My wife was walking through Central Park, looking at The Gates. Perched on top of one of them was a hawk, eating its prey -- something large, my wife said, maybe a pigeon or even a squirrel. And down below stood a crowd of people, watching the hawk eat. Only in New York! … [Read more...]

Someone from an orchestra suggested that I shouldn't have talked about changes in cultural weather. If classical music isn't so popular now, or people aren't buying subscriptions to orchestra concerts, this isn't (my correspondent thinks) a change in cultural weather. It's a change in cultural climate. Weather changes daily; climate changes last for centuries. So a change in climate is far more serious -- and that, my correspondent feels, is what we're facing now. I've since found that this distinction is much debated among orchestra marketing … [Read more...]

I want to thank many people for their responses -- both by e-mail and in person -- to my January 20 post on the classical music crisis. Perhaps the most striking came from two highly placed people deep within the biz, who both thought things were worse than I'd said. And very informative comments came from people who either corrected me, or added crisis points I hadn't thought of. I knew, of course, that I was only taking a preliminary measure of the crisis, subject to modification and elaboration later on. So thanks to Lisa Hirsch, an … [Read more...]

Suppose orchestras knew they were in desperate trouble -- trouble so bad that they could see extinction looming. Or if not extinction, then at least a sharp cutback in their operations. Should they talk about this publicly? Maybe not. It's hard to raise money when extinction looms. "We're asking you [says the orchestra to a wealthy donor, or corporation or foundation] for two million dollars. Oh, and we might be out of business three years from now." Understandably, orchestras might not want to go there. They might think, "Well, we've got a … [Read more...]

Last week, I did the second concert this season in the "Symphony with a Splash" I plan and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony. These are concerts for people who don't normally go to hear the orchestra; we do short pieces (including single movements of long pieces), with commentary from me. This time we tried something really challenging -- John Cage's famous silent piece, 4'33", with the second of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra coming just before and after it. We could get away with this because our theme was "Are You Crazy?" -- and we … [Read more...]