This just occured to me. Classical music purists insist that classical music is valuable precisely because it isn't popular. Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You define classical music as not popular, and its look and feel starts to reflect that. People -- no fools they -- start to get the message, and classical music actually becomes unpopular. People stop listening to it. And so the purists get their wish, though not quite in the way they expected. They hadn't figured that if classical music wasn't popular, it might disappear. … [Read more...]

Here's an e-mail I got from a friend this week, someone who works in the classical music business in New York. No need to say anything to introduce it. It speaks, wistfully, for itself: So this weekend I finally got around to screening some of the DVD's of the Bernstein Young People's Concerts; it's amazing how far we HAVEN'T come.  Who could imagine a Music Director actually leading a series to help people learn how to listen, and a national TV network broadcasting it?  And they're GOOD.    Then I went to MOMA, and I … [Read more...]

There's a lesson for classical music -- and especially big classical music institutions -- in the Arts section of today's New York Times. One of the lead stories (by Julie Salamon, whose byline is always worth looking for) is about Warhammer, a cult wargame played with intricately hand-painted toy soldiers. There was a Warhammer tournament in the visitors' plaza at NASA's Space Center in Houston. And why there? Listen to Mike Wampler, the sales manager at NASA's Space Center: Sixty percent of our visitors weren't born when NASA accomplished … [Read more...]

My wife was walking through Central Park, looking at The Gates. Perched on top of one of them was a hawk, eating its prey -- something large, my wife said, maybe a pigeon or even a squirrel. And down below stood a crowd of people, watching the hawk eat. Only in New York! … [Read more...]

Someone from an orchestra suggested that I shouldn't have talked about changes in cultural weather. If classical music isn't so popular now, or people aren't buying subscriptions to orchestra concerts, this isn't (my correspondent thinks) a change in cultural weather. It's a change in cultural climate. Weather changes daily; climate changes last for centuries. So a change in climate is far more serious -- and that, my correspondent feels, is what we're facing now. I've since found that this distinction is much debated among orchestra marketing … [Read more...]

I want to thank many people for their responses -- both by e-mail and in person -- to my January 20 post on the classical music crisis. Perhaps the most striking came from two highly placed people deep within the biz, who both thought things were worse than I'd said. And very informative comments came from people who either corrected me, or added crisis points I hadn't thought of. I knew, of course, that I was only taking a preliminary measure of the crisis, subject to modification and elaboration later on. So thanks to Lisa Hirsch, an … [Read more...]

Suppose orchestras knew they were in desperate trouble -- trouble so bad that they could see extinction looming. Or if not extinction, then at least a sharp cutback in their operations. Should they talk about this publicly? Maybe not. It's hard to raise money when extinction looms. "We're asking you [says the orchestra to a wealthy donor, or corporation or foundation] for two million dollars. Oh, and we might be out of business three years from now." Understandably, orchestras might not want to go there. They might think, "Well, we've got a … [Read more...]

Last week, I did the second concert this season in the "Symphony with a Splash" I plan and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony. These are concerts for people who don't normally go to hear the orchestra; we do short pieces (including single movements of long pieces), with commentary from me. This time we tried something really challenging -- John Cage's famous silent piece, 4'33", with the second of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra coming just before and after it. We could get away with this because our theme was "Are You Crazy?" -- and we … [Read more...]

The following showed up in my e-mail today. It was from the New England Conservatory, but (with no disrespect to NEC's public relations department), the animating spirit here -- the person who made the press release so convincing -- is Benjamin Zander, music director of the Boston Philharmonic, whose descriptions of music he's performing have wowed me before. And maybe what follows is a little over the top, but how many press releases (or advertisements, or marketing brochures) do we see that make classical music even a little bit appealing? … [Read more...]

Very interesting story linked in ArtsJournal about John Eliot Gardiner, and how he's making his own CDs. That's a growing trend, of course, and I should have mentioned it in my "dimensions of the crisis" point about classical recording. Musicians can make CDs on their own, and get their music out no matter what happens to classical record companies. The London Symphony does it, the San Francisco Symphony does it, composer Michael Torke has done it, and of course lots of people do it in pop. Why not? Take control of your own destiny! But one … [Read more...]

Antonio Celaya e-mailed, quite wonderfully, from Oakland, California, about his experience with a wide-awake opera audience. With his permission, I'll share what he wrote. Thanks, Antonio! Taruskin's description of baroque opera in Italy had much in common with a performance I attended recently.  In fact, after the performance I wrote to friends and compared my experience to what opera must have been like in Venice during carnavale.    I attended the opening night of SF Opera's production of Ligeti's "Le Grand … [Read more...]

For the benefit of my Juilliard class -- and because I don't know any writing that sets forth, in full gory detail, the extent of the classical-music crisis -- I'm going to list some of the ways classical music is in trouble. I'm taking this from remarks I made on a panel at the music critics' conference in New York back in October. 1. There's less media coverage than there used to be, maybe drastically less. In the early '80s, as a critic/columnist for The Village Voice, I could write long and serious classical music essays. They don't run … [Read more...]

I knew something was wrong -- at least to me -- just a few bars into the overture, when I saw Handel's Rodelinda at the Met last month. I feel a little churlish saying this, because the production was lovely and serious, and the Met orchestra, in part simply because the strings played without much vibrato, transformed itself into a passable version of a period instrument ensemble. But still I thought something was wrong. The orchestra sounded too thin. At intermission I did exactly what I later found someone else in the music business had done … [Read more...]

Here's something that happened at a concert at Symphony Space in New York, given jointly by the Ying Quartet and the Turtle Island String Quartet. It was a brave event for the Yings. The Turtle Island String Quartet plays jazz and improvises, the Yings normally don't. But (though only their cellist improvised at this concert) they stretched themselves very happily into Turtle Island territory. This in itself is a sign of changes happening in classical music, but that's not the only thing I want to mention here. What especially struck me is … [Read more...]

On January 8 I spoke on a panel at the National Opera Association convention. This was a panel of very diverse composers -- myself, Ned Rorem, John Eaton, Eric Salzman, and Jack Beeson. I don't want to diminish what anyone said (Ned, as always, was adorably Ned; Jack was wonderfully witty; Eric had forceful things to say about music theater that isn't opera, and doesn't use operatic singing), but I was especially taken with John, whom, alone of this group, I'd never met before. His presentation fell into three parts. First a fetching anecdote … [Read more...]