Last week Slate posted a story whose headline pronounced classical music in America dead. Such obituaries have been written so often—and not just for classical music—that you could be forgiven for assuming that most art forms have more lives than a cat. But classical music, while definitely still alive, has without question lost the cultural weight and audience appeal it once had in this country—it’s now widely seen as stale, fussy, elitist, and boring.
“It’s not something we set out to do, but we’re psyched about taking classical music off of this pedestal,” says Kyle Vegter, one of Parlour Tapes’ five principals. He and cofounder Jenna Lyle, who’d met at a Spektral Quartet concert in summer 2012, first discussed starting a label in October of that year, over beers and macaroni and cheese at the Hopleaf, and the others all came aboard by the start of 2013. Parlour Tapes succeeds in demystifying and revitalizing contemporary classical in large part because its staff treats the act of running the label as a creative pursuit on par with the making of music. Everything it does—broadcasting the burgeoning energy of the Chicago’s community to a larger audience, fostering interactions with other scenes, easing the pressure for perfection on composers and performers—arises from something bigger than just business logic.
Parlour Tapes’ anthology of commissioned work, *And, likewise sheds the formality that most people associate with classical music—it comes wrapped in a black-and-white illustration of a boom box, and it’s packaged with a box of crayons to color it in. It also includes a broad range of sounds, only a few of which could be considered “classical”—Ted Hearne’s “Thaw,” for example, is a straightforward composition for tuned percussion and drums, played by Hearne and Third Coast Percussion. “A Series of Symbols That Signify Nothing,” on the other hand, by clarinetist and sound artist Alejandro Acierto and New York percussionist Matthew Evans, collages together harsh electronic noise, turntable abuse, and rattling metallic tones; “-XED,” by Chicago sound artist Ryan Ingebritsen and New York violinist Todd Reynolds, is a spacey melange of drifting ambience, electronically treated strings (both plucked and bowed), and swirling electronic blobs.
Parlour Tapes currently has no distributor—it delivers cassettes to local shops by hand and sells them online via mail order. (All the label’s music is available digitally via Bandcamp, and every tape comes with a download code.) The affordability of cassettes is one of the big reasons Parlour chose the format, but it’s also interested in working with the limitations of technology. “We’re not Luddites,” says Tham. “We’ve talked about being a format-specific art group in everything we do, and I like the idea of influencing composers and performers to think about how to make something for tape or vinyl or whatever format we’re doing.”
Parlour Tapes is a tiny fringe operation, so it’s hardly likely to resuscitate the huge audience that classical music once enjoyed. But the label’s bustling energy—its enthusiasm for playful recombination, innovation, and fence jumping—provides incontrovertible proof that classical is far from dead, however diminished it might be. “This feels like a place where I can bring my most ridiculous ideas and people will be psyched about it,” says Vegter. Parlour has instigated an exciting creative ferment, and for Lyle all this activity is its own reward: “It makes me love people more.”
