Archives for 2020

Oooo, Pet Shop Boys

January 24, 2020 by Greg Sandow

By popular demand on Facebook…well, two people asked for it :-) …here's the story I said there I'd tell about the Pet Shop Boys. How something I said gave them an idea for a song. I was interviewing them in LA in 1988 or '89, when I was pop music critic for the LA Herald-Examiner. I'd long liked them, as I remember serious rock critics tended to. I know Greil Marcus did. I loved their delirious rhythm, their intelligence, and Neil Tennant's deadpan singing, which somehow made room for both the intelligence and the delirium. But a … [Read more...]

How Ice-T was a mensch

January 23, 2020 by Greg Sandow

One of my happiest moments, in my years as a journalist, was when I got Ice-T (shown in the photo) to stop saying something homophobic and cruel in his live shows. That happened in LA, late in the 1980s, when I was pop music critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a now long-defunct daily newspaper. Ice-T — now best known as an actor, a regular on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit — was the leading rapper in town. So it was natural for me to interview him. Before the second time I did that, I went to a live show he did, and … [Read more...]

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...]