Archives for 2010

More music I loved this summer: Maya Beiser's new album, Provenance, on the Innova label. If you know her playing, of course you want to hear the album. She's a soulful cellist, to say the least, and powerfully so. She wails. But there's also always a marvelous sense of both exploration and control. This album is based on a vision of medieval Spain as a place where cultures coexisted -- Christian cultures, Jewish cultures, Muslim cultures. And so the music evokes the Middle East, with haunting pieces by composers from Iran, Armenia, Israel, and … [Read more...]

Back from vacation. Always a little bittersweet, coming home agai, because home means the tumult of work. Many people wonder how I keep up with everything I have to do, and that's a good question. I find myself getting more organized, or rather having to get more organized, and rising as best I can to the challenge. Using Gantt charts in project management software is my latest way of keeping track of time, future time, in this case. It's endlessly helpful, with too much to do, to have projects, trips, and major milestones laid out on a … [Read more...]

Well, not exactly. Just going on vacation. Leaving today for the Yorkshire Dales, returning on September 4. No blog posts until I'm back. And I'm likely to delay in posting comments, too. (Remember that I have to approve every comment that appears here. This isn't to give me control of what's being said. I've never rejected a comment because I disagreed with it. The approval process is to get rid of spam, which defeats most attempts to stop it -- including those captchas, the words shown in a graphic that you have to type out -- and on one … [Read more...]

...about the dead-horse essay I've been beating. The writer of this airy document, Heather Mac Donald, offers this notion:[Perceptions of a declining audience demand for classical music in our time], however valid, should be kept in historical perspective. Much of today's standard repertoire was never intended for a mass audience--not even an 1820s Viennese "mass audience," much less a 2010 American one. I've seen many people make this point. The reasoning, I guess, would be something like this: Classical music has never had, and was never … [Read more...]

To wrap up what I've been doing in this post, this one, and this one (dispelling some optimistic silliness about classical music's present state and its future)...I'd been enumerating the reasons given, if you follow the link, for classical music being not just healthy, but in a golden age. Those I've listed so far are: Performances are better (more technically accomplished) than they've ever been. Performances are more faithful to the composer's intentions. The early music movement has brought new energy to classical music. Classical … [Read more...]

Continuing (with apologies for letting it drop yesterday) my catalogue of reasons why Heather Mac Donald thinks classical music is in a golden age. Here's her essay to that effect, and here and here are my previous comments on it. And even if Mac Donald's essay is, essentially, fluff, remember that some of these arguments are made by others, too. I'm finding it helpful to put a lot of my answers to classical music optimistts in one place.Mac Donald's first argument was that performances are better than they've ever been. And from there, more … [Read more...]

So here are the main points made in the essay I talked about yesterday -- the main points as I think the author sees them, rather than the serious holes in both her data and her analysis that I noted in my post. This, remember, is an essay on classical music's new golden age, a golden age that the writer, Heather Mac Donald, thinks is happening right now. Anyone who doesn't agree, apparently, is a "declinist," to use the very cloudy term Mac Donald throws around, apparently applying it to anyone who thinks classical music might be in trouble. … [Read more...]

People have been sending me links to an optimistic view of the future of classical music -- an effusive essay that even says we live in the greatest age classical music has ever had. This is "Classical Music's New Golden Age," by Heather Mac Donald (that's really how she spells her name; the space after "Mac" isn't a typo), appearing in the summer 2010 issue of City Journal, a quarterly journal of urban affairs published by the Manhattan Institute. Of course I take a different view, and one person who sent me the link said, wittily, that Mac … [Read more...]

...in Australia. This finishes my paraphrase of my keynote talk at the Australian classical music summit, as summarized from my notes. The story so far (you can read the first part here): our culture has changed, but classical music for decades didn't change with it. This is why the field is in trouble, why we're seeing declines in ticket sales, a sharp drop in the percentage of adults who go to classical performances, drops in funding, and other declines. Implications of all thisFirst: If classical music's problems are due to how far it … [Read more...]

I've said I gave a keynote speech at the Australian classical music summit, but I haven't said much more about my presence there -- here or here -- because what they did, I thought, was more important than what I did. But, for anyone curious, here's what I said in my talk. I'm paraphrasing myself from notes, and giving just a summary. Often I record my talks on my iPhone, but I didn't do it this time, and no other recording was made. Added later: Forgot to say here that -- in my talk -- I stressed that my thoughts were only about what I've … [Read more...]

Today I had the pleasure of talking for an hour with a group of journalists from Siberia and Central Asia -- Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. They asked (in Russian, through an interpreter) terrific questions about classical music in the US.(This was arranged by CEC ArtsLINK, which arranges exchanges of many kinds involving arts people from Russia and surrounding regions.)The question I found the hardest was a simple one. Which new or recent American classical piece did I think was most important? For a moment I blanked, and then four … [Read more...]

Peter Garrett -- formerly the hard-to-forget lead singer for Midnight Oil -- is Australia's Minister for the Environment, Heritage, and  the Arts. He's hard to forget because he's at least 6'6" (one Internet source says seven feet), imposingly bald, and, when he was a rock star, impassioned. Now he's a seasoned politician. He spoke at the Australian classical music summit I've been blogging about (scroll back to see). He dressed informally (open shirt, no tie; don't know if that's a rock thing, an Australian thing, or a Peter Garrett … [Read more...]

More about the Australian classical music summit, where I gave a keynote speech, and which I started to describe (the summit, not my speech) here. The hard work of the summit was done in five working groups, on these subjects:advancing the repertoireadvocacy and researchaudience building [two working groups on this subject]community and regional developmenteducation: school and communityeducation: professional and studio ["studio" means private music teaching]mediaGo here for a summit document, with details on these groups. It's another example … [Read more...]

The following -- a terrific classical music manifesto -- comes from Ken Nielsen, one of the founders of the wonderful Pinchgut Opera in Sydney, Australia. This is a company so happy, internally, that its chorus volunteered to raise money for a production they didn't sing in. And don't be misled because they call themselves a chamber opera company. They currently perform in -- and sell out -- a thousand-seat house. Ken reads my blog, and posts comments. He and I have emailed for a number of years, and it was a treat to meet him -- along with his … [Read more...]