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Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

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Archives for October 2004

News

October 29, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Peter Gelb, as many people already know, is going to be the next head of the Metropolitan Opera, succeeding Joseph Volpe. (I'm writing this before the official announcement, but the news has leaked onto opera websites.) I trust this means the Met wants to make some changes, since Peter isn't an old-fashioned classical music guy. I expect my colleagues in the press to get a little worried, since they've long assumed that Peter has no taste, blaming him for the decline of major-label classical recording, and especially for crossover releases … [Read more...]

Mistakes

October 28, 2004 by Greg Sandow

I apologize for mistakes in my entry about the Pittsburgh audience, starting with -- and shame on me -- some blatant typos in the title. One mistake that really mattered was about the dates of the next "talk back" events in Pittsburgh: November 6 and 7, not December. And the link to my Symphony magazine piece about the audience didn't work. If you'd like to read the article, go here. I've corrected all these things in the original entry. Thanks to everyone, including one of my Pittsburgh colleagues, who noticed the mistakes, and told me about … [Read more...]

More about publicity

October 28, 2004 by Greg Sandow

At the dry cleaner this morning I noticed a poster for Rod Stewart's new album, Vol. III of The Great American Songbook, the series of CDs on which he sings old pop standards. And what struck me was the language used to describe what's going on: "The exciting third installment of the spectacular trilogy," or something very like that. And, below it, introducing the list of songs Stewart sings, "Including these classic songs." Now, this is exactly the kind of meaningless boilerplate I complain about in classical music publicity -- empty, … [Read more...]

Talking to the audience

October 26, 2004 by Greg Sandow

  I’ve started a project with the Pittsburgh Symphony that’s certainly unusual, and could be extraordinary. The Symphony calls it “talk back,” and the idea is simple enough -- to get the audience talking back to the orchestra about the performances they hear. But it’s extraordinary because orchestras don’t normally consult their audience about music, and don’t set up forums in which their audience can talk to them. I’ve written about this, in a piece that appeared two years ago in Symphony magazine, the publication of the American … [Read more...]

What I’ve been up to

October 18, 2004 by Greg Sandow

This is a busy time for me—a little too busy, but also wonderful. Here’s a taste of what’s going on, some of which will show up in this blog, at greater length:  This Thursday, October 21, comes the first of the Symphony with a Splash concerts I program and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony, this time with something very personal—a performance of a piece of my own, A Frankenstein Overture. This orchestral music based on my opera Frankenstein, with an extravagant trombone solo (representing the Creature, who’s meant to sound tortured, … [Read more...]

Fighting the good fight

October 11, 2004 by Greg Sandow

  I keep hearing about my blog posts on publicists – my posts about how bad classical music publicity can be. Sometimes I  hear from publicists, apologizing either after the fact or in advance for problems of the kind I pointed out. (Which were their failure, over and over, to give any real reason why anyone should care about the events they publicize.)   But now I’ve heard from a fellow critic, David Stabler of The Oregonian, in Portland, OR, who’s taken up my crusade. He wrote a fine piece for his paper, looking at … [Read more...]

Good news

October 7, 2004 by Greg Sandow

  I said some harsh things about the state of new music in the mainstream classical world – especially the orchestra world – in my post about the Toronto Symphony.   So here’s a most encouraging response from Curt Long, executive director of the Dayton Philharmonic:   I would say that we include a "moderate" amount of new music in our classical season, balanced with more traditional repertoire (of course, most orchestra's don't even include a moderate amount).  We present a classical series of 9 programs annually, … [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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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...]

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