Speaking of Music

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That’s the title of the course I’m teaching at Juilliard this semester — a graduate course in how to speak and write about music. It began life years ago as a course on music criticism, but that seems to be a subject that engages students less and less.

Speaking and writing about music, on the other hand — that the students think is greatly important. We had the first class in the course on Wednesday, and all but one of the students there said they were interested in the course because they’ll have to reach out to people, and get them interested both in their performances, and in classical music in general. So talking and writing about music becomes a key skill.

Of course this is one more sign that classical music has changed. Once you could let others — an orchestra you played with, bookers who engaged you for concerts — reach out to audiences. Or, more likely, not reach out in any direct or personal way, but at least market to audiences on your behalf.

Those days are gone. Now students know they’ll have to do a lot of that on their own, and that they’ll have to do it in new, lively, communicative ways. Of course this is tied to the new stress on entrepreneurship in conservatories, Juilliard included. Classical musicians in the future will be much better off if they can create careers on their own, and being able to engage people about what they do is a central part of that.

The main documents for the class live online, a course overview here, and the week-by-week class schedule and assignments here. You’ll see that all the assignments are links, so you can do all the reading (and optional listening) yourself, if you’d like.

I’ll end this by coping the start of the course overview, so without going elsewhere you can see what the course is about. And maybe next week I’ll say something about the most compelling thing (in my view) that we do, which is listen to music in class, and then try to find words to describe it. Amazing, the lessons we can learn from a sentence or two that a student comes up with. This group seems to be very good at it.

Course overview (excerpt):

I’ll start with my favorite thing we do in this course. Each day we’ll listen to music I bring in, and try to describe it in words.

This is an exercise in how to talk about music. You might find that it’s trickier than you think, to really nail a description of something you hear, so that it’s very clear and very specific. I’ll ask you to pay attention to two things: the objective facts about the music (the things that anyone listening carefully might hear), and your own subjective feelings. Both are important! 

About what else we do…

I’ve been giving this course for many years, and for much of that time it was a course about music criticism. Which we talked about both from a critic’s point of view, and from a musician’s. (Since I’ve been both things.)

But the world has changed. Classical music critics aren’t so widely read anymore, in large part because the best-known ones write for newspapers, and people — especially younger people —aren’t reading newspapers nearly as much as they used to. 

Another big change is that music schools, including Juilliard, are starting to teach entrepreneurship, to give you skills you might need to take charge of your own careers. 

Some of those skills involve writing. So it seemed like a good idea to change this course. We’ll still talk about criticism, because critics still provide notable examples of music writing, both good and bad. Besides, you’re all likely to be reviewed, so it’s good for you to know how criticism works — how critics think, how they decide what to review, how much influence they really have, and what your relationship with them should be. 

But in the spirit of entrepreneurship, we’ll also talk about more practical kinds of music writing, writing you’ll need for your careers, and will either do yourself, or have done for you. I’m thinking of press releases, program notes, and your professional biography. Plus blogs and social media posts (which unless you’re a superstar you’ll almost surely do yourself). These things are important, even crucial, because you use them to tell the world about you. And to build your careers. But how should they be written? There are standard ways to write press releases and bios, but do these still work, in the world we live in now?