Marla Schwaller Carew wrote a deeply felt message from Detroit, about how hard it seems to be to get younger people -- like herself -- to go to classical events: I recently attended two excellent concerts as part of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival (the Emerson String Quartet played the opening concert in a lovely, smallish hall, where I was able to sit 15 rows from the stage and hear and see like I could never at larger Michigan venues. The second night featured two of the Emersons with other excellent musicians at a very choice, … [Read more...]

Robert Berger, from Levittown, New York, has written many spirited e-mails to me, starting long before this blog. The latest fills out my earlier comment on orchestral horn sections, with all kinds of "he was there" color and detail I don't remotely have. Here's what he told me (posted with his permission, and with many thanks): As a horn player (no longer active because of a physical disability), I read your comments on the use of assistant principal horns in orchestras with interest. The use of an extra horn players is a necessity for … [Read more...]

Before I get too negative, I might take a moment to say why I think classical music should survive. Besides the mere fact that I like it, I mean. That may convince me, but there's no reason it ought to convince anybody else. So I can think of two reasons: 1. It's the musical heritage of the west. If we still read Proust and Shakespeare, if we still look at art by Klee and Renoir, why shouldn't we listen to music by Mozart, Stravinsky, and Josquin des Pres? 2. Organized, long spans of music are an important form of art. We read … [Read more...]

I've been e-mailing with someone who, among other things, thinks many more people would go to classical concerts if musicians talked to the audience. And of course this is happening, though more at family concerts and events aimed at new listeners than at, let's say, the core subscription concerts of an orchestra. It's also true that innovations like this one tend to divide the audience. Older, more conservative people, and long-time concertgoers might not like them; younger people and new concertgoers welcome the change, which they might feel … [Read more...]

From Nick Hornby's marvelous Songbook, in which he writes about pop songs he loves: "That's the thing that puzzles me about those who feel that contemporary pop (and I use the word to encompass soul, reggae, country, rock -- anything and everything that might be regarded as trashy) is beneath them, or behind them, or beyond them -- some proposition denoting distance, anyway: does this mean that you never hear, or at least never enjoy, new songs, that everything you whistle or hum was written years, decades, centuries ago? Do you really deny … [Read more...]

I'm delighted to echo what Andrew Taylor says in his blog -- he and I strike sparks in e-mail, and, just as he wrote, we'll be covering a lot of common ground here. As for the classical music group I mentioned in my "Snapshot" entry on July 24, I hope it's clear that I wasn't deploring them. Andrew is right when he says it can frightening to see what counts as innovation in the classical music world. But the group I mentioned is totally sincere. It really wants to see things change, and one change it contemplates -- having its musicians … [Read more...]

I've been e-mailing with Sam Bergman, the lively assistant editor of ArtsJournal, who's also (or mainly, where his income is concerned) a violist with the Minnesota Orchestra. He told me the story that follows, which I offer exactly as he wrote it, though of course with his permission. He changed the names, to protect both the guilty and the innocent. I guess this illustrates the kind of classical music event that, thanks to the piety that surrounds the field, we rarely hear about. But really I wanted to share it just because it's fun. … [Read more...]

I can see that I'll be finding fault a lot with the classical music business. That's part of moving toward the future; we have to clear away some of what's going on now. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Last night I had dinner with someone who runs a classical music institution, who said -- about the entire field, but especially orchestras -- "We're just starting to open our eyes." This isn't someone with a radical reputation; the group in question is best known for fine performances of standard repertoire. And here's a … [Read more...]

Terry Teachout, our champion blogger, wondered the other day about artistic musicals. Why don't they just bill themselves as operas? Terry quoted something he wrote in The New York Times a while ago about Michael John La Chiusa's musical Marie Christine (which, he says, failed in its Broadway run): "Had ‘Marie Christine’ been billed as ‘a new opera’ and produced by, say, Glimmerglass Opera, it would have drawn a different, more adventurous kind of audience, one better prepared to grapple with its challenging blend of pop-flavored rhythms and … [Read more...]

Why don't classical music magazines -- the few that still publish -- run features like "The 10 Worst High C's Ever Sung"? Opera fans love making lists like that, and they'll share them on Internet sites like Opera-L. Or why not "The Weirdest Chamber Music Performances on Records"? Or "The Five Worst American Orchestras"? Somehow, in the stuffy old world of classical music, stories like these seem undignified. We're supposed to boost the field, not laugh at it. Except that in the real world, people do laugh at things. Tenors really do sing … [Read more...]

The arts are supposed to be good for our culture. Classical music, we hear, makes people smarter, and also teaches (or at least encourages) tolerance, curiosity, and critical thinking. So why did major league baseball have its first black player in 1947, while nobody black sang a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera till 1955? Just asking. Maybe we should teach baseball -- or at least baseball history -- in schools, instead of the arts. … [Read more...]

Here's one. Program notes at orchestra concerts often list the entire instrumentation of each piece being played. "Two flutes, one doubling piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons," etc., etc., sometimes at mind-numbing length. But sometimes what you see on stage doesn't match the printed list. The score calls for three trumpets; on stage, you'll see four. The score lists four horns; five are playing. Why? Because the principal trumpet and principal horn reserve the right not to play all the notes in their parts. Let's say … [Read more...]

My fellow blogman Andrew Taylor raises a smart and sensible point about orchestras -- that there's a "panic" in the press about their threatened demise, which might distract us from serious problems elsewhere in the arts. And I'd add that the orchestra thing has very likely been blown up more than it ought to be. Yes, we're hearing all the time about orchestras in trouble -- and always the same ones, Florida, for instance, or Louisville, or San Jose. But what does that tell us about orchestras as a group? There are lots of orchestras. Some … [Read more...]

I'll start with a practical question. Will there be an audience for classical music in the future? People debate this all the time, but the debate's not very satisfying. And that, I think, is partly because we don't have enough information. Many people in classical music think, for instance, that we don't have to worry about the classical audience getting older. The age of the audience --in its fifties, on the average -- isn't a problem, these people say, because the audience for classical music has always been that age. But there are two … [Read more...]

What does classical music offer now? Or, rather, what could it offer? These are ideas inspired by the Kirov Opera's performance of Verdi's Macbeth at the Lincoln Center Festival, which I saw July 12 with my wife Anne Midgette, who's a classical music critic for The New York Times. (You can read her review -- which I certainly I agree with -- right here, from the Times website.) What struck me first was Valery Gergiev's conducting, which was in many ways stupendous. At first I thought it was (along with the playing of the Kirov orchestra) … [Read more...]