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Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

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Archives for September 2003

Don’t believe the hype

September 23, 2003 by Greg Sandow

Perusing this very ArtsJournal site -- indispensable for me long before I started this blog -- I came across the very sweet Florida Sun-Sentinel story on Ned Rorem's 80th birthday. Now, nothing against Ned, whom I enjoy very much. I even wrote him, in fact, a note telling him my impression of his songs, when I heard them on a multi-day festival of new music in New York, encompassing just about every known musical style, including the most up to date: I thought Ned's songs were the classiest pieces I heard. So, believe me, this isn't meant as … [Read more...]

Worth a Thousand Words?

September 22, 2003 by Greg Sandow

Godawful photos. That's what I thought as I leafed through the annual directory issue of Chamber Music, the publication of Chamber Music America (which of course is the organization that represents chamber music to our nation). This directory issue is essentially a listing -- apart from a few how-to guides (about marketing, commissioning new pieces, and the like -- of chamber music groups, many of them prominently splashed over glossy pages in ads bought by their managements. So there they were, ensemble after ensemble, presented in … [Read more...]

Find a Concert

September 18, 2003 by Greg Sandow

"Experience a live orchestra concert. It may delight you, comfort you, or inspire you...but it will move you." That's the slogan on the American Symphony Orchestra League's "Find a Concert" website, designed to attract new listeners to orchestra performances. I'm not going to comment on the slogan or the site, because I'm part of this effort by the League. They hired me to write descriptions of selected events, picked by various orchestras as ideal for first-time concertgoers. These are on the site. They're longer versions of the kind of … [Read more...]

Milwaukee event

September 17, 2003 by Greg Sandow

Belatedly -- I've had a lot of scrambling to do, to catch up with my normal life after my long vacation -- I want to tell you about a performance of my Quartet for Anne, in Milwaukee this Sunday. The Fine Arts Quartet, bless them, are giving the piece what we can't call its world premiere, because I wrote it for my wife's birthday two years ago, and surprised her with a performance in our living room. That, as far as we're concerned, was the world premiere. So this very welcome Fine Arts performance is being billed, very simply, as the … [Read more...]

Reentry

September 13, 2003 by Greg Sandow

  Well, we’re back, my wife and I, after an idyllic month in England -- in a 17th century cottage, next to hillsides full of sheep, with dramatic hilltops, wide skies, and striking light on the fields and hills. We worked hard on projects dear to our hearts, with nothing to distract us. It was like having our own arts colony. I wrote chunks of a big, strange string quartet, a set of variations on the theme of the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony.   Among many other things, the piece looks back on the history of classical … [Read more...]

Greg Sandow

Though I've been known for many years as a critic, most of my work these days involves the future of classical music -- defining classical music's problems, and finding solutions for them. Read More…

About The Blog

This started as a blog about the future of classical music, my specialty for many years. And largely the blog is still about that. But of course it gets involved with other things I do — composing music, and teaching at Juilliard (two courses, here … [Read More...]

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How to write a press release

As a footnote to my posts on classical music publicists, and how they could do better, here's a post I did in 2005 -- wow, 11 years ago! --  about how to make press releases better. My examples may seem fanciful, but on the other hand, they're almost … [Read More...]

The future of classical music

Here's a quick outline of what I think the future of classical music will be. Watch the blog for frequent updates! I Classical music is in trouble, and there are well-known reasons why. We have an aging audience, falling ticket sales, and — in part … [Read More...]

Timeline of the crisis

Here — to end my posts on the dates of the classical music crisis  — is a detailed crisis timeline. The information in it comes from many sources, including published reports, blog comments by people who saw the crisis develop in their professional … [Read More...]

Before the crisis

Yes, the classical music crisis, which some don't believe in, and others think has been going on forever. This is the third post in a series. In the first, I asked, innocently enough, how long the classical music crisis (which is so widely talked … [Read More...]

Four keys to the future

Here, as promised, are the key things we need to do, if we're going to give classical music a future. When I wrote this, I was thinking of people who present classical performances. But I think it applies to all of us — for instance, to people who … [Read More...]

Age of the audience

Conventional wisdom: the classical music audience has always been the age it is now. Here's evidence that it used to be much younger. … [Read More...]

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