Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

I want to write about something serious, something which - I think - is one of the most serious problems facing mainstream classical music today. And it's this. Classical music organizations are eagerly doing outreach and education, trying to rebuild the audience and cultural clout that they used to have. These efforts are passionate, intense, and deeply committed. The people engaged in them love classical music with all their hearts, and believe - again with all their hearts - that other people can love it, too. But there's one step they … [Read more...]

This is a big subject. We've discussed it here before. (Here, for instance.) I myself don't like the "vs" part, since I enjoy pop and classical music more or less equally, with no thought of pitting one against the other. But I can see that many people don't think that way. In a recent discussion in my Juilliard class on the future of classical music, some of the students defined the value of classical music by saying that it was spiritual, or that it had a great range of emotion. I realized that in saying these things, they were also making … [Read more...]

My last post sparked some lively discussion, including interesting comments from Ryan Tracy, who runs the Counter Critic site. One thing Ryan said left me thinking. He named (almost wistfully, I thought) Ani DiFranco as an example of an alternative rock figure with a small audience, and offered the hope that classical music, too, could accept small performances for relatively few people. Which of course -- in a way -- it always does. One quick (and crude) take on Ryan's point might be that classical music, compared to pop, is a niche genre, … [Read more...]

Problem: How to attract a young audience Solution: I've written about this before, here and here. You can almost infallibly attract a younger audience if you combine classical music with indie rock. (I'm assuming, of course, that you do this well -- that you choose the right indie bands, and produce the concert in the right way.) The London Sinfonietta proved this years ago, and (in the first link, above) I've talked about Wordless Music, a concert series in New York that also offers proof. Last year, their first, they offered just a few … [Read more...]

First and most important -- best holiday wishes, warmest holiday greetings, to everyone who reads this blog. I'm grateful for your interest, your support, your disagreement, your e-mail, and your comments, whether on my side or not. As many of you have been kind enough to say, we've had some good discussions here, and I'm sure they'll continue through 2008. Next year should be interesting for me. (Understatement!) As many of you know, my wife, Anne Midgette, is going to be interim chief classical music critic for the Washington Post, replacing … [Read more...]

Myth: The classical music audience has always been the age it is now. A lot of people still believe this. But -- as regular readers here know -- I've discovered that the myth isn't true. Reality: The audience used to be much younger. Source for this? Studies done in 1937, 1955, and the early 1960s, combined with statistics the National Endowment has been compiling since 1982. I've never seen any data -- any at all -- that supports the myth. Of course I've posted on this subject before, here and here. But now I've gotten something new. In … [Read more...]

Now the New York Times has joined the New York City Opera party, adding "new details" (it says) to the story that just surfaced in an AP story, on the Parterre Box blog, and in one of my own posts about incoming director Gerard Mortier allegedly cancelling the 2008-9 season. The Times story has one curiosity. Mortier, reportedly, doesn't like City Opera's past productions. Asked about that, he says he might keep some of them, including Jonathan Miller's famous Little Italy Rigoletto, "which [says the Times] he called 'a famous production,' … [Read more...]

ArtsJournal had a link today to an AP story, which ran in USA Today. So my item on the company's startling plan was right on target -- the company really might cancel is 2008-09 season. City Opera's board chairman Susan Baker spins the thing very smoothly, making it sound like the most natural thing in the world, as if singers' managers (if we believe what Parterre Box reported) weren't being stonewalled when they ask about their artists' contracts for next year. Not that USA Today seems to have asked about that, though Parterre Box (which … [Read more...]

Stockhausen just died. I've always gotten a big kick out of his music. And I think -- maybe controversially -- that he's been underappreciated in the classical world, and found his most important fans outside it. How could he not be appreciated in the classical world, when any history of music after 1945 will tell you that Stockhausen and Boulez were the two kingpins of the European serial and post-serial avant-garde? In the '60s and beyond, everything Stockhausen wrote was recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon. There were many books … [Read more...]

Yesterday a friend told me some surprising news -- that Gerard Mortier, the incoming director of the New York City Opera wants to cancel the company's 2008-9 season. That's right. No City Opera performances at all. And my friend seems to have impeccable sources. And today the same news surfaced on the ineffable (and drop-dead accurate) Parterre Box opera blog. Check it out! La Cieca, the onlie begetter of Parterre Box, has pretty much the same story I do. Mortier wants to shut down the New York City Opera for a year. One reason, the public … [Read more...]

Erich Stem put something very well in his presentation at the DePauw symposium I spoke at. (See my last post.) He asked whether classical music faced death -- or a paradigm shift? I'm sure it's the latter. And part of the new paradigm would be all sorts of non-conventional performances, string quartets in clubs, new music groups (there seem to be more of them every day), exploding numbers of releases on indie classical record labels, and much, much more. But there's one big question about the new paradigm (or, if you like post-classical … [Read more...]

Last Wednesday, I flew to Indiana for a "Post-Classical Symposium" at the DePauw University School of Music -- and it was just a fabulous event. Some of the high points: Hearing classical music students -- freshmen and sophomores -- play a concert of improvised music Hearing the first concert of the DePauw New Music Ensemble, with a truly unusual program Getting to know the terrific people in eighth blackbird, who're in residence at DePauw Hearing a concert by the Bang on a Can All-Stars (not that I don't hear them in New York, but … [Read more...]

Deutsche Grammophon has just unveiled a new download site, where all of us can buy their classical recordings, including many that have long been out of print on CD. And all of this without DRM! ("Digital Rights Management," which means the kind of copy-protection that up to now has beenalmost universal when we buy downloads (though the tide is starting to shift, not only at DG, but also on iTunes and at Amazon, where all downloads are DRM-free). A good thing, obviously. But the day it was announced, I got an amazed e-mail from someone who … [Read more...]

Some comic relief. Pinchas Zuckerman, uneasy about the future of classical music, and squirming helplessly as he moans about it in the Denver Post, let fly with this: If [classical music isn't] synonymous with our existence, or [isn't so to] at least 5 to 6 percent of the population, then society will become a jungle. And we don't want to see riots as we saw them in the '60s, because that was chaos. Classical music as a civilizing force -- that's a gratifying myth (idealistic at best, self-congratulatory at worst) that we've all met … [Read more...]

I'm withdrawing my "Indie pop footnotes" post. It had some mistakes, some due to my carelessness, some from misinformation. What follows is (I hope) more accurate. It follows up on my earlier post about Sufjan Stevens making history -- maybe -- at BAM. Other indie rock people have done work with orchestras. I've heard, for instance, about this happening in Australia. Ben Folds has appeared with many Australian orchestras, with whom he sometimes improvises, even in songs where they might simply be backing him. The DVD of him playing with … [Read more...]