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

Sandow

Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

“Ghastly ad” followup

October 29, 2005 by Greg Sandow

From Joshua Kosman, the fine classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, comes this reaction to my post about the Shostakovich ad:

The SF Symphony had a marketing director once who was perfectly capable in many areas, just not really as marketing director of a symphony orchestra. She lasted a *very* short time. The best mistake she made — the one people still cackle over — was the ad she conceived and approved in connection with the Symphony’s performance of Babi Yar on 2/14.

I can’t remember the details, but it was actually a Valentine’s deal, something like “Treat your honey to Shostakovich’s great Symphony No. 13” or some damn thing. No one who knew better saw it until it was way too late.

That symphony, for those who might not know it, is a vocal piece in many movements, premiered (not exactly to the delight of the Soviet communists) in the early 1960s. It condemns Soviet anti-Semitism, worries that Stalin’s terror will return, and commiserates with beaten-down Soviet women lined up for hours to buy food.

Filed Under: main

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