Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Here's a new idea for concert dress, or new at least to me -- a new (and none too wonderful) thought about what classical musicians should wear when they play. It comes from New York's Eos Orchestra, whom I heard this past weekend playing smart, tactile, wry, and often touching music by Peter Lieberson, a good man and good composer. The musicians wore black pants, and black Eos t-shirts; "Yuck" might be one quick reaction. The whole thing looked to me like a crass promotion, but then I don't have much affection for Eos, which gets a lot of … [Read more...]

Here's something -- in the spirit of finding meaning in classical music, and also in keeping sight of the reasons we love it -- that classical music does, and non-classical music can't. It's a wonderful moment in the last act of Wagner's Siegfried. Siegfried has come through the fire, and emerged on the mountaintop where Brünnhilde lies sleeping. The music that shows him braving the fire -- an interlude between the first and second scenes of the last act -- is irrepressibly Wagnerian, huge, grand, and unmistakable. I once walked by a … [Read more...]

I've had some correspondence about my last post, and now I think I may have tangled two issues that ought to be separated. One is what cultural things classical and pop critics refer to in their writing. I said that pop critics often have a wider range of reference than classical critics do, and that sometimes my Juilliard students can't follow what the pop critics talk about. Maybe that's true, but obviously there are people who write about classical music who have a wide range of cultural reference -- Charles Rosen, a profound scholar (at … [Read more...]

Perusing this very ArtsJournal site -- indispensable for me long before I started this blog -- I came across the very sweet Florida Sun-Sentinel story on Ned Rorem's 80th birthday. Now, nothing against Ned, whom I enjoy very much. I even wrote him, in fact, a note telling him my impression of his songs, when I heard them on a multi-day festival of new music in New York, encompassing just about every known musical style, including the most up to date: I thought Ned's songs were the classiest pieces I heard. So, believe me, this isn't meant as … [Read more...]

Godawful photos. That's what I thought as I leafed through the annual directory issue of Chamber Music, the publication of Chamber Music America (which of course is the organization that represents chamber music to our nation). This directory issue is essentially a listing -- apart from a few how-to guides (about marketing, commissioning new pieces, and the like -- of chamber music groups, many of them prominently splashed over glossy pages in ads bought by their managements. So there they were, ensemble after ensemble, presented in … [Read more...]

"Experience a live orchestra concert. It may delight you, comfort you, or inspire you...but it will move you." That's the slogan on the American Symphony Orchestra League's "Find a Concert" website, designed to attract new listeners to orchestra performances. I'm not going to comment on the slogan or the site, because I'm part of this effort by the League. They hired me to write descriptions of selected events, picked by various orchestras as ideal for first-time concertgoers. These are on the site. They're longer versions of the kind of … [Read more...]

Belatedly -- I've had a lot of scrambling to do, to catch up with my normal life after my long vacation -- I want to tell you about a performance of my Quartet for Anne, in Milwaukee this Sunday. The Fine Arts Quartet, bless them, are giving the piece what we can't call its world premiere, because I wrote it for my wife's birthday two years ago, and surprised her with a performance in our living room. That, as far as we're concerned, was the world premiere. So this very welcome Fine Arts performance is being billed, very simply, as the … [Read more...]

  Well, we’re back, my wife and I, after an idyllic month in England -- in a 17th century cottage, next to hillsides full of sheep, with dramatic hilltops, wide skies, and striking light on the fields and hills. We worked hard on projects dear to our hearts, with nothing to distract us. It was like having our own arts colony. I wrote chunks of a big, strange string quartet, a set of variations on the theme of the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony.   Among many other things, the piece looks back on the history of classical … [Read more...]

Sandow the blog -- and Sandow the individual -- are going on vacation. We'll both be gone almost a month, happily retreating to the countryside in the north of England, to relax and compose. Look for us again the second week of September. And thanks so much to everyone for making the first month of this so wonderfully stimulating! I'll still be getting e-mail, so if anybody wants to get in touch, I won't be completely gone. Just, perhaps, a little slow, relaxed, and wonderfully lazy… Have a good month, everyone. I'll look forward to resuming … [Read more...]

People reading me continue to write, sending thoughtful, interesting, provocative stuff. I want to post a lot of it, but for the moment only have time for a little. I'll post more (I promise!) when I get back from vacation. My apologies to people whom I'd asked for permission to quote, who haven't yet seen their comments here. I'd hoped to get more in now, but the last few days were pretty hectic. From Donald Clarke, author of a forceful book, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (which you can find here): It always astonishes me when I go … [Read more...]

I wrote earlier about Gregory McCallum, and his project in North Carolina -- bringing his piano to every county in the state, to play concerts, give master classes, and work with schools. Unfortunately, he had to curtail his plans, as he explained in an e-mail to me: This project was to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the invention of the piano by a series of residencies in every county in North Carolina over a four-year period. To ensure that audiences would experience piano music at its best, I insured my Yamaha C7 grand with Lloyds of … [Read more...]

I had to drive a lot over the past two days, and started out with CDs to listen to. All for a project I'm doing with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Pictures at an Exhibition, both the piano version and the orchestral one. Piano version: Evgeny Kissin (who plays the "Promenade" as something fiercer than someone strolling through a gallery; a triumphant army, maybe). Orchestral version: Gergiev (oddly restrained, though maybe I'm wrong, because for my work purposes I didn't have to hear much of his recording; or myabe he just seemed restrained … [Read more...]

Not everyone agrees with what I said about classical music on TV. My faithful correspondent Marla Carew writes: When I saw the PBS special on Turandot at the Forbidden City a few years ago it was instrumental in reigniting my interest in devoting more of my listening time and attendance to opera and classical music. I suspect that PBS broadcasts affected more than a few of us who don't live in cultural hot spots like NYC in this way. Too bad that we're losing that chance (in favor of middling programs like the History Detectives (I may have … [Read more...]

From Drew McManus (who's also shown up in Andrew Taylor's blog, and from whom we'll be hearing more), comes this, about classical music on TV: When I take a group of adult students to a rehearsal or talk to them about what to look for at the symphony, I mention many of the same things you mentioned in the footnote to "Opera troubles": I'd love to see an orchestra televised a different way. Instead of showing us the horns when they play, show us the horn players emptying spit out of their instruments, as they'll do several times during a … [Read more...]

Reading ArtsJournal is indeed an education. (And let me say that I'd been reading this site daily, long before I was ever asked to blog this blog.) Today I hope you noticed the item about niche cable channels. Yesterday I carried on about the limits of niches -- how some niches were surely just too small to support themselves. And then today I read about the Puppy Channel. Only a proposal, so far, but who knows? Maybe it'll fly. And if it does, I give up. Bring on the Asparagus Channel, and the Godard Network. Yesterday I said they couldn't … [Read more...]