Archives for 2003

From my faithful correspondent Marla S. Carew, a dissent on concert dress, one worth taking seriously: I noticed that one of your correspondents opined that formal dress in orchestras keeps away mass audiences. Why? And more important, why should orchestras give in to that prejudice? Yes, our society is becoming more casual, but occasion-appropriate dress connotes respect for the given occasion and for the wearer. Wearing a tux to perform at Lollapalooza would be a sarcastic or "up yours" gesture just as much as wearing jeans onstage at the … [Read more...]

One reader thought I wanted orchestras to still wear formal dress when they play standard repertoire. In an earlier post on concert dress, I'd talked about new music groups dressing informally. Then at the end, I added this: "New music concerts tend to be informal, of course. Their audience tends to dress casually. What you'd wear to play standard repertoire in a formal concert hall for a dressed-up audience -- that's another story." I hope it's clear I didn't mean this wasn't a story that should ever be told. It's just a more complex question. … [Read more...]

News item: When a restaurant plays classical music in the background, diners spend more. Or so conclude researchers at the University of Leicester, in England. According to a story in the Associated Press, these researchers studied how much diners spend when classical music is playing, when Britney Spears is playing, and when there's no music at all. Diners spend more when they hear the classics. I'd have been happier -- assuming that the news story is accurate -- if the researchers had also studied the effect of jazz, and of upscale pop, … [Read more...]

Today's news about Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic is amazing, though not exactly a surprise. Right from the start, as I wrote in my Wall Street Journal piece on the proposed merger, the directors of the two organizations talked very differently about what the merger meant. For Robert Harth, at Carnegie Hall, the merger was an opportunity for adventurous programming. For Zarin Mehta, at the Philharmonic, the merger was all about orchestral imperatives -- the Philharmonic's need to own the hall it played in, and of … [Read more...]

Naxos held a competition some time ago for ideas about saving classical music. Now they're running excerpts from competition entries each day on their website. You can find them here. Today's (credited to "A.A.") is maybe not so helpful: By catering to the elite, classical music has become too conservative, too formal, too inaccessible to the masses. Only when the performers break off their exclusive relationship with the elite and play for the masses will live classical music achieve true popularity. A mass audience, pretty obviously, … [Read more...]

I hate to keep slamming Musical America, but they've done it again -- raised an alarm where no alarm was needed. One story today reads like this in their summary: Venerable Instrument Plant Closing -- Kids just don't want those acoustic white elephants any more. But when you follow the link to the original news item (from WNDU TV in South Bend, IN), things don't look nearly so bad. Conn-Selmer -- which makes wind instruments, and is one of the oldest businesses in Elkhart, IN -- is laying off some of its workforce and closing one plant. But … [Read more...]

Yes, the border -- porous, shifting, maybe even nonexistent -- between art and popular culture is tricky to understand. Yes, the role of pop culture in art (and of art in pop culture) is worth debating. But please, let's be clear about which is which. With near shock today I read this in Musical America, a website (once, in the distant past, a magazine), which I and many others turn to every day for news about the classical music world: For all the talk of Riccardo Muti's resistance to popular culture at La Scala, the conductor is in talks … [Read more...]

Here's a new idea for concert dress, or new at least to me -- a new (and none too wonderful) thought about what classical musicians should wear when they play. It comes from New York's Eos Orchestra, whom I heard this past weekend playing smart, tactile, wry, and often touching music by Peter Lieberson, a good man and good composer. The musicians wore black pants, and black Eos t-shirts; "Yuck" might be one quick reaction. The whole thing looked to me like a crass promotion, but then I don't have much affection for Eos, which gets a lot of … [Read more...]

Here's something -- in the spirit of finding meaning in classical music, and also in keeping sight of the reasons we love it -- that classical music does, and non-classical music can't. It's a wonderful moment in the last act of Wagner's Siegfried. Siegfried has come through the fire, and emerged on the mountaintop where Brünnhilde lies sleeping. The music that shows him braving the fire -- an interlude between the first and second scenes of the last act -- is irrepressibly Wagnerian, huge, grand, and unmistakable. I once walked by a … [Read more...]

I've had some correspondence about my last post, and now I think I may have tangled two issues that ought to be separated. One is what cultural things classical and pop critics refer to in their writing. I said that pop critics often have a wider range of reference than classical critics do, and that sometimes my Juilliard students can't follow what the pop critics talk about. Maybe that's true, but obviously there are people who write about classical music who have a wide range of cultural reference -- Charles Rosen, a profound scholar (at … [Read more...]

Perusing this very ArtsJournal site -- indispensable for me long before I started this blog -- I came across the very sweet Florida Sun-Sentinel story on Ned Rorem's 80th birthday. Now, nothing against Ned, whom I enjoy very much. I even wrote him, in fact, a note telling him my impression of his songs, when I heard them on a multi-day festival of new music in New York, encompassing just about every known musical style, including the most up to date: I thought Ned's songs were the classiest pieces I heard. So, believe me, this isn't meant as … [Read more...]

Godawful photos. That's what I thought as I leafed through the annual directory issue of Chamber Music, the publication of Chamber Music America (which of course is the organization that represents chamber music to our nation). This directory issue is essentially a listing -- apart from a few how-to guides (about marketing, commissioning new pieces, and the like -- of chamber music groups, many of them prominently splashed over glossy pages in ads bought by their managements. So there they were, ensemble after ensemble, presented in … [Read more...]

"Experience a live orchestra concert. It may delight you, comfort you, or inspire you...but it will move you." That's the slogan on the American Symphony Orchestra League's "Find a Concert" website, designed to attract new listeners to orchestra performances. I'm not going to comment on the slogan or the site, because I'm part of this effort by the League. They hired me to write descriptions of selected events, picked by various orchestras as ideal for first-time concertgoers. These are on the site. They're longer versions of the kind of … [Read more...]

Belatedly -- I've had a lot of scrambling to do, to catch up with my normal life after my long vacation -- I want to tell you about a performance of my Quartet for Anne, in Milwaukee this Sunday. The Fine Arts Quartet, bless them, are giving the piece what we can't call its world premiere, because I wrote it for my wife's birthday two years ago, and surprised her with a performance in our living room. That, as far as we're concerned, was the world premiere. So this very welcome Fine Arts performance is being billed, very simply, as the … [Read more...]

  Well, we’re back, my wife and I, after an idyllic month in England -- in a 17th century cottage, next to hillsides full of sheep, with dramatic hilltops, wide skies, and striking light on the fields and hills. We worked hard on projects dear to our hearts, with nothing to distract us. It was like having our own arts colony. I wrote chunks of a big, strange string quartet, a set of variations on the theme of the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony.   Among many other things, the piece looks back on the history of classical … [Read more...]