Why so serious?

WHY SO SERIOUS? How the classical concert took shape by Alex Ross (The New Yorker)

“The problem isn’t that the modern way of giving concerts has grown hopelessly decrepit, as some say; it’s that music has for too long been restricted to a single, almost universally duplicated format. If the idea is to treat composers as serious artists, then concerts must become significantly more flexible, in order to accommodate the myriad shapes of music of the past thousand years. Superbly polished as today’s performances are, I sometimes get the feeling that the classics are a force more contained than unleashed, and that new works might still produce the tremendous effect that Beethoven had on Berlioz’s old music master at a concert in Paris: “When I came out of the box and tried to put on my hat, I could not find my own head.”

Classic goes Clubbing by Andreas Bick (silentlistening)

“Today, the bourgeois culture itself is aching under the pressure of popular culture and mass consumption leading to a situation with diclining and overaged audiences that is often described as a crisis of classical music. An answer to this situation is to open up the classical concert to a younger and hipper audience and bring the music to the places where they usually celebrate their musical rituals, the trendy in-clubs of metropolitan life.”

Posted in de-dans, dezbateri on February 22nd, 2010 by de-dans | 10 Comments