Frank Music Company to Close

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New York’s Frank Music Company

Frank Music Company has supplied classical sheet music to generations of instrumentalists, singers and composers. On Friday, 6 March 2015, the retail store will close its doors for good, succumbing to dwindling sales.

Frank Music has been struggling for years, as music became readily available online, said Heidi Rogers, the shop’s owner. “We went from seeing fifteen to twenty people per day to seeing two or three,” Ms. Rogers said on Monday. “I went from feeling like I was at the center of the world to feeling invisible.” The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937 and provided the city’s musicians scores from the standard – Bach, Beethoven – to the arcane. Ms. Rogers bought it in 1978.

Frank Music is the last store in the city dedicated to selling classical sheet music, Ms. Rogers said, although other places such as the Juilliard School’s bookstore at Lincoln Center have it on their shelves.

Frank Music’s stock, which Ms. Rogers counts as hundreds of thousands of scores, was purchased by an anonymous donor as a gift for the Colburn School, a music conservatory in Los Angeles. The school and Ms. Rogers declined to comment on financial details. Colburn School’s president and chief executive, Sel Kardan, called Frank Music’s scores “an invaluable resource for our students and faculty for years to come.”

To the sixty-three-year-old Ms. Rogers, nothing is more important than the arts. “The idea that classical music is irrelevant is ridiculous,” she said, bemoaning the comparative salaries of tubists and stockbrokers. “People should be paid in terms of what they contribute to people’s well being.” The store’s celebrity clients over the years have included pianists Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk, violinist Pamela Frank and cellist David Finckel. One of Ms. Rogers’s favorite memories is a telephone call from the violinist Itzhak Perlman, asking for Kreisler scores.

The composer Bruce Adolphe, who is resident lecturer at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, described the store as a musical meeting ground. “Frank’s Music was not just a store but a crucible,” he said, “a nexus where musicians from Suzuki beginners and their parents, to Joshua Bell, or the Brentano’s Mark Steinberg, would meet by chance.” Its closing is perhaps the latest example of classical music’s changing brick-and-mortar businesses.

Joseph Patelson Music House, another longtime sheet-music establishment, closed in 2009, and Dowling Music shut its doors in 2013. Last year, J&R Music and Computer World, the last store in New York with a sizable classical CD section, stopped carrying classical albums.

Musicians have plenty of online opportunities to buy sheet music, whether from Amazon.com, publishers or specialty websites such as Sheet Music Plus. The website IMSLP, a digital library of public-domain music, allows users to download scores for free. Some musicians with iPads have dispensed with pesky paper scores altogether.

For now, Ms. Rogers plans to pack up the rest of the store’s contents and then spend some time on her farm in the Catskills, where she has tenant farmers and fifty chickens. “Everyone says, ‘Aren’t you going to have a party?’ ” she said. “I feel like having a funeral.”

Corinne Ramey – The Wall Street Journal

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Frans Brüggen (1934-2014)

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Frans Brüggen in 1978

Frans Brüggen, a Dutch pioneer of the early music movement, a co-founder and conductor of the influential Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, and a virtuoso recorder player who in his youth became (literally) a poster boy for the instrument, died on 13 August 2104 13 in Amsterdam. He was seventy-nine.

His death was confirmed by Sieuwert A. Verster, who founded the ensemble with Mr. Brüggen in 1981.

Their period instrument orchestra was one of the first ensembles to adopt a historically informed method of performance, in which the lush sound, vibrato-heavy string playing and sometimes ponderous tempos that were then standard were abandoned for a buoyant, leaner sound with less vibrato.

Unlike other period ensembles, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century has not strayed too far from its original focus; it has ventured into Mendelssohn, Schubert and Chopin, but not later romantics like Brahms.

Mr. Brüggen had a particular affinity for conducting Beethoven, releasing two recordings of the complete symphonies and leading the “Eroica” Symphony more than one hundred times.

Reviewing a 2007 performance of two Schubert symphonies and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 during one of the orchestra’s infrequent appearances in New York, Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that “by keeping the brass choirs in the foreground sounding punchy in the Ninth, he tapped a vein of both novelty and visceral excitement that gave these familiar works a welcome freshness.”

The orchestra (a part-time group that tours several times a year and regularly releases recordings) was founded with an unusually egalitarian pay plan. After expenses, profits are divided equally among musicians and conductor.

The orchestra recruits its members through word of mouth and never holds auditions. “We are a bit like the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Verster said in a phone interview, “always the same people.” The orchestra intends to continue to perform with guest conductors, he added.

As a guest conductor himself, Mr. Brüggen worked with both Baroque and modern ensembles, including the London-based Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Amsterdam-based Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – bringing a period practice aesthetic to his interpretations.

Mr. Brüggen had a rebellious streak and appreciated counterculture movements, both in and out of musical circles. In 1969 he supported what became known as the “Notenkrakers” (“Nutcrackers”) action, in which conservatory students and composers, unhappy with the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s conservative programming and what they saw as its elitism, disrupted a performance in Amsterdam with noisemakers and a megaphone.

Mr. Brüggen, who in 1972 founded an avant-garde recorder trio called Sour Cream, began his career as a recorder soloist and chamber musician. He elevated the instrument to star status with his brilliant, idiosyncratic approach. Some early albums came along with a poster of him, a tousle-haired young virtuoso.

His performances were physically and aesthetically distinctive: He played while sitting cross-legged and infused his interpretations with a flexible rubato that rendered the music sensually expressive.

Early video recordings highlight his beautiful tone, remarkable technique and soulful artistry, often heard in collaboration with eminent musicians like the Dutch keyboard player and conductor Gustav Leonhardt.

Mr. Brüggen, who also played the flute professionally, played a wide range of repertoire and became a champion of contemporary composers; Luciano Berio and Louis Andriessen were among those who dedicated works to him. He performed as recorder soloist with his orchestra in its early days but stopped after his fiftieth birthday.

Franciscus Jozef Brüggen was born in Amsterdam on 30 October 1934, the youngest of nine children of August Brüggen, who owned a textile factory, and the former Johanna Verkley, an amateur singer. He studied recorder and flute at the Amsterdam Conservatory and musicology at the University of Amsterdam. At twenty-one he became a professor of Baroque music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Brüggen is survived by his wife, Machtelt Israëls, and two daughters from that marriage, Zephyr and Eos, as well as two daughters from a previous marriage, Alicia and Laura, and a grandson.

Mr. Brüggen, who had appeared frail for many years and sat on a stool to conduct, last led an orchestra in May. But despite failing health he had no plans to abandon his career. In 2008 he told The Times that he planned to conduct “until I fall dead, like all conductors.”

Vivien Schweitzer – The New York Times

As Cultures Intersect

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Shi Shuai

Shi Shuai is the face of classical music’s most promising new frontier: a young and gifted violinist, born in Shanghai and trained by some of the West’s most prominent musicians who is eager to return to China to perform and teach in a burgeoning symphony scene. And Fuling, the pretty outpost of 1.2-million at the nexus of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, has the trappings of a new home for Mozart and Bach. Like dozens of smaller Chinese cities, it boasts a gleaming grand theater that just opened this year and has, in its initial season, brought Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) orchestra to perform.

The future of classical music, many have grown fond of saying, is in China – and Ms. Shi’s arrival in Fuling with the NAC seems emblematic of the new sound echoing here. Classical music was banned during Mao’s time. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that it was allowed back in, and it has exploded in recent years, winning converts and attracting students. But the real test lies in smaller centers, such as Fuling, and Ms. Shi is keen to put her talent and passion on display.

“I don’t have a good voice to sing,” she says. “Violin is like my voice, to sing out what I’m feeling.”

But if Fuling is the future, it’s one where the quiet concluding bars to the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 in E minor must compete with the loud chirping of a bird ringtone. As numerous others, as Google and Home Depot, have discovered, exporting Western commerce and culture to China is often not as easy as it seems. The potential of a middle class burgeoning among 1.3-billion new customers continues to thrill, but the work of attracting interest is filled with pitfalls.

The orchestra was recently in China as part of a broader Canadian campaign that included visits from Governor-General David Johnston and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. While the NAC works to build a potentially lucrative long-term music relationship with China, Ottawa is hoping cultural diplomacy can help smooth relations still frayed from years of neglect and, more recently, the tension over Chinese buying up Canada’s oil sands.

Partway into Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, music director Pinchas Zukerman turns to face the noisy burbling of the crowd and vigorously points his finger to his lips; later, Ms. Shi stands up to ask for quiet in Chinese. Nearly all of the theater’s 1,038 seats have been filled, thanks in part to local authorities that bought up numerous tickets and handed them out for free, but not all the patrons are captivated.

In a place where many are hearing this music for the first time, orchestral music occupies no sacred space, no tradition of reverent listening. Classical music has arrived in a cultural market furiously trying out new things. The NAC orchestra sits on the Fuling Grand Theatre schedule somewhere between Mamma Mia! and a Michael Jackson tribute show. The symphony opens not to its own music but to the thundering bass track of a video ad for the theater’s coming shows, with bare chests and thrusting pelvises flashing on the bright screens.

This, then, is orchestra in one tiny part of China outside the major centers, in a place where it must compete for the ears of 19-year-old Ni Sha – Lisa, she calls herself – an English student whose tastes run to blues, country and her current favorite, Taylor Swift.

“I don’t think everybody here can understand this concert, including me,” she says, as a swelling crowd and she gather outside the theater high on the banks of the Yangtze. “But I really want to know.”

When Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, author of River Town, came to Fuling in 1996, it had been a half-century since an American had lived in an isolated place still reached primarily by boat. Today, it’s a quick drive down a four-lane highway. The end to isolation has brought visible change, in shiny new apartment towers and roadside advertisements for a residential complex called, in English, “Hot Springs City.” Less visible is the curiosity it has sparked about a broader world people are now more able to explore.

“Before this theater opened its doors we had almost no contact with Western music,” says Yang Xiao Lin, 43, a realtor who has come to hear the orchestra. High-speed Internet and Youku, a Chinese equivalent to YouTube, have given people a chance to sample orchestral music ahead of its arrival, and Ms. Yang likes what she has heard. Not only is the NAC concert a chance to taste what she calls “high-rank joy” – status music, in other words – but she finds something spiritual in it. “The cello is so deep,” she says.

That appeal – status and sound – has won classical music growing numbers of converts in China, where it had already gained a small foothold pre-Mao, with the Shanghai Symphony opening its doors in 1879. Nine conservatories are now pumping out graduates. Many of their teachers are foreigners or foreign-trained Chinese. Beijing now has at least ten professional symphony orchestras.

The numbers of young Chinese people studying piano and violin far exceed the population of Canada. Some of the top luthiers on Earth draw out rich tones from Chinese woods; earlier this month, Shenyang, China-born pianist Lang Lang was named International Artist of the Year. Even The Julliard School is planning a new location not far from Beijing amid hopes that Chinese ears will prove more hungry for symphonic sound than those in North America, which have left orchestras facing bankruptcy and salary cuts.

But it’s far from clear whether symphonies will truly find a home in China. Even in Beijing, “the National Centre for the Performing Arts after five years is doing roughly half as many international well-known orchestras as they were at the beginning,” says Wray Armstrong, a well-connected, Beijing-based impresario.

Classical music is, in some ways, an expression of a culture foreign to China. “I don’t know if China can save Bruckner or Wagner,” says Jindong Cai, the director of orchestra studies at Stanford University and author of Rhapsody in Red – How Western Classical Music Became Chinese.

There may, however, be a future for symphony with an Asian lilt. The Chinese pipa has found its way into symphony performances in major North American and Australian concert halls, while Chinese composers are experimenting with new orchestral sounds. There’s even an argument that it is no more difficult to lure Chinese audiences to Mozart than to Michael Jackson as both are unfamiliar.

That doesn’t make it easy. The raucous concert in Fuling is “proof that we’re a long way from bringing Western culture to the hinterlands” of China, Mr. Zukerman said. “And the hinterlands are what makes a country. It’s not Shanghai, and it’s not Hong Kong.”

Still, even in Fuling some see an innate appeal in symphony. Ms. Yang, the realtor, emerged from the concert bearing a broad smile. It was, she said, “really, shockingly good. Sometimes it sounds like a young girl is telling a love story gently, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a deep forest.” Her husband, however, thought it could use a slight tweak. “It would be better,” he said, “if they could add a few more Chinese characteristics.”

Nathan Vanderklippe – The Globe and Mail