ONE of the best things about spring in Southern California is the Ojai Music Festival, which runs this Thursday to Sunday. I’m looking forward to this year’s festival, which was programmed by soprano Barbara Hannigan. Ojai is – in my two decades of attending most years – always good and sometimes great. It reminds us that classical music, for all the enduring work of the past, is a living art, … [Read more...]
Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
A quarter century ago, a New England journalist named Milton Moore turned me – a lover of rock and jazz without much interest in music before Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker – on to Schubert, late Beethoven, and The Well-Tempered Clavier. Milton, who has been reviewing music, classical and otherwise, since the ‘70s, today starts a more-or-less monthly column about contemporary and … [Read more...]
All the Poets: Rhiannon Giddens
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The second installment of my Los Angeles Review of Books -- All the Poets, in which musicians discuss their literary influences -- went up the other day: Rhiannon Giddens, who earned her reputation with the string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, talked to me about her childhood interest in science fiction, in the African roots of what we think of as Appalachian or … [Read more...]
Schubert, Meet Beckett
[contextly_auto_sidebar] TONIGHT I am looking forward to going to Disney Hall to see an odd pairing: the songs of Franz Schubert interspersed with the short plays of Samuel Beckett. The recital, put on by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, features several singers and actors including Irish actor Barry McGovern and soprano Julia Bullock. The whole thing springs from the twisted genius Yuval Sharon, … [Read more...]
Culture Crash and the 21st C Musician
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="kIKdAj6Xm5kqbZ9uMHw3rRcxIyuEkbsM"] ONE of my favorite discussions of the new world of the arts and culture -- the economic, technological, sociological changes I describe in my book -- comes in this conversation I had with an editor at the new 21st C Musician site. (I've written several pieces for the site on the transformation of classical music.) Considering both … [Read more...]
The Future of the Arts
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="oNW8dK0FCdGFSKqGQqeHclNNxOzhoCM1"] OKAY, nobody really knows what's coming. But a pretty good stab comes in a new book by veteran arts manager Michael M. Kaiser (Alvin Ailey, Kennedy Center, etc) , who is both hopeful and brutally honest. His opening section on the building of an arts infrastructure (including an audience) in the postwar U.S. is as clear and succinct … [Read more...]
Introducing The 21st Century Musician
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="9QYXBUzJHimvnKsbZ6oLELXVvjWIavAs"] OVER the last few years I've been diving into the breakdown of the old 20th century creative economy and assessing as best I can the crisis we're in now. But I've also been asking myself -- and everybody I know -- how we might move forward. Part of the answer comes from work I've been doing for a new online magazine called the 21st … [Read more...]
Is El Sistema Authoritarian?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="OBug1WHMcv4Mu8jWVEU2LxPTK8wO2pBx"] A NEW book by a British academic has charged that the Venezuelan-born classical-music-for-all program is run like something between a corporation and a cult. I've not seen the book yet, but David Ng of the LA Times interviews its author, Geoffrey Baker. Here's Baker -- whose book is published by Oxford University Press -- discussing … [Read more...]
“U.S. Orchestras Are Shrinking”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="QRGZQv2nVOSC4XC8B8Ht1HMnBnYyaFZJ"] IF you've been following the creative economy lately, it's hardly a surprise, but this makes for dispiriting reading: A New York Times story chronicles how American groups are responding to tough times. Through the 19th century, orchestras got bigger. But as some American orchestras struggle in the post-downturn economy, they are … [Read more...]
Is Opera Really “Dead”?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="bkv13k1YwsUOJ9oOZ89GQDYLY1wM0rF3"] WELL, of course it's not, but another story has gone up recently arguing that the entire art form is finished. The focus of the piece is that the opera repertoire has been stuck in the 19th century for way too long -- that it doesn't move forward, with new work, anymore. That would indeed be damning, but looking closer, we see that … [Read more...]