11 Temmuz 2012 Çarşamba
10 Temmuz 2012 Salı
9 Temmuz 2012 Pazartesi
Jazz Guitarist John Pizzarelli Performs at Rockport Music Series on Sunday, July 8
To contact us Click HERE
Rockport Music is presenting world-renowned jazz guitarist, singer, composer and bandleader John Pizzarelli in concert at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport on Sunday, July 8, 2012 at 5:00 p.m.
Tickets are $41, $51 and $61 and can be purchased online or at the Center on concert day.
The son of another legendary guitarist, Bucky Pizzarelli, John was hailed by The Boston Globe for "reinvigorating the Great American Songbook and re-popularizing jazz.”
Since 1981, Rockport Music has been committed to one enduring purpose: enriching lives through great music. To see a full schedule of concerts presented by Rockport Music this summer, click here.
For details on round jazz activities in Massachusetts by visiting MassJazz.com.
For visitor information go to MassVacation.com and NorthofBoston.org.
Rockport Music is presenting world-renowned jazz guitarist, singer, composer and bandleader John Pizzarelli in concert at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport on Sunday, July 8, 2012 at 5:00 p.m.
Tickets are $41, $51 and $61 and can be purchased online or at the Center on concert day.
The son of another legendary guitarist, Bucky Pizzarelli, John was hailed by The Boston Globe for "reinvigorating the Great American Songbook and re-popularizing jazz.”
Since 1981, Rockport Music has been committed to one enduring purpose: enriching lives through great music. To see a full schedule of concerts presented by Rockport Music this summer, click here.
For details on round jazz activities in Massachusetts by visiting MassJazz.com.
For visitor information go to MassVacation.com and NorthofBoston.org.
Half way around the sun!
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Half-way through the year, wow! Another good week of summer vacation, relaxing, organizing, tutoring, babysitting, seeing friends, staying cool. On Sunday I went to the Museum of Science, which was quite fun. I also made 3 recipes I pinned on pinterest! They all turned out awesome and will blog about them soon, for sure. Ended the week with a nice and relaxing picnic in the park on Shabbat with lots of friends, sweet summertime! 
Also! I am toying with the idea of starting a link-up to share things you've found on pinterest or tried from pinterest and want to gage how many people would be interested. Let me know if you like this idea and would join up! You could share recipes or crafts or anything you've pinned or tried! 
Also! I am toying with the idea of starting a link-up to share things you've found on pinterest or tried from pinterest and want to gage how many people would be interested. Let me know if you like this idea and would join up! You could share recipes or crafts or anything you've pinned or tried!
Tall Ships!
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This week, in Boston's harbor there are several amazing tall ships and other various military vesels docked for people to see. This year's festival coincides with the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, crazy huh? Emily, Kelsey, and I braved the heat on Sunday (mid-90s, but a nice Sea Breeze) and went down to see the ships!
Tall ships, literally! It was amazing, ships with masts and sails and lots of ropes and lines!
Little kids were "ooing" and "ahhing" saying "pirate ships!!" Not quite, but close! 
The 4 ships parked at the south waterfront were from Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, and Indonesia.
So many amazing features! I brought my zoom lens, too, which I usually forget about (never again!) and was so glad to have it!
Each ship had such a unique personality and modern naval conveniences mixed in with old ship charm.
We even found a band of pirates, including a dead on Jack Sparrow impersonator! A modern, Jack Sparrow, iPhone and smart water!
The ship from Columbia, the Gloria, had a HUGE flag at its stern. Everyone loved when the breeze picked up and sent it flapping around. 
Proof that I do get out from behind the camera!
It was packed, but not too much! I did bump into one of my students, who was elated to see me! Then I saw a kid from one of the other first grade classes, he looked freaked to see me out of school!
It was such a fun outing! I took close to 170 pictures, then cut it down to 70 that I want to keep. 44 made it to facebook and 32 made the blog cut!
My amazing 4th of July recap to come early next week!
Tall ships, literally! It was amazing, ships with masts and sails and lots of ropes and lines! Little kids were "ooing" and "ahhing" saying "pirate ships!!" Not quite, but close! The 4 ships parked at the south waterfront were from Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, and Indonesia. So many amazing features! I brought my zoom lens, too, which I usually forget about (never again!) and was so glad to have it! Each ship had such a unique personality and modern naval conveniences mixed in with old ship charm. We even found a band of pirates, including a dead on Jack Sparrow impersonator! A modern, Jack Sparrow, iPhone and smart water!The ship from Columbia, the Gloria, had a HUGE flag at its stern. Everyone loved when the breeze picked up and sent it flapping around. Proof that I do get out from behind the camera! It was packed, but not too much! I did bump into one of my students, who was elated to see me! Then I saw a kid from one of the other first grade classes, he looked freaked to see me out of school!It was such a fun outing! I took close to 170 pictures, then cut it down to 70 that I want to keep. 44 made it to facebook and 32 made the blog cut!My amazing 4th of July recap to come early next week!
Scav Hunt Sunday: Stairs and Sailors
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Patriotic: 
Lots of service men and women around Boston this week. I love the reflection of the mid-shipmen in the Charles River inlet.
View from above:
Looking from my back landing down the back steps. Looks so much farther than the 2 stories it really is.
Mosaic:
My new hobby has been making mosaics out of paint chip samples. This is for a friend who has a new house!
Tiny:
Among all the tall ships last week, this pulley looked mighty tiny.
Vibrant:
The massive Columbian flag was so vibrant against the bright blue sky.
Lots of service men and women around Boston this week. I love the reflection of the mid-shipmen in the Charles River inlet.View from above: Looking from my back landing down the back steps. Looks so much farther than the 2 stories it really is.Mosaic:
My new hobby has been making mosaics out of paint chip samples. This is for a friend who has a new house!Tiny:
Among all the tall ships last week, this pulley looked mighty tiny.Vibrant:
The massive Columbian flag was so vibrant against the bright blue sky.
Week 27 around the sun
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Another great summer week. The week started with the amazing Tall Ships festival and then mid-week I had my first true Boston 4th of July experience! I went down to the Hatchshell for the Pops rehearsal on Tuesday and saw the amazing fireworks (in the rain!) on the actual 4th. In between all of that was the usual, tutoring, babysitting, and day to day life. Fortunately we've been spared from the brutal heat, but my fan is still my best friend! Summer feels like it's flying by...
8 Temmuz 2012 Pazar
Notenkrakers
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Yesterday at Harvard University, composer Rob Zuidam delivered the second of three lectures on contemporary Dutch music. The ongoing series is presented by the Harvard Music Department in conjunction with the Erasumus Lectures on History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders.
Zuidam focused on what's known as Hoketus - or "ensemble culture" in the Netherlands and how it evolved.
It really all began in 1966 when a group of five Dutch composers organized to protest against the artistic direction taken by the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The group called themselves The Five and led a larger group known as Notenkrakers ("Nutcrackers" - which has multiple meanings, including "note" and "nut").
The Notenkrakers wanted the orchestra to hire Bruno Maderna as a second conductor to work along side with their current Music Director, Bernard Haitink. Maderna was perhaps the leading conductor of contemporary music at that time.
Over the course of the next few years little progress was made by Concertgebouw to purge the conservatism from their programs and inject music composed by the younger generation of Dutch composers (such as members of The Five). The Notenkrakers made little if any progress with the Concertgebouw managements on this matter.
It all came to a head in November of 1969 when The Notenkrakers stormed in and disturbed a concert about to begin in the Concertgebouw. This "notenkrakersactie" (nutcracker action) was a historic event that some say changed level of acceptance of new music in Holland.
Just before Haitink was able to complete his initial downbeat, the protesters had skillfully disrupted the concert with their noise makers and megaphones. The group of students passed out leaflets and confronted the orchestra and audience.
Peter Schat (1935-2003), a member of The Five, used his megaphone to demand that Bernard Haitink come down off the podium and address The Notenkrakers and the audience in an open public discussion. The confrontation instilled a a minor riot, and the police were soon called to eject the protesters from the concert hall.
Besides Peter Schat, members of The Five included Misha Mengelberg (b. 1935), Louis Andriessen (b. 1939), and Reinbert de Leeuw (b. 1938) - all of which had studied with the composer Kees van Baaren.
To the disappointment of The Notenkrakers , their protest was denounced by their philosophical mentor: Matthijs Vermeulen. The Five had held Vermeulen (who was the subject of Zuidam's first lecture) in high regard for his harsh reviews of the Concertgebouw and their lack of interest in performing contemporary music. But to their surprise, Vermeulen released a public statement that The Five was off-base. Vermeulen wrote that hiring Bruno Maderna would be impractical and that Concertgebouw actually supported modern music rather well compared to other international orchestras.
Undeterred, throughout the 1970s and into the early 80s, members of The Five independently formed and led ad hoc new music ensembles throughout Holland. Effectively, younger Dutch composers had largely abandoned the idea of the symphony orchestra as an instrument in favor of more responsive new music ensembles that were fluid and dynamic. Louis Andriessen's group Hoketus is a prime example of the resulting "ensemble culture" which continues on today.
Zuidam focused on what's known as Hoketus - or "ensemble culture" in the Netherlands and how it evolved.
It really all began in 1966 when a group of five Dutch composers organized to protest against the artistic direction taken by the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The group called themselves The Five and led a larger group known as Notenkrakers ("Nutcrackers" - which has multiple meanings, including "note" and "nut").
The Notenkrakers wanted the orchestra to hire Bruno Maderna as a second conductor to work along side with their current Music Director, Bernard Haitink. Maderna was perhaps the leading conductor of contemporary music at that time.
Over the course of the next few years little progress was made by Concertgebouw to purge the conservatism from their programs and inject music composed by the younger generation of Dutch composers (such as members of The Five). The Notenkrakers made little if any progress with the Concertgebouw managements on this matter.
It all came to a head in November of 1969 when The Notenkrakers stormed in and disturbed a concert about to begin in the Concertgebouw. This "notenkrakersactie" (nutcracker action) was a historic event that some say changed level of acceptance of new music in Holland.
Just before Haitink was able to complete his initial downbeat, the protesters had skillfully disrupted the concert with their noise makers and megaphones. The group of students passed out leaflets and confronted the orchestra and audience.
Peter Schat (1935-2003), a member of The Five, used his megaphone to demand that Bernard Haitink come down off the podium and address The Notenkrakers and the audience in an open public discussion. The confrontation instilled a a minor riot, and the police were soon called to eject the protesters from the concert hall.
Besides Peter Schat, members of The Five included Misha Mengelberg (b. 1935), Louis Andriessen (b. 1939), and Reinbert de Leeuw (b. 1938) - all of which had studied with the composer Kees van Baaren.
To the disappointment of The Notenkrakers , their protest was denounced by their philosophical mentor: Matthijs Vermeulen. The Five had held Vermeulen (who was the subject of Zuidam's first lecture) in high regard for his harsh reviews of the Concertgebouw and their lack of interest in performing contemporary music. But to their surprise, Vermeulen released a public statement that The Five was off-base. Vermeulen wrote that hiring Bruno Maderna would be impractical and that Concertgebouw actually supported modern music rather well compared to other international orchestras.
Undeterred, throughout the 1970s and into the early 80s, members of The Five independently formed and led ad hoc new music ensembles throughout Holland. Effectively, younger Dutch composers had largely abandoned the idea of the symphony orchestra as an instrument in favor of more responsive new music ensembles that were fluid and dynamic. Louis Andriessen's group Hoketus is a prime example of the resulting "ensemble culture" which continues on today.
(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oNZtjnOjSY )
In the end, the incident of the November 1969 notenkrakersactie when The Notenkrakers stormed in at the Concertgebouw resulted in a positive change for musical performance in the Netherlands. The Five has been credited with "shaking Dutch musical life out of its suffocating provincialism."
Links:
www.Robertzuidam.com/essays
http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2010/02/discovering-vermeulen.html
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Reading Karl Kraus
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It's a rainy weekend, perfect for catching up on some reading.
I'm enjoying Harry Zohn's biography and critical analysis of the Viennese writer and satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Zohn published his book in 1971, and I was a student of his at Brandeis University where I failed to learn even basic German rather quite miserably. But Zohn, who chaired the Germanic and Slavic Language Department, was a real expert in turn of the century Vienna, and in particular the artistic, literary, and musical movements of that fascinating time.
Harry Zohn (1923-2001) was an excellent translator - bringing to English such works as Freud's "Delusion and Dream," the complete diaries of Theodor Herzel, and some 40 other volumes. He was a violist in the Brandeis Symphony Orchestra, and made all of his students (including yours truly) sing Viennese wine garden songs in class (I still have the sheet music). We also sampled a wide-variety of German Beer and pub food during a research-oriented field trip to Boston's Jacob Wirth House.
Karl Kraus Quotes
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kraus
http://www.jacobwirth.com/
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It's a rainy weekend, perfect for catching up on some reading.I'm enjoying Harry Zohn's biography and critical analysis of the Viennese writer and satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Zohn published his book in 1971, and I was a student of his at Brandeis University where I failed to learn even basic German rather quite miserably. But Zohn, who chaired the Germanic and Slavic Language Department, was a real expert in turn of the century Vienna, and in particular the artistic, literary, and musical movements of that fascinating time.
Harry Zohn (1923-2001) was an excellent translator - bringing to English such works as Freud's "Delusion and Dream," the complete diaries of Theodor Herzel, and some 40 other volumes. He was a violist in the Brandeis Symphony Orchestra, and made all of his students (including yours truly) sing Viennese wine garden songs in class (I still have the sheet music). We also sampled a wide-variety of German Beer and pub food during a research-oriented field trip to Boston's Jacob Wirth House.Kraus was a creative force of nature who embodied the Zeitgeist of his generation. Today we would probably call him a Performance Artist. For example, he held some 700 recitals in his traveling show billed as "Theatre of Poetry." It included readings of poetry and prose, satire, opera, and lieder. His circle of intellectuals included composers such as Schoenberg and Mahler, painters such as Klimt and Schiele, and scientists and philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Freud.
Kraus was not a musician. According to Zohn...
Kraus's inability to read music was not compensated for by any great vocal resources. His singing voice was really Sprechgesang in the manner of Schönberg or Berg, but it was considerably enhanced by this great intuition and empathy, his rhythmic acuteness, his talent as an imitator, and his pervasive moral fanaticism.
The pianists who accompanied him were among the best, including composers Ernst Křenek and Josef Matthias Hauer. Zohn observes, "In January, 1932, he gave a program of poems and scenes by Bert Brecht, accompanied on the piano by Kurt Weill."
Kraus's 60th birthday was celebrated with a musical-literary matinee and a film about him. Composer Alban Berg was in attendance. Musicians Eduard Steuermann and Rudolf Kolisch were also amongst Kraus's close friends.
In Zohn's concluding statement ends with the following observation"...Karl Kraus may have been a failure. But surely he was one of the grandest failures in world literature."
Zohn's scholarly but assessable book on Kraus ends with "An Aphoristic Sampler." Here are just a few of the choice translations Zohn made of Kraus's work:
More satirical quotes of Kraus can be found on the web here...I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every free moment gradually to acquire an encyclopedic lack of education.
I dreamt that I had died for my country. And right way a coffin-lid opener was there, holding out his hand for a tip.
Am I to blame if hallucinations and visions are alive and have names and permanent residences?
In one ear and out the other: this would make the head a transit station. What I hear has to go out the same ear.
I ask no one for a light. I don't want to be beholden to anyone - in life, love, or literature. And yet I smoke.
I hear noises which others don't hear and which interfere with the music of the spheres that others don't hear either.
I already remember many things that I am experiencing.
Solitude would be an ideal state if one were able to pick the people one avoids.
Kokoschka has made a portrait of me. It could be that those who know me will not recognize me; but surely those who don't know me will recognize me.
"He masters the German language" -that is true of a salesman. An artist is a servant of the word.
I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.
Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.
A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.
Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.
A Gourmet once told me that he preferred the scum of the earth to the cream of society.
The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.
Democracy means the permission to be everyone's slave.
Medicine: "Your money and your life!"
I do not trust the printing press when I deliver my written words to it. How a dramatist can rely on the mouth of an actor!
The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.
If the earth had any idea of how afraid the comet is of contact with it!
Karl Kraus Quotes
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kraus
http://www.jacobwirth.com/
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How ET Ruined Harmony (and why you shouldn't worry about it)
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Yesterday I caught an interesting lecture at the Longy School of Music by musicologist Ross Duffin. He is the Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
His lecture was about his new book, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and why you should care), which has been called by his critics as "the most subversive book on a musical subject I've ever read." He refers to Equal-Temperament by the acronym "ET."
I didn't exactly know what to expect from Professor Duffin. Based on the provocative title of his book, I feared that he would rail against all music written after Bach. But in the end it was scholarly, well-balanced, and rather informative.
As a musician who grew up playing keyboard instruments and fretted-string instruments, I never really had to deal too much with subtle tuning issues. In practice, singers and string players had to adjust to me - since I was the one who was "out of tune."
Duffin's research aptly summarizes the dysfunction that has existed regarding tuning systems, theories and performance practice since the Renaissance. Is is clear that virtually all of the solutions that have been proposed over the centuries are messy, ad hoc, and less than elegant.
If you are the sort of person who likes certainty, uniform standards, and mathematical precision, you should avoid Duffin's book like the plague. In this regard the world of musical temperament is similar to law-making in Washington DC: you really don't want to know how they make the sausage.
Here were a few interesting tidbits and takeaways from the lecture...
ET is recent invention in music history - a kind of worst-case totalitarian system that arises when everyone is made to suffer for the common good of uniformity and standardization.
In the 18th century, Mozart, Haydn, and probably Beethoven thought of the octave as having more than 12 notes. For them, D-sharp was a very different note than E-flat. Sharps were LOWER in pitch than flats. For example E-flat was a higher note than D-sharp. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father had published the definitive treatise on violin playing with charts indicating these very distinctions.
And it's not only string players who abided by this system. The flutist, composer, and music theorist Johann Joachim Quantz published a fingering chart indicating different fingerings for enharmonic notes. For him, sharped and flatted notes were quite different.
In the 19th century, some musicians - often virtuoso string soloists who played unaccompanied - reversed the paradigm. As performers they tended to focus on the linear aspects of music. For them, D-sharp was played as a leading-tone and would sound HIGHER in pitch than E-flat because of the voice leading. This was the opposite practice of what was done just a century earlier, and this is the current belief, concept, and standard today. It is the convention practiced by the majority of mainstream classical musicians in the 2oth and 21st centuries - although this norm apparently has little acoustical, historical, or theoretical ground to stand on.
The current practice of tuning pianos with ET seems to be a bit of a fraud too. When one analyses what piano tuners actually do in terms of temperament, the result is somewhat sketchy and amorphous. Find me two different pianos, and I'll show you two different tuning standards. It's the invisible elephant in the room. Good piano tuners and excellent chefs don't share their secrets.
Our contemporary bias in favor of scientific and mathematical clarity with tuning systems too often seems to go against our better musical instincts and natural hearing.
While I found Duffin's talk very enlightening, I'm not a music historian. Overall I consider myself pretty liberal when it comes to performance practice.
For me, music is not the acoustical properties of the sound, but the ideas behind its presumed imperfect acoustical representation. In my mind, the tuning and temperament purity argument is a little like saying it's better to read a book printed at 1200 dpi than 300 dpi. The higher resolution allows for a better and more accurate representation of the typeface.
Isn't that kind of missing the point of what music is all about?
Duffin played a few musical examples to illustrate his points. One example utilized an electronically produced and scientifically accurate realization of a piano work in two contrasting temperaments. While I have to say there was a subtle but discernible difference between them - and that the non-ET version sounded less strained, warmer, and had less beating of upper harmonics - I was not overly impressed with the improved version. It wasn't at all like seeing a movie in 3D for the first time after having only known the standard format.
Given all of the factors that go into experiencing a work of music, the tuning aspect pales in comparison. To my ears, the version of temperament that is used is fairly trivial. I don't go to concerts to listen to intonation, and "imprecision" in performance normally doesn't bother me (unless it is really, really bad).
Another thing I realized from Duffin's presentation is that the social aspects of music making override the theoretical rules that theorists claim exist. It could be that every accomplished musician has their own unique tuning system. This is what makes one great violinist different from another. They just hear notes and intervals differently - as if it were part of their musical DNA or cultural context. In practice the range of expression possible in the production of a major-third, or a perfect-fifth can vary enormously. There are more gradations than even an enharmonic sharp or flat. Ask any microtonalist.
ET is no more than an approximation and a guidepost. It has never been more than a musical version of lane-lines painted on the highway. No musician in their right mind would expect all music to conform to such a limited and restrictive tuning system. It's a framework, not a Draconian pitch-grid where your teacher will swat your fingers with a ruler if you go outside of the lines.
On the other hand, alternative tuning systems to ET that have been (or likely will be) proposed are also a compromise. I hate to break the news, but no tuning-system Utopia exists - at least with the 12-note to the octave standard. In the end, ANY tuning system will only function as a rough and imperfect road map for the fabulous musical excursions that practicing musicians will inevitably take us on.
I don't buy the argument that equal-temperament has ruined harmony, and I don't think we have to worry about it either. There are much bigger bones to pick. You can sleep soundly at night knowing that music will still be there for you the next morning, equal-temperament or not.
Links: http://music.case.edu/~rwd/RDWorks/RD.bio.html
-----------------
Yesterday I caught an interesting lecture at the Longy School of Music by musicologist Ross Duffin. He is the Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
His lecture was about his new book, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and why you should care), which has been called by his critics as "the most subversive book on a musical subject I've ever read." He refers to Equal-Temperament by the acronym "ET."
I didn't exactly know what to expect from Professor Duffin. Based on the provocative title of his book, I feared that he would rail against all music written after Bach. But in the end it was scholarly, well-balanced, and rather informative.
As a musician who grew up playing keyboard instruments and fretted-string instruments, I never really had to deal too much with subtle tuning issues. In practice, singers and string players had to adjust to me - since I was the one who was "out of tune."
Duffin's research aptly summarizes the dysfunction that has existed regarding tuning systems, theories and performance practice since the Renaissance. Is is clear that virtually all of the solutions that have been proposed over the centuries are messy, ad hoc, and less than elegant.
If you are the sort of person who likes certainty, uniform standards, and mathematical precision, you should avoid Duffin's book like the plague. In this regard the world of musical temperament is similar to law-making in Washington DC: you really don't want to know how they make the sausage.
Here were a few interesting tidbits and takeaways from the lecture...
ET is recent invention in music history - a kind of worst-case totalitarian system that arises when everyone is made to suffer for the common good of uniformity and standardization.
In the 18th century, Mozart, Haydn, and probably Beethoven thought of the octave as having more than 12 notes. For them, D-sharp was a very different note than E-flat. Sharps were LOWER in pitch than flats. For example E-flat was a higher note than D-sharp. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father had published the definitive treatise on violin playing with charts indicating these very distinctions.
And it's not only string players who abided by this system. The flutist, composer, and music theorist Johann Joachim Quantz published a fingering chart indicating different fingerings for enharmonic notes. For him, sharped and flatted notes were quite different.
In the 19th century, some musicians - often virtuoso string soloists who played unaccompanied - reversed the paradigm. As performers they tended to focus on the linear aspects of music. For them, D-sharp was played as a leading-tone and would sound HIGHER in pitch than E-flat because of the voice leading. This was the opposite practice of what was done just a century earlier, and this is the current belief, concept, and standard today. It is the convention practiced by the majority of mainstream classical musicians in the 2oth and 21st centuries - although this norm apparently has little acoustical, historical, or theoretical ground to stand on.
The current practice of tuning pianos with ET seems to be a bit of a fraud too. When one analyses what piano tuners actually do in terms of temperament, the result is somewhat sketchy and amorphous. Find me two different pianos, and I'll show you two different tuning standards. It's the invisible elephant in the room. Good piano tuners and excellent chefs don't share their secrets.
Our contemporary bias in favor of scientific and mathematical clarity with tuning systems too often seems to go against our better musical instincts and natural hearing.
While I found Duffin's talk very enlightening, I'm not a music historian. Overall I consider myself pretty liberal when it comes to performance practice.
For me, music is not the acoustical properties of the sound, but the ideas behind its presumed imperfect acoustical representation. In my mind, the tuning and temperament purity argument is a little like saying it's better to read a book printed at 1200 dpi than 300 dpi. The higher resolution allows for a better and more accurate representation of the typeface.
Isn't that kind of missing the point of what music is all about?
Duffin played a few musical examples to illustrate his points. One example utilized an electronically produced and scientifically accurate realization of a piano work in two contrasting temperaments. While I have to say there was a subtle but discernible difference between them - and that the non-ET version sounded less strained, warmer, and had less beating of upper harmonics - I was not overly impressed with the improved version. It wasn't at all like seeing a movie in 3D for the first time after having only known the standard format.
Given all of the factors that go into experiencing a work of music, the tuning aspect pales in comparison. To my ears, the version of temperament that is used is fairly trivial. I don't go to concerts to listen to intonation, and "imprecision" in performance normally doesn't bother me (unless it is really, really bad).
Another thing I realized from Duffin's presentation is that the social aspects of music making override the theoretical rules that theorists claim exist. It could be that every accomplished musician has their own unique tuning system. This is what makes one great violinist different from another. They just hear notes and intervals differently - as if it were part of their musical DNA or cultural context. In practice the range of expression possible in the production of a major-third, or a perfect-fifth can vary enormously. There are more gradations than even an enharmonic sharp or flat. Ask any microtonalist.
ET is no more than an approximation and a guidepost. It has never been more than a musical version of lane-lines painted on the highway. No musician in their right mind would expect all music to conform to such a limited and restrictive tuning system. It's a framework, not a Draconian pitch-grid where your teacher will swat your fingers with a ruler if you go outside of the lines.
On the other hand, alternative tuning systems to ET that have been (or likely will be) proposed are also a compromise. I hate to break the news, but no tuning-system Utopia exists - at least with the 12-note to the octave standard. In the end, ANY tuning system will only function as a rough and imperfect road map for the fabulous musical excursions that practicing musicians will inevitably take us on.
I don't buy the argument that equal-temperament has ruined harmony, and I don't think we have to worry about it either. There are much bigger bones to pick. You can sleep soundly at night knowing that music will still be there for you the next morning, equal-temperament or not.
Links: http://music.case.edu/~rwd/RDWorks/RD.bio.html
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Food for Thought
To contact us Click HERE
On a recent trip on IcelandAir with a stopover in ReykjavÃk, my wife Willemien ordered a vegetarian in-flight meal. The food wrapper on her veggie wrap included the following tidbit of information:
Besides Súrsaðir hrútspungar, the cuisine includes many other popular menu items:
One of the specialities of the Icelandic cuisine is "Hrútspungar." It's ram testicles pressed in blocks, boiled and cured in lactic acid. While the taste is not particularly distinct, the texture is. Some say the testicles taste sour due to the lactic acid. Others think they're just tasteless, no matter what they taste like. Many Icelanders really have a ball munching on "hrútspungar" at the annual feast called Þorrablót.
Besides Súrsaðir hrútspungar, the cuisine includes many other popular menu items:
Sivð - burned or boiled sheep heads (your choice)
Selshreifar - seal's flippers cured in lactic acid
Lifrarpylsa - a pudding of liver sausage
Also consider, blood pudding, smoked sheep's thoracic diaphragm, or you could just have some fresh whale meat.
I'm seriously considering becoming a vegetarian. :-)
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Eorramatur
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How does the cultural hierarchy amass itself to select winners and losers in the arts, and what common methods, strategies, and so-called “best practices” do they deploy to determine results from a selection process that is (for the artist) not always transparent or obvious?
My interest in this topic stems as much from plain old curiosity as it does a self-interested desire to be understand the rules. After all, hasn’t everyone wondered at one time or another how and why this or that contemporary work - and the artist who created it – was a success, while many others were not? Finding a rationalization for this process is something that composers in particular should be cognizant of, since as professionals they are significantly invested in having their music performed and in the integrity/viability of the selection-system as a whole – to say the least.
As a composer myself, I strive to observe and understand how this process plays out in the arena of contemporary serious concert music, although to be honest, the subjective data I’ve gleaned thus far only provides a faint hint of the obscure rules that lay underneath. And yet, subtle indications of a mysterious systemic process rise to the surface and reveal themselves to those who pay close attention to the details. The selection-system in the field of music, as I see it, is fairly generic and generally applicable to other fields of art as well.
But how do we construct a viable theory out of fleeting impressions if we can’t peer directly into the black box of social interaction and observe for discernable patterns of information on which to base our claims? What if you can’t be a fly on the wall and observe the powerbrokers at work?
Having never been on a jury myself, I can only base my theory on cumulative results and outcomes of the selection process rather than on an internal narrative that occurs behind closed doors. We can’t see the hidden processes that hide beneath the hood and out of public sight. Although events of day-to-day decisions that reflect and represent inner-mechanics and social patterns that lie submerged are clear enough, it’s the larger trends and the patterns they form that are much more difficult to grasp. Local events generally exist out of sight and out of mind, and are distributed over the course of years of activity and spread among many individual recipients working in isolation. But the establishment always maintains the upper hand. The long-term impact of their positive or negative rating forms an over-arching and cumulative series of events that ultimately creates the pattern of winners and losers. Their mission is decidedly strategic, although they claim to be open-minded and neutral.
Acknowledging there is actually a systemic gateway for art and that it functions on a grand scale could be considered socially taboo, since the conventional wisdom is that outstanding and unique original art (and music) will always bubble up to the top of the vat to reveal itself as a superior product. It’s another incarnation of the survival of the fittest principal. We are trained to believe that true talent can’t be suppressed. On the other hand, it’s painfully clear to many observers that the number of producers of art far outnumber the limited supply of cash-carrying consumers. By hook or by crook, society must rely on a methodology to filter out (as with a cultural “sieve”) the “worthy” from the “worthless.” This concept is nothing new. The assignment of artistic value is an age-old process that has found application throughout time and across culture – yet this all-important filtering mechanism is also underplayed, perhaps in the interest of perpetuating the mystique about the greatness of individual works of art, artistic movements, and even colorful narratives about individual artists themselves. One thing is true: without a working conscious or unconscious filtering process, the public would be completely overwhelmed, besieged with information and the market (by which new art and new music is created and sold) would collapse under its own weight.
Several key factors are at play here. For one thing, there is good art and bad art, but unfortunately not everyone can (or will) agree on a unified criterion of aesthetic judgment to make value assessments on a universal or collective basis. There is no gold standard for art of exceptional quality, and if there were, we’d have other problems to deal with.
Some see the selection filter in purely financial terms. They mistakenly assume that art will succeed only if it has commercial potential, even what could be considered a niche market. I don’t take that view. It’s too simplistic.
While it is presumed that every consumer has a right to make decisions about what is good or bad art, by practical necessity most people tend to defer to eternal experts or specialists to help them form an “opinion” of their own. Here is where professional pundits and power brokers enter into the picture. Often they lend themselves out as experts - even as judges on decision-making committees - and directly influence the outcome of awards, commissions, and grants. It’s rather mercenary.
Several systems and mythologies have evolved over time to satisfy the need to limit the quantity of art in an open and free market. While anyone with means can produce art, the arts establishment oversees commerce in a marketplace that is internally subject to rules it establishes, controls, and self-regulates. It’s fundamentally a dark market, and its operations occur behind closed doors and out of public sight. The public has no idea about what the rules and regulations are, or how decisions are ultimately made. Even worse, the rules and their application are opaque to the creative artist as well.
For a sense of direction and cognitive security, consumers of art sometimes look for prevailing winds, and when they find it, fall in line with their cohorts like a flock of Canadian geese heading south for the winter. They follow this or that trend according to the dynamics of horde psychology. Following along with the masses has become a prevalent mode of group-based decision making in the information age where the number and veracity of Internet-driven spikes is a precise metric for social networking sites, and ubiquitous access to multimedia has made everyone a potential participant.
To put this in historical perspective, we should acknowledge that many artistic movements are as much the result of consumer fad as they are the product of a genuine artistic resonance based on a particular collective idea shared and distributed by the creator. I don’t advocate suppressing fad, but I do suggest that artists and consumers rise about the fray, self-educate, and become cognizant of the mechanisms that potentially fuel the fire of artistic movements – right down to understanding how limited resources are distributed to individual artists, musicians, and composers (or their constituent support organizations).
Perhaps it is because resources are so limited (and dwindling as we speak), that a cadre of so-called arts management professionals and self-appointed experts have inserted themselves to refine the process. In some cases management professionals have pre-selected concert programs before the musicians contracted to perform it have had a chance to provide their input. For these experts, randomness is neither virtuous nor a functional component of their organizational toolkit. Almost by definition, these people want complete control over the selection process and seek to wield absolute power in shaping concert programs (and ultimately the careers of those they manage). In the end, their well-intentioned (but usually misguided) actions determine what the public will be exposed to. Arts organizations experiencing financial stress tend to listen to their wise marketing advisors who may (or may not) have a personal aesthetic axe to grind. But as self-proclaimed experts, they allegedly know what’s best when it comes to the bottom line: ticket sales. Randomness - on any level - is their enemy, since they can’t control it.
The status quo in concert management is to propose and recommend a moderately conservative menu of musical offerings. This approach most often results in solutions that are predictably pre-determined and limited. Using their approach, the number of new works scheduled for a season will typically be very limited (if indeed any local or world premieres are scheduled at all). The prototype program offering of a major symphony orchestra is a case in point, where one hopes that the Music (or Artistic) Director is given at least some artistic leeway to create the season’s program. But it is more likely today that members of the Executive Management team will either lead the effort, or be heavily involved in the selection of actual programs (although in Europe there is a more complicated tradition to involve a mix of orchestral members in the program selection process).
The problem with the “music selected by committee” approach is that in the end there may be little if anything on the smorgasbord that actually appeals to the overall public’s sensibilities. It tends to promote a generic (and boring) outcome. On every level music ensembles are caught between the rock of selecting what a select few might consider interesting and exciting music verses the hard place of a boring alternative that will bring in a broader audience and hopefully maintain (if not increase) ticket sales. And as we have learned, what works in the short-term does not always translate to long-term success.
In some venues, concert programs are still “curated” by an Artistic Director with a particular point of view – which may or may not align with the interests of composers on one side, or an audience on the other. But at least with this singular approach, a unique vision is presented, implemented, and allowed to sink or swim based on its own intrinsic merits or limitations.
Public radio is an interesting example of a system where music was at one time selected by an individual DJ with a particular set of ideas and preferences. If you disagreed with their individual selections of music, you could always turn the dial to another station that conformed to your tastes or wait for the next show. Over time, commercial and public stations merged and their net number of listeners for a particular program grew. Management felt that in the new commercial paradigm the task of selecting specific music to broadcast was far too important on the bottom line to delegate to individual hosts or DJs. Behind the scenes, radio stations adopted committees of experts and consultants to analyze and tailor programs of music based on surveys, analysis, and studies. It’s now all very scientific, like Muzak.
The result of this change is that the independent selection of music for broadcast by local DJs was superseded by pre-selection of works (or at least categories) by a global committee. Their aim and objective was simply to apply pseudoscientific methods to appease the largest number of subscribers and maintain or increase market share as well as to centralize and optimize budgets.
Many people have an aversion to rationalizing the pre-selection of art by systemic means because of a widely held assumption that the consumption of art transpires on a purely emotional level. While both hemispheres of the brain are important factors on the receiving side of the artistic experience, many social and economic hurdles still have to be negotiated by the artist post-creation of his or her work. Although their work may be “pure” or even inspired by the aid of a creative muse, it ultimately has to go to market. In this regard art is a product, and in this sense it is no different than fish, coffee, fresh produce, hamburgers, or pork bellies.
In the case of contemporary music composition, the composer does not exist in a vacuum. Generally, his/her works are created for a venue and performed live (or with electronics) by skilled and trained musicians. The term “professional” is oft-applied to a performer and/or composer if they have formal training coupled with a formative list of accomplishments indicating extensive experience in their field. These incidental facts tend to be prominently published in the bios and webpages of such professionals along with acumens that strongly acknowledge this or that composers’ presumed success. How many times have we read, “X is generally acknowledged as one of America’s leading composers.”
But what do we mean by “professional” and how does society formally or informally assess Composer X’s success in the field? In an uncertain market, what are the criteria by which success and failure is measured? What framework is used to regulate the system or make selections? If it were a business, we could ask for a balance sheet and an analysis of the corporate metrics, but struggling artists and emerging composers don’t come equipped with that data. Even if such things could be measured objectively, our culture is not inclined to think of art in those terms.
It really seems that an entire infrastructure has evolved to assist modern society with the fairly ugly problem of narrowing down the selection of art before it reaches the public’s eye. Specialists and experts have appeared out of the woodwork to fill this niche. For example, to simply the process, consumers often read the recommendations of professional critics for helpful advice. Conversely, critics feel a responsibility to guide their readership in the “right” direction. While I agree there is a role for the well-versed music critic, since on occasion they can provide a common thread for public discussion centered on one or more important topics, there is a risk that critics can become more than mere commentators and cross over the fine line into a role of cultural activist. This editorial transgression should stand as a clear and present danger to the integrity of the selection process. Critics who take sides in the musical or artistic debate do so without actually being a direct stakeholder. For the most part, they are not creators themselves. The media’s recommendations often carry considerable weight. For instance, when a city-wide newspaper publishes their selected “picks” of concerts and venues, the beneficial impact on the featured presenting organization can be rather significant. But the adverse effects on artists and presenting organizations routinely ignored by the press tend to be equally devastating. For them, being ignored is poisonous.
On another front, academia has self-appointed itself as a mediator to provide formal credentials for artists and composers who seek to obtain legitimacy in a woefully over-saturated market. In the hope that a MFA or DMA will provide a competitive edge over their peers, many artists and composers have invested heavily in this academic-based strategy. While some musicians have on occasion found this career path fruitful, the formula has been less successful in recent years and appears to be losing steam and credibility as time marches on. I sense that audiences care less these days about the quality and quantity of degrees listed on a composers’ bio. With a market flooded by credentialed artists, the credential itself becomes less of a distinguishing factor.
And yet credentials seem to matter. A number of new music specialty ensembles in my geographic area appear to perform works by the same small group of credentialed composers more or less ad nausium. I find it interesting that some of these same ensembles are recipients of various awards for “Adventurous Programming.” What’s so adventurous about performing works by the same two dozen mostly academic composers over and over again?
Academia is heavily involved in controlling the filtering process at the source of funding as well. This occurs in instances where a foundation is based at, and administered by, a university. The significant potential for conflict of interest lies here, since the same organization that assigns credentials is tasked with distributing benefits and awards. The filtering process in this context tends to weigh heavily on personal connections and preexisting relationships. Academics tend to award other academics, and inside-politics has been known to reign. For example, if the jury of a grant selection committee were to actually listen to all of the recordings of the submitted works, they would never have enough time to listen to everything that was submitted. Therefore the trend has been to use a system of selection criteria that typically filters out the unwanted based on factors of familiarity and personal bias. From my experience on the submitter side of this equation, this filtering method is not optimal either.
Government subsidy of the arts is related to his discussion in that public money is often used to fund art projects – particularly major ones. I’ve seen both good and bad outcomes from art projects funded by Federal and State agencies in the US and by various European subsidies as well. While this discussion is not about the merits of public funding of the arts, it does raise the issue of cultural filtering when governments are forced to cut back on funding (as they have recently in Europe). The painful discussion about how and where to make these cuts becomes even more relevant when funds are in short supply. Deciding about what to sponsor in the arts is the mirror image of deciding what to cut. Recently in the Netherlands, politicians have decided to take a populist route: future funding will be determined the financial “success” of organizations. The hard metrics of audience size and ticket sales will become the primary determining factor of future support.
I find the “popularity contest” method of filtering to have significant limitations too. It’s an American model, and (from what I can see here in the United States) it does not serve the interests of those who hold a minority perspective in the arts. While select commercial ventures could exist on their own without the infusion of public monies, there is a much smaller market for certain art forms – including some important cultural warhorses such as the chamber and orchestral music. The classical music industry has from the outset never been completely self-sustaining, so it’s simply Pollyannaish to believe it would thrive (or survive) in a purely free-market economy. Recently two commercial British musicals won Tony Awards, which in itself is not surprising other than the fact that the British Government provided seed money to the producers of these stage works. This initial government funding allowed for the kind experimentation in theatre that is not likely to occur with free enterprise alone. My argument is not about reducing funding for the arts (in fact I think it should be increased), but about re-evaluating the means and process by which it is allocated.
Internet-driven crowd-sourcing is an interesting recent variation on the popularity contest. It uses Information Technology to systematize the mass market tabulation of winners and losers. It has commercial application too: collecting SMS texting fees for each “vote” has proven to be quite profitable for Simon Cowell’s American Idol’s empire. The YouTube phenomenon has made more than a few artists famous, if not infamous.
Thus far I have surveyed just a few of the methods in use by the arts establishment to whittle down an overly broad spectrum of art and music into a smaller, more manageable pot of finalists. The finalists then compete for diminishing resources of public and private funding, or get voted off of the island. We’ve seen how professional arts managers have a financial agenda that does not always align with artistic trends. We’ve seen how the juries at foundations often resort to personal bias and inside politics as a filtering method – usually out of practical necessity. We’ve seen how some professional critics inject bias into the public arena and use the power of the media to influence the filtering process. We’ve seen how academia has attempted to influence outcomes by throwing their weight behind their graduates and using credentialing to validate one class of artists over another. We’ve also seen a recent trend to filter art using the tools of social media with “crowd-sourcing” to empower the public through voting electronically for whatever they desire in the moment. This is impulsive and art by the numbers.
Frankly, I’m not a fan of any of the above methodologies. Yet, I fully acknowledge that not everyone can be an artist. As ugly as it, there needs to be a filtering process of some sort. That’s a reality.
Let me propose an alternative system: that of randomness. When someone has an encounter with art that is purely random; something clicks and the resulting experience is often quite positive and memorable. Serendipity has always been an important factor - not only for the consumer, but for the creator.
With human nature being what it is perhaps the best way to bypass back-room politics, personal bias, and insider trading in the art markets is for the distribution of funds and awards to be randomized. Randomization would equalize the playing field and virtually eliminate the potential corruption of committees and outside influence of self-proclaimed experts. While using chance does not guarantee that the “best” work of art will always be selected, it does provide a wider spectrum of options and more points of view than we have today. After the work is initially presented to the public, its intrinsic value is open for interpretation and vigorous debate. The new work will ultimately sink or swim based on its own merits. But the issue we face today is that poorly filtered selections of work make it to the public. By randomizing the selection process we would do a much better job at picking potential winners for society.
Randomness is not to be feared. For example, I am an advocate of open stacks in the library where one can browse books at will and discover new ideas purely by chance. Although I have a very extensive audio collection of recorded music, I often prefer to listen to the radio because the selection of music is out of my control. Random selection takes us beyond our narrow box of ideas and concepts, and can provide us with experiences that would not be part of our self-defined set of values.
How does one implement a system of randomness? I propose using a lottery system to achieve this goal. It’s rather easy to implement and would save funds and reduce (if not eliminate) administrative overhead. Artists would simply apply for a grant by obtaining a lottery ticket after establishing that they met a minimum set of requirements (the subject of another discussion). Foundations and cultural organizations would hold periodic lotteries to select the recipients of their awards or commissions. It’s that simple, and completely fair. It’s as easy as rolling the dice. You can’t get any more efficient than that.
It would require a paradigm shift for cultural organizations and foundations to demote their managers and panels of experts and migrate toward an organized system of chance. But I’m convinced that positive surprises would ensue from the adoption of this new filtering method, not to mention that fact that it would be far more equitable all around. At worst, the lottery system might provide results that are just as mundane or drab as the offerings we have today as the result of filtering by the existing pre-selected calculation methods. Nothing could be more boring than determinism in the arts, and randomness can stir things up.
Under the current system, the more awards an artist accumulates, the more suspicious I become of their work. Art should be about original ideas, not about an artist’s ability to schmooze and work the system to their advantage. If it does nothing else, the lottery system equalizes the playing field.
Is it fair? It depends who you ask. Certainly well-established artists and composers might feel threatened by the idea that their next commission or grant would be awarded on the basis of a lottery. But for many others, perhaps the majority, it does provide at least a chance of success and access to potential financial and artistic resources that they have difficulty accessing. While the odds would not be in any particular recipients favor and generally quite low, at least every basically qualified artist would get an equal shot at the prize.
Some will argue that with a lottery system everyone will suffer. This fear is overblown. The truly committed with continue their work and regularly apply for funding and commissions via the newly instituted arts-lottery system - while the dilatant will grow bored and seek other ways to pass their time. Those who apply more often will improve their success rate. In some cases an individual would have an equal (or better) success rate with the randomized selection method than the existing systems of selection utilized by the status quo.
Ultimately, the proposed lottery selection system would be generally accepted by the majority of creators of art and music, but it would also hold tangible benefits for the public at large too. Some of its positive outcomes in the field of music would include randomized listening tracks on the radio, new pieces of concert music by completely unknown composers, and an open and unregulated playing field unhindered by politics. These would all be welcome contributing factors to a newly vitalized new music scene, and I would embrace all of them as a positive trend toward something better than what we have today.
My interest in this topic stems as much from plain old curiosity as it does a self-interested desire to be understand the rules. After all, hasn’t everyone wondered at one time or another how and why this or that contemporary work - and the artist who created it – was a success, while many others were not? Finding a rationalization for this process is something that composers in particular should be cognizant of, since as professionals they are significantly invested in having their music performed and in the integrity/viability of the selection-system as a whole – to say the least.
As a composer myself, I strive to observe and understand how this process plays out in the arena of contemporary serious concert music, although to be honest, the subjective data I’ve gleaned thus far only provides a faint hint of the obscure rules that lay underneath. And yet, subtle indications of a mysterious systemic process rise to the surface and reveal themselves to those who pay close attention to the details. The selection-system in the field of music, as I see it, is fairly generic and generally applicable to other fields of art as well.
But how do we construct a viable theory out of fleeting impressions if we can’t peer directly into the black box of social interaction and observe for discernable patterns of information on which to base our claims? What if you can’t be a fly on the wall and observe the powerbrokers at work?
Having never been on a jury myself, I can only base my theory on cumulative results and outcomes of the selection process rather than on an internal narrative that occurs behind closed doors. We can’t see the hidden processes that hide beneath the hood and out of public sight. Although events of day-to-day decisions that reflect and represent inner-mechanics and social patterns that lie submerged are clear enough, it’s the larger trends and the patterns they form that are much more difficult to grasp. Local events generally exist out of sight and out of mind, and are distributed over the course of years of activity and spread among many individual recipients working in isolation. But the establishment always maintains the upper hand. The long-term impact of their positive or negative rating forms an over-arching and cumulative series of events that ultimately creates the pattern of winners and losers. Their mission is decidedly strategic, although they claim to be open-minded and neutral.
Acknowledging there is actually a systemic gateway for art and that it functions on a grand scale could be considered socially taboo, since the conventional wisdom is that outstanding and unique original art (and music) will always bubble up to the top of the vat to reveal itself as a superior product. It’s another incarnation of the survival of the fittest principal. We are trained to believe that true talent can’t be suppressed. On the other hand, it’s painfully clear to many observers that the number of producers of art far outnumber the limited supply of cash-carrying consumers. By hook or by crook, society must rely on a methodology to filter out (as with a cultural “sieve”) the “worthy” from the “worthless.” This concept is nothing new. The assignment of artistic value is an age-old process that has found application throughout time and across culture – yet this all-important filtering mechanism is also underplayed, perhaps in the interest of perpetuating the mystique about the greatness of individual works of art, artistic movements, and even colorful narratives about individual artists themselves. One thing is true: without a working conscious or unconscious filtering process, the public would be completely overwhelmed, besieged with information and the market (by which new art and new music is created and sold) would collapse under its own weight.
Several key factors are at play here. For one thing, there is good art and bad art, but unfortunately not everyone can (or will) agree on a unified criterion of aesthetic judgment to make value assessments on a universal or collective basis. There is no gold standard for art of exceptional quality, and if there were, we’d have other problems to deal with.
Some see the selection filter in purely financial terms. They mistakenly assume that art will succeed only if it has commercial potential, even what could be considered a niche market. I don’t take that view. It’s too simplistic.
While it is presumed that every consumer has a right to make decisions about what is good or bad art, by practical necessity most people tend to defer to eternal experts or specialists to help them form an “opinion” of their own. Here is where professional pundits and power brokers enter into the picture. Often they lend themselves out as experts - even as judges on decision-making committees - and directly influence the outcome of awards, commissions, and grants. It’s rather mercenary.
Several systems and mythologies have evolved over time to satisfy the need to limit the quantity of art in an open and free market. While anyone with means can produce art, the arts establishment oversees commerce in a marketplace that is internally subject to rules it establishes, controls, and self-regulates. It’s fundamentally a dark market, and its operations occur behind closed doors and out of public sight. The public has no idea about what the rules and regulations are, or how decisions are ultimately made. Even worse, the rules and their application are opaque to the creative artist as well.
For a sense of direction and cognitive security, consumers of art sometimes look for prevailing winds, and when they find it, fall in line with their cohorts like a flock of Canadian geese heading south for the winter. They follow this or that trend according to the dynamics of horde psychology. Following along with the masses has become a prevalent mode of group-based decision making in the information age where the number and veracity of Internet-driven spikes is a precise metric for social networking sites, and ubiquitous access to multimedia has made everyone a potential participant.
To put this in historical perspective, we should acknowledge that many artistic movements are as much the result of consumer fad as they are the product of a genuine artistic resonance based on a particular collective idea shared and distributed by the creator. I don’t advocate suppressing fad, but I do suggest that artists and consumers rise about the fray, self-educate, and become cognizant of the mechanisms that potentially fuel the fire of artistic movements – right down to understanding how limited resources are distributed to individual artists, musicians, and composers (or their constituent support organizations).
Perhaps it is because resources are so limited (and dwindling as we speak), that a cadre of so-called arts management professionals and self-appointed experts have inserted themselves to refine the process. In some cases management professionals have pre-selected concert programs before the musicians contracted to perform it have had a chance to provide their input. For these experts, randomness is neither virtuous nor a functional component of their organizational toolkit. Almost by definition, these people want complete control over the selection process and seek to wield absolute power in shaping concert programs (and ultimately the careers of those they manage). In the end, their well-intentioned (but usually misguided) actions determine what the public will be exposed to. Arts organizations experiencing financial stress tend to listen to their wise marketing advisors who may (or may not) have a personal aesthetic axe to grind. But as self-proclaimed experts, they allegedly know what’s best when it comes to the bottom line: ticket sales. Randomness - on any level - is their enemy, since they can’t control it.
The status quo in concert management is to propose and recommend a moderately conservative menu of musical offerings. This approach most often results in solutions that are predictably pre-determined and limited. Using their approach, the number of new works scheduled for a season will typically be very limited (if indeed any local or world premieres are scheduled at all). The prototype program offering of a major symphony orchestra is a case in point, where one hopes that the Music (or Artistic) Director is given at least some artistic leeway to create the season’s program. But it is more likely today that members of the Executive Management team will either lead the effort, or be heavily involved in the selection of actual programs (although in Europe there is a more complicated tradition to involve a mix of orchestral members in the program selection process).
The problem with the “music selected by committee” approach is that in the end there may be little if anything on the smorgasbord that actually appeals to the overall public’s sensibilities. It tends to promote a generic (and boring) outcome. On every level music ensembles are caught between the rock of selecting what a select few might consider interesting and exciting music verses the hard place of a boring alternative that will bring in a broader audience and hopefully maintain (if not increase) ticket sales. And as we have learned, what works in the short-term does not always translate to long-term success.
In some venues, concert programs are still “curated” by an Artistic Director with a particular point of view – which may or may not align with the interests of composers on one side, or an audience on the other. But at least with this singular approach, a unique vision is presented, implemented, and allowed to sink or swim based on its own intrinsic merits or limitations.
Public radio is an interesting example of a system where music was at one time selected by an individual DJ with a particular set of ideas and preferences. If you disagreed with their individual selections of music, you could always turn the dial to another station that conformed to your tastes or wait for the next show. Over time, commercial and public stations merged and their net number of listeners for a particular program grew. Management felt that in the new commercial paradigm the task of selecting specific music to broadcast was far too important on the bottom line to delegate to individual hosts or DJs. Behind the scenes, radio stations adopted committees of experts and consultants to analyze and tailor programs of music based on surveys, analysis, and studies. It’s now all very scientific, like Muzak.
The result of this change is that the independent selection of music for broadcast by local DJs was superseded by pre-selection of works (or at least categories) by a global committee. Their aim and objective was simply to apply pseudoscientific methods to appease the largest number of subscribers and maintain or increase market share as well as to centralize and optimize budgets.
Many people have an aversion to rationalizing the pre-selection of art by systemic means because of a widely held assumption that the consumption of art transpires on a purely emotional level. While both hemispheres of the brain are important factors on the receiving side of the artistic experience, many social and economic hurdles still have to be negotiated by the artist post-creation of his or her work. Although their work may be “pure” or even inspired by the aid of a creative muse, it ultimately has to go to market. In this regard art is a product, and in this sense it is no different than fish, coffee, fresh produce, hamburgers, or pork bellies.
In the case of contemporary music composition, the composer does not exist in a vacuum. Generally, his/her works are created for a venue and performed live (or with electronics) by skilled and trained musicians. The term “professional” is oft-applied to a performer and/or composer if they have formal training coupled with a formative list of accomplishments indicating extensive experience in their field. These incidental facts tend to be prominently published in the bios and webpages of such professionals along with acumens that strongly acknowledge this or that composers’ presumed success. How many times have we read, “X is generally acknowledged as one of America’s leading composers.”
But what do we mean by “professional” and how does society formally or informally assess Composer X’s success in the field? In an uncertain market, what are the criteria by which success and failure is measured? What framework is used to regulate the system or make selections? If it were a business, we could ask for a balance sheet and an analysis of the corporate metrics, but struggling artists and emerging composers don’t come equipped with that data. Even if such things could be measured objectively, our culture is not inclined to think of art in those terms.
It really seems that an entire infrastructure has evolved to assist modern society with the fairly ugly problem of narrowing down the selection of art before it reaches the public’s eye. Specialists and experts have appeared out of the woodwork to fill this niche. For example, to simply the process, consumers often read the recommendations of professional critics for helpful advice. Conversely, critics feel a responsibility to guide their readership in the “right” direction. While I agree there is a role for the well-versed music critic, since on occasion they can provide a common thread for public discussion centered on one or more important topics, there is a risk that critics can become more than mere commentators and cross over the fine line into a role of cultural activist. This editorial transgression should stand as a clear and present danger to the integrity of the selection process. Critics who take sides in the musical or artistic debate do so without actually being a direct stakeholder. For the most part, they are not creators themselves. The media’s recommendations often carry considerable weight. For instance, when a city-wide newspaper publishes their selected “picks” of concerts and venues, the beneficial impact on the featured presenting organization can be rather significant. But the adverse effects on artists and presenting organizations routinely ignored by the press tend to be equally devastating. For them, being ignored is poisonous.
On another front, academia has self-appointed itself as a mediator to provide formal credentials for artists and composers who seek to obtain legitimacy in a woefully over-saturated market. In the hope that a MFA or DMA will provide a competitive edge over their peers, many artists and composers have invested heavily in this academic-based strategy. While some musicians have on occasion found this career path fruitful, the formula has been less successful in recent years and appears to be losing steam and credibility as time marches on. I sense that audiences care less these days about the quality and quantity of degrees listed on a composers’ bio. With a market flooded by credentialed artists, the credential itself becomes less of a distinguishing factor.
And yet credentials seem to matter. A number of new music specialty ensembles in my geographic area appear to perform works by the same small group of credentialed composers more or less ad nausium. I find it interesting that some of these same ensembles are recipients of various awards for “Adventurous Programming.” What’s so adventurous about performing works by the same two dozen mostly academic composers over and over again?
Academia is heavily involved in controlling the filtering process at the source of funding as well. This occurs in instances where a foundation is based at, and administered by, a university. The significant potential for conflict of interest lies here, since the same organization that assigns credentials is tasked with distributing benefits and awards. The filtering process in this context tends to weigh heavily on personal connections and preexisting relationships. Academics tend to award other academics, and inside-politics has been known to reign. For example, if the jury of a grant selection committee were to actually listen to all of the recordings of the submitted works, they would never have enough time to listen to everything that was submitted. Therefore the trend has been to use a system of selection criteria that typically filters out the unwanted based on factors of familiarity and personal bias. From my experience on the submitter side of this equation, this filtering method is not optimal either.
Government subsidy of the arts is related to his discussion in that public money is often used to fund art projects – particularly major ones. I’ve seen both good and bad outcomes from art projects funded by Federal and State agencies in the US and by various European subsidies as well. While this discussion is not about the merits of public funding of the arts, it does raise the issue of cultural filtering when governments are forced to cut back on funding (as they have recently in Europe). The painful discussion about how and where to make these cuts becomes even more relevant when funds are in short supply. Deciding about what to sponsor in the arts is the mirror image of deciding what to cut. Recently in the Netherlands, politicians have decided to take a populist route: future funding will be determined the financial “success” of organizations. The hard metrics of audience size and ticket sales will become the primary determining factor of future support.
I find the “popularity contest” method of filtering to have significant limitations too. It’s an American model, and (from what I can see here in the United States) it does not serve the interests of those who hold a minority perspective in the arts. While select commercial ventures could exist on their own without the infusion of public monies, there is a much smaller market for certain art forms – including some important cultural warhorses such as the chamber and orchestral music. The classical music industry has from the outset never been completely self-sustaining, so it’s simply Pollyannaish to believe it would thrive (or survive) in a purely free-market economy. Recently two commercial British musicals won Tony Awards, which in itself is not surprising other than the fact that the British Government provided seed money to the producers of these stage works. This initial government funding allowed for the kind experimentation in theatre that is not likely to occur with free enterprise alone. My argument is not about reducing funding for the arts (in fact I think it should be increased), but about re-evaluating the means and process by which it is allocated.
Internet-driven crowd-sourcing is an interesting recent variation on the popularity contest. It uses Information Technology to systematize the mass market tabulation of winners and losers. It has commercial application too: collecting SMS texting fees for each “vote” has proven to be quite profitable for Simon Cowell’s American Idol’s empire. The YouTube phenomenon has made more than a few artists famous, if not infamous.
Thus far I have surveyed just a few of the methods in use by the arts establishment to whittle down an overly broad spectrum of art and music into a smaller, more manageable pot of finalists. The finalists then compete for diminishing resources of public and private funding, or get voted off of the island. We’ve seen how professional arts managers have a financial agenda that does not always align with artistic trends. We’ve seen how the juries at foundations often resort to personal bias and inside politics as a filtering method – usually out of practical necessity. We’ve seen how some professional critics inject bias into the public arena and use the power of the media to influence the filtering process. We’ve seen how academia has attempted to influence outcomes by throwing their weight behind their graduates and using credentialing to validate one class of artists over another. We’ve also seen a recent trend to filter art using the tools of social media with “crowd-sourcing” to empower the public through voting electronically for whatever they desire in the moment. This is impulsive and art by the numbers.
Frankly, I’m not a fan of any of the above methodologies. Yet, I fully acknowledge that not everyone can be an artist. As ugly as it, there needs to be a filtering process of some sort. That’s a reality.
Let me propose an alternative system: that of randomness. When someone has an encounter with art that is purely random; something clicks and the resulting experience is often quite positive and memorable. Serendipity has always been an important factor - not only for the consumer, but for the creator.
With human nature being what it is perhaps the best way to bypass back-room politics, personal bias, and insider trading in the art markets is for the distribution of funds and awards to be randomized. Randomization would equalize the playing field and virtually eliminate the potential corruption of committees and outside influence of self-proclaimed experts. While using chance does not guarantee that the “best” work of art will always be selected, it does provide a wider spectrum of options and more points of view than we have today. After the work is initially presented to the public, its intrinsic value is open for interpretation and vigorous debate. The new work will ultimately sink or swim based on its own merits. But the issue we face today is that poorly filtered selections of work make it to the public. By randomizing the selection process we would do a much better job at picking potential winners for society.
Randomness is not to be feared. For example, I am an advocate of open stacks in the library where one can browse books at will and discover new ideas purely by chance. Although I have a very extensive audio collection of recorded music, I often prefer to listen to the radio because the selection of music is out of my control. Random selection takes us beyond our narrow box of ideas and concepts, and can provide us with experiences that would not be part of our self-defined set of values.
How does one implement a system of randomness? I propose using a lottery system to achieve this goal. It’s rather easy to implement and would save funds and reduce (if not eliminate) administrative overhead. Artists would simply apply for a grant by obtaining a lottery ticket after establishing that they met a minimum set of requirements (the subject of another discussion). Foundations and cultural organizations would hold periodic lotteries to select the recipients of their awards or commissions. It’s that simple, and completely fair. It’s as easy as rolling the dice. You can’t get any more efficient than that.
It would require a paradigm shift for cultural organizations and foundations to demote their managers and panels of experts and migrate toward an organized system of chance. But I’m convinced that positive surprises would ensue from the adoption of this new filtering method, not to mention that fact that it would be far more equitable all around. At worst, the lottery system might provide results that are just as mundane or drab as the offerings we have today as the result of filtering by the existing pre-selected calculation methods. Nothing could be more boring than determinism in the arts, and randomness can stir things up.
Under the current system, the more awards an artist accumulates, the more suspicious I become of their work. Art should be about original ideas, not about an artist’s ability to schmooze and work the system to their advantage. If it does nothing else, the lottery system equalizes the playing field.
Is it fair? It depends who you ask. Certainly well-established artists and composers might feel threatened by the idea that their next commission or grant would be awarded on the basis of a lottery. But for many others, perhaps the majority, it does provide at least a chance of success and access to potential financial and artistic resources that they have difficulty accessing. While the odds would not be in any particular recipients favor and generally quite low, at least every basically qualified artist would get an equal shot at the prize.
Some will argue that with a lottery system everyone will suffer. This fear is overblown. The truly committed with continue their work and regularly apply for funding and commissions via the newly instituted arts-lottery system - while the dilatant will grow bored and seek other ways to pass their time. Those who apply more often will improve their success rate. In some cases an individual would have an equal (or better) success rate with the randomized selection method than the existing systems of selection utilized by the status quo.
Ultimately, the proposed lottery selection system would be generally accepted by the majority of creators of art and music, but it would also hold tangible benefits for the public at large too. Some of its positive outcomes in the field of music would include randomized listening tracks on the radio, new pieces of concert music by completely unknown composers, and an open and unregulated playing field unhindered by politics. These would all be welcome contributing factors to a newly vitalized new music scene, and I would embrace all of them as a positive trend toward something better than what we have today.
7 Temmuz 2012 Cumartesi
Boston Takes a Bath: Part I
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From the 1848-49 Boston Directory.
Braman's Bath House, bottom of Chestnut street.
Braman's Baths, 1852, bottom of Chestnut street. Click on image for larger view (BPL collection).
Braman's Baths, close view.
I came to the topic of public baths when I found the book Washing the great unwashed: public baths in urban America 1840-1920, by Marilyn T. Williams. When I began investigating, I found the subject could be split into two sections - an early, 19th Century period of private baths, and a later turn of the century development of municipal facilities. I'll begin with the early era, and do a second post on the municipal baths next week.
The maps above show Braman's Baths, which opened in 1835, and sat on pilings in the Charles river near Beacon street and the new Public Garden. . At the time, that meant salt water. The building was two stories, 80x50 feet, with 50 bathing rooms and warm and cold water. The pool itself seems to have floated on the water. People took swimming lessons at Bramans, and we can imagine they cooled off in the summer's heat as well. In the fall, the bathing houses were towed up river and grounded for the winter.
The following list is from the 1848-49 Boston Directory. The baths at Craigie's and Warren bridge baths, and hte Morey bath of Western ave. (now Beacon street through the Back Bay) would have been floating in the Charles river. The others, including a second Braman's bath, were either in a hotel, or were 'medicated' baths.
Bruce Cyrus - Craigie's bridge bath
Cyrus Blodgett 233 Washington st. rear, Marlboro hotel
Henry Blodgett, Eastern Exchange Hotel, Eastern Railroad wharf.
Truman Morey - Western ave. (Beacon st)
Warren A. Veazie, Warren Bath House and Refectory, Warren bridge.
American House, 42 Hanover
Henry May, 1 Cambridge st. (medicated).
M.M. Miles, 13 Howard (medicated).
J. Braman, Tremont House.
From the 1848-49 Boston Directory.Braman's Bath House, bottom of Chestnut street.Braman's Baths, 1852, bottom of Chestnut street. Click on image for larger view (BPL collection).Braman's Baths, close view.I came to the topic of public baths when I found the book Washing the great unwashed: public baths in urban America 1840-1920, by Marilyn T. Williams. When I began investigating, I found the subject could be split into two sections - an early, 19th Century period of private baths, and a later turn of the century development of municipal facilities. I'll begin with the early era, and do a second post on the municipal baths next week.
The maps above show Braman's Baths, which opened in 1835, and sat on pilings in the Charles river near Beacon street and the new Public Garden. . At the time, that meant salt water. The building was two stories, 80x50 feet, with 50 bathing rooms and warm and cold water. The pool itself seems to have floated on the water. People took swimming lessons at Bramans, and we can imagine they cooled off in the summer's heat as well. In the fall, the bathing houses were towed up river and grounded for the winter.
The following list is from the 1848-49 Boston Directory. The baths at Craigie's and Warren bridge baths, and hte Morey bath of Western ave. (now Beacon street through the Back Bay) would have been floating in the Charles river. The others, including a second Braman's bath, were either in a hotel, or were 'medicated' baths.
Bruce Cyrus - Craigie's bridge bath
Cyrus Blodgett 233 Washington st. rear, Marlboro hotel
Henry Blodgett, Eastern Exchange Hotel, Eastern Railroad wharf.
Truman Morey - Western ave. (Beacon st)
Warren A. Veazie, Warren Bath House and Refectory, Warren bridge.
American House, 42 Hanover
Henry May, 1 Cambridge st. (medicated).
M.M. Miles, 13 Howard (medicated).
J. Braman, Tremont House.
Boston Takes a Bath: Part II
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Following last week's entry, the story now changes. Bathing the entire body was not popular in Colonial times, but by the 1840s, and a dramatic increase in immigration, the need for public baths was advocated in major cities like Boston. By 1850, there were at least 12 privately owned public baths in Boston, but they would have been too expensive for the working class and poor. In her book , Washing the great unwashed: public baths in urban America 1840-1920, Marilyn T. Williams reports that in 1866, Boston opened five floating baths (like those of Braman), and one natural beach bathhouse, at L street in South Boston. The Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, 1904, tells us that in their first month of service, the five floating baths saw 100,000 customers. In the next year, six new baths were opened, with four serving women exclusively.
North End Park (BPL Flickr photo group).
L street bath house beach, South Boston (BPL Flickr photo group).
We skip to 1896, and a new mayor, Josiah Quincy. The existing floating baths and bathing beaches would be improved, and new landside buildings would be erected. The L street facility in South Boston was expanded for girls and women, and now had separate boy's, men's and women's sections. The North End park, the next most popular, opened in 1898. There were again separate facilities for men and women, and upwards of 5,000 bathers attended daily. The facility covered six acres, and contained hundreds of lockers and closets, a playground, and open air gymnasium, floating platforms and shade tents.
Dewey beach, Charlestown, 1901.
East Boston had a beach and bath house at Wood Island park, which would later be lost to Logan Airport. Charlestown had a facility similar to East Boston on the Mystic river known as Dewey beach. Dorchester had two smaller facilities, at Commercial point and Savin hill. Even land-locked West Roxbury had a bath house. The Spring street beach, also called Havey beach, was on the Charles river where the V.F.W. parkway is now. All of these facilities were free. There was a charge of five cents for a men's bathing suit, and one cent for a towel, but bathers could bring their own.
There were twelve floating bridges, open from 6 A.M. to 10 P.M., from May 15 through September 15. Three baths were located in East Boston, four in Charlestown, three in Boston proper, and one in Brighton. Each served its local community, resulting in an ethnic segregation among the facilities. The two at the West Boston bridge served the African American community on the back of Beacon hill. The Craigie bridge bath house served the Jews of the West End, and the Warren bridge facility attracted both Jews and the Italians of the North End. And the Dover street bridge bath house attracted the Irish of the South End and South Boston.
The municipal bath movement had begun as a hygiene measure for the poor and working class crowded into the city. The poor and working class, however, seem to have taken to the facilities more as entertainment - swimming - than simply as bathing establishments. And so the city would shift from bath houses to swimming pools. At the same time, gymnasiums were built, in some cases combining the two facilities in one building. Two outdoor gymnasiums were laid out, at Wood Island park in East Boston and at Charlesbank. Harrison avenue in the South End and Tyler street in today's Chinatown saw gymnasiums fitted out, and ward rooms at Elmwood street in Roxbury were turned into a gym when not in use.
Dover street public baths. Notice the tower of the former Boston Fire Department headquarters at the upper right.
Dover street baths, South End, 1902.
A survey of 72,000 families in apartments in Boston revealed that only 25% had bathrooms, in some districts the number going down to one percent. The Dover street bath house in the South End was erected to serve the many poor and working class residents of the district. This was built for washing, rather than for swimming.
Cabot street bathhouse, Roxbury, 1906 (close-up).
Cabot street bathhouse, 1906.
At Cabot street in Roxbury, a combination gymnasium, bath house and swimming pool was erected. There were classes for schoolgirls, mothers and working girls.
North End Municipal Bath.
North Bennett street gymnasium/bathhouse, North End, 1917.
The North End municipal building was similar to that at Cabot street.
To end the story, I'll add a photo of my own of Jamaica Plain's Curtis Hall. The Curtis Hall municipal building was erected as the town hall of the short-lived town of West Roxbury, just in time for the ephemeral community to be annexed to Boston in 1874. In time a gymnasium and swimming pool would be added to the building. My memories of the 1960s include going to 'tank' to swim during the summer. For five cents, we got access to the pool for what I believe was half an hour. Boys and girls swam separately, the girls using the supplied and required gray bathing suits and the boys...swimming naked.
That's what I said - a room full of pre-adolescent boys gamboling about buck nekkid while lifeguards and facility workers looked on. Can you imagine that happening now? My father told me that it was the same when he swam at Curtis Hall in the 1930s. I can only imagine now that the boys' naked swimming was a hold-over from the time when bathing was favored over swimming. I know that we weren't allowed in without a towel and a bar of soap.
The Jamaica Plain Gazette recently announced that the refurbished Curtis Hall pool has re-opened. Hours and admission fees were discussed, but no mention was made whether boys should bring a bathing suit.
Washing the great unwashed: public baths in urban America 1840-1920, by Marilyn T. Williams
North End Park (BPL Flickr photo group).L street bath house beach, South Boston (BPL Flickr photo group). We skip to 1896, and a new mayor, Josiah Quincy. The existing floating baths and bathing beaches would be improved, and new landside buildings would be erected. The L street facility in South Boston was expanded for girls and women, and now had separate boy's, men's and women's sections. The North End park, the next most popular, opened in 1898. There were again separate facilities for men and women, and upwards of 5,000 bathers attended daily. The facility covered six acres, and contained hundreds of lockers and closets, a playground, and open air gymnasium, floating platforms and shade tents.
Dewey beach, Charlestown, 1901.East Boston had a beach and bath house at Wood Island park, which would later be lost to Logan Airport. Charlestown had a facility similar to East Boston on the Mystic river known as Dewey beach. Dorchester had two smaller facilities, at Commercial point and Savin hill. Even land-locked West Roxbury had a bath house. The Spring street beach, also called Havey beach, was on the Charles river where the V.F.W. parkway is now. All of these facilities were free. There was a charge of five cents for a men's bathing suit, and one cent for a towel, but bathers could bring their own.
There were twelve floating bridges, open from 6 A.M. to 10 P.M., from May 15 through September 15. Three baths were located in East Boston, four in Charlestown, three in Boston proper, and one in Brighton. Each served its local community, resulting in an ethnic segregation among the facilities. The two at the West Boston bridge served the African American community on the back of Beacon hill. The Craigie bridge bath house served the Jews of the West End, and the Warren bridge facility attracted both Jews and the Italians of the North End. And the Dover street bridge bath house attracted the Irish of the South End and South Boston.
The municipal bath movement had begun as a hygiene measure for the poor and working class crowded into the city. The poor and working class, however, seem to have taken to the facilities more as entertainment - swimming - than simply as bathing establishments. And so the city would shift from bath houses to swimming pools. At the same time, gymnasiums were built, in some cases combining the two facilities in one building. Two outdoor gymnasiums were laid out, at Wood Island park in East Boston and at Charlesbank. Harrison avenue in the South End and Tyler street in today's Chinatown saw gymnasiums fitted out, and ward rooms at Elmwood street in Roxbury were turned into a gym when not in use.
Dover street public baths. Notice the tower of the former Boston Fire Department headquarters at the upper right.Dover street baths, South End, 1902.A survey of 72,000 families in apartments in Boston revealed that only 25% had bathrooms, in some districts the number going down to one percent. The Dover street bath house in the South End was erected to serve the many poor and working class residents of the district. This was built for washing, rather than for swimming.
Cabot street bathhouse, Roxbury, 1906 (close-up).Cabot street bathhouse, 1906.At Cabot street in Roxbury, a combination gymnasium, bath house and swimming pool was erected. There were classes for schoolgirls, mothers and working girls.
North End Municipal Bath.North Bennett street gymnasium/bathhouse, North End, 1917.The North End municipal building was similar to that at Cabot street.
To end the story, I'll add a photo of my own of Jamaica Plain's Curtis Hall. The Curtis Hall municipal building was erected as the town hall of the short-lived town of West Roxbury, just in time for the ephemeral community to be annexed to Boston in 1874. In time a gymnasium and swimming pool would be added to the building. My memories of the 1960s include going to 'tank' to swim during the summer. For five cents, we got access to the pool for what I believe was half an hour. Boys and girls swam separately, the girls using the supplied and required gray bathing suits and the boys...swimming naked.
That's what I said - a room full of pre-adolescent boys gamboling about buck nekkid while lifeguards and facility workers looked on. Can you imagine that happening now? My father told me that it was the same when he swam at Curtis Hall in the 1930s. I can only imagine now that the boys' naked swimming was a hold-over from the time when bathing was favored over swimming. I know that we weren't allowed in without a towel and a bar of soap.
The Jamaica Plain Gazette recently announced that the refurbished Curtis Hall pool has re-opened. Hours and admission fees were discussed, but no mention was made whether boys should bring a bathing suit.
Washing the great unwashed: public baths in urban America 1840-1920, by Marilyn T. Williams
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