I was recently entrusted with delivering the graduation address for the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I wound talking about the future of orchestras. My larger point was that this is a moment for young musicians – and not so young institutions – to hone their sense of mission. Here’s what I had to offer: A lot of the writing that I’ve done … [Read more...] about A Message for Young Musicians and Old Orchestras
Search Results for: music unwound
Charles Ives and National Understanding
Charles Ives, 150 years old, is immensely important right now. Why is that? What’s changed? For the Ives Sesquicentenary festivals currently sponsored by the NEH Music Unwound consortium, The American Scholar has published an extraordinary online Program Companion. In addition to my essay on Ives and Mahler, it features contributions by a leading American art historian, a … [Read more...] about Charles Ives and National Understanding
The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Four: What Happened to Charles Ives?
In 1951, Leonard Bernstein, age 32, led the New York Philharmonic in the belated world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 – music composed half a century earlier. The performance was nationally broadcast and widely noticed. Seven years after that, Bernstein began his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director with Ives’ Second Symphony. In all, he performed Ives’ … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Four: What Happened to Charles Ives?
Mahler, New York, and Cultural Memory
“It is always instructive to read European newspapers on American affairs. It gives us the much needed opportunity to see ourselves as others see us – with their eyes shut. . . Do we not all reek with malodorous lucre? Are we not a nation of tradesmen?”? Thus W. J. Henderson, in the New York Sun (March 8, 1908), on the arrival of Gustav Mahler in New … [Read more...] about Mahler, New York, and Cultural Memory
When Charles Ives Wrote a Song as Magnificent as Brahms’s
In the remarkable absence of any suitable acknowledgement of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary by our nation's slumbering orchestras, it has fallen to the National Endowment for the Humanities to celebrate the 150th birthday of America's greatest creative genius in the realm of classical music. In its latest embodiment, the NEH Music Unwound consortium, which I have directed … [Read more...] about When Charles Ives Wrote a Song as Magnificent as Brahms’s