The daily rags feel compelled to print none but the most well-worn tropes about contemporary classical music. Boldly going where all have gone before. By the time something interesting is being said, the audience has moved on. Why not skip the "contemporary music is hard" bit and go straight to talking about how great the festival is? It's only hard if you say it's hard.
I mean no disrespect to Ms. Kelly when I say that it really is a severe waste of column inches to drone on and on about the ways in which audiences are so easily turned off to classical music, contemporary or otherwise.
In fairness:
...I think we probably agree about most points, but when are we going to start talking about just how great the 20th century is? It's the world's greatest cornucopia of art. Every possible kind and variety of sound has been explored since the year 1900. One of the many problems is that we still try to lump them all together and sell them together. Corporate types love to talk about "unbundling". When will we start to see unbundling in the music world?
The truth is, this has been taking place for sometime, with things like the American Mavericks festival a few years back. But we need more. We need festivals, artists, presenters, and ensembles committing themselves to concerts and series and festivals devoted to only a handful of great works from specific 20th century genre. It's important to remember that the contemporary art music sphere has exhibited far more biodiversity in the 20th century than has the popular music world. Yet one would ordinarily bristle at the thought of mixing Benny Goodman and Tupac in one music event. True, classical music has a fan culture with more eclectic tastes. But the point is that we want to grow audiences. And some audiences want specific things and don't want other things. So let's be more considerate of their tastes when we design concert programs.
In fairness:
With all due respect, the only failure of 20th c. music is failure of imagination on the part of we, the performers.
— Jordan Randall Smith (@jordanconductor) December 5, 2013
...I think we probably agree about most points, but when are we going to start talking about just how great the 20th century is? It's the world's greatest cornucopia of art. Every possible kind and variety of sound has been explored since the year 1900. One of the many problems is that we still try to lump them all together and sell them together. Corporate types love to talk about "unbundling". When will we start to see unbundling in the music world?
The truth is, this has been taking place for sometime, with things like the American Mavericks festival a few years back. But we need more. We need festivals, artists, presenters, and ensembles committing themselves to concerts and series and festivals devoted to only a handful of great works from specific 20th century genre. It's important to remember that the contemporary art music sphere has exhibited far more biodiversity in the 20th century than has the popular music world. Yet one would ordinarily bristle at the thought of mixing Benny Goodman and Tupac in one music event. True, classical music has a fan culture with more eclectic tastes. But the point is that we want to grow audiences. And some audiences want specific things and don't want other things. So let's be more considerate of their tastes when we design concert programs.
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Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise, which was the spur to the Southbank Centre festival (Picture: BBC Archives)
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