Archives for March 2017

Classical music…its role in our culture…that’s something I’ve pondered for a long time, and talked about often here. aMy usual answer hasn’t been very positive. If classical music is going to focus on the past — as of course it still does; such a large percentage of performances are of music from past centuries — then is it really still art? Art is a furnace Art, I’d think, is stronger than focusing on the past. Should tell us things about who we are now, what’s going on in the world around us. Or, to use a phrase I love from the very end of … [Read more...]

Quite a lively discussion in class this week, about how conservatories could change. One quick takeaway: That the Juilliard graduate students in my class would love to go to a school where the focus was on how students want to make music. And where music of all genres was talked about, taught, and played. Here comes the ice cream! But of the many ideas in the readings I gave them, and the videos I asked them to watch, there was one they most loved. An ideal music school “will have pour over coffee and ice cream readily available at all times. … [Read more...]

Last week, in my Juilliard course on the future of classical music, one of my students asked about art and commerce. Where do they fit in classical music’s future? What roles will they play? Questions like that often come up in my work. They’re often asked — though not, I think, by this student — with some suspicion. Art is good, commerce is bad. Art is pure, commerce is, well;, commercial. Or, as another student said in this week’s class, often things that aren’t so good succeed because they’re marketed. Which of course is true. Though … [Read more...]

More about an engaged, participating audience…following up on my last post. I exchanged some email with Tom Wolf, the consultant whose firm’s newsletter I’d happily quoted. In this exchange, he told me a fine story involving Boris Goldovsky, whom I’d known of as an opera personage (host of the Met Opera’s old radio intermission feature, Opera Quiz, founder of the opera training program at Tanglewood). I hadn’t known that Goldovsky was Tom’s uncle, or that he’d been a pianist and conductor. Or that, as a musician of the old school, he’d have … [Read more...]

Very good comment from Matthew Hodge on my Tabatha Coffey post. I’d talked about Coffey, the embodiment of tough love — just go to her site and read the powerful words you’ll see — who on a reality TV show impressively fixes failing hair salons. What — I asked participants in a workshop I led — would Tabatha change if she came to an orchestra? And I listed some of the responses I got. Things people had seen, that might revivify orchestras. Audience coming up to talk to the principal cellist during a break. Kids in a youth orchestra smiling … [Read more...]

Here’s something I did in the workshop I led about imagining the future, at a League of American Orchestras conference. You can read about the workshop in my last post. We imagined hat in 10 years, all orchestra problems would be solved. They’d have a big new audience, community buzz, all the funding they need. So how would that happen? What would have happened to get us to that paradise? This is a workshop I’d love to do again. If you’d like to talk about it, contact me! So here’s one of the things I did. Imagine, I said, that Tabatha … [Read more...]

Suppose in 10 years all problems that orchestras have will be solved! Suppose that orchestras have a vibrant young audience, that people all over the country are talking about what orchestras do. Suppose there aren't funding problems. And that all of this has been accomplished without the slightest artistic compromise. How -- looking back now from this imagined 10-year perspective — would we have gotten there? What would have changed? That was the conversation I led four years ago at a League of American Orchestras national conference. … [Read more...]

Black History Month is over. But classical music stills needs to be more diverse, every month of the year. So another post on that subject, recycling one I wrote in 2013. That year I led a workshop at the national conference of the League of American Orchestras. My job was to ask participants — mostly orchestra staff and board members — to imagine a glorious future. Just suppose, 10 years from now, all the problems orchestras now have will be solved! Orchestras — yours included — will have vibrant young audiences, eager support from their … [Read more...]