Results tagged “guardian” from Slipped disc

A Dutch-American blogger, Marc van Bree, has compiled a preliminary list of classical music writers and institutions on Twitter. The list, displayed here, makes no claim to be comprehensive and Marc warmly solicits additional contributions.

There is something of the zeitgeist about this catalogue. Last week Alex Ross, pioneer of the music-crit blog, froze his main site and announced that his future contributions would be rather more occasional and under his employer's banner.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, in a thoughtful article on media trends of the decade, cited google, wikipedia and twitter as top three and omitted blogging altogether, except as a by-product of his newspaper's reader-response policy.

Two twitter storms have just generated a minor constitutional crisis in the British Parliament and an advertisers' retreat from a newspaper site that carried an article criticising the gay lifestyle of the late Boyzone singer, Stephen Gately. These are very much signs of our times, and both were driven by the agendas of print newspapers.

So could it be that the cultural blog has had its day? Certainly many of its functions are gravitating to twitter, facebook and other places of savvy congregation. Many writers use them as eye-magnets for articles they have placed in traditional newspapers. 

Some of those newspapers are now planning to put up paywalls, which means that if you're intrigued by the tweet you may not be able to access them for free.

A new convergence is emerging between old print media and new social sites. Does this signal an economic revival for arts journalism? Too soon to tell but the straws in the wind are not uninteresting. As this long-running mini-series indicates, we are in the thick of a fast-moving story. 

A number of people walked out of Andras Schiff's lecture-recital on Haydn at the Wigmore Hall on Friday night, so I'm told.

The erudite Hungarian pianist is in the chrysallis stage of morphing from concert artist to public intellectual, a transition last successfully achieved by Alfred Brendel.

Schiff's 2006 Beethoven lecture recital was received with rapture by the editor of the Guardian newspaper, himself an avid pianist, and his residence at the Wigmore is one of the hall's outstanding trademarks.

So why did people walk out when Schiff was at full steam? Apparently, it had something to do with the language he used. One young person was heard asking an usher what was meant by 'tonic and dominant tonal relationships'. Others were visibly puzzled by such helpful advisories as 'moving to the minor chord with the altered 5th'.

Musicians in the hall knew exactly what he meant. These are terms they assimilated in first-year college and use among themselves as shorthand, in the way heart surgeons refer to capillaries by letters and numbers. In an academic lecture, these terms would have been perfectly in place. But in a public presentation they sundered those in the know from those without and alienated the curious beyond risk of return. What was intended by the hall as an educational venture achieved the very opposite function.

Musical terminology is often clumsy and seldom irreplaceable. Most things that are done in music can be expressed in words that an unprepared audience will understand. There are plenty of artists who welcome listeners pithily into their world and plenty of critics and writers who advance the process of communication by avoiding technical jargon.

I don't want to single out Andras Schiff as an antedeluvian elitist. He is pursuing an honourable path of enlightenment in the language he knows best. But Schiff should remember that if he invites the public through the door he should speak to them in expressions and metaphors they can readily understand. Using shorthand may be handy among friends, but it always makes strangers feel unwanted.