Paula Robinson Flute

Wednesday February 1, 2006

American Philosophical Society

8:00 PM

www.pcmsconcerts.org

Artist web site: www: www.eliotfisk.com

PCM: You are leaving for Austria today?

Eliot: I'm leaving in three hours.

PCM: Did you at all think this would have been your future when you picked up the guitar?

Eliot: No, I had no idea. It's hard to see forty years in the future anyway. The world has transformed itself in some astounding ways that I don't think anybody could have predicted.

This is what the biggest surprise to me in the whole classical music thing has been. It's what I call the decay in the ecology of classical music. Let me explain. When I was a kid growing up, I idolized a certain kind of artist, artists like Stokowsky, Ormandy in his hay day in Philadelphia, of course Segovia, he was my great inspiration, these kind of unbelievable artists. What surprises me has been the loss of a certain ethic in classical music. The cheapening, the wholesale rush to dumb down the message, cheapen the message and treat the people as thought they are stupid and ignorant.

What I'm very interested in trying to do is to do my bit to kind of rebuild musical infrastructure. I think it has a lot to do with all the things that have happened in American life. What's happened to art music is part of what's happened in many areas of life. The growing gap between rich and poor, the increased militarism, there are a lot of things that are disturbing. There are also a lot of things that are very positive. I'm trying to be part of the positive side, not to dwell to much on negative.

PCM: I was reading through some of your album liner notes. There are very old names that you don't hear anymore. I feel like I grew up in the old classical world.

Eliot: Well there was a dignity, there was an elegance. There was a supposition of a couple things.

First of all there was a supposition that there was an intelligent, feeling, caring human beings out there who could be reached if we were only good enough on stage, if we only worked hard enough, if we only cared enough about every single note that we tried to play. I don't mean to hit the note in a technical way, I mean to invest the note with the whole resonance of a good life well lived. I'm talking about touching the soul of the listener. The great composer Francis Couperin said, "I would rather move the listened than amaze him". And these days people would rather amaze them than move them. We have it backwards.

The other thing that saddens me is that I see some of the most interesting artist, musicians being totally neglected. I don't think that was necessarily always the case in the past. For one thing in the past not that many people were playing music now what we've done, we've leached out all of our musical top soil and we are down to the granite and basically what my generation has to do is recreate the whole musical top soil so that a healthy and variegated rain forest can grow back.

I think a lot of my work is dedicated to that be it as an educator/performer in everything I do. I'm trying to huge that great moral standard that I hope I inherited from my great mentor Segovia, and from Ralph Kirkpatrick the wonderful harpsichordist with whom I had a chance to work with at Yale. And with some of the other people who were influential in my younger years. Of course all the great composer I worked with who all seemed to exhibit a certain aspiration for human excellent. As opposed to aspiration for publicity or being in a shallow sense, a household name. There are so many wonderful things all over the world that are going on but so much of what's wonderful is unsung.

You can start with our heath system which is held along by these unbelievable dedicated nurses of both sexes who are working unbelievable hours enduring sometimes permanent damage and they're the one's that keep us alive. They are the one's that are my hero's. Not some Hollywood starlet equally vain and vapid who is getting married for the fifteenth time. We are canonizing the generals and not the soldiers.

PCM: In 1996 you were granted exclusive performance and recording rights to some newly discovered compositions by Segovia. I think that is out of print.

Eliot: Yes. That was ten years ago. That's another problem I have. I have a tremendous problem with the distribution of records. I am now between two record companies and trying to figure out where to go. It's another symptom of the times. If you see the stuff that's put out and the way it's put out. These days it's all geared to some yuppie. The yuppie wants a complete works of Bach, the complete works of Chopin, so he can go home and put them in alphabetical order in his cd case . This is what the record companies think people want so they program this way. When Segovia made records he use to do mixed programs, he use to do recital programs, you can't get a record company to publish a recital program anymore. They won't do it. I'm not saying you never have a complete works of Bach, that's an interesting thing. The record companies are now recording the complete works of Bozo B. Boobio and filling the bins with this and I think they're barking up the wrong tree. The recording companies have a great deal to do with the demise of interesting classical music. For one thing, because there choice of performance for me is some of the less interesting performers as far as their program and playing. And secondly as far as the fixation with single composer cd, it is a limiting factor. So that old Segovia cd was an exception that I managed to convince my company to do at that time. That was one example of a mixed cd. I have done a lot of cd's that are one composer cd's that I enjoyed doing. But I think there is such a monopoly on the one composer cd it's about nine to one, and maybe that doesn't have to be the case.

PCM: Was that cd hard to get out?

Eliot: No, it was very easy. I knew Segovia's playing so inside and out.

PCM: In terms of the record company?

Eliot: No they did a tremendous promotion, well distributed well reviewed, it was a big success.

PCM: Would you be able to put that out now?

Eliot: Sure it could. All you would need is the right record company that was willing. In America we sell. If you turn on the tv at three in the morning they are selling schlock jewelry. Its on twenty four-seven. If they can sell that crap twenty four-seven, my god where is the marketing instinct to sell also a good product.

Another great frustration for me involves the university's of the world and their schizophrenic split between theory and practice. There's way to much theorizing inside the university and not enough balancing the analyst with experience in the outside world. One thing I want to propose is a Phd topic for someone at a school of marketing or business administration that would be how come in classical music we have this fantastic under valued product selling cheap and we're having trouble selling it. With all he smart people we have in music how come the schools haven't taken this problem on as something worthy of analyst and how come they haven't launched fifteen million pilot projects to see how we can get around this. The universities aren't even admitting this. The schools of music want to bury there heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. They want to continue with the beautiful lie. What is the lie? The lie is that if you study here you will play in Carnegie Hall the day after you graduate.

What happens? Disappointed people.

PCM: Do you think there is a class distinction in classical music?

Eliot: That's a great lie, so called popular music costs way more than our music . We are the bargain people. You pay fifty dollars for a classical music ticket, you sit up front and see the guy. You spend fifty, one hundred, two hundred fifty dollars to sit in a stadium and you can't tell if it's the Rolling Stones or an imposter. Twenty thousand people where the basketball team plays to hear a concert. Classical music if the concert hall is big, two thousand fifty. You can go backstage most of the time and meet the people and they're friendly and anxious to talk. So here we have this tremendous under valued product and with all the musicians you would think that two to five percent of the graduating class could maybe go into the marketing end seeing that everybody cannot be stars. I've been battling the music schools for years to offer a marketing program

PCM: Does it get you angry that the Segovia album is out of print and there is such bad stuff out? 

Eliot: No I'm way beyond getting angry at that stuff. I have a much more fatalistic view at this point. Lots of people have been in the history of man kind and have created or been part of great things that have been discovers later or even never re-discovered. I don't even worry about that. It's not like I'm starving, I have a great career I have houses in three countries. I'm not starving to death. It's just the way it is. There's no point in being mad about it. I'm trying to figure out solutions. I'm trying to galvanize the younger people who come after me to change things. I realize I'm planting oak trees. If I live long enough maybe I'll be able to enjoy the shade of these oak trees. My prerogative is to stay healthy for another thirty years so maybe by the time I die I will see some of the fruits of my labor. They crucified Christ, murdered the Kennedy's, murdered King, murdered Malcolm X, this is a minor injustice. There are things that get me much more upset than a record being out of print.