I've been reading the comments on my post about El Sistema and new music, and truly I'm surprised. I criticized El Sistema for (if my information is correct) not teaching composition and not including new music in the music its students play. And people reacted as if I'd said they shouldn't teach traditional classical music at all. Douglas Laustsen put it very simply in a comment he posted yesterday:I think all that Greg is suggesting is that in addition to a core classical training, the kids are given the experience of music written in their … [Read more...]

This may be controversial.Yesterday I got promotional email about an event the LA Philharmonic is cosponsoring -- a three-day symposium in May about El Sistema, and the attempt to transplant it to the US. The other sponsors are El Sistema USA and the League of American Orchestras. And of course we all know the connection. Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema's proudest son, is the LA Phil's music director. The LA Phil is engaged, bigtime, in the attempted transplant. As are others. When American classical music people learned how El Sistema was teaching … [Read more...]

Conductor/composer Paul Haas sent this as a "solutions" comment:For our upcoming NYC concert - Tweetheart - Sympho has teamed up with the multimedia team Aytia|Matia and four intergenre composers to craft a continuous, truly multisensory evening.  Sympho's fan base has an active role in programming Tweetheart, having already sent in suggestions for love songs via Facebook and Twitter contests.  The winning entries will be announced and performed (arranged for orchestra, of course!) at the concert.This was wonderfully laconic. Sympho … [Read more...]

From March 25 to March 27 I'll be at the Yale School Music (where i got an MM in composition in 1974), for a variety of activities, culminating in a talk on the 27th at one of their Think Tanks, a series of discussions they've set up for students involved in community outreach, and which they're advertising with a slogan that says "reimagining the future of classical music."When they asked me to speak, i asked if I could deviate a little from standard ideas of community outreach, and talk about how I think music students should be reaching an … [Read more...]

Proactive, that is, with anyone who buys a concert ticket. Momentary digression. Note that the solutions page has been updated, as will happen every Monday. This is where you find a growing catalog of ideas and projects that help to define classical music's future. What follows came by email from David Ezer, who formerly worked for Chamber Music America, and now is Conference Director of the Jewish Funders Network. I'm putting this in the blog with David's permission:Each group/orchestra/opera house/whatever needs to be asking themselves: … [Read more...]

In my post on using new media for promotion, I said something that might sound provocative. I said that some people at big institutions may not understand that before they can jump into social media, "they have to understand how to use them, and make them part of a larger strategy." And, even more, that...they'll never learn about social media and never understand a larger strategy unless they jump in first! The changes social media have brought are so radical, that an understanding of those changes ought to change -- maybe drastically … [Read more...]

The "Solutions" page at the right of the blogsite is updated. Hope to have updates every Monday. Thanks, as ever, to Douglas Laustsen, for maintaining the page. And here's a terrific contribution from Xavier Losada, a composer and producer in Caracas, who just sent it as a comment to my "Something to talk about" post:I try to involve new and more people in my creative process so they can own and sell part of the story. Designers, editors, writers, painters, etc. My first two CD's "Escritorio" and "acantilado" were overwhelmed with my name in … [Read more...]

ADDED LATER: The future of classical music connection. Too often we worship at the shrine of the great composers, and react as if every note they wrote needs to be taken very seriously. Which means we sometimes miss the most obvious things that -- if we found them in something that isn't classical music -- we'd react to instantly. In this case, what we might not get is that Shostakovich was a 22 year-old brat when he wrote The Nose in the 1920s, and that -- unrestrained brattiness here -- he piled on 1920s ironies that just don't mean very much … [Read more...]

As a comment to my "Getting around" post (though really to the piece about composers that I wrote for Peabody Magazine and spoke about in the post)), Xavier Losada wrote this:I totally agree with you! We need to find our audience day after day.That's the real tough part of our journey as composers. We need to practice, we need to listen, we need to record, we need to criticize us, we need to a lot of stuff, but to find our audience! How should we eat that? I believe in our music evolution (composer's evolution) as a main part of the strategy, … [Read more...]

I've written a piece about composers and their audience for Peabody Magazine, a publication of the Peabody Institute. It's the kind of thing some people might call a provocation, but I don't mean it that way. i think it's about a simply truth -- that classical composers on the whole don't have a true audience, and that they ought to go out and find one. Which I hope will be part of what happens as I continue working at the University of Maryland. (At College Park, by the way, since I'm thinking some people since I didn't say otherwise, think I … [Read more...]

This, too, is a "solutions" post. I've mentioned that I'm artist in residence this year and next at the University of Maryland, with a mandate to work with students at the music school there, to help them develop concerts where they'd reach an audience their own age. This follows, of course, from my work at Maryland last summer, where I spoke to students at the National Orchestral Institute, who then went out and took control of one of their concerts, to extraordinary effect. I blogged about that, here, here, and here. The key to what happened … [Read more...]

A solution from Melissa Dunphy, which is cited on our "Solutions" page, but deserves to be read in full. Melissa sent it as a comment (thanks, Melissa):Not to toot my own horn (OK, I am tooting my own horn; we composers sometimes have to do whatever we can to get attention), but I wrote a political cantata that was performed in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival last year, received a fair bit of national press, including features in the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.[Greg says: tooting horns is allowed. … [Read more...]

A followup -- more constructive, maybe -- to my multicomment-inspiring post on the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. (And Janine Jansen.)Call this another in my "solutions" series. So let's say we agree that many classical performances need to be reinvigorated. Not because they're awful, not because they're not committed and vigorous, but because there's something somewhat impersonal about them. That would have many causes; the emphasis on precision, and the emphasis (in music schools) on playing in proper style (so that classical music becomes a … [Read more...]

This will be a hard post to write, and I hope it won't be a downer. But I heard two dismaying performances this week, and I want to understand what dismayed me. Both performances were by young musicians. One was Janine Jansen playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Concertgebuow Orchestra in Washington, and the other, also in Washington (and also at the Kennedy Center) was by the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. The chamber orchestra seemed in advance like a dream come true, for anyone who wants classical music to change. Young musicians, … [Read more...]

I'm going to need a new kind of title for these "solutions" posts.But first -- the "Solutions" blog page is now up, accessible in the "Resources" section of the blog, on the right. Or of course through the link in the last sentence. Many, many thanks to Douglas Laustsen, who was one of the people who volunteered to help with this, and who created the page and will maintain and update it. (And on the subject of volunteers. I'm developing a variety of projects, all connected with the subject of this blog, and I can always use help. Thanks to … [Read more...]