1. Ten-year-old slaps down Anthony Bourdain.
3. Are IQ measures from young ages stable?
4. The demographics working against classical music.
5. New Port-au-Prince photos, excellent quality.
6. Austin Frakt calculates the tax subsidy to health insurance.
7. Dan Ariely is now writing for Wired.
8. Doug Holtz-Eakin starts American Action Network.
Both Bourdain and the girl embarrassed themselves by referring to “Czechoslovakia,” (Bourdain said he was going there – to a non-existent country?) or being “Czechoslovakian.”
I love how Holtz-Eakin’s group sounds so similar to Sharpton’s.
Those two were separated at birth!
I admit that I am not a fan of Alex Ross and, in his defense, he is echoing the incorrect analysis he is receiving from elsewhere but it is still wrong.
People do not go to see symphony orchestras because symphony orchestras don’t offer them much of anything. If ppl want to hear Beethoven (again), they’ll download it. It’s really easy, much cheaper and doesn’t involve getting dressed up or venturing out into the cold (concert season is during very cold weather in most places).
Even if someone really did want to hear Beethoven in the concert hall instead of on a recording (BTW, a lot of recordings are doctored to sound better than live…see any recording on which Rostropovich is conducting), there is no reason to go today because you can be certain they will be playing Beethoven again next year!
This education excuse is total bullshit and is just the concert music community trying to unload blame which is part of a larger alarming trend of ppl not willing to take responsibility for the position they are in.
I will go see Meshuggah any chance I get, even if I have to drive 100 miles and they just played in my town the night before because it is an important performance of new music on the edge that is exciting and their tour bus could flip over tomorrow killing all of them. There is no excitement, no sense of urgency, and very little exclusive value being offered by any major symphony orchestra in the United States. Ohh, and BTW, it’s no good to do like LA and try to generate some excitement while undermining the quality of your offering.
Concert music, in its current incarnation, is doomed but that’s OK. Once it has collapsed, it can be rebuilt anew free of overpriced union labor and without programs that are 95% stuff you can download off the Internet for free.
I think “agnostic” lacks reading comprehension skills.
I stated, “People do not go to see symphony orchestras because symphony orchestras don’t offer them much of anything.”
I don’t see where you’ve shown that I am wrong.
I also did not state that YouTube, iTunes, etc. would save classical music.
I’m not particularly interested in saving classical music anyway. I’m interested in concert (note, I say “concert” not “classical”) music evolving to be something evocative and worth seeing.
If you would like to discuss digital music listening habits, my point there was that _IF_ ppl are going to listen to concert music, it’s a much better value for them to get their music from the Internet than from the concert hall. In no way did I say or suggest that online listening was supplanting concert going. I think most ppl know that the stuff that gets listened to most online is also the stuff that is attended most heavily. The two need each other to healthily survive. Concert programmers are doing their best by repeatedly programming Brahms and the like to ensure that both will die though.
Also, my point about the concert music community being unwilling to accept the blame for their current situation stands.
In the article Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless — New York Magazine, this sentence jumped off the page: “Early good testers don’t make better students,† he tells me, “any more than early walkers make better runners.†
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrongwrongwrongwrong. Rotten analogy, and a silly statement based on a presumed denial of the opposite, which would be that early bad testers make bad students. There’s no logic, however, that says denial of the opposite proves a contention. If you want to support a contention with that type of logic, you have to work with the contrapositive. For which, see next paragraph.
Early bad testers aren’t necessarily dumb. But it’s a VERY good bet that early good testers are smart. You can’t fake smart, or luck into it. When you’re seventeen you can study for the College Boards, and to some extent you can fake it. But when you’re four? If you score in the 99th percentile at four, you’re not faking it; you’re very bright.
Ken rhodes, sure, someone who makes 99th percentile at four year old is smart, smart, smart. Smart for a four year old, that is! College students are supposed to have better standards.
Although it looks like a ten year old can join debate society if s/he’s good enough <grin>.
People do not go to see symphony orchestras because symphony orchestras don’t offer them much of anything. If ppl want to hear Beethoven (again), they’ll download it.
There’s a cultivated classical music audience, who know the canon, and then there’s the rest. I’d bet the majority of adults have never experienced a Beethoven symphony or concerto live. Within the general population, there’s probably a segment of 2-3% who attend classical music concerts regularly, another 8-10% who do so once in a while (spouse/partner, business-related social occasion..etc), whereas, most of the rest never have. How do you get some of the last group to have a try? Dumping Beethoven for contemporary noise is going in the wrong direction.
How can anyone trust someone who calls himself “composer” while rejecting the role of education in forming an interest in classical music.
That is like calling ones self “author” and then claiming a nation that doesn’t have much of a book market other than comic books shouldn’t blame the lack of teaching of reading, but should instead blame the lack of new and exciting books.
If reading were looked at the same way music is, I think the school boards would have trim public school reading down to reading programming manuals, campaign ads, and sales flyers. How many bookstores would there be after a couple of generations of that?
I lived in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when
I was in my twenties, and its legendary
orchestra had something of the aura
of Independence Hall. It was a tradition
among quite a few Philadelphians to have
a subscription or at least to hear the
Orchestra with some regularity. I would
guess that the tradition continues. Whether
it has a narrower base than in the past
I do not know. I imagine this holds for
established orchestras in cities across
America.
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