Pat Bianculli's List: I B MUSIC- Aesthetics

• What's broken in classical
• music, and how do we fix it?
• I wonder why everyone thinks that there should be orchestras everywhere?
• Our music schools are turning out thousands of musicians trained to play orchestral music and then sent out into a world that does not support their skills.
• First, music education has virtually disappeared from our schools. Second, the atmosphere of a "standard" classical music performance is isolated and impersonal. Third, the performance takes place in an intellectual vacuum; the performer (often, as Mr. Andsnes says, dressed in old-fashioned clothes) walks onto a distant stage, plays, then walks off, the end.
• If I were the musical director of an orchestra (and I do work cheap), the first thing I would do is have a tuxedo burning concert and put it on YouTube. Go!
• The only real difference between a "composer" and a songwriter is in the degree of challenge the composer is willing to issue to a listener.
• Leonard Bernstein.
• how the symphony halls had become museums.
• Despite great efforts, there has been virtually no new "classical" or orchestral music written for the concert hall in the past 50 years or so that's had any discernable impact on the culture at large.
• The current audience for classical music is aging, and it is not being replaced with a younger audience.
• The solution? Better music education in the schools, I think
• I host the last remaining classical music program in Milwaukee, Wis. on Sunday afternoons. It seems kind of strange that one of the country's largest cities has been reduced to three hours of this music once a week.

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• Each performance consists of fundamentally the same material (the notes played are almost always the same) but each gives a remarkably different experience by varying the tempos, the relative volume, and the emotional feeling of each section of the orchestra.
• If you want to see exactly what Beethoven’s 5th symphony consists of, you can pop down to your local university music library and examine the same sheet music used in a concert performance.
• Linux and classical music are both difficult to get into. You can’t understand the latter after a single listen; it takes many attempts before the parts of a piece start to make sense and come together in all kinds of unexpected ways.
• With a classical piece you will always find new things, and they are often dramatically new. In fact, until you’ve heard a piece at least ten times, you pretty much don’t understand it at all.
• are the intellectual and emotional rewards you get from dealing with all the difficulties in understanding.

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• And there are burning questions to be answered. Is the classical music audience getting older? Will it die off, and not be replaced? Can we find a younger audience? And why, exactly, should we be having a classical music crisis? Has our culture degenerated? Is it now too shallow -- too noisy and dumb, too frenetic, too careless -- to support cultivated musical art? Or has classical music just fallen behind the rest of the world, and gotten out of date?
• four kinds of people might get caught up in them.
• people who work in the classical music business
• and if the classical music world really does collapse, they’ll very likely be heartbroken. (The musicians, I’d think, would keep on playing, but not without any chance of ever making a living.)
• warm and often gentle people who go to classical concerts, and of course to the opera.
• they do love the music.
• that they themselves are getting older, and that younger people just aren’t showing up.
• And third come people who like classical music well enough — they might listen to it on the radio, and maybe they’ll buy classical CDs or downloads — but don’t go to classical concerts.
• “Culturally aware nonattenders.”

• No matter why classical music might be threatened — whether it’s because culture is rotting away, or because classical music has stagnated — what’s going on is an ongoing, large-scale, long-term cultural shift.

    
• Essentially, I think the game is over. The classical music business won’t be able to exist much longer in its present form.
• It’ll have to transform itself both externally, in the way it presents itself to the world, and internally, in the way that it’s taught, played, analyzed, and composed.…

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• Classical Reinvention, a student creation attempting to bring classical music to modern audiences.
• “In the eyes of the public, classical music has become something it’s not,” Perrin said. “People think of classical music as calm and relaxing background music, when in reality there’s a rich repertoire that’s emotional and extremely intense.”
• “We want people to be active participants in the music,” Perrin said. “Today’s concert environment feels more like an educational setting than entertainment, and we have to change that if we want to make classical music relevant today.”
• The concert replaced the traditional program handed out to the audience with a slideshow that detailed the history and styles of the different pieces being performed. Halfway through the concert, finance and biology senior Sergio Lozano performed John Cage’s composition “4’33,” which is comprised of complete silence. Perrin then spoke with the audience to ask them about their experience of the music.
• “People think of classical music as this narrow genre,” Kues said. “It’s not a genre at all, but it’s a musical form that you can get all sorts of styles and emotions out of. And there’s so much history to it that it varies over different periods and ages.”

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• Concerts were promoted, music was widely published, great halls were built, commissions were offered, and music raced to catch up with the boldness of the other arts. Conservatories and orchestras were widely established, texts and treatises were widespread, and music became a profession.
• And there remained Vienna. Almost uniquely, this city was a focus of innovation and achievement. Perhaps matched only by New York in our times, the capital was for two hundred years simultaneously the seat of innovation and judgment, the place where anyone of substance was required to succeed, and usually did. Although there were other important regional capitals of music (consider London, Paris, St Petersburg), only in Vienna did there exist a gravitational pull capable of attracting virtually every talent in the world. And there they met, heard and were influenced by one another's music, argued and competed and learned and taught, and music was much the greater for it.