Grease is the Word

Grease is the Word

By Frank J. Oteri
If editors deem classical music or jazz or name-your-neglected-genre-du-jour to be inconsequential, it will become so, and indeed, it has; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

The elevators in the building where the American Music Center now has its offices each have a screen display of something called the Captivate Network which flashes breaking headlines, weather forecasts, and other quickly digestible informational tidbits in a PowerPoint-type presentation. In this era of information overload, it seems an ideal and somewhat unobtrusive method for communicating important news. It’s certainly a much more pleasant format than the totally obtrusive audio/video loops that now greet you whenever you get into a New York City taxicab, which I’ve finally figured out how to turn off.

Anyway, I bring this up in part as a response to the ongoing debate generated by Dan Visconti’s provocative comments here last week about program notes. I’ve always been a lover of program notes. Even if I totally disagree with something I read, I love reading about music in whatever form it takes. In fact if I disagree with something it might even spark more thoughts than if I was on the proverbial same page. In fact, program notes opened doors to so many pieces of music for me long before I was able to understand enough about a piece to disagree with what was being written about it. And nowadays I write endless essays about my own pieces (which are usually but not always edited down for concert programs) and I’m asked to write program notes from time to time for other composers. These assignments always help me understand the pieces I’m asked to write about much better and hopefully I can get some people thinking more about these pieces, too. It’s actually one of the few platforms we have left to be persuasive and advocatorial about what we do as well as the things that others do that we feel strongly about.

You might recall from a few weeks back that I was gushing about a book I had just started reading called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll. I’m finally up to the penultimate chapter where I came across an amazing factoid: back in the early 1960s Seventeen magazine used to have a classical music column. Who knew? Obviously at some point, some editor decided that classical music wasn’t something their reader base cared about. I’m always suspicious when the media tells me what the audience thinks.

O.K., back to Captivate Network. Riding upstairs earlier this afternoon I learned that one of the cast members of the 1978 film version of Grease suffered a serious injury from a fall in his apartment. I feel very sorry for him, but seeing this somewhat random incident flash across a screen together with the major news items of the day made me do some deeper pondering. I have no memory of this actor or the character he played in the film even though I saw the first Broadway run as well as the film, own the original cast LP, and was actually the music director for a high school production of it in the late 1980s during my tenure as a New York City high school teacher. (Don’t ask.) I still don’t think this is relevant news information, especially in a world where Seventeen is deemed an inappropriate publication for a classical music column. Relevance is clearly subjective.

The point is the media creates interest in what they are interested in. So if editors deem classical music or jazz or name-your-neglected-genre-du-jour to be inconsequential, it will become so, and indeed, it has. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. This same generation of editors was most likely at a formative age when Grease was the big summer film and is still carrying the torch for its version of the good old days and therefore anything related to Grease is somehow still newsworthy while lots of other truly vibrant music of our time continues to be marginalized. This is in no way meant to cast aspersions on the perfectly fine score of Grease or the extremely talented casts who have been assembled over the years to bring it to life. Rather it is a reminder of the extremely narrow and not particularly current lens that mainstream media outlets use when determining what cultural information is newsworthy, even on the elevator.

If only we could find a way for Captivate Network to reprint the birthday list of American composers which refreshes daily on NewMusicBox (and which represents all genres although I have yet to track down the birthdates for Grease‘s creators Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey—Anyone?). It is only by finding ways to get information in front of people—e.g. a column in Seventeen, program notes, a slide in regular rotation on the Captivate Network—that we can instill a sense that such information is relevant. Can you really know what you like if you just like what you know?