To everyone who reads the blog, everyone who comments, all our guest bloggers, anyone who happens to see this — my best wishes for a warm and happy holiday season, and a terrific 2014. Changes have been gathering force in classical music, and I hope we'll all track them here, with hope and joy. My warmest thanks to everyone in this blog community, and everyone working for classical music's rebirth. We're all in this together, and together we can work miracles. I'm grateful to all of you. … [Read more...]
Archives for December 2013
Brush the issues aside
Here's a thought from my friend and Juilliard colleague David Wallace, a violist, composer, teaching artist, and — as Doc Wallace — a Texas fiddler. And much, much more. His subject? All the issues he, I, and so many others thrash out, about classical music, its problems, its future, its place in our culture. Everything discussed in my blog. At some point…but let David tell it: At some point, self-marketing that surfs the "What's wrong about classical music wave, and why I'm not that" is going tobe blown away by marketing that simply … [Read more...]
American Voices, footnotes and letdown
Followup to my post on Renée Fleming's American Voices festival at the Kennedy Center (which featured classical, pop, jazz, country, Broadway, and gospel singing): Pop, jazz, and classical singers have some of the same problems. As I said in my previous post, I couldn't attend the masterclass for classical singers, which Eric Owens taught. But Anne (Anne Midgette, my wife, who did attend, and reviewed the festival for the Washington Post) said he told the students not to pump out a big operatic sound, but instead to build meaning from the … [Read more...]
The walls are coming down
That's a phrase you might have seen me use, when I've talked about closing the gap between classical music and the rest of our culture. But the person who said those words at the Kennedy Center in Washington the weekend before Thanksgiving ago wasn't me. It was Renée Fleming, who of course is one of the most famous classical musicians alive, and who's knocked down walls herself by recording albums of jazz (here, here) and even indie rock. She used the phrase at the Kennedy Center because she was knocking walls down again, this time by … [Read more...]
Amateur work
On Facebook and Twitter I’ve been talking about bad graphic design in classical music. Why does bad design matter? Because we need a new audience. Our new audience comes — will come — from the outside world, where good design is everywhere, taken for granted when you’re dealing with professionals. If we can’t match that, we look like we don't function in the real word. That we're not professional. That what we do can't be very good. Which, to put it mildly, isn’t in our interest. I'll give an example -- the Kennedy Center program book. Not … [Read more...]
Instead of a press release…
A colleague teaching an entrepreneurship course at a major music school emailed this question: I’m planning my entrepreneurship class for the spring and I used to have an exercise (using your blog actually) that required students to write a press release. This now seems kind of futile to me, since press releases, well, they are so analogue. Do you have any ideas about what I could replace this with? I like the notion of students having to publicize (and articulate) their projects. Blog post? Personal letter? Here's how I answered: You're … [Read more...]
From Erica Sipes: Twitter in the concert hall?
From Greg: Erica helps us here with a question many of us ask. If we break the traditional silence of the concert hall — and the sitting motionless that goes with it — will people still listen with the care and attention we expect? You'll see that she herself wondered about this, but by taking part in something she'd never tried before, she learned… But let her tell you. I almost always play the role of the "good girl" but a few weekends ago I found myself in a position where I was being glared at with obvious distaste and disgust within the … [Read more...]