What It Means To Be a Teenager Who Loves Classical Music

As young musicians, most of us have already aged. One violinist I know, who is 16, wears a top hat and breeches to each orchestra rehearsal. Another girl is never seen without her small heels. Nails are short and clean, and all the young women tie their hair back before picking up their instruments.

As children, we practiced every day, whether it was beautiful outside or not. In middle school, we went to school dances and played on sports teams, but we also learned how to use vibrato and memorized our scales. By high school we were enmeshed in youth orchestras and master classes, and we began to do competitions each spring—not to win, but because we craved every performance. By the time junior year arrived, we had created double lives, balancing our school life, the domain of prom and homework and sports—and our music life, the domain of Rite of Spring and sight-singing and unparalleled bliss.

Every spy has a hard time keeping up a double life, especially when both sides are so polarizing. As a teenager—and, in fact, in American culture generally—one must either eschew classical music entirely, or eschew everything but. Sometimes, I want to listen to classical radio in the car with my school friends, but they’re unable to sit through a single sonata. “Oh God, Fiona, I know you like it, but spare us.” Meanwhile, with my classical-playing friends, it’s the opposite; any mention of a group outside the genre is a no-no. It’s all-or-nothing. Bring up James Blake in conversation, blank stares arise.  The Black Keys? Nothing. Justin Bieber? Laughs, after a pause to remember who I’m talking about.

As a fierce advocate of both sides of the spectrum, I am disturbed. I’m 17 years old, and I have hundreds of friends from orchestra, quintets, summer festivals, competitions, et cetera, who are thoroughly and completely invested in classical music. I also have hundreds of friends who could care less. Whether these friends will go on to Juilliard or Morris, music or sales, is irrelevant. What matters is the joy that our respective musical upbringings—whether raised on Joni Mitchell or Wagner—have given us, the way music has shaped us and allowed us to speak.

What disturbs me is to hear people asking, as Jay Gabler recently did, who gives a shit about classical music. I give a shit. My quintet gives a shit. My teacher gives a shit. We give as much of a shit as you give about the music that changed your life. But because of the deep divide between the communities, classical and everything else, so to speak, I cannot blame Mr. Gabler for asking the question.

Remember when you started to love the Beatles? Was it when you heard “Blackbird,” or perhaps “Here Comes the Sun?” You didn’t try to, you didn’t need to, per se, but this love just happened, it just appeared. Passion is not snobbish—this passion arises. That is the essential truth, and that is what we forget, when we spend all our time denouncing each other’s tastes as simpleminded (as classical listeners might say about pop) or pretentious and boring, mere “sawing away” at old compositions (as Jay Gabler said about classical).

This passion arises, as it did when you heard that Beatles song. It arose in a young plastics factory worker 38 years ago, when he heard a violin concerto for the first time (my father). It arose in a poor first-grader six months ago, when she learned “I’ll Tell Me Ma,” at school (my student). It arose in a shy and anxious girl almost 11 years ago, when she heard a silvery flute played like water (me). We are not born loving classical music, but anyone can love classical music. That is the essential truth.

I have no idea how to save the Minnesota Orchestra—like I said, I’m 17. But it scares me that kids after me, kids like me, won’t get to experience what I’ve experienced. They won’t have Manny Laureano, principal trumpeter, conducting them in a youth symphony. They won’t have Wendy Williams, second flutist, teaching them every week. They won’t have Friday nights with Debussy and Mozart.

These people, this music, will be in other cities, but not this one. The community of classical-lovers, people like me and my friends, will get smaller and further removed from the rest of the population, who, as a result, will never get the chance for passion to arise. They’ll never hear the concerto that could change their life, or see the silvery flute, or learn the choir song.  They’ll see an ever-diminishing group of aficionados, far away from them, and never know if classical could give them joy. That, to me, is a tragedy, and that’s why some of us give a shit about classical music, and that’s why everyone should give a shit. Because passion arises, and it could be yours.

- Fiona Kelliher

Does It Matter That No One Gives a Shit About Classical Music Any More?

Minneapolis likes to compare itself defensively to New York, which makes it all the more poignant that James Oestreich of the New York Times has just published a pained essay calling Minneapolis a “great cultural mecca” and lamenting the fact that one of our indisputably world-class cultural resources—the Minnesota Orchestra—has just lost its entire 2012-13 season to an “agonizing and seemingly inexplicable” labor dispute.

“Inexplicable” might be a little strong—the basic explanation seems to be the possibly insurmountable challenge of funding a world-class orchestra in a city that can’t match the audience size and philanthropic resources of a global metropolis, which is a challenge being faced by cities of comparable size around the world. If the Minnesota Orchestra goes completely out of business, it won’t be the first and it certainly won’t be the last.

But why, after decades of happily sawing away at Beethoven and Sibelius, are orchestras in crisis now? That question gets to the “agonizing” part of Oestreich’s comment.

The floundering of the Minnesota Orchestra is agonizing for Oestreich and other classical music lovers like The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, who wrote that in on one night in 2010, that “the Minnesota Orchestra sounded, to my ears, like the greatest orchestra in the world.” It’s even more agonizing for the orchestra’s musicians and management, and it’s surely agonizing for some other people in Minnesota. But who? Truth be told, I don’t know any of them.

That may peg me as a rube, but if I’m a rube, the world’s orchestras are going to have tough luck paying their expenses with the contributions of non-rubes. I’m a 37-year-old arts journalist with a Ph.D., living less than two miles from Orchestra Hall. I attend multiple ticketed arts events every week, and I do not know a single Minnesota Orchestra season ticket holder. In fact, I couldn’t even name one single person in my acquaintance whom I know to have purchased a ticket—even a rush ticket, much less a full-price ticket—to a Minnesota Orchestra performance in recent memory. That fact is evidence of what a wide swath of the population—especially the younger end of the population—has largely become indifferent to traditional, professional performances of classical music.

To be fair, classical music has never in recent history paid for itself; American ensembles have always been heavily subsidized by corporations, foundations, wealthy donors, and occasional government support. Even so, the evidence is clear: each succeeding generation over the past century has been less likely than the previous generation to attend classical music performances. That not only means a declining number of ticket-buyers, it means a declining proportion of the wealthy who feel deeply invested in classical music and a declining incentive on the part of corporations and foundations to fund classical music.

In 2010 I wrote a post called “Why we shouldn’t do a damn thing about the decline of classical music,” provoking various outraged responses. I wouldn’t be surprised to get some testy comments on this post, but from who? Who would miss the Minnesota Orchestra, and where are they on the Internet? They’ve been keeping pretty quiet over the past year. I’ve seen indignant posts defending the musicians on labor-rights and artistic grounds, but the New York Times post is a more impassioned cry for the defense of Minneapolis’s artistic excellence than anything I’ve seen coming from Minneapolis itself. There seems to be very little popular perception that the artistic excellence of Minneapolis specifically or Minnesota generally is closely tied to the rise and fall of the Minnesota Orchestra.

It’s not that classical music doesn’t matter any more—it’s not even that it doesn’t matter to young people. School orchestras (where they haven’t been ravaged by budget cuts and No Child Left Behind) continue to engage students of all ages. Community choirs are booming. Put a piano out at a party, and just wait to see how long it takes someone to sit down and start plinking out an étude. (Answer: not long.) We—and by we I mean Americans generally, but especially pre-AARP Americans—simply no longer believe it’s necessary for a respectable city to have a respectable professional orchestra.

In my 2010 post, I wrote that it’s not necessary to take extraordinary efforts to preserve classical music, because “great art takes care of itself.” That provoked a few grumbling responses along the lines of “tell that to the Buddhas of Bamiyan,” but music isn’t a delicate sculpture, it’s a living art, and all life must evolve in response to a changing environment.

If “classical music” must be defined as “dozens of highly-trained and highly-paid professionals sitting in tuxedos in a silent concert hall playing music composed 200 years ago,” then sayonara, Schubert. A few Minnesotans will miss you on the stage of Orchestra Hall, but I’ll look forward to seeing how your music continues to inspire and inform through recordings (the horror!), performances by visiting ensembles (what, imported?!), performances by amateur musicians (how gauche!), and in other ways that—unlike, say, a night at the symphony—are wonderfully impossible to predict.

- Jay Gabler

(Source: thetangential.com)

The Tangential presents: FUTURE CITIES Release Party and Twin Cities Tumblr Meetup

We’re excited to announce that our Future Cities book release party will be sponsored by Tumblr. Where would we be without Tumblr? That’s too scary to think about. It’ll also be sponsored by our publisher, Hillcrest Media.

Please join us at the Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis on February 27th for a book release party and Tumblr meetup. For just $10 you’ll get entry, a copy of the book, and a free drink ticket while supplies last.

Other fun deets:

Musical Guests:
- The Golden Bubbles (featuring Tangential editor Chris Vondracek)
- Koo Koo Kanga Roo
- DJ @jimfrick of Wak Lyf (Curator of technodrome.tumblr.com)

Here’s what’s going to go down:
7:30 p.m. - Doors open
8:30 p.m. - A reading by the contributors
9:00 p.m. - The music begins

Please bring your party shoes. We can’t wait to see you.

Future Cities contributors, in order of appearance in the book:

Jason Zabel—a Tangential editor, formerly editor of the late great Twin Cities A.V. Club.

Katie Sisneros—a Tangential founding editor and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Minnesota.

John Jodzio—author of Get In If You Want to Live (Paper Darts, 2011) and other story collections.

Becky Lang—creator of The Tangential and a creative at Zeus Jones.

Jay Gabler—a Tangential founding editor and the editor of Unreality House.

Sarah Heuer—a Tangential editor and a cowriter of PhiLOLZophy.

Crispin Best—editor of For Every Year, guy who recently ran through a parking area yelling, “I’m going through a lot right now!”

Heidi Schatz—a Tangential editor.

Kat George—managing editor of Portable.tv and contributor to Vice, formerly an editor at Thought Catalog.

Kelsey McDonough—a Tangential staff writer.

Christopher Vondracek—a Tangential staff writer.

Chrissy Stockton—a Tangential staff writer and a cowriter of PhiLOLZophy.

Book cover and flyer design by Caroline Royce

Not near Minneapolis? Order your copy of Future Cities here—just $7.99 for a hard copy or $3.99 for an e-book!

Is the Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs” the Best Album of All Time?

The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs is a long album, a three-disc set. On first listening, some of the songs grab you immediately, some float pleasantly by, and some annoy you. Try to excerpt the album, though—make a playlist or mix CD of just your favorite tracks—and you’ll find editing kills it. The songs you love just aren’t as good without the songs that annoy you, and the more you listen to the album, the more you’ll find yourself coming to love the songs you used to hate, and finding depths of emotion in the songs that used to bore you. It’s an album that you love like a person: as a whole, the sweet along with the sour, the imperfection along with the perfection.

The set’s stature has steadily risen since its 1999 release, and while it will never be Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper or Nevermind—it doesn’t aspire to the historical significance of those albums—I think it will eventually become a mainstay of even the shortest all-time best album lists. It’s certainly my personal favorite album of all time, and I know that doesn’t make me at all unique.

Tonight at First Avenue in Minneapolis, dozens of artists are going to perform 69 Love Songs in its entirety; a complete cover version of the album, with 69 Minnesota artists covering the songs, can be downloaded for free at 69ls.mn. There have been cover projects in many media around the world, because Stephin Merritt’s songs are ripe for reinterpretation. It’s not that the originals are lacking, it’s that Merritt writes and records in a manner that never feels definitive. I don’t expect it’s meant to.

The Magnetic Fields include both male and female vocalists, and both on record and in concert they trade the songs among themselves, never switching the pronouns’ genders. Merritt is gay, but the point of this approach isn’t just to “queer” his band’s music, it’s to render it universal. Whether Merritt’s writing about love, lust, or loss, his approach argues that ultimately it doesn’t matter what parts are getting stuck where; what matters is whose heart is getting stuck to—and unstuck from—whose.

Further, Merritt and the other Magnetic Fields vocalists sing in a distinctly affectless manner. They hit their notes precisely and without flourish, giving their performances a sense of innocence that helps to leaven Merritt’s lyrics, which are almost too witty for their own good. (“It’s making me blue/ Pantone 292.”) One of the great pleasures of the Minnesota cover set is hearing all those different artists play with phrasing in a way the Magnetic Fields don’t; it doesn’t feel like a violation, because who’s to say what’s the right way to sing about love?

The epic scope of 69 Love Songs doesn’t just leave room for an unusually large number of great songs, it’s central to the album’s greatness. 69 songs is enough to examine love in a vast number of permutations, and by the end you’re left both exhausted and exhilarated. Why are so many songs about love? 69 Love Songs answers that question: because it’s the one subject that’s inexhaustible, and essential. The joke of the title makes plain that Merritt doesn’t intend to take himself too seriously, though of course he also does take himself very seriously. If that sounds like a irreconcilable contradiction, you’ve never been in love.

- Jay Gabler

(Source: thetangential.com)

My $800 Checkup and the Myth of America’s Health Care “Open Market”

Even after Obamacare—the core provisions of which are possibly about to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court—the U.S. health care system is based on the premise that open-market competition is the best way to deliver health care. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that this is both theoretically absurd (one doesn’t buy health care at one’s leisure, like choosing a toaster) and factually inaccurate (the U.S. system is only very partially an open market, but because we’re pretending it is, the non-market components of the system are haphazard and inefficient). I’m not out to draft a complete thesis on the failures of the American health care system, just to illustrate them with my own recent experience.

I’m 36 years old, and in good health. For now, at least, I have the luxury of rarely requiring health care—which is a good thing, since my job does not provide it for me. I went completely without health insurance for my first couple of years in this job, because I could get away with it: I knew that if something dire happened to me, Hennepin County Medical Center would take me in and stick the taxpayers with my expenses. (This being the free market and all.) But eventually I decided to do the prudent thing and buy health insurance—thinking that, well, if my appendix suddenly ruptures, it would be convenient not to have to declare bankruptcy.

So where do you go to buy health insurance? They don’t sell it at Target (I don’t think). I asked around, and was pointed to Assurant. After asking me a long series of questions about my physical fitness—this was circa 2009 in Minnesota, when it would still have been perfectly legal to leave me in the lurch if I had any potentially expensive condition—Assurant agreed to hook me up with coverage. For $88.97 a month, I’d have a $5,000 deductible.

I did the math, and that actually seemed fair. If I stay basically healthy and then, like most Americans, die around age 70 in a fantastically expensive manner, Assurant will probably about break even. I have to say that it’s been a little troubling that my premium has since risen at a rate that, if it continues, will make my monthly premium over $4,000 a month by the time I’m 55—but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I did contact Assurant last year to inquire about raising my premium to reduce my deductible, and was told that so few people requested those plans, they’d been discontinued.

Well, there’s the free market for you: unless I find a job that provides health care, I have little choice but to pay out of pocket for anything short of a major medical procedure. Obviously this reduces my incentive to go in for check-ups or preventative care, but what the hell. Who has time for that stuff anyway? I figured I’d deal with any troubling health incidents if and when they occurred.

When turned out to be last fall. I woke up one night with a pounding heart and a strangely tight chest, which seemed very strange since I knew I was in good shape and don’t have a family history of early heart disease. Still, enough of the Google results told me that I was in mortal danger that I went in to the doctor. By “the doctor,” I mean my childhood doctor—or at least to the clinic I’d used as a child, which turned out to still have the records of all the physicals and vaccinations I’d enjoyed back when I was on my parents’ health insurance.

Where else was I supposed to go? I needed an appointment on the quick, and not only was it impractical to compare and contrast prices and services, it might have been impossible. Here’s the conversation I had with the scheduling nurse when making my appointment:

“How much will this cost?”

“You have insurance, right? It will go on your insurance.”

“Yes, but I have a high deductible, so I’m expecting to essentially be paying cash for this.”

“Your insurance will bill you.”

“Right, but how much will they bill me? How much does a physical cost?”

“Oh, God, I have no idea. You’re paying for the whole thing? I mean, maybe several hundred dollars? I really don’t know.”

Okay then. Well, I had to get checked out, so I went in. The doctor sent me for an EKG, gave me a clean bill of health, and told me to drink less coffee and alcohol. At no point was I told how much anything would cost, or asked whether I wanted to pay. They just did what they did, and I went along via not wanting to die or whatever. I actually went in once more, to urgent care, about a month later after being freaked out by some tingling in my fingers. The bottom line basically seemed to be that it was the effects of anxiety—which I do have a family history of—probably coupled with some overdoing it in the booze ‘n’ caffeine departments. Good to know: I’m not dying, and I’ve been fine ever since. Now, back to our story.

It was December, I’d been to the doctor twice in the last month, and I hadn’t been billed one single penny. They just knew where I lived—and who my health insurance provider was. How much health care had I just purchased? I had absolutely zero idea other than the very rough estimate the nurse had given me on the phone. I tucked a thousand dollars away in savings—fortunately, I was in a position to do so—and braced myself for the bills to come.

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Remembering Sara

We’ll never know exactly what happened on that road in Mexico in 2009, beyond the fact that there was a sudden stop, a swerve, an oncoming truck, and a collision that took the life of my cousin Sara Vargas. She was a couple of years older than me, but the fact that I’ve now lived longer than Sara did has given me a new perspective on just how much life she lived in her 35 years.

I’ve written little that’s directly about Sara, but I dedicated a book to her—Insiders’ Guide to the Twin Cities (2010). It seemed only appropriate that those 300 pages about activities and events in Minneapolis and St. Paul should be dedicated to Sara, since as long as I can remember, she exemplified the possibilities in life: how much you could do, and how much fun you could have doing it.

My siblings and I grew up idolizing Sara: she always seemed to have the best ideas, the coolest clothes, the most interesting friends, and the funniest jokes and observations. What particularly endeared Sara to us was that she wasn’t one of those snobby cool cousins (we didn’t have any of those, but you know the type) who tell you what’s wrong with you—she was always friendly and inviting to us, and made us feel like we were cool too.

As I grew up, my indie-minded cousin introduced me to the intoxicating (not literally—other cousins would have happily done that if I’d thought to ask) world of alt culture. In the 80s Sara made me tapes of albums by college rock bands like R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Trip Shakespeare, Fifty Four Forty, and Scruffy the Cat. In the 90s she took me to my first concert: an all-ages show at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis with Zuzu’s Petals opening for Run Westy Run. I shook the hand of Zuzu’s Petals frontgirl Laurie Lindeen—who would later marry Paul Westerberg of the Replacements—crossed over to a dance night in the Mainroom, saw Siouxsie and the Banshees projected on a giant screen, found $10 on the stairs, and felt like my life had officially begun.

After college Sara moved to Uptown—a Minneapolis neighborhood that was then unquestionably the coolest, and where I now live and continue to define as the coolest in part because Sara lived here—and participated in various artistic and musical projects that culminated in a highly conceptual buzzband called Walker Kong and the Dangermakers. Frontman Jeremy Ackerman and his girlfriend Alex were skilled musicians, but the other three Dangermakers—Sara included—were half-winging it, dressed in a changing wardrobe of outrageous coordinated costumes (cavewomen, etc). In 1999, when my sister Julia graduated from high school, Walker Kong played a set in our living room for what will possibly stand as the world’s most epic graduation party until Blue Ivy Carter gets her diploma.

I moved to Boston for college and graduate school, and for several years I saw Sara only infrequently. We were able to become close again in fall 2008, after I’d moved back to Minnesota and just before Sara moved to Mexico to work at a resort. Sara and I were both in tumultuous relationships, and she became a source of comfort, companionship, and perspective as I tried to figure out what the hell was going on with my life. One night we went to a show at the Entry—the same place she’d taken me for my first show—and when it turned out that we’d arrived way too early for the band we wanted to see, we headed out for a downtown adventure that involved Sara buying my first-ever lapdance and one of her friends giving me what may or may not have been my first-ever experience with hallucinogens. (I wasn’t quite sure—I leaned over to Sara and whispered, “What was in that Starburst?” She paused and replied, “Corn syrup?”)

The band who are now simply called Walker Kong are still together, and playing a show in Minneapolis tomorrow night to release their new album, which concludes with a song called “There’s a Light,” written in tribute to Sara. I haven’t followed in Sara’s footsteps by starting any bands, but my friends and I did start this blog—which turns out to be very much in Sara’s spirit. In an interview about the new album, her bandmate Jeremy says:

It was Sara’s early philosophy that has defined the band over all these years. She once said that the band had to enjoy all other aspects of life together and if that happened the music would have a real purpose. I’m paraphrasing…I think her actual statement was more along the lines of “As a band we should eat lots of cookie dough and watch movies together.” We’ve always been a band of friends over a band of musicians and I think that’s why Walker Kong has endured for all of these years.

Make stuff with your friends. Don’t be boring. Don’t suck. There’s no dedication page on a blog, but there’s no need: you can see Sara’s influence all over my life, and the lives of everyone else in our family, and the lives of her many friends. In her last Facebook status, Sara asked, “How much beautifulness can two eyes absorb?” I don’t know, but I’m going to keep looking, and making, and remembering. Life’s not the same without Sara—but much more importantly, life’s not the same because of her.

- Jay Gabler

(Source: thetangential.com)