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Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

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

Archives for December 2004

Happy holidays to all

December 23, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Time for a Christmas break. I don't think I'll blog again till January. And I do need a rest. So to everyone who reads me (and to everybody else), all the best for the holidays, and for the new year. Let's hope that 2005 brings good things. My thanks, too, to all my readers. Simply knowing you're there means a lot to me. Your responses -- either in person, or by e-mail -- or even just your telling me that you like to read this, makes me see (among many other things) that this business can really change. I used to think the things I said were … [Read more...]

Far into the past

December 16, 2004 by Greg Sandow

For various reasons -- a project with an orchestra, a pending review (which my wife and I are writing jointly) of Richard Taruskin's five-volume history of western music -- I've been listening to renaissance music, by Josquin and Ockeghem. And I'm both bored and irritated by some of the performances I hear. That pure sound of unaccompanied (and, all too often, uninflected) voices, rising and falling, without any evident point or purpose, no rhythm to speak of, every piece taken at the same tempo…yuck! That's not very musical, if you … [Read more...]

Judging conservative composers

December 14, 2004 by Greg Sandow

This morning, for a project with an orchestra, I'm listening to the Sibelius Fourth Symphony (in a moving performance by the Slovak Philharmonic, conducted by Adrian Leaper, streamed from the Naxos website). I find it riveting. And I remember having the same experience a year or so ago with the Sibelius Fifth, which I think I also blogged about. But now I think of how despised Sibelius used to be, among many serious musicians and, above all, by anyone who took new music seriously. Virgil Thomson, for instance, in a review of the Second … [Read more...]

Power metal and my own composing

December 13, 2004 by Greg Sandow

A footnote to my last post: What connection do Pantera and Jackson Mac Low have to my own composing? Not that they have to have one, of course; I can admire music that plays no role in my own. But still I wonder. When I was studying composition in graduate school, I began to write in what I then would have called a "downtown New York" style, with (for instance) pieces for speaking voices, whose music wasn't completely determined in advance. My score for the piece I'm thinking of was a set of verbal instructions, whose outcome would be … [Read more...]

Connections

December 10, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Today I was intrigued to see obituaries for two very different people juxtaposed on top of each other in The New York Times. One of these people was Jackson Mac Low, the Fluxus poet who made his poems with random procedures, the way John Cage often composed music; the other was Dimebag Darrell, the metal guitarist who was shot last week while he was playing in a Columbus, Ohio club. It would be hard, I thought, to find two more different people either in music, or (in Mac Low's case) with strong musical connections. Idly, I began wondering how … [Read more...]

How to do it

December 7, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Two posts ago, I complained about critics using empty words of praise ("masterpiece," etc.), and suggested that all of us describe our experience with music, rather than pin inflated labels on it. Now I'm happy to pass on an evocative example of a critic doing just what I like to see. It's from Anthony Tommasini's review of a recital by Simon Keenlyside, in today's New York Times: Mr. Keenlyside, accompanied by the splendid pianist Julius Drake, was also in his element in Ravel's "Histoires Naturelles," a song cycle about animals. A standout … [Read more...]

A dire statistic

December 5, 2004 by Greg Sandow

Last week I learned that ticket sales for the Big Five orchestras haven't declined all that much in the past 10 years (though this year's, people tell me, are troubling, and I don't know what the decline might be for all professional orchestras). But I also learned this stunning, dire fact: In this same period, the cost of selling a ticket rose 40%. Yes, you read that right. It now costs large orchestras 40% more to sell tickets than it did 10 years ago. Why? Because orchestras sell fewer subscriptions, or, to put this more precisely, the … [Read more...]

Enough already

December 4, 2004 by Greg Sandow

In the past week I've read -- in newspaper pieces by respected critic colleagues -- that a Mozart piece is "sublime," and that a Mahler performance was "stamped by magnificence." It's not exactly rare to read things like this, of course, and I'm sure I've been as guilty of this puffed-up praise as anybody else. But I'd like to call a halt to words like "sublime" and "magnificent," when classical music is talked about, along with "great" and "masterpiece," and a host of other empty ways to say how good the music (or a performance) is. Why are … [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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