Who cares about the Etler? Is there money in brass art music?

In March of 2005, I checked out some grad schools. Since I was (for a terrible 6-month period) carless, I visited the University of Iowa and some schools in the NYC area in an absurd whirlwind of red-eye flights and, yes, Greyhound bus. Appleton , WIàMinneapolisàDes Moines, IAàIowa City (via Greyhound bus) àDes Moines (with seven hours overnight in the airport in lieu of a hotel) àMinneapolisàNewark (via turbulence, and—once on the ground—flak jacket) àLaguardiaàDetroitàAppleton.

An awful trip, and my auditions were, well… Let’s just say the highlight of my trip was the sightseeing. I had only been to New York once, a few months earlier, and—sleep deprived or not—I was going to experience Capital-C-Culture. On the flight into Newark, I bought a New York Times and a New Yorker magazine, scouring the arts section for monumentous events. The Meridian Arts Ensemble! One of my friends spoke the praises, endlessly, of Brian McWhorter and the MAE, so I resolved to check it out—it was one of only a large handful of classical music events going on that night, New York or not. In New York, I was staying with a couple of wonderfully fun, talented brass freelancers I knew from growing up in the Chicagoland area. They called me Friday night after my audition, asking me if I wanted to see a brass group with them. I told them I was already going—wow, it was going to be packed. Word-of-mouth was happening!

The show didn’t disappoint, not one bit. Their performances and style are almost always edge-of-your-seat and in-your-face in the wittiest way, and the repertoire was close enough to left field to make it a gem of a program. But the crowd, in a hip, dry converted theater… well, it wasn’t small, but it wasn’t big. I suppose I expected that somehow New York would be different. That “New Music,” brass music, there—well, how many millions of people live within a 30-minute subway ride? How many gigging musicians? How many hundreds of thousands of people read the New York Times each day? The crowd was comprised primarily of aficionados: just like in Iowa, just like in Wisconsin, dedicatees following the progress of one of their own. And while the program (starting with the Etler, standard rep. notwithstanding) would have been challenging to the man-on-the-street, the visceral style could have won more than a few converts, who may have been especially charmed by the straightforward Piazolla and Gershwin transcriptions. Who cares, though, about a brass quintet unless it’s Easter Sunday or an outdoor wedding?

While American Brass Quintet concerts—the brass equivalent of the Julliard String Quartet—may draw a slightly bigger crowd, how restless do audiences (even informed ones) grow upon hearing new works by composers other than David del Tredici, John Adams, John Corigliano, lately Osvald Golijov, maybe even Berio, Boulez, or Babbitt? These are composers that educated audiences—even if they may not like—at least understand that they ought to tolerate. There is a contemporary canon of music worth respecting that your average subscription-goer will be aware of. Who is this David Sampson? What of Gilbert Amis, or even—it’s hard to believe—Eugene Bozza? Are their works “irrelevant” to the orchestral or opera fan? If these composers were worth performing, wouldn’t the New York Phil be playing their symphony tonight? Where is Bozza’s opera? Ewald is, to us, standard repertoire. But who out there, who is not one of us, never was one of us, and never will be one of us, gives a rat’s you-know-what about Ewald? Or even, rest in peace, Malcolm Arnold.