tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post5503516807560910602..comments2024-03-26T15:57:13.443+00:00Comments on On An Overgrown Path: Classical music must quit the shallows for deeper watersUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-8660996271177379972013-06-25T23:58:53.177+01:002013-06-25T23:58:53.177+01:00Thanks for all of the insightful posts.
I've ...Thanks for all of the insightful posts.<br /><br />I've been thinking about music for a long time. So when I found your statement that "classical music is being seduced by the fallacy that art can be repurposed as entertainment", I concluded that it's most likely that you believe that this should not be the case. So if not entertainment, or not merely entertainment, what should classical music be? Should it be emotionally stimulating in addition to entertaining? Should it be intellectually stimulating? Should we lose the entertaining qualities?Deanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12167802656231880227noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-39646245804765540222013-06-23T22:15:48.127+01:002013-06-23T22:15:48.127+01:00“That elusive experience of momentarily "cros...“That elusive experience of momentarily "crossing over" is, for me, the raison d'être of music, and unlocking the secret of how it is achieved also unlocks the secret of how classical music can reach new audiences.” What a wonderful statement in your post of last Sunday (6/16). Yes, that’s it! <br /><br />And then on Wednesday (6/19): “One of the biggest obstacles in the fight against the classical music revisionists has been the emotive pejorative "dumbing-down" with its connotations of elitism. Now Nicholas Carr has shown a way round that obstacle by talking about 'deep' as opposed' to 'shallow' cerebral experiences…” <br />I needn’t further enumerate all the ‘dumbing-down’ ideas that continue to be utilized by the classical music establishment that fail to produce the desired result. <br /><br />As one who still owns some of those old Argo vinyl recordings of the King’s College Choir (!) and trained at St. Peter’s Choir School in Philadelphia, I’ve been fascinated by people’s listening habits or the lack thereof since I was nine. Our attentiveness to music is something that we have the conscious ability to control. From noticing almost no detail at the shallow end of the dial and progressing up to the deep end where we notice almost every detail of the sounds received by our faculty of hearing – and all the intermediary stages - the choice is ours.<br /><br />So how do we cajole people to make the conscious choice to listen to music as opposed to hearing music as a background to other thoughts, texting, reading or whatever? Answering this question is the raison d'être of The Discovery Orchestra. We don’t claim to have ‘the answer,’ but we have been having some success. We know one thing for sure. If individuals can have an ‘aha’ around whether they are actually listening or just hearing and begin to notice detail in music, it tends to become a self-fulfilling, self-rewarding activity. It allows them to ‘cross over’ in a huge variety of music – whether written last month or one thousand years ago. The huge expanse of styles and musical vocabulary becomes not an issue but a source of delight as one learns to take each musical expression on its own terms and let the plasticity of our brains do the rest. We believe that becoming a perceptive listener is the “secret to unlocking how this is achieved.” As my mentor, Saul Feinberg is fond of saying: “The more we perceive, the more we receive.”<br /><br />Thank you for your thought provoking blog posts! <br /><br />George Marriner Maull <br />Artistic Director<br />The Discovery Orchestra<br />http://bit.ly/10WT5V7Notes from Maullariahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09389031735153173872noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-44417089530502896312013-06-20T01:36:45.115+01:002013-06-20T01:36:45.115+01:00Rachmaninoff said radio can't do justice to go...Rachmaninoff said radio can't do justice to good music. He told the New York Times that his chief objection to radio had nothing to do with any technical limitations that radio has (he was speaking in the 1920s). Instead, his chief objection was, "It makes listening to music too comfortable." He continued: <br /><br />"I believe that one shouldn't be too comfortable when listening to really great music. To appreciate good music, one must be mentally alert and emotionally receptive. You can't be that when you are sitting at home with your feet on a chair. No - listening to music is more strenuous that that. Music is like poetry; it is a passion and a problem. You can't enjoy and understand it merely by sitting still and letting it soak into your ears." (NYT, 22 December 1928)<br /><br />Tech-boosters ridiculed him for having this view, of course.<br /><br />Here's an interesting article in the Telegraph:<br />http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3557671/Paying-attention-to-Rachmaninoff.htmlAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com