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Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Creeping back to the blog…

May 17, 2005 by Greg Sandow

Life has been rich, full, and exhausting. I’ve neglected the blog, for which I apologize (and also for not being able, yet, to answer some of the terrific e-mail I’ve been getting).

But a lot of good things have been happening. My students at Juilliard have done some astounding stuff, which I want to share here — presentations about works in their repertoire, aimed at people who don’t go to classical concerts, and plans for concerts to appeal to this new audience. My students just blew me away with their ideas, and their feelings. If the classical music world could talk to its actual and potential audience the way my students do, we’d be well on our way out of trouble.

I also gave a commencement address at the Longy School of Music, in Cambridge, MA, where I studied singing back in the ’60s. Turns out that Longy is a hotbed of classical music change — the whole school seems to be run (or heading toward being run) on the sort of thinking I do in this blog. I couldn’t have found a more receptive audience, but actually that’s the wrong way to put it. What was really remarkable was that I fit right in. They were already there.

I’m going to write more about all this. But meanwhile, here’s something else striking. On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jâma Jandrokoviã will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally — to state the obvious — it’s people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here’s someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, “chronicle Ms. Jandrokoviã’s romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself.” I haven’t read the poems, and can’t say if they’re good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert — very good move here — has a stage director. This is not your grandmother’s vocal recital.

Unfortunately, I can’t attend; I’ll be in Cleveland, doing some work with the Cleveland Orchestra. Brave to Ms. Jandrokoviã, though, and boo to her publicists, who don’t seem to have grasped the importance of the occasion, because they don’t stress, in their press material, how new and unexpected this concert is. Don’t they want people to pay attention?

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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...]

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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...]

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Before the crisis

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Age of the audience

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