Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

A couple of weeks ago I asked a question -- how many people would like to see more inside information in reviews and other writing about classical music? As an example, I told a story from the New York Philharmonic. Semyon Bychkov had replaced Christoph von Dohnanyi one weekend, and had substituted the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony for most of the music Dohnanyi had planned to conduct. The Shostakovich, though, is a very expensive piece, because it needs many extra brass players, and so the Philharmonic must have had some special reason for … [Read more...]

Yes, he's glamorous. Yes, he's polished. Yes, he's a wizard of the podium, or some such hackneyed thing. And yes, he's full of larger than life energy. But does anybody really want to hear him? Or, more to the point, will they want to keep on hearing him? What music do we identify him with? Itallian opera. This isn't a criticism, merely a fact. That's the repertoire he's best known for. And otherwise, well, sure, he conducts other things, but do many of us have any sense of what he does with them? Are any of us looking forward to Muti's … [Read more...]

I've been very critical of classical music press releases, which typically say nothing that would give me or anybody else -- and especially someone new to classical music -- any reason to go to the concerts they publicize. Biographies of classical musicians -- the ones we find on press releases, and in program books -- have the same problem. They're deadly. Long blank lists of distinctions and superlatives, and never anything to tell you what kind of artist the musician in question might be. This gets especially annoying when the musician is … [Read more...]

I'm looking at the New York Times' "Arts & Leisure" section, today's edition (it's April 17). The lead story -- "The Long Goodbye: Why the most celebrated departures in njetwork news are still some of the most visible faces on television" -- doesn't concern me here. We all know what it's about, and I don't see a classical music connection. (Hmm…why are the most celebrated dead composers still some of the most visible voices in concert halls? But let's move on.) What does interest me are the other two front-page stories: The Strangest … [Read more...]

Here are thoughts from the opening pages of Paul Light's book, High Performance: How Robust Organizations Achieve Extraordinary Results. It summarizes lessons learned from more than 10,000 studies done over many years by the RAND Corporation, and it's fascinating to read. (How did Volvo, which hadn't changed its ways in many years, figure out how to introduce a successful SUV? Why did Pearl Harbor take the U.S. by surprise, when all the information necessary to suspect that an attack was coming was available?) One of the book's mantras is that … [Read more...]

One way to define the classical music crisis is in terms of shrinkage, starting to happen now, and maybe accelerating in the future -- shrinkage of the number of people interested in classical music, and thus in the market for it, and then in the organizations that perform it. So for anyone who thinks this is a danger, or, worse, even a reality right now, a story linked on ArtsJournal yesterday is really sobering. It's from the Chicago Sun-Times (their music critic, Wynne Delacoma wrote it), and it's about staff cutbacks at the … [Read more...]

Here's something I might add to my list of ways that classical music is in crisis: Even music students now don't seem to have the same interest in classical music that students used to have, years ago. (And as they did when I was a graduate student in composition at the Yale School of Music, from 1972 to 1974). A fair number of my Juilliard students say they never listen to classical music. Of course, they play it all day, and maybe that explains why they don't want to listen when they're not playing. But some of them show no curiosity about … [Read more...]

I was browsing in Coliseum Books, a very fine and serious bookstore in New York, and I noticed that they sell a few CDs. Some were fascinating compilations from the All-Music Guide (African rap, for instance), and some were low-rent, like a two-CD collection of Sousa marches with nothing on the box to say who played them. But the worst, the nadir, the rock bottom was something called Classical Music for the Reader, which claims to feature "specially selected triumphs in classical music appealing specifically to the dedicated reader." And so … [Read more...]

And speaking of Pittsburgh (see two posts earlier), the Symphony has marvelous photos of its musicians, which is uses, in effect, to brand the orchestra. They're all in a delightful book, posed in groups by sections, and individually. And then they're used on the cover of the program book, on posters outside Heinz Hall, where the Symphony plays, and in cutouts standing in various places inside the hall. Here's one of them, showing the oboists, from a program book cover a few months ago. It's friendly, human, inviting, easily the best cover … [Read more...]

Some time ago I wrote about two newspaper articles, one from San Francisco, the other from Cincinnati. Both, I said, seemed to be saying that musical organizations (the San Francisco Opera and the Cincinnati Symphony) were in improved financial shape, when in fact details of the stories made it clear that both were still in trouble. I wondered why the press sometimes seems to go easy on major classical music institutions. But I'm happy to say that the Cincinnati article misled me. Janelle Gelfand, the music critic at the Cincinnati Enquirer, … [Read more...]

I was just in Pittsburgh, where I did the last of my "Symphony with a Splash" concerts this season. We shaved someone's head on stage during the Bacchanal from Samson and Dalilah. We asked for volunteers from the audience, and got several, including one player from the Pittsburgh Steelers! I picked someone else, though, who'd caught my eye the moment he stood up. Our haircutter was both expert and theatrical. She actually shaved the guy's head in rhythm with the music, and paced herself so she'd finish with a flourish, just as the music … [Read more...]

Semyon Bychkov has been conducting the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony at the New York Philharmonic. He's substituting for Christoph von Dohnanyi, who was going to conduct something else. But for Bychkov, the Philharmonic changed the program to the Shostakovich Seventh. The New York Times review gave a little background, saying that Bychkov had recorded the symphony. As it happens, he'd also conducted it in Pittsburgh the week before. It wasn't surprising, then, that when he agreed to replace Dohnanyi on short notice he wanted to do the piece … [Read more...]

Like my post on marketing, what follows comes from conversations with many people, and from one consulting job. Let's say you run an orchestra, or work in a high position at one. You know you have to change, and one obvious change is to become more accessible, more transparent, more understandable to everybody in your city. And so you start looking at the face you present to your public. You look at all the printed matter you produce -- your brochures, for instance, and your program book. Pretty quickly you find things that ought to change. … [Read more...]

Or, really, not a footnote, but a huge piece of art history that had no equivalent in classical music. I'm in Pittsburgh, doing some work with the symphony. I had a day off today, and went to the Andy Warhol Museum, and was just blown away. It's easy to think of Warhol's work as 80% concept, 20% realization (in the form of a compelling art object), but that's just not true. The color, design, and presence of his pieces (the Mao series, for instance) is really stunning. Reproductions don't begin to do them justice, and when I saw many of them … [Read more...]

I loved Josh Kosman's piece on whiny modernist composers, linked from Artsjournal yesterday. Certainly there's a problem here, and in fact a serious historical conundrum. Why hasn't atonal modernist music by composers like Schoenberg and Charles Wuorinen caught on, even after a century (in Schoenberg's case)? Why does the mainstream classical music audience hate it so much?  Josh's piece was brought on by a New York Times interview with Wuorinen, John Harbison, and James Levine (who conducts a lot of atonal modernist music). … [Read more...]