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

Sandow

Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

You are here: Home / 2010 / Archives for November 2010

Archives for November 2010

Giving thanks

November 24, 2010 by Greg Sandow

Warm and happy Thanksgiving wishes to everyone. One of the things I'm thankful for, all year long, is you -- all of you who read my blog. Maybe you comment, maybe you don't, maybe you email me, maybe you don't. Doesn't matter! I'm so glad you're here.And lately I've been grateful for the warm comments I've gotten on my last series of posts, about ways to get people caring about classical music (and about your own classical music performances). With two examples from the University of Maryland. If you haven't read these, you might want … [Read more...]

Don’t do it online

November 22, 2010 by Greg Sandow

Not long ago I got an email from someone trying to promote some musical events. As part of the promotion, she'd posted things that seemed interesting -- questions to answer, videos to watch -- on her group's Facebook page, hoping to get some discussion going. But there wasn't much response. Which, I thought, was more or less what I'd expect. A performing arts center I'm in contact with created an extensive blog to promote a fascinating concert, and the blog was full of tasty things, including videos (really lively ones) of musicians … [Read more...]

Thanking your new audience

November 17, 2010 by Greg Sandow

In my last post, I passed on an email from John Devlin, a graduate conducting student at the University of Maryland at College Park, and co-conductor of the school's Repertoire Orchestra. He'd had great success attracting a new audience to the orchestra's last concert, and his email explained some of how he did that.After the concert, he sent a thank-you email to the new people who'd come. You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but I don't know how often it's done in the classical music world. Elsewhere, of course, it's common. (My inbox is … [Read more...]

Another Maryland success

November 14, 2010 by Greg Sandow

John Devlin is, along with Michael Jacko, co-conductor of UMRO -- the University of Maryland Repertoire Orchestra. (The school seems to specialize in baffling acronyms.) This is a group made up of students who aren't music majors, who play concerts of symphonic repertoire in casual dress, with great success. (Check out the performance of Beethoven's Seventh on John's website.) John supports my Maryland project with great enthusiasm, and in fact was the source of some of the ideas that helped UMSO (the Symphony Orchestra) and UMWO … [Read more...]

Download PDFs of my writing

November 5, 2010 by Greg Sandow

As maybe the start of a larger effort to publish my writing on the web, I've made a ;; of my posts about awakening the audience. It's rewritten to be a single essay, and you easily can send it to your friends and colleagues. If you'd like it, please email me with "audience series" in the subject line, and I'll send the PDF to you by return email. Also available:My Australia talk, which -- when I posted it here -- I said was the best summary I've ever made of my current ideas about where classical music is going, and what we need to do. An essay … [Read more...]

Making it work — finishing (for now)

November 5, 2010 by Greg Sandow

Here's the end of my series on awakening relationships -- relationships, of course, between classical music performing groups and their communities. Didn't know it would turn out to be so long. I call the post "finishing -- for now" because certainly there's more to say on all of this. ***Final installment (for now) -- excitement and surprise.There are few things, I think it's safe to say, less surprising than most classical performances. The music mostly is familiar. The musicians know it. The long-time audience knows it. Performances move … [Read more...]

Making it work — continuing

November 2, 2010 by Greg Sandow

In my last few posts -- here, here, and here -- I've posed a problem (based on both things I've heard about, and my direct experience) about classical music and the community. (And thanks to so many people for so many thoughtful and supportive comments.)The problem, very simply, is that many people in a community, knowing that classical music is being performed, will think that the performances are likely to be nice enough. Which then leads them to say that maybe they should go sometime. As opposed to saying: "From everything I've heard, the … [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