Music@Menlo Café Conversations

Each year, the Music@Menlo festival schedules 2 or 3 "Café Conversations," hour-long talks or interviews about various musical topics. This year's were advertised as career-planning advice to the artists of Menlo's Young Performers Program, about 30 audition-selected kids from 11 to 18 in age. I think they were required to attend; at any rate, there they were, packed into the first three rows of the small lecture hall.

I attended the first one, which was billed as "The Role of the Music Critic." I'm a music critic, I wanted to know what my role is.

It was not what I expected. The speaker, Juliette de Marcellus, is a British writer who's stuck in a past that ceased to exist some 50 years ago, where the vast majority of music critics worked for smaller papers. They didn't necessarily know anything about music; what they did know was how to produce adequate journalistic copy in the two hours between the end of the concert and the paper's daily deadline. de Marcellus was quite aware that small-paper music criticism of this kind has nearly vanished, but she has no idea what's replaced it, and she kept returning to it. In her world, beginning professionals advance their careers by accumulating reviews (clipped out of the paper and pasted in a scrapbook, I suppose), and if their concert isn't reviewed, it's worthless to them professionally. Asked what musicians can do to contribute to the public conversation around careers, she suggested writing letters to newspapers: again, an idea at least 50 years out of date.

There was much more like this, and she meandered and ranted in a way that made some audience members think she must have been ill. She began by encouraging "stupid questions," i.e. don't be afraid to ask ones you fear might be naive, but whenever anyone spoke up, she interrupted their opening framing by snapping, "So what's your question?" and then answered it with "I'll get to that later" (only sometimes true). Wu Han, the festival's co-artistic director and the nominal interviewer, tried to rein her in, but it was like taming a bucking bronco.

de Marcellus did say, at the beginning, one true thing: that a critic is not "critical" in the usual meaning of that word, but is just a reviewer, like reviewers of books or movies, and whose function is as a guide and help for the audience.

That aside, she didn't say anything that could possibly have been of any help to these children facing professional careers, and I wanted to shout out to them, "Don't listen to anything she said! It's totally useless!" It was embarrassing to listen to advice to clip non-existent newspaper reviews to young players who've already earned a sterling credential to advance their careers by having been accepted to Menlo in the first place - festivals like this were a rare thing 50 years ago.

So I decided to attend the next week's Conversation, in hopes that it would act as something of a corrective and give some specific advice. For the most part, it didn't, though it was entertaining enough and at least coherent.

It was the other co-director, David Finckel, interviewing Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park about their careers. They're a married couple who play cello and piano, respectively, and for some years have been the directors of the Young Performers Program, so all those kids lined up know them well. Accordingly they said little about their role in the program. It was mostly an account of their training as students, followed by a lot of detail on the chamber music concert series they run at the University of Nevada-Reno, where they both teach. They talked about what they do, and why they do it, but not much about how it's done.

There were a few useful nuggets. Asked about competitions, Atapine said don't approach them hoping to win; that's the wrong and probably a hopeless attitude. Their use is as professional discipline practice: you've got to get a concert ready by such a time and you've got to give it your best. He advised building a concert series like theirs at Reno by inviting your friends and your mentors to perform. And they all emphasized that ancillary matters like marketing and stage direction contribute to the success of concerts.

So how do young players advance their careers today, if there's no scrapbooks of reviews to accumulate? They apply to audition for festivals and competitions, of which today there are many. They make professional-quality videorecordings of themselves and put them out where concert promoters can watch them. Nothing was said about most of this, but perhaps the students already know it all.