In my last post — the first in this series — I said that music schools aren't creative enough. Now I want to talk about how we can fix that. I should say here that I'd love to run a music school, or otherwise be in a position to put my ideas into practice. The first principle is simple enough, but very important. We can't turn the school upside down. There's an established structure, inhabited by people with a stake in how the school operates: students, their parents, faculty, alumni, donors. We can't tell everyone to start thinking … [Read more...]

Not long ago, I was talking to students at a major music school about performances from the past, like the ones from the 1920s through the 1950s that I assign in my Juilliard course on the future of classical music. (If you'd like to see them, follow the link, and scroll to the assignment for February 27.) The students loved these recordings, and some had heard one of them before. They kept saying how much personality those old musicians had, and how they all just seemed to "go for it" (as the students expressed it) — to put all of … [Read more...]

I have a personal/mission statement on my website, that says: Where I want to be is out here on the front lines making the world safe for classical music, one note at a time. True, every day. And out here on the front lines, life is fast and furious, and unpredictable. Sometimes very noisy. I was thinking about what to write about for Greg's blog today, and I thought that really I should write just about that. The sound and fury of the musician's life. Just the day to day, in all its beautiful, crazy-making complexities, in these … [Read more...]

Time to go on with our mavericks posts, in which I and many readers listed people and groups doing new things in classical music. And on that tip, I've started to create a mavericks document in our Resource sidebar, which you'll find if you look on the right of the blog site, and scroll down. You'll see that we now have various things there — Nathan Shirley's guest post about good classical music videos, for instance, and a summary of my research about how young the classical music audience was in the past. I want to turn Resources into an … [Read more...]

 [From Greg: A followup to Erica's guest post yesterday, about the performance of Winterreise she did in a small town. Here she tells us what she said before the performance, to introduce the piece to an audience that doesn't know classical music. This is one of the best introductions to a classical piece I've ever seen. An inspiration, in my view, for us all.] Ed and I are so glad that you have joined us here today.  I’ve had the opportunity to perform this incredible set of songs before but I was struck today, as my husband and I were … [Read more...]

[From Greg: Again I'm happy to introduce a guest blogger, my friend Erica Sipes, a pianist and cellist who plays and teaches in rural Virginia. Erica brings a perspective that I certainly don't have: She tells us what it's like to bring a new audience to classical music in small towns. For an overview of her thoughts on that — invaluable, I think — see her own blog posts about the classical city mouse, and the classical country mouse. In the post you'll read here (which she and I decided we'd crosspost from her blog)  she talks with deep … [Read more...]

This is my course on the future of classical music, called "Classical Music in an Age of Pop." You can see the week by week schedule — and all the assignments — here. And I'm ready to teach a version of the course online. Three 90-minute sessions, with group discussion, for $250. I have people interested already, and if I get one or two more, I'm ready to go! Please contact me if you'd like to join us. So what happens in this course? Which, I'm amazed to remember, I've been teaching now for 17 years. Well, right now we're looking at what … [Read more...]

[From Greg: Here's another guest blogger. I met Liza Kravinsky maybe a year ago, when she hired me as a consultant, to help her work out a strategy for launching the project she describes here. The things we talked about don't enter into her post; maybe they'll come up in later posts she might make, or maybe they won't. That doesn't matter, because what I loved was the project itself. And especially the way that it didn't simply combine pop and classical music — that's been done quite a lot — but also brought together pop and classical … [Read more...]

[From Greg: Again I'm happy to introduce a guest blogger, our second one, pianist/composer Nathan Shirley. He brings us his favorite classical music videos, and I think it's a marvelous list, lively, provocative, and — as the best lists of this kind are — highly individual. We'll save it as a permanent blog sidebar, in the "Resources" section on the right, on the main blog page. This section will expand over time, and I hope will become an archive of ideas and information, useful for anyone interested in the future of classical music. Nathan's … [Read more...]

When I saw I had 16 comments on my latest post about CD covers (and more have come in since), I knew I'd provoked a storm. And I had. Many of the commenters objected to the Lara Downes CD cover — for her album Exiles' Café — I offered as an example of something good. (Shown here.) Which is perfectly fair. Nobody's required to have my taste. But the reasons for not liking it! You can't see her whole face. She's not in focus. She's on a slant. "It looks like when my five-year old goes on a shooting spree with my phone camera." It's soft … [Read more...]

First, here's a success — a good CD cover, sent to me by Lara Downes, a pianist whose new album it is:   Strong, evocative. And the image resonates with the album's name. Thanks, Lara, for sending this to me! Your website is terrific, too. Now for some bad ones. I doubt they need any comment, but I've added few words anyway. From Sony Classical:   Who, looking at this  — and not knowing Manny Ax — would want to hear it, let alone buy it? Does the person shown here look like an artist, someone with taste and … [Read more...]

Fascinating pushback that I've gotten to my "Fail" post, about how bad classical CD covers are. To me, their prevailing hopelessness suggests that classical record companies  — even the biggest — don't really believe they have a market. Any healthy company engaged with a market wouldn't put up with these covers for five minutes. But one commenter, who's often angry with me, rose up to defend the record labels, saying I had no idea how many hours they spent in meetings, trying to decide what the covers should be. This was appalling news. So … [Read more...]

But first, the flu. That's what floored me for the past week, explaining my silence here. I did make my Boulder trip, and had a fabulous time, seeing friends, family, and engaging with the Entrepreneurial Center for Music at the College of Music at the University of Colorado. While barely fighting off the flu at night. When I got home, I thought I'd better rest. Now I'm back. Mainlining cough drops on Amtrak, but I'm back. And my first priority here is expanding the blog. In a post all too long ago, I asked for people who might want to … [Read more...]

In posts a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the community around this blog, and about new directions I wanted to move in, and wanted the blog to go in. Here are some ideas, some things I'd love to see. First, I'd like other voices on the blog — guest bloggers, including a few who'd be regular guests. I've got one guest gearing up for his first post, a young composer in Britain. Anyone else? I'm open to all kinds of people, all kinds of ideas, as diverse (geographically, musically, and otherwise) a group as possible. Contact … [Read more...]