Category: music

Part of what looking across the genres shows you is that the big-selling, celebrity-driven mainstream of just about every style of music offers very little social or economic critique. If that’s what you’re looking for, look to the edges.

Scott Timberg: “During the Great Depression, which saw widespread homelessness and US unemployment reaching 25 percent, popular films showed the very rich drinking cocktails in formal dress; cheery songs like ‘Pennies From Heaven’ charted. And in the post-2008 decade of recession, instability, and income inequality, blockbuster acts spent a lot of time telling us the incredible time they were having. The real story of the past decade has been harder to hear.”

The outgoing president of the San Diego Youth Symphony explains how he helped rebuild music ed in San Diego area schools: “We started with violins and cellos and violas and double bass. Actually we put third graders on double bass. We started that because we had asked the leaders in the community and the principals of the schools what instruments would be the right instruments to start with and the response we got was We have a tradition of string instruments in our community. We believe that there would be a strong response to string instruments. So when we first started this was 2010 we saw that kids were simply behaving better in their classes and as a result there was less disruption in the class. And that meant everybody was learning better in the class.”

“The average compensation for the music directors of 64 American ensembles … [has] topped $600,000 for the first time.” For the 2015-16 season, nine music directors were paid more than $1 million; Jaap van Zweden in Dallas and Riccardo Muti in Chicago made more than $3 million each.

“Oboes and bassoons are generally not known at all in schools. They might have picture on the wall but they haven’t seen them in the flesh. This has been reflected in the massive falling off of the number of children learning them. The sheer physical size of the instruments, the complications of the reeds, and the expense of lessons has led to these instruments being sidelined.”

Or was it more ambiguous? Director and MacArthur genius grant recipient Yuval Sharon: “All of these various ideas resonate with each other, or clash with each other, or sometimes don’t get told all the way to the end. … I love things that aren’t closed, because then the audience has such power and freedom to discover things for themselves.”

Take the touring company of An American in Paris: “In between big song-and-dance numbers like ‘Fidgety Feet,’ ‘But Not for Me’ and ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,’ the musicians checked their phones, perused a paperback or prepped their instruments until their next cue to play. As the show moved toward its finale, I appreciated that if I was going to spend the evening perched in proximity to a piano, I couldn’t ask for anything more than for the pianist to be playing Gershwin.”

And what’s to blame? YouTube. Kids aren’t watching live music. Etc. (It’s true at least that very, very few music students are playing any of these instruments, the tuba included.)

William Preucil, who was suspended by the Cleveland Orchestra (where he was concertmaster) after an investigative story about sexual assault in the classical music world came out in the Washington Post, has resigned as Distinguished Professor of Violin at CIM. “In a letter to the school’s students, faculty, and trustees on Saturday, [CIM President Paul W.] Hogle announced that Preucil had tendered his resignation effective immediately.”

In Cincinnati, the Chamber Orchestra director says, “Since we don’t have to sell 3,000 tickets, we can be more inventive, we can forge ahead, we can go to bars and do little shows there. … We can look to the next way of what to do with this medium, classical music. How do we stay relevant?”