{"id":988,"date":"2010-01-09T17:47:09","date_gmt":"2010-01-09T21:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/?p=988"},"modified":"2010-01-09T17:47:09","modified_gmt":"2010-01-09T21:47:09","slug":"diversity-challenge-already-being-met","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/?p=988","title":{"rendered":"Diversity Challenge, Already Being Met?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Greg Sandow has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/2010\/01\/quotation_of_the_day_9.html\">series<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/2010\/01\/important_thought.html\">of<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/2010\/01\/more_on_diversity.html\">posts<\/a> on diversity in classical music where the principle idea is derived from Ramon Ricker&#8217;s quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Thinking about the well-documented changing demographic of the US towards greater numbers of citizens with other than European (read: white) ancestry, I can\u2019t believe that this population, in 50 years or probably less, will want to sit in a concert hall and listen to Mahler. It\u2019s not in their DNA or culture. And that\u2019s not a put down. They also don\u2019t get exposure to this music in schools. If I keep going along this line of thinking, I don\u2019t see a bright future for \u201cclassical\u201d music in general or US orchestras in particular. Sure this music will be with us, but will professional musicians be able to make a living playing it? That\u2019s already difficult to do today in all but the largest US cities.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>When trying to envision the future, I am reminded of this quote that is attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. It\u2019s a good one. When asked how he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and consequentially scored more goals than others, he replied, \u201cI don\u2019t go where the puck is. I go to where the puck will be.\u201d Orchestras and musicians\u2014maybe we should try to be like Gretzky.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When reading this, the first thing that comes to mind is that these ideas are already well on their way to being implemented.\u00a0 Yo-Yo Ma&#8217;s Silk Road Project, the ascendancy of Osvoldo Golijov, and Philip Glass&#8217; Orion are all examples of pressures on classical music to expand the cultural heritage of western classical music.<\/p>\n<p>In one of the subsequent posts that Sandow made, he reiterated one of his own conclusions that:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>The classical music world doesn&#8217;t look outside itself enough, doesn&#8217;t understand what&#8217;s happening elsewhere in our culture.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>To this point, I disagree.\u00a0 In the current new music scene, world music, which seeks to adopt other culture&#8217;s music into the classical heritage, is one of the most significant threads.\u00a0 Cross over acts between art\/avant-pop and classical music are also becoming more frequent.\u00a0 Head over to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newamsterdamrecords.com\/\">New Amsterdam Records<\/a> and you&#8217;ll find a plethora of different, interesting takes on where art music is heading.\u00a0 If I may offer a more specific conclusion to be drawn, it is that <em>most classical music <strong>institutions<\/strong> are cloistered, failing to look outside<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>This is understandable though, the major donors and patrons of these institutions are the gray haired audiences that attend the current concerts, programmed with music which is usually over a century old.\u00a0 Since these institutions are supported by people who <em>want<\/em> to hear 19th century music, they have every incentive to continue to put on a restricted program, even if it doesn&#8217;t make any long term economic sense.<\/p>\n<p>This ascendancy of world music in the scene could be accounted for as some sort of market pressure to expand classical music&#8217;s horizons for a more diverse audience, but I&#8217;ve always seen it as something else.\u00a0 The world music thread provided an aesthetic &#8220;out&#8221; for western music.\u00a0 For quite a while, a work&#8217;s ability to delimit what music <em>can<\/em> <em>be<\/em> has judged it&#8217;s significance in the 20th century pantheon (open a music history text book and peruse the museum of addled ideas that, while philosophically correct, have done more than anything else to engender the idea that classical music is for sophists).\u00a0 World music&#8217;s &#8220;out&#8221; has provided institutions and composers a way to an accessible aesthetic while also allowing them to avoid charges of being sell outs, cheesy, or old fashioned.<\/p>\n<p>That this movement in classical music has also begun to broaden audience demographics (see the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/2010\/01\/more_on_diversity.html\">example<\/a> Sandow cited from another commenter) is fantastic.\u00a0 I hope that it continues to be a part of the classical tradition even as us musicians and composers go about fixing the &#8220;western side&#8221; of the music.\u00a0 Ramon Ricker should know, though, we&#8217;re is already heading for where the puck will be, but that doesn&#8217;t mean we&#8217;ll score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greg Sandow has a series of posts on diversity in classical music where the principle idea is derived from Ramon Ricker&#8217;s quote:<\/p>\n<p>Thinking about the well-documented changing demographic of the US towards greater numbers of citizens with other than European (read: white) ancestry, I can\u2019t believe that this population, in 50 years or probably less, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[110,108,109,107],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-on-music","tag-diversity-challenge","tag-greg-sandow","tag-ramon-ricker","tag-world-music","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}