Flying High

06. May 2005 · Comments Off on Flying High · Categories: imported, Ramble

Tomorrow I will be flying down to UCI to visit my daughter Kelsey for the weekend. She attends UCI … a beautiful campus! Of course my Saturday students are well aware of this visit; I had to cancel their lessons. (See you next week, folks.)

I’ll also be hearing the UCI orchestra perform. A former student plays oboe and English horn there, as does another oboist I taught the summer before she left for Irvine. Here’s the program:

Dvorak: Carneval Overture
Hindemith: Mathis der Maler
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2

Sounds good, don’t you think?

I’ll bring this handy iBook with me, of course, so you’ll still hear from me, whether you like it or not.
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More On Our Little Problem

06. May 2005 · Comments Off on More On Our Little Problem · Categories: imported, Links

Just read some thoughts from Paul Cantrell’s blog, Comparing Notes. Read the entire post here.

Two things strike me:

1. Concerts probably fall into this same group of what Putnam would call social captial building activities, along with picnics and churches and voting. Playing music in the home as a social activity certainly is. The decline of public interest in classical music, which is live music at its heart, is likely a part of the broad phenomenon Putnam is talking about.
2. Classical music culture in particular has lots of built-in bonding, and is quite good at that, but is not so good at bridging. In spite of the outreach campaigns and attempts at watering down or explaining up the music for “everyone else” — institutional efforts at bridging — there’s very little bridging built into the musical culture itself.

Thoughts?
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Music Quote

06. May 2005 · Comments Off on Music Quote · Categories: imported, Quotes

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Frank Zappa (1940 – 1993) US singer, guitarist, philosopher, actor, The Real Frank Zappa Book, ch. 8 (1989; written with Peter Occhiogrosso).

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