tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10680113.post1268579384279528434..comments2024-03-23T11:40:13.092-05:00Comments on Musical Assumptions: Robert Freeman's The Crisis of Classical Music in America: a minority opinionElaine Finehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14248422399226824168noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10680113.post-17470620942956885322015-04-23T14:30:14.030-05:002015-04-23T14:30:14.030-05:00The purpose of my book is to provoke a national di...The purpose of my book is to provoke a national discussion on how we teach music. Alan Fletcher's comment is very well taken. He writes, "In an age of sound bites, tweets, ill-informed criticism, multi-tasking, and ever-decreeing attention spans, an art form that stands instead for deep listening, repeated engagement, willingness to risk the experimental, recognition that to be prepared and thoughtful is a precious and rewarding thing, may prove very lively and hardy." But then we need to see to it that our teaching of music reflects these values as a central part of daily regimen.<br /> Elaine Fine is right, too, when she complains that our over-production of PhDs in the social sciences and humanities undermines the employability of too many able young people who serve as underpaid adjuncts, in order not to bankrupt our students. Too many music schools, with vastly differing resources, are trying to emulate Juilliard, while too many universities are trying to be Harvard. Too many orchestras are being obliged to cut the number of their players, while too many not-for-profits are spending more than 5% of the market values of their endowments, all warnings of a bleak future for the music we all love unless we can decrease supply of performers and increase demand for music.<br />Robert FreemanAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10680113.post-86705146553069127782015-04-14T03:19:23.875-05:002015-04-14T03:19:23.875-05:00Something about Freeman makes me think he is a tho...Something about Freeman makes me think he is a thoughtful and thought-provoking pompous ass. But as the book notes, 30,000 collegiate music degrees a year says 300,000 over a decade and, since the 60s which he mentions, this that means over a million degrees for precious few well-paying jobs, like the ones he held as an academic now peddling his book crying "Crisis!" Maybe there are too many college music courses? My own graduate professor in theory said so often.<br /><br />"Classical music isn't dead! It's just too expensive." So said Slipped Disc in January of this year. In 2014 Slate published, " Classical music has been circling the drain for years, of course." The New Yorker tried to answer Slate a week later, arguing the opposite in "The Fat Lady Is Still Singing." Huffington Post published the question, "Is Opera Dead?" In it, Alan Fletcher wrote, "I think, in an age of sound bites, tweets, ill-informed criticism, multi-tasking, and ever-decreasing attention spans, that an art form that stands instead for deep listening, repeated engagement, willingness to risk the experimental, recognition that to be prepared and thoughtful is a precious and rewarding thing -- that art form may prove, as it has for many centuries, very lively and hardy. And enduring." Matthew Kessel began his Observer article as, "The stale idea that classical music is dead has been repeated so many times that it’s not really worth being bothered by anymore."<br /><br />I think Kessel trumps Freeman, hands down. In a couple hundred years, I wager Bach will be around and still amazing audiences. So many musicologists' books will have been discarded from college libraries for remaining too frequently unread. Nope, there is no crisis in classical music in America. There are many crises, but none of them can be traced back to -- an advertisement for your blog -- "musical assumptions." They will be traced to presidents, chancellors, deans and provosts, and a host of university level administrators and then down into the same sort running the K-12 systems. The crisis in collapsing symphonies and bankrupt opera companies is one of financial mismanagement and those once-clever deficits which crush. Classical music will survive, because it survived Sousa's "The Menace of Mechanical Music," as it is surviving YouTube and Petrucci and other new methods of delivering music to us, the unwashed masses.<br /><br />Somehow, I refused to be worried because my and I hope your musical assumptions are that classical music has merit which is deep and enduring in a time when "hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" has done nothing to advance our culture. <br /><br />This blog has advanced something of classical music via the dreaded YouTube videos, as via PDF-rich Petrucci, not to mention cloud data availability.<br /><br />"The stale idea that classical music is dead has been repeated so many times that it’s not really worth being bothered by anymore."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com