Tag: 11.12.00

Leonard Bernstein was a trailblazer. And yet, “since Bernstein’s passing in 1990, at 72, none of the Big Five American orchestras has appointed an American music director. Of the other leading U.S. orchestras, only the San Francisco Symphony, which is thriving under Michael Tilson Thomas, and the Atlanta Symphony, which recently named Robert Spano as its music director, have dared to engage native sons.” – Chicago Tribune

Aaron Copland would have turned 100 years old this week. “Ten years after Copland’s death, and 29 after Stravinsky’s, the latter seems secure as one of the seminal figures of 20th-century music. Copland’s position is more provincial, his reach only barely extending beyond the Americas. But Copland made it respectable to be a composer of art music in America.” – Dallas Morning News

“All in all, there were roughly five Coplands, some of them overlapping. He was a Stravinskian modernist of the 1920s, a folk-inspired populist from the 1930s through the ’50s, an even more modernistic 1960s serialist, a Hollywood film composer who won an Oscar for 1949’s The Heiress, and, in the most encompassing characteristic of all, a musical dramatist. In all guises, Copland is, more than ever, a fixture in the American musical landscape.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

The staff tumult at Carnegie Hall since its new director took over become nastier. “Maybe the Carnegie staff has not done its job and is being told so in no uncertain terms. Yet having observed the people who seem to be fleeing pell-mell from the building, I find that notion hard to believe. Another possibility is that Americans take more kindly to persuasion than to command and obedience. Resistance to strongly expressed authority is in our nature; in fact, it is why we happened as a country.” – New York Times