Music City

If you've only spent a day or two in Nashville, your impression of its music scene probably was formed by the loud bands that play in honky tonks on lower Broadway. 

But if you spend even a little more time in the city, you realize how embedded music is in the local culture.  In a sense, music is a language unto itself, and in Nashville, everyone is fluent in that language.

--You go to a doctor and finding yourself discussing the relative challenges of playing syncopated Scott Joplin rags and Beethoven's moody Moonlight Sonata.

--You go to the gym and one of your swimming friends invites you to come watch her play bassoon at her community orchestra's performance of Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto.

--Another gym friend shares pictures of his new grandson and then gives you his indie CD in which he is the solo singer backed up by a Nashville band.  Then he has to say goodby because a well-known local artist wants to tell your friend how much HE enjoyed the music.

--As you leave the gym, you notice a young man improvising dramatic chords and arpeggios on the grand piano in the lobbby.  (Yes, the YMCA gym has a grand piano in the lobby.)

--You go to the airport, and there's a platform for group performances.  You go to a hockey game, and a live band plays classic rock between the periods.  

In short, the place is shot through with music.

Library

A couple weeks ago, I was in the downtown library and heard music coming from the courtyard.  When I went to investigate, I found this.

This group was practicing for the library's entry in the annual Christmas parade.  There were marchers in Santa hats, big puppet images of Mark Twain and Maya Angelou (Beatrix Potter and a Cat in the Hat were on the sides), and a large African American man was carrying a big soft Elvis Presley figurine.  The music, of course, was "Blue Christmas."

A week later, I stopped at the library and found a string group playing Christmas carols in the balcony over the entry hall.  I counted 12 dulcimers, a violin, a guitar and a double bass.

In the fall months, the library's courtyard hosted noontime concerts of jazz, rockabilly, folk and soul music, as well as a program by a tribute band called the WannaBeatles.

Music Shops

A cell biologist we know took us around one day when he was visiting family in Nashville, his home town.  

He's a guitarist, so we went to the two high-end vintage guitar stores, where he talked with his longtime friends, the owners.  

At Gruhn Guitars, we were invited up to the second floor, where famous musicians are invited for coffee or to jam and where a half dozen guitar repair experts were working on instruments from a large vintage collection that had been bequeathed to a local university.  (Every college and university, and there are a bunch here, has a music department and/or a business division devoted to performance art.)

While we were there, we talked with George Gruhn, a genuine polymath who wrote the definitive book about vintage guitars.  After a while, he pulled out an acoustic guitar and taught me a few chords; he urged me strongly to take up the instrument.   He wasn't trying to sell lessons or a guitar -- his point was, why wouldn't you want to play another instrument?

At Carter Vintage Guitars we found folk guitars, bass guitars, electric guitars, double-necked guitars, steel guitars, banjos, mandolins and amps.  Co-owner Walter Carter writes extensively about music, and so I picked up a copy of his most recent book, "The Mandolin in America."  A nice read.

There are at least six other guitar stores in Nashville, also a violin store and a drum store.  I don't know where to find the keyboard and horn stores yet.

Plus, on 7th Street downtown, is the world headquarters of the Barbershop Harmony Society; its website has a 35-page list of affiliates, mostly in the US, but also around the world.  A cappella has been surging in recent years, and apparently so has barbershop.

Performance

Obviously, Nashville has more places than country-western bars to hear music.  Two of the main ones are the Ryman, an old church repurposed for audiences of 2,000 or so and busy just about every night of every week; and the Bridgestone Arena, where big, big stars -- lately Jay-Z and Garth Brooks -- entertain many thousands.

One remarkable spot is the Schermerhorn, home to the Nashville Symphony and Chorus.  We've been there four times this fall to hear everything from Shostakovich to a bang-up performance of the little-heard "Creation" oratorio by Joseph Haydn.  (See below.)

What I find remarkable about the Schermerhorn is that it draws a much broader audience than the senior-citizen demographic that dominates just about every other classical venue in the country.  There are families with children, millennials on dates (if that's what they're called now), groups of friends and people of all ethnic backgrounds.

The symphony courts these groups with $15 children's concerts, free chamber concerts, pops events, programs like November's "Music of Prince" performance and regular post-concert discussions with musicians in the back of the hall.  Other cities' orchestras could take a lesson here.

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These things build on each other.   An area with a big music industry attracts others -- a guitar player from Germany, a drummer from Maine, a songwriter from California, students to local colleges.  They form a large pool of teachers for young students.  They organize young people's recitals and choirs.  They marry each other and share music with their children.  After several generations, the effect is remarkable.  

If you meet someone who was raised in Nashville and you want to start a conversation, say this:  What musical instrument did you play when you were in school?  This always gets an interesting answer.

Note

Handel's "Creation" is a musical version of the Genesis story, flavored a bit with Enlightenment themes from the composer's era.  I had never heard it before, but it seems to be having a revival in recent years -- and deservedly so.  The music is beautiful throughout.  Here, from a 2015 London performance, is part of the Adam and Eve duet from the third act.  

Cities, Growth and Amazon

I've been spending time the last couple years in downtown Nashville, where the most common street sign is either the first or the second one below. 

It's nearly impossible to walk or drive two blocks in any direction without having to maneuver around at least one of these. 

Nashville is booming, thanks to its three big industries:  county/pop music, healthcare and state government.  The Economist reported last year that 81 people were moving into the metropolitan area each day; others say the number is higher.  Home prices are increasing, and so is construction of apartment buildings and townhouses and, farther out, single-family homes.  

In addition, the city is playing a huge game of infrastructure catchup.  Its population, 174,000 in 1950, has blossomed into an MSA (metropolitan statistical area) population of 1.8 million as of last year.  Traffic is pretty bad, and while there is talk of a five-spoke light-rail system, there is no plan to fund such a thing, whose buildout would take perhaps 20 years.

This of course is the sort of problem cities would love to have.

Where Tower Cranes Are

One rough measure of the health of a city is the number of tower cranes employed on major construction projects in its area.  Recently the Nashville Business Journal crowed about the number of tower cranes here -- 28 -- and ran this national map. Only New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle had more tower cranes.  If you've read about rents in those areas, you won't be surprised.

Actually, the map is now inaccurate.  One tower crane that had been working just down from our Nashville building was dismantled last month.  The process took a week and closed all traffic on the entire block.  Next month, the new 45-story tower of apartments and condos will open.

Where Tower Cranes Are Not

The US population is shifting.  Some cities like Nashville are attracting new residents.  Other cities have been shedding population for decades.  

Here are a few of those population losers.

--Detroit.  Its population crested at almost 1.85 million in the 1950 US Census and then dropped more than 60 percent by 2010.  Since then, another 50,000 people have left, leaving 672,000 people to maintain a built infrastructure designed for many more. 

--St. Louis.  Its 1950 population was more than 850,000 but is now below 320,000.  As is the case in other cities, residents seem to have relocated to surrounding suburbs.  

--Memphis. For most of its history, Memphis had twice as many residents as Nashville.  Its metro area population now trails Nashville's by 500,000, and the trend seems to be continuing. 

-- Cincinnati -- 300,000 residents in 2010, down from more than 500,000 in 1950.

    

-- Cleveland -- 400,000 residents in 2010, down from 900,000 in 1950.

I could go on about Buffalo and Akron and other cities, but you get the point.

Amazon

Recently Seattle-based Amazon has announced plans to build a second, equal-sized headquarters facility somewhere else in the country.  Every city and town in the Midwest and East craves this business, and for good reason:  Amazon estimates it will need 50,000 employees to staff the new facility, with an average compensation level of $100,000 a year.  

Cities and states are being invited to submit proposals next month, which sounds similar to a professional sports team hinting that it might move its franchise to a city in exchange for a locally financed arena.  We'll see if that analogy holds up. 

Nashville, a go-getter kind of town, naturally wants the Amazon headquarters.  When civic leaders talk of bidding for the project, they fret that the Tennessee legislature's failure to enact a suitably progressive transgender bathroom bill could hurt the city's chances.

More to the point, I would think, is the fact that Nashville is crowded already.  Home prices are expensive relative to local incomes, and traffic, especially for commuters, is very congested and getting worse.

Many commenters have offered free advice to Amazon about where to locate its new operation.  CNN, for instance, suggested these eight cities:  Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Dallas, Austin, Boston, San Jose and Washington, D.C.

The selling points for these places, CNN argued, were good schools and large populations of high earners.  In effect, the recommendation was to choose a city that already is winning and to make it even richer.  

(There are people who like Amazon because it has lowered vegetable prices at its recently acquired Whole Foods stores and because its workers are paid well.  

         I'm less sanguine.  It's not that Amazon has demolished the traditional bookstore trade, or that it is doing much the same for retail generally, or that it appears set to try to control the grocery business, or that its founder has bought one of the most politically influential newspapers in the country.  My problem is that Amazon, a company based on algorithms, has done all of these.  To me, this looks like a prima facie case for the expansion of the definition of antitrust. But I digress.) 

If I were advising Amazon, I would encourage it to set its new headquarters in a hollowed-out city like one of the ones I described above. 

Here's what's in it for Amazon:

   -- Those cities have infrastructure -- road systems, empty schoolhouses, underused airports, cargo rail tracks and, in many cases, abandoned intracity railroad tracks waiting to be used again for new urban transit development.
       An influx of Amazon employees -- and Americans generally are happy to move for good job opportunities -- would make use of these and would appreciate the opportunity to buy or rent homes in a location where prices have not yet been bid up to unaffordable levels.

  --  Those cities also have largely empty central business districts and abandoned industrial sites ripe for repurposing and available at lower cost than similar sized, less well-located properties in Atlanta or Boston or Washington, D.C.  

  -- Amazon could show itself to be a good corporate citizen by demonstrating how a city of the industrial past can be turned into a successful city of the future.   

        It might also inspire Alphabet (Google) to abandon its plan to build a totally new techie-enabled city and to focus instead on updating an urban area that could be a showcase for a new kind of redevelopment.  

        Maybe even Facebook would decide to adopt a company town (although I personally would prefer not to live there.)  

Conclusion

Our country has cities that are thriving and cities that are not.  It also has big companies with grandiose plans for controlling larger portions of the economy.

In the US, we admire people who change their lives and succeed when the odds are against them.  Maybe it's time to show our struggling cities a similar way to change their destinies.

If big companies like Amazon took an interest in such projects, they would gain broad respect and the country might regain some of its now-tattered can-do spirit.  

I don't see any downside to this idea.