[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Q3lLIvq9OQOFPqtEqcFaEV5ajAx8rG11"] [From Greg: Full disclosure. I got to know Liza when she hired me as a consultant. But we worked only on a very modest plan to launch her project, a plan that turned out not to be needed. Maybe I encouraged her in some helpful way, but the stunning success she's been having comes from things she did entirely on her own. Go, Liza!] In a series of guest blogs, I've talked about my Go-Go Symphony, a composition that combines original classical music with the go-go beat, Washington … [Read more...]
From Liza Figueroa Kravinsky: You scratch my back…
From time to time, Liza Figueroa Kravinsky has been guest-blogging here about how she's developing her Go-Go Symphony, an ensemble that combines classical music with Go-Go, the iconic dance music of Washington, DC. One reason her group is unusual is that the crossover is rooted in the people involved. Instead of having, as I've sometimes seen, classical musicians playing in a pop style, pop musicians writing classical music, or shotgun marriages in which a pop artist guests with a classical group, without much true artistic interchange — … [Read more...]
from Liza Figuroa Kravinsky: Challenging an assumption
I am a composer in her fifties, so a New York Times article about how innovators get better with age piqued my interest. According to the article, The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s. And two of the biggest-selling authors of fiction for 2012 — Suzanne Collins and E. L. James — are around 50… According to research, the age of eventual Nobel Prize winners when making a discovery, and of inventors when making a significant breakthrough, averaged around 38 in 2000, an increase of about six years … [Read more...]
From Liza Kravinsky: Go-go symphony marketing (1)
It's time for me to plan a marketing strategy for the go-go symphony, my composition that plays symphonic music over Washington DC's unique go-go dance beat. I figure that blogging about my thought process would help me think, so here we go. But first some basic information for the uninitiated: As I explained in more detail in my last blog post, go-go is a sub genre of funk that has been extremely popular in the Washington DC area since the 1970s, especially with African Americans. Its main feature is live swinging polyrhythm — endless … [Read more...]
From Liza Figueroa Kravinsky: More hope than you realize
[From Greg: Here's another guest blogger. I met Liza Kravinsky maybe a year ago, when she hired me as a consultant, to help her work out a strategy for launching the project she describes here. The things we talked about don't enter into her post; maybe they'll come up in later posts she might make, or maybe they won't. That doesn't matter, because what I loved was the project itself. And especially the way that it didn't simply combine pop and classical music — that's been done quite a lot — but also brought together pop and classical … [Read more...]