my facebook status is now "Andrea believes."

suddenly I feel like blogging again. who knew? judd, did you watch the speech?

read this!

Back in the day, Part I

I was really happy to come across this proof that we've been doing it for ten years, now. Ten years!

More to come, as I find it.

Youth, Revisited

In my very first blog post - serendipitously, almost exactly three years ago - I wrote about young composer Jay Greenberg, who had been profiled on 60 Minutes and was receiving a good deal of media attention. I wrote about the strange fetishism surrounding youth and classical music, applying to both performers and composers. It's something that I really don't quite understand, but normally it seems to fit into a neat slot in our mass entertainment culture, the "next Mozart" line resonating with people who normally have little or no contact with classical music.

But while browsing the various lectures available on the TED site, I found that it's not just our mass media that has fallen under the spell of classical youth. TED is basically a Smart People Organization, originally an annual conference of thinkers from a diverse array of fields, and now an organization dedicated to their three-pronged acronym principles: Technology, Entertainment, Design. They are, despite this being a critical blog post (I'm getting there), a really cool organization, even if they have a super-elitist vibe about them that makes me very uncomfortable.

Anyway, I found a number of musical acts among their lectures and presentations. The only two that I could find that involved classical music (I'm not counting Ethel, the downtown string quartet - not classical music, but it's awesome that they were invited) were performance-lectures by pianist Jennifer Lin and violinist Sirena Huang. Ms. Lin is 14 and Ms. Huang is 11. Do I need to say any more? Actually, yes. Under the "About This Talk" for Jennifer Lin, it gives the following description:

"If you follow only one link from this blog in your life, let it be [this one]," wrote Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, pointing his readers toward this performance by pianist and composer Jennifer Lin. Lin, then 14, starts by playing Joseph Hoffman's "Kaleidoscope," then Robert Schumann's "Abegg Variations." She talks about the process of composition and discusses the state of flow, when she can improvise beautiful music instantly -- a state of mind that cannot be forced. Lin invites audience member Goldie Hawn to choose a random sequence of notes, from which she improvises a beautiful and surprisingly moving piece, known to draw tears even via podcast. She finishes with a lightning performance of Jack Fina's "Bumble Boogie."

First of all, it needs to be said that these are good musicians. They give fine, high-level performances of some classical repertoire. But this is just silly. As far as I can tell, they are the only children who are invited to this entire conference - a conference dedicated to presenting the best minds in a variety of fields. Where are the child physicists? The child political scientists? Do otherwise smart people believe that children are better at performing classical music than are, say, the teachers of those children? Has Steven Levitt ever heard classical music? Jennifer Lin's improvisation is passable, but it's not even borderline representative of the best new music being written (or improvised) today. And if this were 60 Minutes or Time Magazine, I wouldn't expect that any representative artists would be considered. But this is supposedly a conference that is dedicated to finding those people across a wide variety of fields! And yet they default to children?

I mean no disrespect to either of the musicians who perform here - it's not their fault that they are being used in this way. But it's totally offensive to me that these are the people who would be chosen to represent my field. It displays a willful ignorance on the part of the organizers, who must know that there are resources available for finding more accomplished practitioners in the world of classical music. Choose someone I don't like - choose Helmut Lachenmann, for all I care. But don't tell us that a 14-year old playing white notes is the best we have to offer.

It is encouraging, though, to think that even something so (relatively) banal would apparently stir the hearts and minds of an assembled audience, and an online community. If a mediocre, though impressive-for-a-14-year-old, improvisation can lead a smart author to put that video above all the other links available in the entire internet, perhaps that says something positive about the potential inherent in our line of work.

The state of classical criticism, filtered through computer preferences

I wouldn't be surprised if this comment page were reprinted in some future chapter on "Classical Music Criticism in the Early 21st Century" or the like.

At the end of a really great day

cross-posted at juddgreenstein.com

My friend Emily Driscoll was killed in a car accident last Friday. She wasn't a very close friend of mine, but she was one of those rare, obviously remarkable people, smart and confident and charismatic, a doer and a mover and a shaker, compassionate and on the side of justice. Emily was a fantastic artist, and, along with Walker Waugh, was the co-director of the WORK Gallery, a small but intrepid art space in Red Hook. I'd planned to do some collaborations with them; they both shared my sense of art as a moving, living thing, and were eager to reach out to the other disciplines. It looks like our first collaboration will be a memorial. It's really a tragedy, with no consolation, save for the global recognition - too early - of a life well lived, in the fullest possible sense of that phrase.

My friend Eve said that Emily died the way that we might all hope to - "at the end of a really great day". She meant, I think, both the day itself, full of action and accomplishment, and also the entirety of her life, the broader "day". The phrase seems perfectly right to me, and so I'm giving that name to the Seattle piece, and giving its dedication to the appropriate mix of joyous days and tragic ends that it will forever conjure in my mind.

My deepest condolences to the Driscoll family, and to Walker. The world has lost a good one - thank you, Emily.

let's do...

...an official release of The New Austerity, I think that could be fun. But other fun things, like the "who has the weirdest dream" thing in the park, should happen. It looks like it will be warm forever, so maybe it's not as urgent/unlikely as we thought. The dreams are getting weirder, by the way, but I'm starting to win in the end.