Endangering Classical Music by Dumbing It Down

    Nearly three years ago, I posted an entry on classical music as an endangered ecosystem. I’ve also posted, in years past, on how public radio’s commitment to classical music has declined in our new—not really so new anymore—century, viewing this as a symptom of endangerment. There have been others, none greater than the decline in funding for classical music teaching in the schools, at all levels: K-12 predominantly, but also at the college and university level. But that is a topic for a different post.
    As 2016 comes to an end, I want to return to one of my old topics in this subject, classical music on public radio—specifically, public radio in the state of Maine. Two momentous changes occurred this year. One is that the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) changed its name to Maine Public (MP). That’s it—Maine Public. The new name could mean anything—a water or gas or electric public utility, for example, or perhaps the state’s public library system, or the state public relations council, or the public health commission, or any of several other public entities. To the network, it’s a bit of a brag: we are the public, the name seems to be saying, no need for further identification. To any public employee in the state, the name could be confusing, even off-putting. Two was the creation of a second radio channel, Maine Public Classical. Whereas it had been possible to stream classical music 24/7 from the MPBN website, the new channel also broadcasts over the air, both on the FM band and on HD radio. This certainly increases the availability of classical music on the radio in the state, and suggests that it may not be so endangered after all.
    In fact, Maine has more classical radio stations than this. Some of the college and university radio stations play a bit of it, but there is another full-time station, WBACH, which can be heard from two stations in the state, one in the largest city, Portland, and the other in mid-coastal Maine. They stream the “world classical network,” from Cape Classical 107.5. It’s not exclusively Bach, although his music is well represented, and most of what’s heard is from the 18th and 19th centuries. Maine Public Classical’s station, which can be heard over the air in most but not all sections of the state, now programs the few shows that were left after years of classical music’s gradual shrinkage, the morning classical program from 9 to noon, the 8 pm hour’s symphony broadcasts from New York, Boston, Chicago, etc. and one weekly broadcast from a chamber music concert in the state of Maine, and Saturday afternoon opera. The Maine Public station, the same over-the-air station that reaches the whole state and has done so for decades, is now mostly talk, plus a couple of hours of music in the evenings and a little more on weekends that is difficult to categorize—more on that in another post, perhaps—but at any rate it’s meant to appeal to an under-40 audience. The same repertoire of talk shows one hears on most public radio stations today can be heard here in Maine, most of the time—BBC news all night, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, news talk shows like those hosted by Diane Rehm, and Tom Ashbrook; politics and the arts shows like those hosted by Terri Gross; and so on, along with a re-configuration and reduction in local news reporting.
    One would think that with WBACH and Maine Public Classical, the audience for Western art music was being better served than before. Certainly more classical music is more easily available over the air now than it was three, six, ten years ago. But what classical music is it? Is it the same classical music that was available in earlier years? No. There’s a much higher proportion of pop classics, and easy pieces—almost nothing that is atonal, for example. There’s a much higher percentage of short pieces. Strings predominate. Vocal music is in short supply. On “Classical 24,” the out-sourced service that Maine Public Classical uses for several hours a day, most pieces played are 20 minutes or less in length. If a piece is longer, then one movement from it is played, without apology. Composers, beware: if your compositions are longer than 20 minutes, they won’t be played in their entirety. Maine Public Classical does broadcast one other syndicated show, Performance Today, that is more varied than the others, in the sense that the host offers biographical tidbits about the composers, interviews performers, even offers listeners a little quiz--all in the name of educating the public and making classical music more attractive. A wider variety of pieces, and much more modern music, is played on Performance Today; yet most of them are, still, short.
    It was the polymath musicologist Charles Seeger who made fun of one of the synonyms for classical music—“serious music”—calling the name preposterous, as if no other music could stake the same claim. Had Seeger lived to hear the dumbing down of classical music on radio, he wouldn’t have needed to comment. Altogether, this dumbing down of classical music endangers it as much as, if not more than, its absence on radio.

Sustainability, the sound commons, and Garrett Hardin's tragedy

    I've written earlier about the soundscape as a commons, i.e. as a resource available to all creatures. Recall that according to the acoustic niche hypothesis, each animal species that communicates by sound does so within a niche in the soundscape, the result of evolutionary adaptation. The niche is marked by timbre, frequency, volume, repetition, time of day or night, etc. with the goal that individuals' signals be received by other species members unambiguously. Of course, they are also overheard by predators, to whom animals may give false signals. Obviously, this works best in a relatively stable ecosystem. Introduce disturbances, such as drastic changes in habitat, or frequent noise interference, and sound communication becomes difficult. Natural disturbances such as fire, human-made disturbances such as agricultural development in forested areas, or climate change, or noise pollution due to ocean vessels, wreak havoc with the soundscape and the acoustic niches available. Communication suffers and species health inevitably declines, due of course not only to the degradation in soundscape but to the ecosystem generally.
    For a century anthropological linguists have written about endangered languages, and comparative musicologists and ethnomuiscologists about endangered musics. As traditional cultures have become displaced or even in some cases gone extinct, or as they modernize and discard their older layers of music, various musical resources, such as instruments, genres, and the knowledge associated with them also have disappeared. This endangerment discourse moved from preservation to conservation to safeguarding to sustainability, gradually acknowledging the dynamism in living traditions. What's been missing is a framework for sustainability. I don't mean a particular type of sustainability, such as economic, environmental, musical, cultural, etc. What I'm getting at is a framework within which to view sustainability. It's not an adjective that modifies sustainability at issue here; it is the larger context within which sustainability rests. And that context, I believe, is commons, broadly understood as a resource commons where resources are not only material but also intellectual, ethical, and cultural, extending culture from humans to the higher vertebrates as well. Sustainability occurs, in other words, where the overriding principles are interconnectedness and mutuality, whether we are talking about an information commons, a fishery, a music culture, or chemical processes such as photosynthesis within an ecosystem. Commons defeats entropy.
    In thinking about commons once more, I returned to Garrett Hardin's seminal essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons" and discovered that I had not really remembered it carefully.[1] This influential essay, now 45 years old, is usually understood to argue against commons; but upon examination it turns out that is not what Hardin had in mind. His article opposed an unregulated commons, not commons per se. The unregulated commons is unsustainable; no "technical solution" (Hardin meant technology) can save it. But a managed commons is sustainable. What is his reasoning?
    In terms which were prescient, Hardin begins by stating that certain problems, such as continuous world population growth, do not admit of technological solutions. The planet's resources are finite, which means despite technological means of extracting more and more of them, population growth cannot in the long run be infinite. This contention prepares his discussion of commons, but readers usually ignore it (or forget it, as I did) and pass directly to his claim that individuals sharing a commons and always acting only in what they see as their personal best interest ultimately must exhaust its resources. And that is all most people take away from this influential essay. In the enormous literature produced in response to it, readers tend to forget that Hardin continues his commons argument in order to discredit the "invisible hand" doctrine of Adam Smith and other laissez-faire (today we would say neoliberal) capitalists. In other words, the tragedy of the commons gives the lie to Smith's claim that if everyone works in their personal best interest an invisible hand will see to it that the public will benefit as well. On the contrary, the public suffers; and ultimately the individuals who may profit at first also suffer as resources become exhausted even for them. For that reason, Hardin concludes, a regulated commons is best. 
    Hardin insisted that relying on individual restraint brought on by knowledge of the common good would not always suffice. His overriding concern was with population growth; wishing to limit this so as not to bring about a Malthusian conclusion, he acknowledged that individuals could scarcely be depended on to limit their number of offspring voluntarily. Regulation by law was the only answer. In China, of course, this is precisely what occurred; but in the West, it has been unthinkable to do anything but depend on individuals' sense of ethical responsibility. Take the discussion away from population growth, or "breeding" in Hardin's unfortunate phrase, and put it into carbon emissions and their effect on climate change, and we have the same argument that is being made today for carbon offsets, carbon taxes, and the like, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide humans are putting into the atmosphere. We may also see the wisdom in Hardin's choice of the word "tragedy," even though we are loath to accept its implications. Hardin's essay, rightly read, helps us frame the sustainability discourse for music and culture as well as for population and energy.

[1] Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science, New Series, Vol. 162, No. 3859 (Dec. 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.