Category: music

Musicologist Joseph Horowitz has made plenty of waves with his new book which traces what he sees as the decline and fall of classical music in the U.S., and why that decline was inevitable. But Greg Sandow isn’t wholly convinced by Horowitz’s story, well-told though it may be: “Is this really history, the way a real historian would write it? Or has Mr. Horowitz instead staged a passionate morality play, in which he uses history as his casting office, providing him with heroes and villains?… This book is best understood not as analysis or history but as a cri du coeur.”

It seems absurd to think, in this age of endless entertainment choice, that classical music is truly falling off the map, as so many self-styled experts claim. The real problem may actually be the opposite: “the challenge for classical music ahead is not that people constantly fired upon by the mass-marketing budgets of commercial music won’t know how to relate to Brahms and Ravel. The danger, rather, is unexpected: that there is so much classical music around in this golden age of choice that it is ceasing to be special.” So what’s the solution? Try a little personal connection, and give your customers a sense that they’re truly important to you.

“All over the Western world, the alarm is sounding that classical music is in trouble. Orchestra subscription sales are dropping widely, in some cases by as much as two percentage points a year. Ensembles are not balancing their budgets. Audiences are getting older; young people are turned off by classical music… So, at least, goes the refrain. Is it true that people don’t want classical music anymore? Or is it just a question of how to give it to them? And is it even possible – heresy of heresies – that they are being given too much of it?”

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries reports that “one of every three compact discs sold in the world last year was pirated, with sales totaling $4.6 billion. “In a record 31 countries, fake recordings now outsell legal ones, the said in its annual report.”

“Unless you use the specialist’s language of musicology and talk in terms that only musicians would understand, to put music into words you must borrow ideas from other art forms and the senses to which they appeal. Making sense of music requires that we speak as if we have seen it, or smelled it, or felt it with our hands. So flutes make bright tones, trombones dark ones. Composers, we say, work like architects, structuring sound, building arches of melody. At one moment, musicians may play dense or textured sounds, at another, thin and airy ones. Even the most basic musical terms — high notes, low notes — are described with spatial metaphors. What’s the “high” point on a piano string?”

“On paper, 13 concerts are affected by the move, which an OSM statement blamed on the musicians’ strike that began on May 9. In fact, several of the OSM’s concert partners had already withdrawn their invitations to perform, for fear of a long strike. The OSM is usually the most active of Canadian orchestras in the hot months, with habitual engagements at the Lanaudière Festival, and at concerts in parks and other civic spaces.”

Why is classical music shrinking, asks Julian Lloyd Webber? It’s our own faults. “Yes, we know that there are lots of other kinds of music apart from classical – and don’t we classical musicians fall over backwards to say how wonderful they all are – but while our children are continually being bombarded with pop music, they are also being denied a knowledge of some of mankind’s greatest creations and their adult lives will be much the poorer for it.”

“Forget the album and corporate radio. Fan-built playlists and mixes are taking over the way people get their music. The popular iPod shuffle is designed around the idea that people like pairing reggae and pop with country and jazz. But music fans are ahead of corporate-endorsed playlists, putting their own clever twists on mixes by holding mixing contests, auto-generating playlists from blog posts and collaborating with others to build theme mixes. People are choosing what they want to hear rather than having it pushed on them.”

Fans gobble up all 35,000 free tickets for Canada’s Live 8 concert in just 21 minutes on the internet…

Midori begins a tour of Asia, and blogs about it on ArtsJournal: “To be reminded that Japan was completely closed (at least officially) to the West and its influences for over 250 years until 1854, and at what lightning speed some elements of the Western culture have become part of Japanese society is absolutely breathtaking. More to the point, in my case, I grew up thinking (and feeling) that music was Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Stravinsky, Bartok, and Prokofiev. There was classical music, which was “music,” and then everything else bulked together in one. All other genres of music were exotic and mysterious including jazz and Traditional Japanese music. For me, a Schubert lieder was much more “normal” and “understandable” than the infamous Japanese song “Sakura, Sakura.”