Is Placido Domingo truly tired of being an opera star?
Does Luciano Pavarotti secretly yearn to get back in front of the movie cameras, even though he bombed in ”Yes, Giorgio”?
Will Nastassja Kinski really portray Clara Schumann in a torrid new Hollywood film?
Hard-core classical music buffs ponder such things all the time. Surprised? If you think the highbrows are really more concerned with legatos, rubatos and staccatos, just check out the spate of classical fan magazines that has sprung up in the United States in recent years.
Gracing the coffee table of any self-respecting music fan will be such full-color glossies as Flute Talk, the magazine with the latest buzz on flutists; Ear, the hip New York publication that listens in on rumblings from the avant-garde; and–prepare yourself–Synthetic Pleasure, the East Coast magazine that turns on electronic music fans.
And that`s just for openers. Want to find out how Van Cliburn whiles away his days now that he no longer performs in public? Clavier magazine talked to the great one himself. Tired of reading about male conductors and male performers and male composers? Paid My Dues chronicles women who are shaking up the hitherto man`s world of serious music.
Each of these publications clearly has its own tone and readership, but they all share one critical ingredient: an apparently insatiable fascination with the stars who make classical music.
”Yes, I suppose there is a certain feeling of voyeurism to magazines that cover the classical scene,” says Clavier editor Barbara Kreader, whose 25-year-old publication weighs in at up to 72 pages and comes out 10 times a year. Its circulation of 25,000 may seem trifling compared with that of Time or Newsweek, but to its devoted readers the magazine is as important as, well, owning a good recording of Beethoven`s Fifth.
”We have subscribers as far off as India, South Africa, Honduras and other amazing places,” Kreader says. ”They want to keep up with their concert-hall heroes. Some of them write us to say that without Clavier, they might feel isolated!”
But wait a minute–classical music is supposed to be a bit more refined than that. Fan magazines are supposed to be for teenagers who want to read about Billy Joel and for groupies who want to see sizable photos of Sylvester Stallone`s biceps.
Yet consider the adulatory paragraph that runs prominently on page 2 of every issue of Chicago-based Guitarra magazine.
”Guitarra Magazine is dedicated to the world`s greatest guitarist, Andres Segovia. He has given the guitar its brightest hours. After Segovia, and until eternity, no one will ever hear the guitar played as we are now hearing it played.”
Little wonder that many issues of Guitarra have Segovia on the cover, plus the latest news of him inside.
A certain starstruck reverence also graces the pages of Ovation magazine, which in one recent issue managed to crowd onto a single cover flattering color photos of James Galway, Herbert von Karajan, Placido Domingo, Mstislav Rostropovich, Joan Sutherland and, of course, Pavarotti.
”We`re a magazine for classical music buffs, and classical buffs want to read about the people in the spotlight,” says Ovation editor/publisher Eric Selch. ”They want to know who`s appearing where, who`s recording what, who`s friends with whom, who`s on the rise, who`s the next star.”
The 115,000 readers who buy Ovation nationwide get that information–and more–from a chatty ”Music People” column that opens the magazine, plus slick, splashy celebrity features inside. Anyone who has been keeping up with Ovation in recent months knows that:
— Yehudi Menuhin ”first discovered the benefits of a vegetarian diet in India, and only under rare circumstances do I ever eat red meat.”
— Clint Eastwood, the new mayor of Carmel, Calif., recently presented the Cavani String Quartet with a $2,000 first prize in the 1986 Carmel Competition.
— And new-music guru Pierre Boulez positively tickled a gathering of his fans when he verbally skewered the New York Times. ”People have said Beethoven composed very well without computers,” said Boulez, referring to an anti-Boulez, anti-computer-music article that ran in the Times. ”He also composed without electricity or without an electric shaver! This is a trivial remark.” The audience ate it up.
To its considerable credit, Ovation also probes the serious side of the artists it profiles and chitchats about. And it carries an ample spread of cerebral record reviews. But, like most classical magazines, weighty features such as record critiques are discreetly tucked into the back pages of the magazine.
Exactly why all these magazines have sprung up lately–Ovation is just seven years old, New York-based Opus is three and Flute Talk is only two–is anybody`s guess. Certainly the magazines` shrewd advertising strategies is a critical factor: Most of these publications have picked up considerable ad support from small, specialized businesses that larger publications have overlooked. Ads from conservatories, private music teachers, small record labels and the like have found a welcome home in the classical magazines.
The proliferation of classical music outside America`s major cities also has been a boon to the small publications.
Ovation, for instance, has won its foothold in cities across America by carrying the complete program listings of the classical radio station in each town (Chicago is the major exception, with WFMT`s schedule printed monthly in Chicago magazine). And Opus, which was formed by several High Fidelity staffers who resigned in a much-publicized huff two years ago over reduced classical LP coverage, has come up with ingenious ways of marketing itself to America.
”We`ve found that one of the best ways to get out the word about us is to give 10 free subscriptions to every classical radio station we can think of,” says Wayne Armentrout, associate publisher of Opus, which has grown to 50,000 circulation from 12,000 and to 64 pages from 48. ”The stations auction subscriptions to Opus as premiums during their fund-raisers. It`s the perfect way to get people hooked.”
Those hooked tend to be ”the usual doctors and lawyers” who listen to classical music, according to Opus editor James Oestreich. More specifically, says Opera News managing editor Jane Poole, they tend to be folks with silken pockets. ”One in every five owns a CD player,” says Poole, who recently commissioned a demographic study of her 120,000-plus subscribers. ”Fifty-nine percent of them are men, they have a median household income of $58,710, and 90 percent attend the theater, opera or concerts regularly.”
In other words, they`re an advertiser`s favorite kind of person–a spender, which may explain why a magazine such as Ear has been able to swell its circulation from 2,000 just a few years ago to 38,000 today, even though it covers the tiny, arcane world of avant-garde music.
”The strange thing about our success is that the Ear is not really for an audience who wants to read about composers–it`s for composers who want to break into an audience,” quips Ear editor Carol Tuynman. ”We covered Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich before most people even knew they existed. In fact, Laurie Anderson used to work on Ear in the `70s!
”You see, we couldn`t always afford editorial help, so we would invite new-music composers to come in and write and edit articles about themselves.” Sounds hokey, but Ear, which has the snazzy look of a New Wave fashion catalogue, has turned out lively theme issues on such otherwise leaden subjects as microtonality, the Balinese gamelan and aleatoric composition.
Esoteric though they may be, these shoestring journals (there are hundreds around the United States, plus scores more from England and Canada)
will probably always find a small, passionately devoted readership so long as they continue to mine nuggets of information on the highbrow scene.
