Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Followup to my post on Renée Fleming's American Voices festival at the Kennedy Center (which featured classical, pop, jazz, country, Broadway, and gospel singing): Pop, jazz, and classical singers have some of the same problems. As I said in my previous post, I couldn't attend the masterclass for classical singers, which Eric Owens taught. But Anne (Anne Midgette, my wife, who did attend, and reviewed the festival for the Washington Post) said he told the students not to pump out a big operatic sound, but instead to build meaning from the … [Read more...]

That's a phrase you might have seen me use, when I've talked about closing the gap between classical music and the rest of our culture. But the person who said those words at the Kennedy Center in Washington the weekend before Thanksgiving ago wasn't me. It was Renée Fleming, who of course is one of the most famous classical musicians alive, and who's knocked down walls herself by recording albums of jazz (here, here) and even indie rock. She used the phrase at the Kennedy Center because she was knocking walls down again, this time by … [Read more...]

On Facebook and Twitter I’ve been talking about bad graphic design in classical music. Why does bad design matter? Because we need a new audience. Our new audience comes — will come — from the outside world, where good design is everywhere, taken for granted when you’re dealing with professionals. If we can’t match that, we look like we don't function in the real word. That we're not professional. That what we do can't be very good. Which, to put it mildly, isn’t in our interest. I'll give an example -- the Kennedy Center program book. Not … [Read more...]

A colleague teaching an entrepreneurship course at a major music school emailed this question: I’m planning my entrepreneurship class for the spring and I used to have an exercise (using your blog actually) that required students to write a press release. This now seems kind of futile to me, since press releases, well, they are so analogue. Do you have any ideas about what I could replace this with? I like the notion of students having to publicize (and articulate) their projects. Blog post? Personal letter? Here's how I answered: You're … [Read more...]

From Greg: Erica helps us here with a question many of us ask. If we break the traditional silence of the concert hall — and the sitting motionless that goes with it — will people still listen with the care and attention we expect? You'll see that she herself wondered about this, but by taking part in something she'd never tried before, she learned… But let her tell you.  I almost always play the role of the "good girl" but a few weekends ago I found myself in a position where I was being glared at with obvious distaste and disgust within the … [Read more...]

From Greg:  Victoria will explain how she and I happened to meet, and strike sparks from each other. What excited me was the large audience she gets for the American Modern Ensemble, the new music group she runs with her composer husband, Robert Paterson. I fear I can be a broken record on the subject of audience, but I'm not going to stop saying that classical music needs new listeners. At new music concerts I'm saddened by seeing only 20 or 30 people in the audience, or seeing a repeating group of insiders, And I'm saddened, too, when I hear … [Read more...]

It's been liberating, I have to confess — not writing the blog for a bit, while I keep up my intense travel schedule. New York (from Washington) every week, and then, from the second week in October, a trip to DePauw University to continue my work with the music school there, a trip to Dubuque to help a community music school evolve a strategic plan. And then Boston to speak (twice) at a conference (and serve on a panel). And last week DePauw again, and this week Los Angeles. There I'll be joining Doug McLennan, founder of ArtsJournal and my … [Read more...]

From Greg I've been in email touch with Jeff Nytch for a few years. We have a mutual close friend, and of course a shared interest in teaching entrepreneurship at music schools. Last spring, Jeff invited me to speak at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he runs the music school's entrepreneurship program. But what Jeff writes about here goes beyond any friend-of-friendship, or any speaking engagement. Jeff is not just an entrepreneurship teacher. He's an entrepreneur, and tells us here how he used entrepreneurship — defined much more … [Read more...]

I've been dashing about. Two weeks ago — and twice since the start of September —  I've been at the DePauw University School of Music, plunging into my intensive consultantcy, working with faculty, students, and the dean to help define the school's radical new curriculum. And last week I was in Dubuque, IA, helping the Northeast Iowa School of Music — a spirited community music school — evolve a strategic plan for future growth. This turned out to be as gratifying as my DePauw work. They're terrific people in Dubuque, and to judge from the … [Read more...]

From the New York Times Book Review a week ago, a Q&A with Scott Turow: What was the last truly great book you read? When I noticed that Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” had won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2010, I ranted about contemporary culture, so celebrity-besotted that we were now giving vaunted literary prizes to rock stars. Then I read the book. It is profound and unique, a perfectly wrought account of what it means to give your life to art and to another person. I expect it to be read with wonder for a long … [Read more...]

The first of my timeline posts offered two snapshots of classical music coverage in Time magazine — which declined (a lot) in recent decades. That shows us classical music receding from mainstream culture. Or mainstream culture moving away from classical music. Now, in my second timeline post, I'll quote an overview of the crisis from Ron Nadel, who posted it as a comment to the first of the posts I've been doing on the classical music crisis, the one where I asked how long the crisis has been going on. Note that it's based on his own … [Read more...]

I'm continuing my posts about the classical music crisis, and I'm coming now to the crisis timeline, which will how and when the crisis developed, decade by decade. I started these posts by asking when the crisis began. Here are some answers, in three parts. First, two snapshots. Then, tomorrow, a savvy overview, written as a comment to my original post. And on Thursday a detailed timeline. Two snapshots. First: a graph showing mentions of the word "orchestra," tracked year by year through every issue of Time magazine from its founding in … [Read more...]

Many of us know that the Philadelphia Orchestra couldn't kick off Carnegie Hall's season, as planned, because of a brief strike by Carnegie's stagehands. Their concert was cancelled. So what did they do? They gave a free concert -- dressed in colorful, informal clothes — in their hall in Philadelphia. 2200 people showed up. And clearly had fun. Before the concert, there was a conducting competition. For members of the audience. A nine year-old won, and -- what a prize for a contest winner — conducted the orchestra in the end of … [Read more...]

I've mentioned here and on Facebook a consulting job I said I couldn't talk about, because the project it's part of hadn't been made public. But now that project has been announced, so here's the news. The DePauw University School of Music is revolutionizing its curriculum — I don't think that's too strong — to focus on training what it calls 21st century musicians. Which means musicians who make careers in new ways, give new kinds of classical performances, and find new audiences. Other schools, of course, have entrepreneurship programs, … [Read more...]