New Ways of Thinking

This week I was struck my three blog posts by Greg Sandow who blogs about the Future of Classical music on http://www.artsjournal.com, in the past he has been a composer and a music critic.  I was going to try to pick just one of the blogs entries to use for this weeks post but each of these three is an expansion on a similar idea and one that I found fascinating. 

His first blog post was eye opening for me because he discussed that while outreach and educational programs are great they will never do enough to fill the seats in our music halls.  He makes a call for us to "create performances so powerful" because we have tough competition with the current popular culture.  Our first thought should be filling seats before we move to creating educational and outreach programs in our community.  I would have to say that I agreee with Mr. Sandow mostly, except that I believe we should be creating new and exciting performance opportunities in our field but that we also need to have the other programs running simultaneously.  Though I do believe that those programs need to have a stronger focus on what is happening in today's world of classical music and not getting heavily bogged down in the past.  We need to be teaching what is happening now and while giving them a strong foundation of the past, we need to show the how to take it further. 

The second post continued Mr. Sandow's ideas on where we need to head into the future with our art form.  It was discussing why we don't want to move forward.  Mr. Sandow, 71, said that when you look around at today's audiences its hard to see anyone in attendance who was born after 1943.  I will admit that I live in a classical music bubble so I disagreed with him a little bit with this point but I did understand what he was trying to get at.  This article was a explanation to older audiences that we will never see a growth in classical music if we don't start to change that allow for newer audience in our concert halls.  He goes on to say that many of the older generation are afraid that they will have to dumb down music to get younger audiences to the concerts.  Here I agree with Mr. Sandow that you don't have to dumb down classical music but we will actually be forced to enrich it further.  We will have to make it savvier for my generation. 

The last post was about how the arts as we know it is changing and to even call it the arts means that we are out of touch.  If you look around in today's world there is art everywhere but not in the ways we are use to it.  He makes a comparisons to shows on HBO and that they are comparable to great novels of the past.  We need to open up our eyes to the changing world and not be afraid to try different ways to get our art out there.  We cant rely on the arts to continue, but we will always have ways to keep art alive and we need to find ways that do that.  We should not be afraid to branch out to contemporary culture because it won't dumb down our art form but only make it better.