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Pizzicato Reactions
By Steven Ward and Scott Woods One of the prevalent themes that has emerged through dozens of interviews on this site is the supposed decline in actual rock criticism, particularly since the explosion of the web. You're probably familiar with the usual suspects: declining word counts in both the dailies and the glossies; the apparently unquenchable thirst of publishers for gossip and artist profiles over critiques or "think pieces"; the editorial shunning of individual voices...Yeah, yeah, yeah, heard it all before, right? Well, compared to those who earn their living writing about classical music, it must be said that rock critics have it pretty damn easy. Outside of New York, L.A., and Boston, how many alt-weeklies can you think of that devote regular space every week to classical reviews? How many daily papers in your area never cover classical performances or the opera? And quick, can you name the classical critics at Time, Newsweek, or Entertainment Weekly? Pardon our own ignorance, but do such people even exist? "Ignorance" is a key concept here. We ourselves confess to being very much in the dark on these and other issues related to classical criticism. So we decided to approach a few well-known classical writers with a set of very general survey questions related to classical music and classical criticism. Thus, our first venture into a topic that has little or absolutely nothing to do with rock 'n' roll or pop music. Or does it? Indeed, this was one of the topics we were most curious about. (For instance, it's rather obvious that most pop commentators aren't well-versed in classical music--and by extension, classical criticism. But what do they make of us and the music we cover?) Kyle Gann, Anne Midgette, Greg Sandow, Lloyd Schwartz, and Anthony Tommasini (see their bios below) are not the only prominent classical critics in North America, but they are all fiercely passionate both about writing and about the music they cover. We're grateful to them all for their time and generosity in responding to this survey.
Contributor Bios
[This bio is taken from Kyle Gann's Home Page.]
[Greg Sandow on the Web, including his article, Why Classical Music Needs Rock & Roll.]
His reviews, articles, and poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Poetry, the New Republic, the Paris Review, Parnassus, and Raritan, among others. His poems have been selected twice for The Best American Poetry. He has been an Artist in Residence at Trinity College in Hartford and for the Northeastern University Music Department, a member of the Executive Board of PEN New England from 1983 to 1998, and the Associates of the Boston Public Library have chosen him as one of Boston's "Literary Lights." He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts for poetry, the United States Information Agency, ASCAP (he's a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award), the Amphion Foundation, and has won the Radio and Television Award from the Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity. A former actor, he has appeared with such notable performers (at the beginning of their careers) as Stockard Channing, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Woods. He was a regular on WGBH's prize-winning series "The Spider's Web," on which he played, among many other roles, Scrooge in the annual broadcast of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Jump to the survey topic of your choice: 1) Is there a young audience for classical music? 2) Classical critics as classical musicians. 3) Pop music and pop music criticism. 4) Who is the target audience and how do you reach them? 5) Classical music for beginners. 6) Influential classical critics. 7) Writing about words vs. writing about notes. 8) Excessive media coverage of pop. Some related links on classical criticism and/or classical music.
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