Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Maybe a month ago I mentioned I book I plan to write; I said I'd draft it online, and welcome comments from anyone who reads it. And since I mentioned it again in my previous post, I'd better give an update. The book is happening. I won't draft it on this blog, but on another, more public, site to be announced. I hope that I'll begin to post my draft sometime this month. Watch for announcements! The plan, so far, is to post a new installment every two weeks, with time off for holidays, and maybe other breaks as well. Between installments, I'll … [Read more...]

I might have seemed to take a hard line in my post on Dr. Atomic, in which I said the subject of the piece has been pondered endlessly elsewhere, for decades, and that therefore this work doesn’t do much to establish opera as an art form we might look to for illumination of our current lives. But I stand by that, and I’ll even go further.Nixon in China (the first opera John Adams created with Peter Sellars, along with librettist Alice Hoffman) didn’t do much for the art form, either. I went to the New York premiere, two decades or so ago, … [Read more...]

I haven't seen Dr. Atomic, the new John Adams/Peter Sellars opera. But I did notice something Sellars said about the piece, quoted from Tony Tommasini's New York Times review of the premiere: As Mr. Sellars explained in a preperformance talk, Oppenheimer understood that by pushing science to new limits he would unleash barely imaginable forces in the world and even more fearsome forces within mankind. But he willed himself to turn off the part of his brain that processes ethical qualms about his work. The "best people" in Washington will make … [Read more...]

In the October Vanity Fair—the one with Paris Hilton on the cover, covering her breasts in a way that looks like a commercial provocation, not a sexual one—there’s a two-page spread on Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. The photo, spread over the two pages, is wonderful, relaxed, friendly, a little impish, just as Franz is in real life. Congrats to everyone involved in placing this lovely tribute. But also some questions: Franz, as I said, looks wonderfully informal in the photo. But anyone who goes to a … [Read more...]

A few further thoughts on the New York City Opera, their $25 ticket promotion (for two special performances), and their ways of attracting a new audience. As I wrote, I saw one of those $25 performances—the opera was Butterfly, with a greeting from the stage at the start, and video introductions to the first two acts—and thought it was quite a success. But now what? Doing this once doesn’t mean much, and in fact might even alienate the audience that the promotion attracted. “We thought they cared about us, and now…?” So what’s the … [Read more...]

Here’s something good—something the New York City Opera did on the second and third nights of this season. On the second night (having opened the night before somewhat conventionally, with a new production), they had a gala. All seats were $25, and not all the music was classical. Rufus Wainwright sang; he’s a big opera fan. And the gala finished with the East Village Opera Company, who do dance versions of opera hits. (They’re hardly the only group that’s done this, but their versions—try “La donna è mobile”—are especially tasty.) Of … [Read more...]

Here are provocative (and very useful) thoughts from Eric Barnhill, a pianist I met when he was in one of my Juilliard courses, the first year I taught there, way back in 1997. He e-mailed me as follows (and of course I’ve posted this with his permission): A belated [reply to] something you blogged in August re: regional groups. Not only are regional ensembles unsung heroes of classical music, I think there is a lot of untapped, appealing material with regional or second-tier groups that they can use to an advantage over "star" ensembles. … [Read more...]

I’m back in action, after what I could call a stimulating rest. It’s exhilarating to move into a new house, especially a gorgeous one (if I do say so), which my wife and I helped design. Spacious, comfortable, views on all four sides, with windows everywhere to bring the views to us, plus three decks and two porches…my reward for challenging the sacred cows of the classical music world? Nah. The only cows  I see are the ones in the field across the road. There’s also a fox who comes around (we think she lives with us, because we’ve found … [Read more...]

I'm on vacation; have been for a week, in fact. So most likely no posts here till after Labor Day. We've moved into a new country house, which we've been building for more than a year. Now it's finished. Exhilarating! When the blog resumes, I'm eager to make many posts. More about pop music and pop culture -- I've gotten some very thoughtful objections to what I've been saying, which help me refine my thoughts. And then there's the aging audience; I have some striking data. And finally I'm going to write a book on the future of classical … [Read more...]

Linked on ArtsJournal today is a fabulous “critic’s notebook” by New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn, about the way orchestras program new music. Or, rather, about one way that they don’t program it.  Allan had heard a piece at Tanglewood that knocked him out—Stephen Stucky’s Second Concerto for Orchestra, which was premiered a year or so ago by the LA Philharmonic, and won the Pulitzer Prize this year. And so Allan asked why he had to wait this long to hear it: While intending no disrespect to the Tanglewood Music Center or its superb … [Read more...]

When I went to the Glimmerglass Opera a few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend—Carleton Clay, principal trumpet in the Glimmerglass Orchestra, and also a composer and music professor at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. He’s been principal trumpet at Glimmerglass ever since the company was founded, 30 years go. I’ve known him since a couple of years after that, when I was working for the New York State Council on the Arts. My job was to evaluate grant applications  in music (I was one of four people doing that). One year we … [Read more...]

In my last post, I talked about walking in New York, and some classical music trivia I ran into. But there’s more to say about walking. It was heavily hot, almost unbelievably so. If I came out from an air conditioned store, the heat was a shock, no matter how many times I encountered it. The air seemed to weigh three times what it normally does. The streets were full of people, though, at least in the places I walked. And walking was disruptive. Every time I’d pass a store, and someone was coming out of it or going in, a blast of cold … [Read more...]

Walking in New York; hot weather, the temperature up as high as 99. Walking is good for me, says the current fad, echoed by my body, which feels toned and alive after walking miles on shopping trips. But then I’ve breathed enough exhaust to give me cancer faster than a lifetime of second-hand smoke. The air is foul. As I’m walking downtown on Broadway, I stop at LincolnCenter to buy some bottled water. I want to sit and drink it by the fountain. They’re charging $3 a bottle, for Aquafina—Pepsi-Cola water, a product of the Pepsi-Cola company—so … [Read more...]

I raise a lot of perilous questions here on my blog, but sometimes my life in classical music seems completely old-fashioned. I talk to people in the music business about music. I might e-mail with a conductor friend, commisserating about the orchestra he’s conducting at a leading European opera house, which turns out to be full of musicians who don’t like Bellini. Or I go to the Glimmerglass Opera, and see Massenet’s little one-act trifle, The Portrait of Manon, and even though the piece is so slight it’s hardly worth performing, I find myself … [Read more...]

One of the dumbest, most ignorant, and most insulting things I’ve heard in the present culture debates is that younger people have a short attention span. Where did that come from? I won’t try to unearth the history of that insane assertion, other than to suggest that it might in part derive from conventional wisdom about MTV—the videos, supposedly, have a lot of quick cuts, which then infected movies, commercials, and just about everything else in our culture, creating undemanding fodder for people who can’t keep a thought in their head for … [Read more...]