oboeinsight

Doing a search on classical music snobs, I landed at Naxos.com and read this:

Coping with Snobs

There are snobs everywhere, in every field. Baseball snobs try to make you feel bad if you don’t know Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average or Willie Mays’hat size. Computer snobs try to make you feel bad if you don’t know a ROM from a RAM.

Classical music snobs are some of the snobbiest snobs of all. They try to make you feel bad by showing off their knowledge and declaiming their opinions. Often their snobbery masquerades as helpfulness, but snobs have a way of making you ashamed of your ignorance.

Nobody should feel ashamed of ignorance. If a classical music snob tries to shame you at a concert, don’t take it personally. They’re just showing off, and may be unaware that they are making you feel small in order to make themselves feel big.

Classical music has a reputation for snobbery, but in fact the audience is full of wonderful people who aren’t snobs at all, people who come to enjoy the beauty of the music. These people know that what really matters is your willingness to open your mind and heart to the music.

I don’t know why, but “Nobody should feel ashamed of ignorance” bugs me. Maybe because we shouldn’t be ignorant about certain things – hunger and racism come to mind immediately. I wish they had put that differently. So there are times, I think maybe we should be ashamed of ignorance (and remedy the situation). It’s just that perhaps we ought not be ashamed of ignorance in classical music (although it’s not difficult to fix that). But anyway, I just thought I’d post this here for all to read since I’m guessing not everyone does a search on classical music snobs!
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The symphony orchestra’s future has been discussed, seemingly, forever now. So much of the time we are told that we seem distant or elitist. (I think that most things appear that way to people who don’t understand them. I’d say, in fact, that some of my friends who listen to only a certain kind of music, say, for instance, “indie rock”, seem like snobs to me because I haven’t a clue who or what they are talking about.)

But Toronto Symphony is doing something they think will appeal to a good number of new audience members. I just think what they are doing sounds like fun, and I can use fun!

Clutching a plastic doll of the golden droid he made famous, Daniels admitted to being “put off by opera houses, concert halls, by a certain snobbishness.”

“There is none of that in this concert,” said the British actor during a chat with reporters just prior to rehearsing the program. “People already belong to the music and the music already belongs to them.”

Well heck, if C3PO says this, it must be true, yes?! Read more here.

I like the whole idea of a Star Wars concert. (I wanna play, I wanna play!) I liked doing the Final Fantasy “Dear Friends” concert as well. I really like hearing how similar these works are to the music we often play in our snobby symphony and opera performances.

San Jose Symphony (RIP) played a concert many, many years ago that included music from Star Wars. R2D2 even visited. (And my son was chosen from the audience to meet the robot, and get a t-shirt from Skywalker Ranch. I’ll never forget how he looked when the conductor asked if there was a Brandon Mitchell in the audience!) The music to Star Wars isn’t all easy fluff. A lot of movie music, in fact, is challenging to play, and is wonderful stuff.
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