Major. That’s the key
CLASSICAL COMPANIES CAN’ T SETTLE FOR SUPERFICIAL CHANGE
Last month, architect Frank Gehry and Los Angeles Philharmonic CEO Chad Smith gave me a masked hard-hat tour of the nearly finished Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center at Inglewood. Gehry’s reimagining of an abandoned bank building may not satisfy all the demands for systemic change directed toward classical music privilege. But it may be the single most heartening start.
The YOLA Center, intended to serve 500 advanced music students from the Inglewood area, is neither something lost nor something found during our disastrous year with coronavirus. Youth Orchestra Los Angeles is, instead, Gustavo Dudamel’s educational initiative begun in 2008, shortly after he was appointed music director of the L.A. Phil. A program that started with 40 students has grown to 1,200 and led to institutional and individual successes that are a model for orchestras.
The $23-million YOLA Center, around the corner from City Hall and Inglewood High School, won’t be able to welcome students right away once it’s finished early next year. But the facility promises to be inspiring and eminently hang-out-able.
The YOLA Center may work its wonders by piquing curiosity through its all-glass front. Walking by or waiting for a bus, you will see young musicians from the community rehearsing or performing in an airy, state-ofthe-art building designed for them and equipped with acoustics by Disney Hall’s Yasuhisa Toyota. You might even spot Julie Andrews’ white Steinway grand piano, which she plans to sign and dedicate to the students. Young people will want in.
Just how rosy a picture the YOLA Center’s clear glass will reveal is something that can’t be known now. But it does address existential issues of economics, inclusivity and relevance facing orchestras and other classical music institutions in the wake of the pandemic, with wider implications for all of society.
Black Lives Matter has, of course, made systemic change a nationwide issue. But systemic has to mean systemic. Change can’t coddle quick-change artists. You can break a system overnight, but you can’t make one overnight. Real change is hard, time consuming and expensive. It requires patience and is not always popular at first. Still, the catastrophe that was 2020 can reveal the way forward.
Orchestras face pressing challenges all at once. Unable to do what they do, which is play music as a tightknit unit for a tightknit audience, creating a uniquely stirring communal experience, orchestras must first figure out how to survive the pandemic. In nearly all cases, that means downsizing: reducing salaries, instituting furloughs and layoffs, pulling the plug on ambitious projects.
Yet they have the imperative of creating an innovative online presence to hold onto patrons, and that requires new resources. Though downsizing, institutions are compelled to diversify while taking on new and timely repertory, particularly by composers of color. This is essential for the future of the art form, no matter how hard it is to sell unfamiliar music to core audiences.
In many cases, these challenges have brought Band-Aid solutions. It is rare to find a new orchestra that doesn’t highlight players of color in its online videos, even if that means returning to the same player over and over. American ensembles (and to some extent British and European ones) in the last few months quickly added music by Black and Latino composers to their programs without having had the time for research.
A prime example is the sudden near-ubiquity of George Walker’s short and sweet “Lyric for Strings.” This piece, long a February staple, is an easy acknowledgment of Black History Month by the first African American classical composer to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The attraction of “Lyric” in COVID time is obvious. It’s doable. A modest, carefully crafted love letter by a budding composer is hardly objectionable. Modeled after Barber’s Adagio, the 1941 score is by a 24-year-old of immense promise. I confess to clicking more than once on Dudamel’s sterling performance with the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer’s “Sound/Stage” series.
Walker was a composer of gripping honesty whose most substantial works over seven decades contend with the thorniest issues of African American and Western classical music. Yet unless put into context, as the L.A. Phil does, “Lyric” is to Walker what “Für Elise” was to Beethoven. Lazily programmed, it can be condescending.
Walker’s formal, uncompromising style isn’t particularly in fashion, which may explain why his music doesn’t get the exposure it deserves. But if his compelling voice is lost because of “obscurity,” that can be another
George Walker, left, Wadada Leo Smith and Anthony Davis.
word for systemic racism. He is not alone. A trove of music, by the likes of William Grant Still and Olly Wilson, to name but two other neglected originals, is lying in plain sight to be discovered.
Instead, the trend has been to seek out composers of fine but derivative music that sounds familiar and comes with a compelling historical narrative. Florence Price was a remarkable woman and a highly capable composer in the first half of the 20th century who as a Black woman spectacularly broke barriers. Her symphonies tell of her struggles and aspirations. They can fill a listener with a sense of pride. They provide striking speculation about what a composer of Price’s talent and conviction might have become if she’d had more opportunity. But the rush to perform her pieces — which drew on Dvorák, Still and Ellington — can be an easy way out, when Black composers whose work deserves more consideration remain neglected.
The obvious lesson is to support the Prices of today. For that we can celebrate the contentions of 2020 for getting so many ensembles to jump on the bandwagon of such hot young composers as Tyshawn Sorey, Errollyn Wallen and Jessie Montgomery. Missing, though, is the attention to most substantial, mature, challenging, differencemaking masters. My nominations include George Lewis, Jeffrey Mumford, Wadada Leo Smith, Alvin Singleton, Anthony Davis and Anthony Braxton. They need elevation to repertory, i.e., systemic, status.
Systemic diversity can be pushed by circumstance, like we’ve had in this year of upset. But it can’t be shoved. Soon we will celebrate more people of color at orchestras. But hiring could be limited by the economic havoc ahead. For real systemic change, we need a real system in place, something lasting.
YOLA is that system. It trains talent and attracts audiences. It generates enthusiasm, broadens horizons and inspires commitment. Soon grads will be playing in the orchestra. YOLA looks to be impervious to the coronavirus.
If the center holds, we have a future; 2020 be damned.