Here's how I discovered a wonderful classical music fan. On my iPhone, I have an app called Reportage, which lets you pick up Twitter feeds in your area. Who's tweeting within a mile of you, within five miles, within ten miles? Tonight, in a down moment, I played with it. Who's tweeting within a mile of my apartment in New York? A lot of people, I figured. But not so. There were only about a dozen recent tweeters. Idly, I looked at what a couple of them had been tweeting. It''s fun, sometimes, just to dip into the Twitter stream at random. And … [Read more...]

As I've been saying on Facebook and Twitter, I spoke Saturday and Monday to students at the NOI, the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland. I did that last year as well -- this is a one-month program every June for music students who play orchestral instruments -- but this year I was invited with something very specific in mind. Jim Ross,who conducts the student orchestra at the university and runs the NOI, wanted me to help the students come up with ideas for new ways of giving concerts -- ideas that he's ready to … [Read more...]

From a profile in this week's Washington Post Magazine, by Manuel Roig-Franzia:He pads in his socks across finely woven Persian carpets --  "This one would be worth $100,000 if it were in better shape," he remarks offhandedly. He passes the buttery soft Le Corbusier leather sofas arranged by his interior designer and the burbling fountain positioned just so by his feng shui  consultant in a living room where soothing classical music is almost always on the stereo"Soothing classical music." People really do think classical music is … [Read more...]

This is the flip side, more or less, to my last post, about how safe it is for an authoritarian government like China's to encourage classical music. The repertoire from the past -- all those great masterpieces -- seems very safe today. There's not much in it that could challenge anything the Chinese government wants its people to believe. And classical music has worldwide prestige, so China seems greatly cultured by encouraging it. But today there's a stunning piece in the New York Times, by their classical music reporter, Dan Wakin, that … [Read more...]