Cooking with classical
For curious listeners, Now Hear This offers a comprehensive intro to music
Now Hear This PBS
The bad news is the entire classical music world is cancelled due to technical difficulties. The good news is the entire classical music world is also technically at our fingertips, ready to play.
Between the pandemic-driven mass migration of various orchestras and organizations to online programming, the rise of specialized classical streaming services like Idagio and Primephonic, and video platforms like Medici.tv and Marquee.tv, and the ever-expanding (if chaotic) offerings of YouTube and Spotify, classical music has never been easier to get.
And yet for millions of potential listeners, this hasn't made classical music any easier to get. Casual listeners trying to get their bearings amid this overwhelming online abundance have fewer and fewer guides to help lead them across the widening interpretive gap between the music and its audience.
For those seeking a way into classical music that swirls together historical and contemporary context, mixes deep scholarship and live performance, you might try the PBS docuseries Now Hear This.
Written, directed and produced by filmmaker Harry Lynch and hosted by Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra principal director Scott Yoo, it is ostensibly a show about composers.
Each episode turns its exploration of a single subject into a hybrid of travelogue, mystery, history, cultural study, documentary and performance — all with spiffy, audiophile-tickling production values and intricate narrative webs that connect composers across episodes and eras. As one might expect, it feels expertly conducted.
This may be due to Yoo's own investigative approach toward his favourite music and his knack for unpacking its intricacies.
Lynch met Yoo at the University of Texas at Austin's Butler School of Music, where Yoo was hosting an event he normally held as part of Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo. Notable Encounters was imagined as “a museum docent's guide” to a particular piece of music — in this case, the trios of Brahms and their metaphorical relationship to his life.
Lynch immediately took to Yoo's engaging, jargon-free, dot-connecting approach to potentially esoteric musical ideas. There, in an audience of about six, he saw a show forming before his eyes.
“(Yoo) and I started to brainstorm on what might we do to try to make this into the kind of show that anybody would want to watch,” Lynch says.
“Classical music is suffering right now. The audience is aging, a new audience is not replacing it. What can we do to try to help with that? How can we introduce classical to a new generation while giving existing fans a new way to love their music? Honestly, we found the inspirations through cooking shows.”
Yoo may cut a far less gruff figure than Anthony Bourdain (stylish leather jacket aside), but you can see the late chef, author and documentarian's influence in Yoo's globe-hopping history lessons. His is a genuine and insatiable curiosity, and the show's threads feel like natural footpaths across wide swaths of musical terrain.
In its first season, he visits Venice and Bergamo, Italy, for Vivadi; Berlin and Leipzig, Germany, for Bach; Madrid and Tangier, Morocco, for Scarlatti; then doubles back to Italy for Handel and the four formative years the composer spent there. This second season will advance from that Baroque batch into the Classical period via Haydn, Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven. A third season will focus exclusively on U.S. composers.
But another major element of its highly watchable formula is the way it draws clear connections between music and culture, grounding otherworldly compositions in the real lives of its composers and, centuries later, its listeners.
“To me … it's not about getting somebody to hear, say, Schubert's last piano sonata or Schubert's Cello Quintet,” says Yoo. “That's nice, but it's more about shifting classical music's place in society.”
If that sounds like a tall order, both Yoo and Lynch point to what contemporary cooking shows have done for the restaurant industry, just by giving viewers a peek into the kitchen. The first season reached millions of viewers — an audience that, Yoo points out, would take several thousand concerts to reach the old-fashioned way.
Of course, nothing in the performing arts is turnkey these days. Lynch and Yoo have had to adapt to the changing conditions the pandemic has brought.
“We've opened up the idea,” says Lynch, “that Now Hear This can be anything.”
The Washington Post