I hate to keep slamming Musical America, but they've done it again -- raised an alarm where no alarm was needed. One story today reads like this in their summary: Venerable Instrument Plant Closing -- Kids just don't want those acoustic white elephants any more. But when you follow the link to the original news item (from WNDU TV in South Bend, IN), things don't look nearly so bad. Conn-Selmer -- which makes wind instruments, and is one of the oldest businesses in Elkhart, IN -- is laying off some of its workforce and closing one plant. But … [Read more...]

Yes, the border -- porous, shifting, maybe even nonexistent -- between art and popular culture is tricky to understand. Yes, the role of pop culture in art (and of art in pop culture) is worth debating. But please, let's be clear about which is which. With near shock today I read this in Musical America, a website (once, in the distant past, a magazine), which I and many others turn to every day for news about the classical music world: For all the talk of Riccardo Muti's resistance to popular culture at La Scala, the conductor is in talks … [Read more...]

Here's a new idea for concert dress, or new at least to me -- a new (and none too wonderful) thought about what classical musicians should wear when they play. It comes from New York's Eos Orchestra, whom I heard this past weekend playing smart, tactile, wry, and often touching music by Peter Lieberson, a good man and good composer. The musicians wore black pants, and black Eos t-shirts; "Yuck" might be one quick reaction. The whole thing looked to me like a crass promotion, but then I don't have much affection for Eos, which gets a lot of … [Read more...]

Here's something -- in the spirit of finding meaning in classical music, and also in keeping sight of the reasons we love it -- that classical music does, and non-classical music can't. It's a wonderful moment in the last act of Wagner's Siegfried. Siegfried has come through the fire, and emerged on the mountaintop where Brünnhilde lies sleeping. The music that shows him braving the fire -- an interlude between the first and second scenes of the last act -- is irrepressibly Wagnerian, huge, grand, and unmistakable. I once walked by a … [Read more...]

I've had some correspondence about my last post, and now I think I may have tangled two issues that ought to be separated. One is what cultural things classical and pop critics refer to in their writing. I said that pop critics often have a wider range of reference than classical critics do, and that sometimes my Juilliard students can't follow what the pop critics talk about. Maybe that's true, but obviously there are people who write about classical music who have a wide range of cultural reference -- Charles Rosen, a profound scholar (at … [Read more...]