Future of Classical Music

in fact acts like boards of canada, akufen, techno animal and Oliver Lamm are making music on the edge of classical music, avantgarde and pop/dance.

there lies the future of classical music. and ofcourse there will always be the need of playing old ancient stuff again and again and again and again....

And no, IDM doesn't have much to do with classical composition.

-- Brett G

Can be driven on long, slowly unfolding, complex melody lines... abscence of geetars = OMG NOT ROCK, not disco, not 'live' music, more like modern compostion?? must be... ??

I think people associate IDM & Classical together for the lack of trad. pop structures & straightforward melodies. For not being rock OR 'dance' music (sometimes). For being more like art than 'tunes' on occasion, for being premeditated, challenging music.

Is that better? I'm not sure it is :/

AFAICT, stylistic fusions (like this) probably are the future of the music. Especially in Canadian music, seems like the happening stuff's usually in the vein of cross-cultural fusions + fusions across genres or high-brow/low-brow lines (unibrow?) , often with some debt to minimalism and usually keeping some choons in. Or maybe I'm just exaggerating the importance of stuff that I like.

(weird subtitle though: er, "the" music critic for the New Yorker?)

As a matter of fact, there have been none since "Bolero".

The Rambler is a good place to read. He also knows jungle and follows grime, is a musicologist himself and very smart, very judicious, very well-rounded

http://johnsons-rambler.blogspot.com/

Kyle Gann is a composer, journalist, and teacher whose point of view is downtown nyc post-cagean minimalism. He also has a great webcast of new music.

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/

From these you'll be able to find plenty, just follow the links

The Rambler is a good place to read. He also knows jungle and follows grime, is a musicologist himself and very smart, very judicious, very well-rounded

http://johnsons-rambler.blogspot.com/

Kyle Gann is a composer, journalist, and teacher whose point of view is downtown nyc post-cagean minimalism. He also has a great webcast of new music.

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/

Also Greg Sandow:

http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/

From these you'll be able to find plenty, just follow the links

Every choral, oratorio, art song and opera singer in the world now wants to kick you squarely in the nuts.

i know its geir, but this has to be one of the dumbest posts i've read in 3 years of reading ilm.

Geir batshit as per usual.

It never has, but it usually does become familiar to the man on the street after a while. The man on the street is certainly familiar with "The Four Seasons" and "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", both of which are clearly part of the canon more than most other works.

Barber's "Adagio" and "Carmina Burana" may be known to lots of people, as may also "Fanfare To The Common Man", "Rhapsody In Blue" and parts of "The Planets". But generally, 20th century "classical" music has struggled to get the same impact with the man on the street as its 18th and 19th century counterparts.

But this is the kind of crossover that some orchestras might need to get into if they're to stay viable! Its the same w/the classical rec industry that has to back commercial winners to keep issuing the 'good stuff' which makes a loss. I guess the q wd then be something like: is this situation a good thing?

There's a really good quote (its on Gann's blog from earlier this year) from Lou Harrison on the classical DIY wing that you all should hunt down and then maybe we can get over this fretting abt whether classical music might "die" or whatever - i dunno, every year there's millions of artciles on how classical music is finished but it won't go away. The grim reaper should hurry up!

Sundar - you can also include the second movement of Gorecki's Third Symphony (composed 1976) in your popist classical canon. Anyone who's ever seen a Holocaust documentary will know that one.

The whole 'man on the street doesn't recognise it, therefore it's in crisis' is a tired argument, isn't it? I'll be honest, if you play me certain bits of Beethoven's 9th Symphony I couldn't be guaranteed to recognise it. And why does this standard only get applied to classical music? Is anyone fretting that IDM, say, is in a crisis because your average man on the street hasn't heard of Black Dog or Squarepusher? (And they haven't.) Classical's standards are impossibly high for itself, yet for its overall impact on how the music we hear day to day (in films, TV, radio, adverts, etc.) is shaped, very little else comes close. Not to mention the fact that it is classical composers and performers who have almost entirely shaped how we think about music and musicians today.

The 'museum piece' part of classical music is in difficulty, financially speaking, because it's expensive to put on, fewer people are interested in it, and the industry is reluctant to change anything to make people interested. *shrugs* Luckily, all the interesting, living stuff has never been healthier - self-publishing is cheap, new music performers are better and more numerous, there are plenty of venues, a dedicated and growing audience, and there are so many good composers that people actually worry that there might be too many. Seriously.

If you think there's no future in "classical" music, go down to a venue like the Warehouse in Waterloo, London (or its equivalent in your town) and see some new music. If you still think it's dying a slow death, then fine - you don't care for it, so no need to worry about any crisis.

Revive (as I wait for Tropical Storm Kay to rip the roof off my home (j/k)). Any current composers doing interesting -- even new -- things with classical music? I loved the eerie/beautiful version of The Sinking Of The Titanic that Gavin Bryars and Phillip Jeck and Alter Ego released earlier this year (tho I think Bryars wrote the piece itself in the sixties, so it isn't that new).

what are the most significnt classical works of the last 15-20 years?

Excellent! Thanks. I screwed up by typing "Classical-Music" as a term in the search engine.

The future of classical music is like the past of classical music. It has been a museum piece since around 1900 anyway, and those so-called "contemporary" works will never become classical as they will be forgotten because of their lack of recognisable tunes.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/conductorbot.jpg