• Home
  • About
    • What’s happening here
    • Greg Sandow
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Sandow

Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

You are here: Home / 2004 / Archives for May 2004

Archives for May 2004

Concert Companion

May 28, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Last night (Thursday, 5/27) was the first test of this device that I've been part of, a test we did with the New York Philharmonic. The Concert Companion is the heldheld PDA that audiences may, in the future, be able to rent from orchestras, or might get free with special ticket deals. It gives real-time program notes, that change with the music -- ongoing descriptions of whatever you're hearing at a given moment. I wrote the text for this test, which involved Stravinsky's Petrushka, and Ives's Three Places in New England. After the concert, … [Read more...]

Levine

May 21, 2004 by Greg Sandow

I'm sure we all saw the front page story in The New York Times about the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and James Levine -- about how some of the musicians think Levine can't cut it any more. In reaction, two prominent New York critics defended Levine. But in the flurry -- "He conducts as well as he ever did!" "He's lost it!" -- that naturally followed the Times piece, I think we lost one crucial part of what's going on. Even if the complaining musicians aren't right, the mere fact that they're complaining -- and, above all, that they were … [Read more...]

Videogame music

May 20, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Out of the blue, unsolicited, from Matthew Burns in Los Angeles, came this marvelous comment on the LA Philharmonic's performance of music from the videogame Final Fantasy. I hope everybody takes it seriously, and reads to the end, for Matthew's answers to a couple of questions I asked him:  So how many standing ovations do you think a modern - as in still living - composer of orchestral music could get in one night? The answer, as I saw it the other evening at the first live concert of video game music in the United States, is upwards … [Read more...]

Straw in the wind

May 19, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Note the following, from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story by Andrew Druckenbrod, about the Pittsburgh Symphony and its new head, Larry Tamburri: Publicly, the new CEO of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is a laconic leader. Privately, however, he has spent his first four months on the job in nonstop conversations within and without the organization."Meeting the community has been very important because the Symphony is a community institution," Larry Tamburri said. "I have been out in the arts, business, political and religious communities to … [Read more...]

Return

May 18, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Can't quite believe that it's been a month since I blogged, but…my schedule, like Crazy Eddie's prices (for those who remember those long-ago, screaming TV ads), has been totally insane. And it's all blog-related, all involved with projects that touch on the future of classical music, including my Pittsburgh concert series (for that elusive new classical audience), the Concert Companion (program notes that describe orchestra music in real-time, as the music changes), my Juilliard course (about the future of classical music), and, almost back to … [Read more...]

Levine

May 9, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Last night (Saturday) I went to hear Götterdämmerung at the Met. When Levine came out to conduct, the crowd gave him the largest, warmest ovation I think I've ever heard for a conductor at the start of an opera. Now, maybe they were so friendly because it was the last night of the season, or because it was the last night of the last Ring cycle (certainly many people there were hearing all four operas, and for them Levine's appearance at the start wasn't the beginning of something new, but the continuation of something wonderful). But I'd … [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...]

Follow Us on FacebookFollow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSS

Archives

@gsandow

Tweets by @gsandow

Resources

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...]

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in