Two great loves
The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it’s helping classical music.
I’ll be forever grateful to oboist and impresario James Roe for cluing me in - Alex Ross has a wonderful blog. He’s the music critic of the New Yorker, and to be linked to on his blog is like getting a nod from BoingBoing. Bigger than big. Huge.
I think I discovered pianist Jeremy Denk’s blog, Think Denk, on my own, but maybe James should get credit for that, too. It’s splendid. Here’s an excerpt from this summer:
Classical music is so often the victim of a haughty love. Or a nerdy one. The other night, after a concert, I was talking with a young man whose enthusiasm was tremendous but whose every expression of this enthusiasm disheartened me in the extreme. He explained to me, smiling, all the reasons why he refers to the various Beethoven Sonatas in various ways … for instance, never “Les Adieux,” but always “Lebewohl,” since “THE goodbye,” he claimed, doesn’t make sense; “Waldstein” is permissible because it is a dedication; he confessed to using “Appassionata,” somewhat guiltily, but it’s OK because it’s Italian (?); but never, EVER, would he use the term “Moonlight” Sonata. I thought to myself, looking in his sincere, sweet eyes, aglow with these distinctions, that this person loves the same music I do, he’s my target audience, I can give something over to him, possibly, pass on some of my love … but at the same time this conversation about titles made me feel like jumping out the window. Probably I was reacting this way because I saw my teen self in his face … I sincerely hope he is not reading this blog entry, but if he is, what apology can I offer: I’m sorry you made me feel like jumping out the window???
Haughty love is worse than nerdy love, though, and it spreads through the apparatus of the classical world, sometimes through maestros pontificating and glorifying on PBS specials, sometimes through critics who adore to condescend, etc. etc. Everyone is guilty; I am terribly guilty; there are so many lurking clichés. All so well-intentioned, like a benevolent squadron of embalmers. So hard to speak of our music in the present tense!
[From a post called Grocery Stores Of the Mind.]
Now I feel all happy and insider-engaged to report Alex Ross has written about Jeremy Denk’s blog, and many other online classical music landscapes, in a superb article in the New Yorker. Lots of people are writing beautifully about classical music in the present tense on the web — Ross says that “Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace.” Bloggers chime in on all possible classical subjects, concerts are immediately uploaded, performers tell us what it’s like to perform - endless.
It’s wonderful. All the haughty love that Denk talks about, all the mysterioso hiding-away-in-amber qualities of this culture (the things that make people call it “classified” music), all that distance melts away online. Classical music is engaging, human, immediate, and often charming, just like the online world as a whole.
Try some of the sources in Ross’s article. See Michael Tilson Thomas educating people about how this music is put together. See all the artists showing you their work, and the groupies blogging wildly about what happened at the opera tonight. This is a lucky, fruitful time for classical music.
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Hello, Susan!
Is this “Susan Crawford” the oboist who once co-rented a house in Hull, Massachusetts with Linda Rohr, Jeff Wheeler and Clinton Ross? If so, Hello! If not, well, Hello, anyway, thanks for your time and sorry for the intrusion.
Clinton Ross
Plymouth, MA
No, sorry, I’m a violist. but hello!