Sunday I gave the commencement address at the Eastman School of Music. Very happy moment for me, because I’ve been teaching there for three years, and each year I’ve warmly bonded with my students. Eastman generally is a very warm place — I could see that in the way faculty and students hugged as the commencement proceeded. My speech seemed wonderfully well received, and I’ll post a summary here of what I said.
And on the blog — note a new section on the side, called “Resources.” I’m going to post things there that might help anyone interested in the future of classical music. The first post is about the age of the audience, which I’ve blogged about here very often, presenting the results of my research, which shows that — in defiance of current classical music conventional wisdom — the audience used to be dramatically younger. Go to the age of the audience entry, and you’ll find links to primary source documents (scans of some of the old studies I’ve read), links to NEA studies on the Web, and links to my posts on this subject. The entry is still under construction, but most of it is finished. You can read, for instance, audience studies from 1937 and 1966, and I’ll shortly add parts of the Minneapolis study from 1955, which showed that half of the orchestra audience was younger than 35.
(This is part of an ongoing revamp of this blog site, and my website, though none of the website renovation is online yet.)