Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

At the dry cleaner this morning I noticed a poster for Rod Stewart's new album, Vol. III of The Great American Songbook, the series of CDs on which he sings old pop standards. And what struck me was the language used to describe what's going on: "The exciting third installment of the spectacular trilogy," or something very like that. And, below it, introducing the list of songs Stewart sings, "Including these classic songs." Now, this is exactly the kind of meaningless boilerplate I complain about in classical music publicity -- empty, … [Read more...]

  I’ve started a project with the Pittsburgh Symphony that’s certainly unusual, and could be extraordinary. The Symphony calls it “talk back,” and the idea is simple enough -- to get the audience talking back to the orchestra about the performances they hear. But it’s extraordinary because orchestras don’t normally consult their audience about music, and don’t set up forums in which their audience can talk to them. I’ve written about this, in a piece that appeared two years ago in Symphony magazine, the publication of the American … [Read more...]

This is a busy time for me—a little too busy, but also wonderful. Here’s a taste of what’s going on, some of which will show up in this blog, at greater length:  This Thursday, October 21, comes the first of the Symphony with a Splash concerts I program and host with the Pittsburgh Symphony, this time with something very personal—a performance of a piece of my own, A Frankenstein Overture. This orchestral music based on my opera Frankenstein, with an extravagant trombone solo (representing the Creature, who’s meant to sound tortured, … [Read more...]

  I keep hearing about my blog posts on publicists – my posts about how bad classical music publicity can be. Sometimes I  hear from publicists, apologizing either after the fact or in advance for problems of the kind I pointed out. (Which were their failure, over and over, to give any real reason why anyone should care about the events they publicize.)   But now I’ve heard from a fellow critic, David Stabler of The Oregonian, in Portland, OR, who’s taken up my crusade. He wrote a fine piece for his paper, looking at … [Read more...]

  I said some harsh things about the state of new music in the mainstream classical world – especially the orchestra world – in my post about the Toronto Symphony.   So here’s a most encouraging response from Curt Long, executive director of the Dayton Philharmonic:   I would say that we include a "moderate" amount of new music in our classical season, balanced with more traditional repertoire (of course, most orchestra's don't even include a moderate amount).  We present a classical series of 9 programs annually, … [Read more...]

Or, rather, no new music in Toronto. I'm talking about the amazing news yesterday about the Toronto Symphony -- they're going to banish new music from their regular season, at least for this year, and stick it off by itself in a few concerts next spring. I imagine many people will be outraged. If you're a serious classical music person,  you're supposed to support new music, and demand that orchestras play it whether their audience likes it or not. But I'd like to take another view. Maybe the Toronto Symphony's management is right. If … [Read more...]

In the past two days, I've talked to two arts professionals who each told me the same troubling thing -- that subscription sales have been dropping strongly, not just in music, but in the other performing arts. (And, within the music world, not just for orchestras, but for opera companies as well. As one of these two people said, the conventional wisdom is that orchestras are in trouble while opera companies are doing fine, but the reality is otherwise.) I haven't tried to check what these two people told me, but they're both in a position to … [Read more...]

Here's something I found in Crescendo 75, a really marvelous book published by the Indianapolis Symphony, to celebrate their 75th anniversary: The issues surrounding a less-than-52-week season [which became an issue for orchestras in the mid-1960s] caused the public to take a look at what these highly-trained professionals had been doing to put bread on the table during the periods of time they were not being paid to perform. An article in The Indianapolis Star of August 23, 1964, shed some light on the typical exploits of those who were … [Read more...]

I'm back from vacation, much refreshed, back to work, but a little frightened of the schedule I, like many New York professionals, take too much for granted -- constant pressure, too much to do, a whirlwind of deadlines, opportunities, and work-for-hire, which all become more than a little demoralizing. Maybe that's related to what I want to talk about today. When we imagine the future of classical music, we think a lot about externals -- a larger, younger, more excited audience, less formal concerts, more new music played, a sense that … [Read more...]

I'm off for two weeks of rest, play, and composing. I'll blog again after Labor Day. Before I go, I want to thank Gavin Borchert for a thoughtful and friendly response to my comments on his Seattle Weekly piece, about the future of classical music. Might be worth quoting, if he'd let me do that, when I get back. But above all, it shows that people can debate very sharply and still be civil, even cheerful about it. Gavin seems like a class act. One thing worth noting, by the way -- his piece is two years old, even though it was linked on … [Read more...]

Gavin Borchert's rant in the Seattle Weekly -- linked today in ArtsJournal -- gives me a good opportunity to sum up some reasons why classical music is in trouble. Borchert ratns that classical music is just fine, and that the whole commotion is mostly hype. Here are reasons why he's wrong: Orchestras that fold [Borchert writes] make headlines; healthy ones don't. A decade ago, it was San Diego and New Orleans; this year, it was San Jose, with Toronto and St. Louis teetering. This is tragic--but it's not the apocalypse. A few baseball teams … [Read more...]

Here's a piece I wrote this summer for the Aspen Festival program book. Comments welcome!   We hear that there's a crisis in classical music, that the audience might disappear and that in fact it's getting smaller. We hear that classical music institutions, even some of the major ones, might be in trouble, and that they aren't selling enough tickets, or raising enough money.   But here I don’t want to look at the complex facts and figures of the apparent decline, nor the innovations in performance (video screens at orchestral … [Read more...]

In today's New York Times, Paul Griffiths -- a very poetic academic critic, if that mélange of qualities makes any sense -- writes about doubts in playing music. He's explaining Brice Pauset, a French composer, who, since he's an early-music keyboard player, spends a lot of time with Couperin, Bach, and Schubert, who for him offer no safe haven. Like other practitioners of "historically informed" performance, he lives in a world where important questions -- of ornamentation, tuning, authentic text -- must remain forever uncertain… Nicely … [Read more...]

"Handel operas are boring," said someone I know. And I agree -- or rather current productions generally are, despite the fad for Handel operas, despite how well some singers sing them, and despite all the clever ideas that directors have. They're boring because Handel operas aren't any kind of drama we readily understand. Mostly they're strings of arias, each in the same undramatic form, A-B-A, the point being, first, to express two contrasting affects (Baroque Music 101), and, second, to give the singer a chance to put on a show. Contrasting … [Read more...]

A while ago, driving into New York, I listened to the start of the broadcast of the opening concert of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart festival. I heard one complete piece, the overture to Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito, along with commentary from Margaret Juntwait and Fred Child, top radio personalities from, respectively, WNYC (New York's public radio station) and NPR's Performance Today. And the commentary made me itch. Juntwait and Child sound like smart, humane people, and when they started praising Mostly Mozart's new music director, … [Read more...]