Posted on 03/08/2017 7:45:45 PM PST by brucedickinson
While organizations in other artistic fields — theater, literature, the visual arts — attempt, however haltingly and imperfectly, to broaden the scope of their activities to include a range of creative voices and life experiences, the leadership in classical music keeps on ignoring the whole subject. The field is just as committed now to the work of white men as it was 100 years ago or more. That’s a very bad look for any cultural organization in 2017. And it’s a particularly bad look for a field that needs to be thinking seriously about how far the traditional models can be relied on in a rapidly changing artistic landscape.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfchronicle.com ...
The best classical style music being produced over the last forty or so years has been for movie soundtracks.
John Williams, Basil Poledouris, James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Silvestri, etc.
Don’t forget Elmer Bernstein. His background score for “Animal House” is one of the best things about the movie.
You’d be surprised at how many Jazz artists actually took a stab at composing symphonies. Mingus wrote “Epitaph”, Ornette Coleman did “Skies of America”, just to mention a few.
* I used the word "Oriental" rather than "Asian" to distinguish him from those of the sub-continent, SE Asia, etc. If it offends anyone...too damned bad.
When I was a teenager I got to hear the Houston Symphony which came to our little town. Though not an elite group the Symphony was good enough to excite me and bring me into a life-long love of classical music.
|
When I came to Chicago for school one of the reasons was that I wanted to hear Fritz Reiner conduct. Unfortunately, he died before I arrived but I still went to many concerts with the CSO buying cheap tickets to sit in the gallery. In the period after my marriage I did not get to attend much but that picked up some after I retired. Hopefully, my health improves enough that I can go some more.
Here we have three orchestras: the CSO, the Civic and the Grant Park Orchestras. The first is the world’s greatest band. The second is composed of young musicians (it is called the “training orchestra for the CSO) and plays free concerts across the city. The third plays free concerts in the Park during the summer three or four times a week. There is, of course, the Lyric Opera’s orchestra as well. All play excellently and even the worse is as good as those not in the top tier across the nation.
You had a great experience with the CSO. Philadelphia had a wonderful orchestra with Eugene Ormandy, and of Course Boston had TWO great orchestras both based in Symphony Hall, the BSO and the POPS.
That is the main and unfortunate reason why classical music is fading - classical compositions worth listening to are museum pieces from centuries past. Most contemporary "classical" music is the sound equivalent of abstract expressionist art: a collection of gimmicks like rolling dice to pick notes or playing the same note or chord over and over again for hundreds of measures.
So true. I have heard some that sounded like an orchestra tuning up with a lot of intentional dissonance and then somebody played the sound of a trash can full of glass and silverware tumbling down a staircase. Music deconstructed and destroyed. What's even worse, somebody convinced an orchestra to "play" it.
Sarah Chang - Massenet - Meditation from Thais
CRAZY ENCORE BY YUJA WANG! Turkish March (Mozart/Volodos/Say) Carnegie Hall
It's not a piece of real estate.
If most of the people playing it are Asian and female, it becomes their music as much as anybody else's.
“There is one big difference between Western and Eastern musical traditions.
Harmony.
Western music has the world’s only tradition of harmony, discovered, nurtured, and perfected in the West, culminating in the tradition of Bach-Mozart-Beethoven.”
On the topic of harmony, I have recently been listening to various Baroque composers, and I came across the music of a French composer by the name of Jean-Philippe Rameau. It turns out that he was a renowned music theorist as well as a composer, and much of what he wrote was on harmony. His system of harmony is the basis of most 20th-century harmony textbooks. And his music, to me, is stunning in its use of harmony as well as rhythm. I think that his orchestral compositions for opera and ballet are some of the best ever written. As an example of his superb use of harmony, please listen to Rameau’s beautiful “Entree de Polymnie.”
I should have been clearer. I should have said: Classical music is a product of white/western culture, and no amount of finagling and redefining composers and periods is going to change that.
So far, whites have not had a problem with people from other cultures learning and performing classical music. All this talk about “cultural appropriation” might drive some folks to change their mind about that.
The 2nd piece down says “calassial” and the third piece down says “classsical.”
Nice music, though!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.