The New York City Ballet 'Family Saturday'

Corps de ballet members performing an excerpt from Peter Martins’s Swan Lake as part of a NYCB "Family Saturday."

James writes:

A cultural highpoint of classical music must be the development of engaging programs for children. Such events combine just the right mix of performance and narration to captivate and educate future generations (while also delighting the parents in tow).

The "Young People's Concerts" series at the New York Philharmonic offers the best, longest, and most consequential example of how this can be done right. The YPCs started as weekend children's matinees back in the late nineteenth century, became a regular feature in 1926, and reached their zenith (and "the Zenith") in the televised broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein starting in 1958. Some years ago, I watched the full run of these TV broadcasts, which is now available in a nine-DVD set from Kultur video, and wrote about it here.

I grew up attending the children's concerts at Lincoln Center (just after the Bernstein era). Now that I have a young daughter, I am back again. But as we've found, just because they are aimed at children, such concerts are not easy to perform well. A good children's concert is not a short, poorly orchestrated, dumbed-down version of an adult concert, which was what we unfortunately found last summer on the lawn at Tanglewood. All the Boston Symphony Orchestra did with that performance was drive a generation away from live performance, or at least the BSO's approximation of it, and back to YouTube. (If you didn't already know, some of the most captivating classical performances for children can now be found online. Just take a look at our current favorite--the Mariinsky's Nutcracker in flawless HD).    

Coming off the BSO experience, we were unsure what we'd find at last weekend's New York City Ballet "Family Saturday." Billed as a one-hour presentation "designed especially for family audiences," the performance promised "short works and excerpts from New York City Ballet's diverse repertory" with narrative instruction by NYCB artists "offering insights on the music and choreography." 

The answer was the finest children's performance I could imagine. Kept to a captivating, fast-paced hour, the NYCB performed excerpts from the season's repertory. This meant Emeralds with music by Gabriel Fauré, The Concerto Barocco with music by J. S. Bach, Who Cares? with music by George Gershwin, Barber's Violin Concerto, Dances at a Gathering with music by Frédéric Chopin, Todo Buenos Aires with music by Astor Paizzolla, and excerpts from the second and third acts of Coppélia with music by Léo Delibes.

Of the entire selection, the opening performance of Emeralds was the one letdown. At least one of the dancers was off a beat, and viewed from left orchestra, some of the staging was obscured by the musicians who were performing stage right.    

But it all came together as soon as the morning's emcee, Silas Farley, stepped on stage. Farley may for now just be a young member of the corps de ballet, but his star quality can already outshine the principals of the company. My daughter and I first got to know about him through the NYCB's new online reality show, a high-production-value if slightly clichéd web series produced by AOL of life inside the company, with Sarah Jessica Parker narrating and ballet master Peter Martins acting as the heel (he would make a great villain in a 1970s-era James Bond film).

Here's a tip for next season's videos: less talking, more dancing. But between the catty gripes, the show did give us a glimpse of Farley, who was filmed the moment he received his contract to join the company. Taking bets now: With his great poise and bright attitude, Farley may one day be, what, Principal Dancer? Ballet Master? President of the United States? Until then we were lucky to catch him leading the NYCB's Family Saturday.

On stage, Farley's enthusiasm for dance was infectious as he (and the show's writers) made intelligent and fun comparisons between the programs--such as the differences between the choreography of George Balanchine in Jewels (with its performance directed at the audience) and Jerome Robbins in Dances at a Gathering (played more towards the other dancers on stage). He helped us appreciate the fun of Martins's choreography in the Barber Violin Concerto (with ragdoll moves by Megan Fairchild). He introduced us to an accordion-like instrument called the Bandoneon, played by JP Jofre, in Todo Buenos Aires. Finally, for Coppélia, with its robotic doll, he had the children of the audience stand up and move like marionettes.

It seems to be just the right metaphor. Here was a concert that pulled every string to further a child's appreciation of ballet.  

The NYCB's next Family Saturday is May 10, 2014, hosted this time by Principal Dancer Daniel Ulbricht. Tickets are for general admission and $20 each.  

Pete Seeger's symphony of bad ideas

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
January 29, 2014

Pete Seeger's symphony of bad ideas
We should learn to appreciate a man's artistry even when we despise his politics
by James Panero

No other singer could connect with an audience of different ages quite like Pete Seeger, who passed away in New York this week at age 94. The night before he died, my mother, my daughter and I all happened to find ourselves gathered in my living room listening to “Pete Seeger and Brother Kirk Visit Sesame Street,” the 1974 album that was the soundtrack of childhood for my Upper West Side generation and, now, continues to be loved by the next.

What else brings a family together quite like a sing-along to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” with Kirk, Big Bird and Seeger — whose soft voice and rooted instrumentation, so recognizable, will continue to be welcome for generations?

That I have come to see the message behind Seeger’s musicality to be so wrong, often terribly wrong, has only made me appreciate his musicianship more. I seem to spend much of my career editorializing against the full range of mistakes he made. From world politics to the environment of New York State, the innocent idealism communicated through his songs would only be destroyed, I would argue, if we were to act on the positions he took in his lyrics. Seeger’s beliefs began with big-C Communism and ended in little-c communism. The fact that his music could be so inviting despite the many bad ideas that went into it speaks to the power of his artistry.

Great artists don’t always have great politics. If we let the politics dictate the art, we let the politics win out. Richard Wagner’s anti-semitism shouldn’t deprive us of the Overture to “Tannhäuser.” Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet sympathies shouldn’t detract from our appreciation of “Battleship Potemkin.”

The same goes for Seeger. He was politically effective precisely because his music was that good.

Despite his hardscrabble, rail-riding demeanor, Seeger was the Harvard-educated son of an American musicologist who studied how to push his ideas out in the guise of a well-tuned folk vernacular.

Some years ago in City Journal, the journal of the conservative Manhattan Institute where I am also a contributor, Howard Husock wrote that, “Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music, Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever.”

This is true especially in the way Seeger could package leftist anthems as children’s songs. Husock does a line-by-line analysis of the political messages in Seeger’s lyrics. For example, “If I Had a Hammer,” Husock writes, “was an extraordinary anthem. It pulled off, with great aplomb, the old Popular Front goal of linking the American revolutionary past with the communist revolutionary future, joining the Liberty Bell with the hammer and sickle.”

Writing in the New York Sun in 2007, Ron Radosh, a one-time student of Seeger’s who has been arguing against Seeger’s ideas longer than I have, struck a similar note: “He never pauses to criticize the communist regimes he once backed, nor the few that still exist, like Castro’s prison camp in Cuba. Mr. Seeger’s cries for peace and his opposition to every American foreign and military policy (even ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan) show that he has learned little from the past.”

(To Seeger’s credit, he responded to Radosh in a letter expressing remorse for his youthful Stalinism: “I think you’re right — I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” This story was recounted by the Sun’s editors in a tribute to Seeger this week — one that also pays tribute to his musical legacy separate from his politics.)

Beyond Seeger’s Stalinism and his isolationism, there was also his environmentalism. A resident of Beacon, New York, Seeger had long lamented the pollution in the Hudson River. In “My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)” Seeger wrote of “Sailing down my dirty stream/ Still I love it and I'll keep the dream/ That some day, though maybe not this year/ My Hudson River will once again run clear.” In 1969, he constructed a sloop called Clearwater as an icon of advocacy and went on to fashion an organization around it to campaign for the river’s remediation.

Seeger was right that the Hudson needed help, but his advocacy has at times made it worse. One of Clearwater’s main targets have been the PCBs that General Electric legally discharged into the Hudson from its electrical-equipment plants in Ford Edward and Hudson Falls, New York. GE ended this practice decades ago and had undertaken its own cleanup, leading to dramatically improved river conditions.

Yet river advocates including Clearwater pushed for extensive dredging of the river bottom, which the current EPA compelled GE to do through an interpretation of contamination levels that was more punitive than prudent.

“General Electric’s dredging to clean up 30 years of deposited PCB’s from the river is a direct result of Clearwater activism,” the organization boasted in a tribute to its founder.

Yet as I wrote in a study of this action, the cleanup is “both unnecessary and environmentally destructive . . . Because the river bottom was being disrupted, PCB levels in water, air, and fish all rose dramatically and exceeded federal limits. By every measure, the health of the river and the surrounding community deteriorated, at least temporarily, through the EPA’s intervention.”

The same goes for fracking for natural gas from New York’s shale reserves. As its obituary reminds us, Clearwater is “also active in the battle to pass moratoriums on hydrofracking in the region.” Just last year, Seeger himself marched on Albany to keep fracking out of state. “If you take the money that they want to give you for going along with fracking and injuring people for generations to come,” Seeger says to Gov. Cuomo in a YouTube address, "you will go down as perhaps the worst [governor in the history of New York].”

Once again, Seeger came out on the wrong side his own ideals. New York’s fracking moratorium is actively hurting the poor workers of New York’s depressed Southern Tier, as opposed to just the fictional ones Seeger liked to sing about. Environmentalist opposition to fracking, based on a host of dubious claims, also negatively impacts the environmental gains that would result from further gas exploration, especially when it comes to airborne pollutants.

“Displacement of coal-fired power by gas-fired power . . . is the most cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions in the power sector,” concluded a recent study by MIT. As I recently documented, the gas from fracking in fact “helps protect the environment by replacing coal in power plants, since gas produces far less carbon dioxide, sulfur, carbon monoxide, and ash than coal does.” The same would go for converting the dirty basement boilers in New York City from oil to gas — if only environmentalists wouldn’t stand in the way of gas exploration and distribution.

If you really want to understand the appeal of disagreeable positions, there's sometimes no better way than through its art. In this regard, Seeger could be a teacher without equal. The simplicity of his songs, perfect for a child's call and response, is also what made them ill-equipped to deal with complex issues. It is certainly true that his artistry was dictated by his politics. That doesn’t mean we must be dictated by it, too.

Don't Let the Unions Call the Tune

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 3, 2013

Don't Let the Unions Call the Tune
by James Panero

IATSE/Local One's action has temporarily shuttered New York's famed concert hall

Within hours of when its season-opening concert by The Philadelphia Orchestra was set to begin, Carnegie Hall was forced to cancel that performance Wednesday after its stagehands, represented by IATSE/Local One, went on strike. The unprecedented walkout follows a week of terrible news for classical music in the U.S., in which the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra resigned over its musicians' contract disputes, and New York City Opera announced it was filing for bankruptcy, ending its 70-year run as "the People's Opera." The Philadelphia Orchestra, locked out of Carnegie and still recovering from its own bankruptcy, announced that it would instead present a free concert at its home in downtown Philadelphia.

The dispute at Carnegie Hall follows a year of negotiations that have centered on the expansion of Local One's control from the Carnegie stage into the hall's new education wing, set to open in fall 2014. "Carnegie Hall Corporation has spent or will spend $230 million on its ongoing studio tower renovation, but they have chosen not to appropriately employ our members as we are similarly employed throughout the rest of Carnegie Hall," writes James J. Claffey Jr., president of Local One, in a statement to the press issued on the union's website. "Carnegie Hall Corporation continued for 13 months to fail to acknowledge the traditional and historic work that we perform and after no significant progress, we found it absolutely necessary to take action to protect the members that we represent."

In response, Carnegie says that the union's demands would compromise the hall's mission by diverting significant funds away from education into stagehand fees. "In opting to strike, the stagehands have rejected a proposed new agreement that includes annual wage and benefit increases and continued jurisdiction throughout Carnegie Hall's concert venues." Calling their demand "unprecedented," Clive Gillinson, the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, adds that "the stagehands have one of the most lucrative contracts in the industry," and the planned activities for the education spaces "have nothing to do with the performance-related work they do in the concert halls." 

Mr. Gillinson's reply only scratches the surface of frustration shared by arts organizations around the country in the grips of union control. For over a century, Local One has been collective-bargaining the life out of New York's performing arts. Just how much does this union of carpenters, electricians and prop masters bleed from city arts organizations? Carnegie Hall's tax returns for its 2010-11 season, its most recent publicly available records, suggest an answer. Non-profits are required to itemize the top compensation for its officers, directors, trustees, independent contractors and employees. At Carnegie, five of the top 10 earners are stagehands.

Dennis O'Connell, Carnegie's properties manager, has pulled down headline-making salaries from the concert hall for years. Between 2001 and 2003, for instance, his annual salary ranged between $309,000 and $344,000. For the 2010-2011 fiscal year, his earnings topped $436,000 in reportable and other compensation, making him Carnegie's highest-paid employee after Mr. Gillinson. Four other stagehands—carpenters James Csollany and Kenneth Beltrone ,and electricians John Goodson and John Cardinale—garnered earnings exceeding $300,000 apiece.

These numbers only hint at a deeper truth well known in the New York arts community—one that affects Lincoln Center, all of Broadway, and numerous other venues. Because of the stranglehold of Local One-negotiated contracts, New York theater owners must all pay a sizable tribute each day just to keep the lights on. The pay rates that Local One secures for its stagehands far exceed the deals struck by other IATSE chapters nationwide, and many employees can pad their base pay with multiple surcharge triggers—overtime, missed meals, and tasks that mandate excessive staffing.

The money comes out of arts organizations' bottom lines, driving up production costs and ticket prices and inhibiting the evolution of New York theater. Union control has been particularly punitive toward organizations trying to expand their reach through advances in technology like webcasting and movie-theater simulcasts. The Metropolitan Opera had to spend years at the bargaining table to launch its Live in HD program. Now Carnegie is being pressed as it tries to open its education wing.

Local One has established its prerogatives through a closed network, where a select few members benefit and the rank and file are scared to protest for fear of retaliation. Chapter President Claffey is the son of a Local One member and has counted five brothers in the union. The leadership is predominantly white and male, and of the union's 3,000 members, few are women. Thanks to a tiered salary structure and a union-controlled promotion system, not all of the members benefit from the big payouts. One anonymous blogger who has identified himself as a rank-and-file member has railed against what he calls the union's system of preferment: "2500 victims plus the 350 to 500 plus relatives and loop boys."

In better economic times, Local One's impositions were bad enough. Now, as arts organizations are struggling, the union's compensation packages should receive the same scrutiny as the pay rates of top management. The high salaries commanded by maestros and executive directors, which can exceed $1 million, have been determined in an open marketplace. Could another prop master do Mr. O'Connell's job just as well, and for less pay?

This is a fight Carnegie Hall needs to win. If the union is allowed to extend its reach to areas outside its purview, then sooner or later every other performing arts institution nationwide will face the same challenge. And they, and their audiences, will pay dearly.

UPDATE: Look for my appearance on Al Jazerra America talking about the strike and Carnegie's settlement with Local One.