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classical links
Jan. 28th, 2005 05:34 amTerry Teachout, whose writing I originally discovered through his Commentary magazine music columns, writes there this month on Haydn, probably my favorite single composer if I have one. I'm especially drawn to symphonies: Haydn wrote more of them than any other major composer, and they're central to his output in a way that most of Mozart's aren't. Teachout focuses on the sophisticated, intelligent wit of Haydn's mature works - and he recommends the Beecham recordings, which apply to this music the mind of the most intelligently witty conductor of the recording era. Beecham used old inauthentic scores and tinkered with them a lot, but always gave enjoyable results.
But my favorite Haydn works are the lean and strange works of his earlier years, of which the Farewell Symphony is the best known, but there are many others. His symphonies numbered between 35 and 52 are the highlight of this period, and there are some good discs selecting from them. I learned these from some old Nonesuch recordings which now don't sound so good, but I still remember them fondly.
Greg Sandow says that classical music is in trouble. I don't say he's wrong, but it's been in trouble for a long time now, and some of Norman Lebrecht's deadlines for the sky to have finished falling have passed already. Also, Sandow has mistaken some of the symptoms which are actually symptoms of something else. Yes, classical radio and record stores are slowly dying - and mightily annoyed I am at the decline of my one remaining local classical station into purveying their wares as Easy Listening with salacious backstories - but that's part of a migration of all specialty radio and specialty retail onto the web, and of recordings into sound files. Sandow says that audiences are aging, but according to his own statistics the big jump occurred decades ago and hasn't changed much since, and that the concert audience is declining, but I read that this crisis is also hitting pop music: after over a century of recorded music, people are finally beginning to prefer listening to it.
Lisa Hirsch, who links to Sandow, comments that he left one thing out: classical music is no longer being taught in schools.
This if true is bad, but thinking back to my own school days I don't think exposure to this or other things was all that helpful. The only classical music exposure in school I had that I didn't seek out was some special assembly programs in elementary school. They were interesting, and taught me a few basic facts, but did nothing for my appreciation. Same goes for things like history and Shakespeare: I was exposed to them in school, but my love for them came entirely through independent curiosity, and school did little or nothing to generate that curiosity.
My elementary education in classical music came almost entirely through the two good radio stations we had in those days, public library record collections, and leafing through bins in record stores. Well, the public library collections around here are still pretty good if not as good as they used to be, and for the others we have the Web. Were I a young seeker today with a high-capacity web connection, I'd be exploring pretty intensely and learning a lot more than I actually did 35 years ago. Sandow himself links in his sidebar to one such site, Naxos Records, which I haven't explored but which Sandow calls "The best classical site on the web, because you can stream nearly every CD Naxos releases, not just samples, but the entire CD. And given the size of the Naxos catalogue, that means you can hear nearly the entire standard classical repertoire on this site, plus many, many unusual works."
If young people are not listening to classical today, they sure weren't in my day either, which was the blossoming and heyday of rock as an art form. That just didn't happen to appeal to me, so I found something I liked better. Many of my contemporaries who had no early interest in classical started exploring it in their 30s, and I've helped a few.
If anything, classical music is going the way of the original classics: once a universal taste of the well-educated, now a small minority taste, but not at all forgotten.
But my favorite Haydn works are the lean and strange works of his earlier years, of which the Farewell Symphony is the best known, but there are many others. His symphonies numbered between 35 and 52 are the highlight of this period, and there are some good discs selecting from them. I learned these from some old Nonesuch recordings which now don't sound so good, but I still remember them fondly.
Greg Sandow says that classical music is in trouble. I don't say he's wrong, but it's been in trouble for a long time now, and some of Norman Lebrecht's deadlines for the sky to have finished falling have passed already. Also, Sandow has mistaken some of the symptoms which are actually symptoms of something else. Yes, classical radio and record stores are slowly dying - and mightily annoyed I am at the decline of my one remaining local classical station into purveying their wares as Easy Listening with salacious backstories - but that's part of a migration of all specialty radio and specialty retail onto the web, and of recordings into sound files. Sandow says that audiences are aging, but according to his own statistics the big jump occurred decades ago and hasn't changed much since, and that the concert audience is declining, but I read that this crisis is also hitting pop music: after over a century of recorded music, people are finally beginning to prefer listening to it.
Lisa Hirsch, who links to Sandow, comments that he left one thing out: classical music is no longer being taught in schools.
This if true is bad, but thinking back to my own school days I don't think exposure to this or other things was all that helpful. The only classical music exposure in school I had that I didn't seek out was some special assembly programs in elementary school. They were interesting, and taught me a few basic facts, but did nothing for my appreciation. Same goes for things like history and Shakespeare: I was exposed to them in school, but my love for them came entirely through independent curiosity, and school did little or nothing to generate that curiosity.
My elementary education in classical music came almost entirely through the two good radio stations we had in those days, public library record collections, and leafing through bins in record stores. Well, the public library collections around here are still pretty good if not as good as they used to be, and for the others we have the Web. Were I a young seeker today with a high-capacity web connection, I'd be exploring pretty intensely and learning a lot more than I actually did 35 years ago. Sandow himself links in his sidebar to one such site, Naxos Records, which I haven't explored but which Sandow calls "The best classical site on the web, because you can stream nearly every CD Naxos releases, not just samples, but the entire CD. And given the size of the Naxos catalogue, that means you can hear nearly the entire standard classical repertoire on this site, plus many, many unusual works."
If young people are not listening to classical today, they sure weren't in my day either, which was the blossoming and heyday of rock as an art form. That just didn't happen to appeal to me, so I found something I liked better. Many of my contemporaries who had no early interest in classical started exploring it in their 30s, and I've helped a few.
If anything, classical music is going the way of the original classics: once a universal taste of the well-educated, now a small minority taste, but not at all forgotten.
