FIRlnGLlne HOST: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

GUESTS : ROSALYN TURECK and SCHUYLER CHAPIN

SUBJECT: "IS GOOD MUSIC GOING UNDER?"

FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL.

This is a transcript of FIRING LINE program #2833/1200, taped at HBO Studios in New York City, March 31, 1999, and telecast later on public television stations.

Copyright 1999 FIRING LINE

Transcripts and videocassettes are available through Producers Incorporated for Television, 2700 Cypress Street, Columbia, SC 29205 8031799-3449

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MR. BUCKLEY: Every few years Firing Line touches down on the question, Is classical music dying? We are lucky enough this time around to have got in to discuss the question two persons who have spoken to us before on the subject. One is perhaps the most distinguished pianist alive, the second, the senior man of music in New York City.

Rosalyn Tureck recently stopped them dead with her recording for Deutsche Grammophon of the Goldberg Variations, of which she is a celebrated interpreter. Dr. Tureck was born in Chicago, was a child prodigy, graduated from the Juilliard School and went into the world as a great virtuoso. After the war she concentrated on playing the work of J.S. Bach and did so for many years, only recently going back to romantic work from time to time. Mostly she gives her time to scholarly work in Oxford: definitive editions of the Goldberg, the chromatic fantasy and other works. We will close the program at the end of the hour with two minutes ofTureck playing two variations from the Goldberg done for us years ago and played also at the White House on the 30Qth anniversary of Bach's birth.

Schuyler Chapin is a New Yorker, an honorary graduate of Millbrook School, whose extensive career in the world of music led to his appointment as general manager of Metropolitan Opera Company. After that he became the dean of the School of Arts at Columbia University. Now, indefatigably, he serves as commissioner of cultural affairs for.the Giuliani Administration here in New York City.

Let me begin by asking Dr. Tureck: Glenn Gould prophesied 20 years ago that in the future live music from the stage would end. Are there reasons for thinking this is true?

MS. TURECK: There could be one reason in that we are living more and more in an electronic age. But I do think that the human communication that occurs when you play live concerts is something that can never be fully replaced. And although with CD-ROM, which interests me very much--! think it is definitely a future way of listening to music and learning about music--! don't think that the human being, the direct experience of the human being communicating music is going to be lost.

MR. BUCKLEY: Well, of course, to argue that listening to it personally is preferable to listening to it on CD doesn't tell you that people are going to do the logical thing. By which I mean that I don't think Mr. Chapin is going to argue that you're better off listening to the music electronically than in person, but that doesn't belie the question that that is what more and more people are doing.

MS. TURECK: It's a different experience, and the whole experience of reception is different, and I think the whole function is different, because, for instance, with CD­ROM, you have the music score, you have some text about the music, you can follow each measure, you can jump from one place to another. You can study very carefully both with your ears and your brain, and with your eyes, the music text, the score, certain musicological ideas about it, as well as the actual sound of a particular performer. This is quite an experience, a total experience. In the concert hall I think also one has a tremendous total experience, but it's a different kind of experience and has a different function.

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MR. CHAPIN: If I may-

MR. BUCKLEY: Yes.

MR. CHAPIN: -add to that. I think Dr. Tureck essentially is correct, but I would put it a slightly different way. The fact is that when you are listening to a record, a CD or whatever, you are sort of sitting back and the music sort of comes to you. When you're at a live performance, you are moving forward to join with the performer. There is a human contact between the stage and the audience. And that quality will never disappear. There is nothing to substitute for live performance. All of the mechanical wonders and the extraordinary things that are done technically do serve, as Dr. Tureck has indicated, as all kinds of things-as a pleasure, as a learning process, as all of that. But nothing replaces the human contact, because you in the audience move to join with the performer on the stage, and that quality is what makes live performance unique-

MR. BUCKLEY: But, you know, that's-

MR. CHAPIN: --and it isn't going to go away.

MR. BUCKLEY: But that's a little like saying nothing replaces Plato more than reading Plato. Now I would agree. On the other hand, we are talking about the phenomenon of fewer and fewer people reading Plato. We're not talking about the phenomenon of a decreased share of music that is being sold going to classical music. It was 3.7 percent, as low as that in 1996; the next year down to 3.4 percent. So the graphs are all pretty discouraging, and that's what I wanted to draw your attention to.

MR. CHAPIN: Yes, the graphs could be discouraging if you just took them literally. But you have to remember that in the course of the last 20 years, because of technical explosions and technical perfections, the audience has expanded. If you are talking about 3.2 percent of an audience back in 1920, let's say, then you would really have a cause to worry. But you are talking about 3.2 percent of an audience in 1999, which has available to it the marvels of mechanics which have helped people to come to music in the first place. So I don't think the statistic can be looked at quite as formidably as you are suggesting.

MS. TURECK: May I interject something here?

MR. BUCKLEY: Yes, sure.

MS. TURECK: I think the statistic in itself is interesting, but it's a bald statistic and I would agree with Schuyler and what he is saying, because one must study all the relative inferences at the same time. When I was a child and radio was taking over the music world, I remember my teacher, Olga Samaroff, who was still then quite an active pianist, and all the active famous people in the performing world were frightened to death. They thought that their careers would be finished because radio was becoming popular and catching on, thousands and thousands all over the world were picking up radios and listening to performances on the radio. They thought never again would they have the great personal careers and the travel all through the world. Quite the contrary occurred, and I remember her telling me that. A complete reversal of what

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their fears had been and their careers flowered and many more people came to concerts as a result of having listened to them on the radio.

MR. CHAPIN: Yes, I think that's exactly-

MS. TURECK: And I think that's what's happening with recordings.

MR. CHAPIN: It's what's happening with recordings, and I think you have to look at it in that way, because what Dr. Tureck has spoken about is totally true. We had the radio, which became a great promoter of music. In fact, the radio originally was supposed to be a music box in the home.

MS. TURECK: Yes.

MR. CHAPIN: We keep forgetting about that historically. Then you had the motion pictures and you had sound movies, and of course sound movies were going to take people out of the theater.

MS. TURECK: Yes.

MR. CHAPIN: They weren't going to be coming back to the theater. In point of fact, the theater is more vigorous in America now than it's ever been. Ever. And music, I believe, is in exactly that same position. The diminution has to do with size of audience; the size of audience has grown in such a way that we're talking about something that from the standpoint of people is tremendously important. I don't buy the statistic.

MR. BUCKLEY: Well now, I have heard you complain that New York City schools simply stopped exposing students to music for 25 years.

MR. CHAPIN: Twenty-five years, and that is, of course, now, thank God, over because the arts--music, theater, dance, poetry, and painting and sculpture--are back in the schools, back in all of them by September of 1999. Arts curriculum is back. We had a generation in this city, two generations actually, without any arts education. And the audiences in theaters and in museums began to be noted for being grey-haired instead of youthful. And when you cut out the education system, you're cutting out the most important introduction of the arts to children.

MR. BUCKLEY: Well, speak to us of what damage was done. If we go 25 years without teaching the public school children and exposing them to music or arts, what becomes palpable after that?

MR. CHAPIN: What becomes palpable after that is the fact that-

MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. The fact that they're deaf? Two generations of people just don't show up for music or what?

MR. CHAPIN: No, the fact that people were not exposed during their schooling to the arts in any degree, except the handful of schools that invited arts organizations to come in and do things for them. You have now to replace a generation of teachers

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because you have not had teachers of arts in the schools. As we speak now there are over 750 teachers in preparation, 835 of the 1100 schools in this city are part of Project Arts and that translates to arts restorations throughout the system.

MR. BUCKLEY: And you're in charge of that, right?

MR. CHAPIN: No, I'm not in charge of it but I just had a wonderful role in helping it happen. It happened here because we have a mayor who fully understood the importance of arts education and a school's chancellor who felt that the arts were the answer to illiteracy. And when you have two political forces like that lined up positively in the direction of arts education, that's when things happen.

MR. BUCKLEY: Dr. Tureck, what are the scars visible from 25 years of nonexposure? If you have 25 years without any exposure to any moral maxims, you become scarred for lack of that particular knowledge.

MS. TURECK: You don't know that they exist. I agree with Schuyler in everything he has been saying. I think that this generation simply doesn't know this music. And the beautiful thing is that when children are exposed to great art, they do respond. One point, I think, has been-perhaps a few-but there's one of the points that's been omitted in our talks, and that is the programming in concerts and recitals that's been going on for the last 25 years in fact. And certainly among the professionals there is a good deal of concern about the situation of falling-off audiences at concerts, as you say the gray-haired generation at all the orchestra concerts and very few young people.

MR. CHAPIN: Except opera, that's one of the fascinations.

MS. TURECK: Except opera, yes, well I think that the younger people are rather discovering opera, too. But the programming had been increasingly on the spectacular, on what was considered the popular, and I do think that it's a complete misconception that if you play second-rate music you're going to get a bigger audience.

MR. CHAPIN: Oh, I agree with that.

MR. BUCKLEY: Manifestly you do.

MS. TURECK: I speak out of my own life experience because-

MR. CHAPIN: Manifestly you get a big audience.

MR. BUCKLEY: We're getting- We're clocking at 3.4% so the other guys are coming in at 96.6. [l.aughter]) Obviously, they're doing better than we are, aren't they?

MR. CHAPIN: Well, they're doing better than we are, but if you look at it that way, popular culture has always done better than what I guess you could call high culture. It has been a- But high culture is the leader. High culture-

MS. TURECK: Yes.

MR. CHAPIN: --is the leader. Popular culture takes off from that.

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MS. TURECK: Yes.

MR. BUCKLEY: In the Germany of the 18th century, the early 18th century, you would have had a far higher incidence of people, would you not, listening to-

MS. TURECK: Not really--

MR. BUCKLEY: --interesting music.

MS. TURECK: --not in terms of quantity, at all. It was an entirely different social setup. You had people listening in the court, but not outside in a secular way, in a popular way. This idea, whole idea of concerts--

MR. BUCKLEY: They didn't have the facilities.

MS. TURECK: The whole idea of concerts is quite a modern one. It started only in almost the mid-18th century. Bach, for instance, was one of the first managers of a series of concerts. But that was as late as the 1730's, the mid-1730's and it didn't begin to develop really until the second half of the 18th century and· with the 19th century then we had a great explosion of concerts in concert halls. But previous to that, it was a very exclusive thing. Making music was in the court, doing the operas was in the court-

MR. BUCKLEY: And in the church.

MS. TURECK: --and the sacred music, which was in the church. And this was art music. There was always popular music, which was called folk music.

MR. CHAPIN: Well, it was more than that, you know. I mean, Schubert, among other things, wrote a lot of wonderful music that was played in taverns and people enjoyed-

MS. TURECK: Yes, but by that time there was a mixture-

MR. CHAPIN: Yes.

MS. TURECK: --of this kind of thing, but that wasn't really until the late 18th, until the 19th century. But previous to that for several centuries, art music took two branches, the sacred and the secular. And this music was performed in what was considered its appropriate place. It was either the court or the church. But it spread then to the popular, more popular, certainly audiences in concert halls grew larger and larger and larger. So that in our mid-20th century, you know, we are accustomed to playing to 2,000 and 3,000 people, whereas that was unheard of in the 19th century.

MR. BUCKLEY: Well, from this, do we have any generalities about the tendency of the human ear to welcome what Weeks called "roughly classical music" as distinguished from the other kind of music.

MR. CHAPIN: I like the phrase, "the other kind of music." [laughter]

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MR. BUCKLEY: The other kind of music. It's probably safer. Do we have the accumulated cultural experience to know that the percentage of people who will be attracted to the music of J.S. Bach, or for that matter, Wagner, is going to be a tiny percentage of every 100 people who are exposed to it?

MS. TURECK: It's always a small percentage.

MR. BUCKLEY: Why?

MR. CHAPIN: Yes, I think-

MS. TURECK: It has always been a small percentage.

MR. BUCKLEY: Why?

MS. TURECK: Well, for instance when you go back in history, it was a small percentage of people who listened in the court and in the church, whether it was imposed upon them or not.

MR. BUCKLEY: Those two percent who were invited to court. [laughter]

MS. TURECK: Quite right. Quite right.

MR. BUCKLEY: Do we know that all the people who were invited to court listened?

MS. TURECK: Oh, yes indeed. We are quite sure that there was lots of conversation going on during the performances.

MR. CHAPIN: And sleeping.

MS. TURECK: In fact, there is a wonderful story about Liszt, who was playing for the czar of Russia. And the czar carried on his conversation while Liszt was performing, and Liszt stopped playing, looked at the czar and said, "If you please." And the czar stopped talking. [l.aughter] So these things did go on for quite a long time. But you speak about the reception of the ear of classical music. I think we should define classical music a little bit, what we are really referring to when we say that. In our time the general reference when one uses that term is to 18th and 19th century music. Perhaps the less revolutionary composers of the 20th century like Prokofiev and Scriabin, early Stravinski and Rachmaninov and those.

MR. BUCKLEY: Strauss.

MS. TURECK: Yes, exactly. But that is now a very limited period. It's only a matter of about 150 years. There was an enormous peak and flowering of magnificent products. But in the 20th century we have moved out of that world altogether, and therefore most people are still trained in the major and minor scales which produced this period of about 250 years of music. But now no composer writes in major and minor scales unless they are nostalgic and want to go back. And therefore most people don't go to listen to the more recent developments in contemporary music.

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MR. CHAPIN: No, but a lot of contemporary- composers now have gone back to realizing that the experiments of the 12-tone scale and all of that, which really have produced nothing that people remember, is perhaps not necessarily a way of assuring their immortality. The other thing-

MS. TURECK: I would differ with you on that.

MR. CHAPIN: Well, okay. But I am fascinated by the fact that the Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, announced publicly that starting next season, all their concerts would be only 20th century music. And in doing that there was a hue and cry until people began to think of what that meant. Now Dr. Tureck has just reeled off a number of important composers of the 20th century and there are many more. The fact is that a major orchestra, having decided that they will take the 20th century for a season, the initial reaction of people is, Oh my God, I am not going to like that music. The fact is, of course, that a lot of it they don't even know was written in the 20th century. And therefore it's going to be interesting to see what kind of audience reaction there is.

MR. BUCKLEY: That's [unintelligible] but I kind of like it.

MR. CHAPIN: I like it too.

MR. BUCKLEY: But assume in a laboratory test you've got 100 12 year olds and you put them in a room and you turn off the lights. And for two hours a week you play the great works of the 19th century. Okay, three months go by and you set out to find out what percentage of those 100 students now enjoy it. Take the same 100 people and read to them only the sonnets of Shakespeare for three or four years. You may have to make them a little older. How many of them gravitate to the music of that sort of high literature? Are you optimistic compositely in your answer to that question or do you think there is too much variation in different cultures.

MS. TURECK: I think the same percentage, the same sort of percentage, obtains really in every culture. It has been the minority who live with Shakespeare throughout their lives, who live with Johann Sebastian Bach or the late works of Beethoven. It still is the minority. This is no complaint. It just seems to be a fact through history. And I have found, when you speak about taking the young people and exposing them to Shakespeare and the music of the 19th century, I am thinking of taking these same people and exposing them to the contemporary- mode of composition, which is a very different thing, not only in the scales, but in the whole concept of form and in structure. And I have found in my own experience, quite a long time ago--although I do some teaching, not a great deal, although I love it--1 was working with a little child, a little boy who was about six or seven years old. And you know, Stravinski has written some tiny pieces for young people. And I gave him some of those; he adored them. I find that children go immediately to what the generations who think only in terms or mostly in terms of 19th century or that style of music whether it was created in the 20th century or not. Young people accept these new idioms without any question. They absorb them, they enjoy them, they relate to them. So I don't think we can set down rules as to how many would react and respond and keep them as part of their life.

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MR. BUCKLEY: So the challenge is to find more little boys like hers, right? [laughter} And put them in the New York schools.

MS. TURECK: I think there are a few little girls also.

MR. CHAPIN: Yes. Yes. I think so too.

MR. BUCKLEY: But you 're optimistic then about the impact of the restoration of the arts-

MR. CHAPIN: I am.

MR. BUCKLEY: --in New York.

MR. CHAPIN: I am absolutely. I think it is one of the most important things that could have happened to this city. New York, which was the pits in terms of arts education, in the last two-and-a-half years has become the national urban leader. And the effect that this is having on the schools in which Project Arts takes place, and the Annenberg grant, which is a wonderful grant that gives schools the rights to make their own arrangements with individual artistic organizations to supplement the curriculum so that it is possible for both the artistic riches of this city, plus the new curriculum in the schools to really put the arts into the proper perspective in education. Nobody said it better than Rudolph Giuliani when he made the announcement about this-that they are as important as the sciences and as important as the other humanities.

MR. BUCKLEY: And you expect to be able to document that, say, 10 years from now.

MR. CHAPIN: Absolutely. Absolutely. If we're wrong then we really have a problem in education. But I do not think we are wrong.

MS. TURECK: If you are wrong, we really have a problem with humanity. {laughter}

MR. CHAPIN: Yes, well I'll stretch into that. I won't argue. I wouldn't disagree with that. That's true. That's absolutely true.

MR. BUCKLEY: You do believe that it's necessary to be a little bit authoritarian on exposing children of that age to music.

MR. CHAPIN: Oh, yes.

MR. BUCKLEY: You have to say, Okay, now stop talking and listen.

MR. CHAPIN: Yes. I mean, I think you have to realize that the younger the child is, the more the magic happens. Because young children discover music or painting on their own. Nobody really tells them anything. They hear a sound or they splatter paint on a piece of paper. Suddenly the mind begins to become an individual. The most important part about the arts for long-range education is that it opens children's minds.

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MR. BUCKLEY: Now we get a taste of what children can be exposed to, because you will have two minutes of Dr. Tureck playing on a previous program two variations from the Goldberg, which, as I say, she also played at the White House. So get braced for a great two-minute treat.

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