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Thursday, March 08, 2007

Music is Hard 1

Just to put this concept as simply as possible:
  • Once upon a time, "classical music" was popular music.

  • Classical music can be popular again.

4 comments:

  1. Do you have a plan for achieving the second bullet?

    I don't know that our music can or even needs to be "popular" again. I'm not even sure what that means, actually.

    But I do know that concert music needs to and should occupy more intellectual space than it does today.

    If nothing else, we are the counterculture, and we should learn how to exploit that.

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  2. Steve, I don't have a plan, but Drew McManus and (cover your ears, ACD) Greg Sandow have plenty of good ideas. A couple of other things: the cellist Matt Haimovitz is having success playing in small clubs; locally, the Freight & Salvage folk music theater has started to have chamber music concerts, with a narrator of sorts, on a monthly basis. That'll be interesting to watch, though I've heard that the narrator is annoying.

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  3. Part of the problem is that most classical music in America plays to large halls. You can't get a good, growing body of new music if you don't have smaller venues where that stuff is tried out.

    When you only have big orchestras playing Top 100 works, then they make money but kill the overall scene.

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  4. "Classical" music is the music of Haydn,Mozart,Beethoven et al
    "Popular music" is music that people like to listen to.
    "Classical" is classical because it has been popular for a long time.
    Some since the renaissance.
    Some "Classical" music was written in the 19th and 20th centuries.
    Therefore it is not classical "Classical"
    What needs to be done, besides coming up with a usable definition and name for the stuff, is to support modern composers by playing thier work.
    "Good" (yuk)or "Art" (ech) music becomes "Popular" by withstanding a Darwinistic "test of time"

    Or something like that

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