Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Already one friend has e-mailed me, expressing horror at the upcoming BBC broadcast of John Cage's famous (or is it notorious?) silent piece, 4'33". I'm thrilled, then, to see the radiant story linked in ArtsJournal today from the Guardian, the British newspaper, putting Cage in a fuller context. Please read it. Cage was a great man and a great artist. I understand why a lot of people don't see that -- he was very far from the way most of us live and think -- but I've found that many people who think he's nonsense don't know much about him. … [Read more...]

  Has anyone read the Financial Times interview with Joseph Volpe, the man who runs the Metropolitan Opera? Extraordinary document. You could, if you wanted, make a case after reading it that Volpe should be fired right now. The Met, it's widely known, is having trouble -- not selling enough tickets, accumulating a deficit. And Volpe, if this interview is accurate, has no plan to deal with that. Nor does the interviewer ask him what his plan might be, in this almost-a-crisis situation. I kept thinking of Casey Stengel's famous line, … [Read more...]

(In which, as promised, I start from the top, measuring the subject of my blog…) Lots of us say that classical music is in crisis. But what exactly do we mean? Well, we might start with what I might call the commercial problem, or, more simply, the objective, measurable side of what's either a crisis now, or soon might be one: Many people worry that classical music will simply disappear. There won't be any audience to sustain it. The current audience, average age at least 50, will grow old, fade away, and never be replaced. Orchestras will … [Read more...]

  Not long ago I was having dinner with some reasonably substantial people in the orchestra world. And as often happens when people inside the business get to know me, the conversation turned to critics. Why, I’m regularly asked, do critics…and here we can fill in the blank with whatever odd behavior some critic recently exhibited. (Though the question people really want to ask is a lot simpler, and eventually they get around to it: Why don’t critics know how the music business works?)   This time, though, my dinner partners wanted … [Read more...]

This weekend a press release came in the mail, announcing what it called the "first commercial recording" of Carlisle Floyd's opera Of Mice and Men, recorded by the Houston Grand Opera on the Albany label. But this isn't a commercial recording, or at least it's not what most people commonly mean by commercial. Nobody invested huge sums of money in it, hoping to make a profit. Instead, this recording -- like many classical records today -- was subsidized. The fine print at the end of the press release says: This recording is made possible … [Read more...]

Another reader, Jason Stewart, contributes some provocative thoughts (along with a compliment to me, for which I'm grateful): Saving The key to saving classical music is to let go of all the dead weight in that genre. There are so many hour-long classical "masterpieces" out there that don't have any more to say than a three minute pop song. People are bombarded by these musical barbiturates on the classical station, and the truly great works are being passed over because of the "guilt by association" factor. If we make it so that the virgin … [Read more...]

From reader Lang Thompson I've just heard some striking news -- that Columbia House (one of the two big record clubs) has stopped selling classical music. Here's what Lang wrote me: A little over a month ago I went to place an order for some items that included classical and those weren't there. In fact the whole classical section was no longer listed. I emailed Columbia House and after a few days they replied that since they can't provide the "level of customer service" that they would like then they've discontinued all the … [Read more...]

Happy new year, everyone. Next week I'll start my systematic look at classical music's problems, with the first post coming a week from today, Monday, January 12. This week I'll gather up some odds and ends, things I've been thinking about for a while, but haven't posted. I'll start with a Renée Fleming footnote. Just before Christmas I said she should have given the profits from her holiday promotion to charity (see my last post). But here's some clarification. Of course she doesn't have to do it. That's her choice. But wouldn't it have been … [Read more...]

It's 11 PM on December 23. Tomorrow my wife and I leave to see family for the holidays. I wasn't planning to post anything to this blog. And then something arrived by e-mail that just appalls me. It's a press release from Universal Classics, Renée Fleming's record label. It announces some auctions on eBay, to be conducted literally during Christmas, from now until December 26. Some lucky Fleming fans will…but let the press release speak for itself: Universal Classics announced today that Renée Fleming, opera superstar and two-time Grammy … [Read more...]

For the last week or so, I haven't been able to blog. A work crunch hit -- this is the time of year when I write marketing blurbs for major orchestras, trying to describe next season's concerts in ways that both respect their artistic intentions and will attract an audience. You'd think this wouldn't be a new idea, or that there shouldn't be any contradiction between the two goals. But in fact orchestras are only starting to learn how to talk to their audience, and (sad but true) the way the artistic staffs of orchestras talk to musicians and … [Read more...]

Quite by chance, I learned that my post about public radio quite a while ago generated some froth on the web, not least a strong dissent from my blogmate Terrry Teachout. I'd said that public radio has reasons for cutting back on classical music, and that it doesn't do any good to protest without understanding what the reasons are. But some people think I've forgotten what public radio's mission is supposed to be -- to broadcast things unavailable elsewhere. Now, this is an old argument. It's one of the first objections brought up -- often … [Read more...]

Here are some freely paraphrased responses to my post on piano advertising (by which I mean piano companies blazing their brand name on the side of their pianos):    -- from a music publicist: Thanks, I hate it too!    -- from the publicist at a mid-sized orchestra: Get over it! Commercial sponsorship is here to stay. To which I can only answer, sure, but shouldn't there be limits? Advertising, all over our culture, is spreading out of control. In the past year or so it started showing up on supermarket floors. … [Read more...]

We'd all be shocked, I think, if we saw a Nike swoosh behind the musicians during a classical concert. Of course commercial sponsorship helps keep classical music alive, but commercial sponsors are supposed to know their place. Yet there's one kind of advertising we constantly see -- advertising for the brand of piano being played. I was at a mostly wonderful concert Saturday night, a recital by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at Zankel Hall in New York. Peter Serkin was her accompanist, and there it was, on the side of his piano, placed … [Read more...]

Like most of you, I'm sure, I get a lot of spam. But lately someone has been having fun with it -- I'm getting messages that pretend to be from crazy names. Much as I hate the spam, I'll congratulate the spammer, who's weirdly, unforgettably inspired. (I imagine that it's just one person making up the names, because the style -- which I might describe as W. C. Fields gone totally insane -- is so consistent.) How could anybody think an offer could be real, when it claims to come from names like these? Revitalize B. Germany Anthrax T. … [Read more...]

The following e-mail comes from Iris Greidinger of New York, who corrects me about some things I said about Andrea Bocelli earlier. I said, for instance, that the Metropolitan Opera should book him for a pop concert, unaware that (as Ms. Greidlinger lets me know) he now sings pop songs only as encores. Whatever one thinks about Bocelli's singing, I should have known more before I ventured my comments. I'll only add that Ms. Greidinger and I have now exchanged more friendly messages, and that I hope it's clear that I'm serious about posting … [Read more...]