they’re going to do new things and then do the same thing as always, just a little worse, a little less, a little more staid and conventional. Standing pat, staying the same.

The thing is, society is changing, rapidly and drastically. On the one hand, a national regime that is racist and authoritarian, has established a secret police, is building concentration camps, and is taking ideological control of universities and a premiere broadcasting network. On the other, the rise and popularity of Zohran Mamdani as an expression of how regular people in the streets are sick of all this bullshit and have found someone who listens to what they need rather than what The New York Times editorial board tells us we should be grateful for, and shut the fuck up.

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An Immodest Proposal

In between is a Democratic Party establishment that is afraid of and has contempt for its voters, and wants the rich to keep it safe. And that is where Lincoln Center is putting itself. Yes, David Koch’s name already stains the ballet house, but what I mean is that clinging to an irrelevant notion of normality in a changing world is reactionary. Meanwhile, staring them right in the face is the perfect opportunity to not be reactionary, but be conservative in the best, most constructive and meaningful sense. Next year is the 250th anniversary of this country, and the normal thing, the culturally and programmatically conservative thing to do is to celebrate the values and pleasures of American musical culture, in the heart of the ruling elites pantheon to their own taste. I propose:

• A multi-day blues/roots festival in Damrosch Park, featuring Cedric Burnside, Shemekia Copeland, Eric Bibb, Fantastic Negrito, and Wilco and Billy Bragg doing the music from the Mermaid Avenue albums.

• A modern dance series, with Martha Graham’s company, Alvin Ailey, Mark Morris, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company doing Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk for the roots of human communication in movement and singing.

• A Downtown Uptown series that pulls in John Zorn, Melvin Gibbs, Mikel Rouse, and Glenn Branca symphonies as a reminder of where musical innovation used to come from, now that we’re in an age where who gets to make music and who decides what is put in front of audiences is mainly decided by the socio-economic circumstances of who can afford to go music school or get an MBA.

• Brass and marching bands in the Lincoln Center plaza.

• Cabaret Night: Weill to Miranda.

This is the culture this country has produced, about this country. It is arguably the most important culture in the modern world, a beacon for humanist aspirations. Putting this on display takes no social or political courage, it’s as simple as breathing.

And for classical music, first consider that Carnegie Hall has a lot going on for the coming year, with America at 250, and the New York Philharmonic will play The People United Will Never Be Defeated. Lincoln Center can be part of that while can giving us the mainstream establishment of American musical culture.

Here are suggested programs that would be crowd pleasing and meaningful:

• Louis Moreau Gottschalk: Bomboula (hire someone to orchestrate this, hell, I’ll do it, cheap)

• Aaron Copland: Billy The Kid Suite

• Carlos Chavez: Symphony No. 6

Or:

• Adolphus Adolfus Hailstork: An American Port of Call

• Leonardo Balada: Steel Symphony

• Valerie Coleman: Concerto for Orchestra

Or:

• Florence Price: Mississippi River Suite

• John Adams: El Dorado

• Charles Ives: The Housatonic at Stockbridge

• John Luther Adams: Become Ocean

Or:

• Charles Ives (orchestrated by William Schuman): Variations on America

• Lou Harrison: Symphony on G

• Ives: Holiday Symphony

Here’s why it matters:

This is all mainstream music, there’s nothing avant-garde about it except that it’s American. It’s also the kind of thing not usually programmed for classical seasons, which are engineered to mainly reflect the cultural status of people who donate to the Republican Party and put their names on buildings. Cultural institutions always have to choose between catering to donors and us regular people, and now that’s close to an existential question.

The answer is, if you set out the welcome sign for everyone from the streets—which again I praise Lincoln Center for doing—it’s insulting to feed them the self-regarding blandishments of the ruling class. Give us the best of our culture, which is American culture, which is fabulous culture. It is culture that stands for America, for us, and if it stands against the people who donate to Trump and also the Metropolitan Opera, then tough for them. They should try standing for America once in a while.

It’s the ordinary thing to do, the conservative thing to do, and the right thing to do. For the people.