Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Yesterday I had an enjoyable phone talk with a freshman at Stuyvesant High School in New York, which happens to be where I went, decades ago. He’s doing a project about why classical music isn’t popular today, and, as many people do, found me online and hoped I’d talk to him, which I was happy to do. I enjoyed every minute of our talk, and one part of it — how he came to classical music, and his reaction to his first orchestra concert — is worth reporting here. So how did he come to classical music? From hiphop. That would seem to be his … [Read more...]

The answer to the question in the title — I think it’s yes. My thesis here: That classical music should be more diverse not just because of social justice. And not just because — in a 2019 world where, in the US, just about everyone in the public arena makes a point of being diverse — we look like backward fools because we’re so white.  There’s also something else. If people of color played a larger part in what we do, we in turn might play a larger part in the world. Thus helping to close the gap between classical music and the rest of our … [Read more...]

A story one of my students told me, a few years ago. I might not remember every detail. But as I recall, a family member was visiting this student. Someone who’d never been in New York. And fell in love with the variety of people on the street. As anyone might! The dynamic, varied, ever-changing life of a major US city is something to see. After a couple of days, my student took his relative to a classical concert at Lincoln Center. They walk into whichever hall it was, and the family member says, “Where is everyone?” Bewildered and … [Read more...]

The Met Opera, presenting a nearly all-white profile in its streaming performance of La Traviata,  faces (as far as I can see) no consequences for appearing nearly all white in 2019. They aren’t publicly shamed. They aren’t picketed or boycotted. They don’t (as far as I know) lose funding. Here I’m continuing my recent theme, by exploring yet another way in which our classical music community isn’t like the outside world. Diversity. I walk down the street, in Washington, DC where I live. Lots of people of color. I ride the busses there. … [Read more...]

Saw some promotion from the Utah Symphony, with this about La mer: Allow yourself to answer the siren call of the sea with music that is so realistic you’ll want to ask for a life vest. Ooof! When I posted this on Facebook, people had fun thinking of things equally clunky. Because, obviously, La mer — evocative, sensual — doesn’t make you feel like you might drown! So this, from Susan Larson: "Tristan n Isolde, so sexy you’ll want to run out and commit adultery!” (And, by the way, there aren’t any sirens in La mer. They’re in the third … [Read more...]

Yes, we in classical music have a focus, have concerns that the rest of the world might not share. And which might seem odd to people on the outside. It’s nothing new to say that our focus on the past is one of those odd-seeming things. Art of the past, in all genres? Of course! No problem, whether it’s a Shakespeare play, a Tolstoy novel, a Robert Frost poem, a Joan Crawford mov Many of us love those things. We just don’t focus on them. Theater companies do just as many new plays as old, serious readers read many new novels. And so on. … [Read more...]

Whoa…this is the 23d year I’ve taught my course on the future of classical music, at Juilliard. Which gives an idea of how long the classical music crisis has been going on. Way back in 1997 there was concern enough about our future to get me invited to teach. And here I still am. Here’s the course overview, and the week by week class schedule and assignments. I always start by asking the students to tell me about themselves, and about why the course interests them. In recent years I’ve been hearing a lot about the perceived isolation … [Read more...]

I have a suggestion for any opera company that commissions a new opera. And I don't mean this as a joke. Once the work starts to take shape, show it to someone at HBO. And if they say it isn't good enough for them, pull the plug. Why do I say this? Because HBO, along with Netflix and other cable/streaming companies, sets the gold standard for dramatic art in our time. The Wire — one of the most powerful works of art I've encountered, from any age, in any medium. The Sopranos. On the Syfy channel, Battlestar Galactica. (If you haven't seen … [Read more...]

Here’s an important question, which arrived on the blog as a comment from a reader who doesn't give their name. Clearly a classical music professional. Because the question they ask is important, I’m making it a full blog post, along with my answer. (Both comment and reply were public, so I’m free to repost them here.) The subject: my thought that classical music institutions have to find money and resources to do two things at once. Maintain what they traditionally do, and at the same time embark on a major program of new initiatives, … [Read more...]

I have a request from someone I know in classical music management. This friend has seen me make radical suggestions here, and wants me to make sure we all understand something — that these changes would be hard for big institutions to make. Of course I know that. The first thing any big classical music institution needs to do — a major orchestra, let’s say — is survive. To survive, it needs to keep doing what it’s always done. That’s what its current audience wants, and its current donors. Can’t do without those ticket sales, and those … [Read more...]

In a past post, I said that if we want classical musicians to look like their future young audience — or the audience we hope will be there in the future — a lot of these musicians will have to have tattoos. I didn’t quite put it that way. I was talking about a new young audience in Washington, DC. But I think it applies more or less everywhere. I also thought I was exaggerating. Meant tattoos to serve as only as a symbol of what younger people look like, the ways in which they’re different from the classical music norm. But I didn’t … [Read more...]

This comes from Ronald D. Moore, the showrunner — chief producer, chief writer, and overall conceiver — of the Battlestar Galactica TV series (not the original 1970s version, but the 2004 remake, surely the best science fiction TV show ever, and for my money one of the best TV shows of any kind). Moore said, early on (according to an oral history of the show), telling his team about an important sci-fi TV producer he’d worked with in the past: “Everything he says you have to do, we’re not going to do. And everything he says to never do, … [Read more...]

In my last post, I quoted an idealistic thought from Simon Rattle, that orchestra musicians should look like the people in the city around them. My point was to talk about how not very specific that thought was, how when we say things like that we don’t really define what we mean mean, or plan how we’d achieve such goals. And in passing, I said we weren’t likely to see what Rattle imagines until classical music becomes a truly contemporary art. But what would that mean? I put down a kind of IOU: And yes, I realize that what I’m saying … [Read more...]