THE FUTURE (?) OF ARTS JOURNALISM

posted by James Reel

Here’s an interesting article about the future of arts journalism—that is, how the arts will be reported on and reviewed in a society in which newspapers either don’t care about such things or don’t exist at all. One trend: fired newspaper critics are getting published at online-only sites. This is fine, except that these sites are run on a shoestring budget, and most of the contributors don’t get paid. My rule is, if you aren’t paid for your work, you’re not a professional, no matter how “authoritative” your writing is. So even though these arts sites are springing up (don’t be surprised if some ex-Citizen people find their way to one), the future of professional arts journalism remains dire.

WHERE I'VE BEEN

posted by James Reel

I’ve been away from the blog and the radio station for a while, occupied with other duties. First, I was making my biannual appearance in A Conversation with Edith Head, in which the Invisible Theatre’s Susan Claassen plays the famous Hollywood costume designer, and I serve as a heckler in the audience (typecast again) correcting Miss Head when she misspeaks. Then it was on to the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival, which I help organize as a board member of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. I also give the pre-concert talks, which was a problem on the first Sunday of the festival; I was scheduled to do that at the same time I was supposed to be in the play at IT. Solution: Make a poster out of a photo of myself, have the festival’s stage manager prop it up on stage and play a recording of my pre-concert talk. People actually thought it was an amusing solution, but I doubt that I could get away with it again.

The festival came off very well, despite a few glitches (besides that first pre-concert talk). Because of a contract error, the Tucson Convention Center double-booked Leo Rich Theater on the first Saturday; luckily, we needed the place only for rehearsals that day, so the TCC moved our musicians to another part of the facility. Also, bassist Volkan Orhon was separated from his instrument courtesy of an airline, but they were soon reunited. Our artistic director, cellist Peter Rejto, got very sick late in the week, but one of the festival’s other cellists, Antonio Lysy (a very nice fellow, by the way), subbed for Peter in the one concert that coincided with Peter’s illness. There was also a complication with some of the rental scores, but I think I’d better not go into any details until we’ve sorted things out with the publishers.

Despite all this, the performances were excellent, and so was attendance, although the Wednesday-night concert, typically, didn’t draw more than 500 people—still a quite respectable number for a hall with an official seating capacity of 511 (we can actually, and legally, get more like 550 people in there).

During this period, I also co-taught an Elderhostel class on chamber music, for which I didn’t have to do much more than show up and talk, because I still have my materials from the last two times I’ve done this. I did crank out a little PowerPoint presentation to make playing recordings easier; odd that Elderhostel has a computer projector but no equipment for audio playback (I had to bring my own computer speakers).

So, a very busy week and a half, during which I sent other people in my place to review plays for the Tucson Weekly. I did manage to find time to attend a workshop production of an expansion of the play Mesmeric Mozart by my friend Harry Clark, with original music by Libby Larsen. Libby was a bit disgruntled, I think, because she’d written the music for quite a different version of this play, and by the time she got to Tucson to see what was going on, a lot of elements of the script and structure had changed. Harry and I tried to convince Libby that the production needs more music from her, but she’s inclined to drop in more bits of Mozart. Frankly, I think the play has grown away from Mozart—originally, it was one of Harry’s “portraits,” basically an excuse to weave Mozart’s music through a text—and now Libby really needs to take ownership of the soundscape. Harry should probably come up with a new title, too, but Mozart sells. We’ll see what develops.