What has me going this week is an article that is, exasperatingly, called "Five Minutes to Make You Love Classical Music." Exasperating because that's as clickbait as it gets; the entire proposition is dubious because so many works last longer than that, and because whether you love a piece or not is so dependent on the performance and the circumstances in which you hear it. I mean, who is going to be converted by just five minutes?
The article itself....well, the author got responses from 18 people, who are all critics for the Times or "some of our favorite artists." Here's the breakdown by sex of those who responded:
- 14 men
- 4 women
Breakdown by what they do:
One of the four women is Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, who is a Times writer. The others are composers Carolyn Shaw and Julia Wolfe, and soprano Julia Bullock.
The men are Zachary Woolfe, Anthony Tommasini, Seth Colter Walls, Joshua Barone, and Michael Cooper of the Times (four critics and one music-biz writer); Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leon Botstein, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, John Eliot Gardiner (conductors; Salonen is, of course, also a distinguished composer); composers Nico Muhly and Nicholas Britell; pianists Daniil Trifonov and Ethan Iverson; director Yuval Sharon.
Fifteen of the works chosen were by men, three by women.
So, the Times has no control over what people choose as their potential gateway classical music drugs, but they sure had some control over who they asked about this. Just to suggest a few women who could have been asked and might be among "our favorite artists:" Susanna Mälkki, Marin Alsop, MGT, Yuja Wang, Martha Argerich, Leila Josefowicz, Alisa Weilerstein, Claire Chase, Francesca Zambello, Kaija Saariaho. And as long as the Times's critics got to have their say, how about a couple of highly visible non-artists, Anne Midgette and Deborah Borda?
2 comments:
Well, then, they should have asked you. So if they had, what would you have picked, if anything?
Ha, I'm not a big enough wheel to be asked.
I think I would have laughed and rolled my eyes. Any music will be the gateway for somebody. I know people who got started in classical music with Wagner, Baroque opera, Beethoven, early music, Strauss and Shrecker, Mozart, Glass, and on and on.
I love a huge range of music and to some extent I think that just being enthusiastic about a work can help it catch someone's fancy.
Post a Comment