On Faux Musical Quality, Popularity, and Relevance

A few weeks ago I read a clickbait piece on mic.com, "How The Music Industry Is Brainwashing You to Like Bad Pop Songs." It linked to a study showing how the emotion centers of the brain light up in fMRIs when familiar tunes were played to the test subjects. This isn't a particularly surprising result.  …

Myth of the Monolithic Pop Culture

One of the many ideas that Crisis folks rely on is what we could call a Monolithic Pop Culture trope. The whole idea of Classical Music culture being rooted in the past (and therefore needing to "catch up" to contemporary culture) relies on this myth that culture has "evolved" (nevermind the problematic aspects of a …

Opera: “I’m not dead!”

With all the talk about San Diego Opera, the Met Opera, and a bit further back, the closure of New York City Opera we might be quick to say that Opera is a dying art form in the US. Indeed, a recent NAI report shows that Opera attendance is steadily declining from a recent high …

Creativity, Craftmanship, and Copying

Michael Rushton's recent post says some wonderful things about the problem of focusing on either Creativity or Quantification. Creativity is a wonderful thing, but successful songwriters, playwrights, poets, video game designers and chefs, know technique – they have to. It is great to encourage children to experiment and explore, to instill a love of creativity. …

Cultural Omnivores must truly be dead…

The shrinking Cultural Omnivores issue is an interesting one since they functioned primarily as "swing voters" in the realm of audiences.  This sub-population tend to go to both highbrow and lowbrow events, not favoring one over the other--hence the name, "Cultural Omnivores."  Apparently, one of the studies explaining decline has shown that there are fewer …

The Classical Music “Crisis” and Millennials

I was reading a few posts about Millennials in Classical Music at Catherine Starek's blog, Mezzaphonically Speaking, and it occurred to me that I haven't spent as much time taking a look at how the changing ethnic demographic of the US is affecting attendance at music events. Sure, I've brought up the emerging Demographic Racial …

Strategic National Arts Alumni Project Survey

I just took the SNAAP (Strategic National Arts Alumni Project) 2013 Survey, which is interesting as I've recently had a conversation about The Julliard Effect and thought it might be very interesting to see a broader overview of how folks who have had arts training fare later in life.  The SNAAP survey gives such a …

Historical Overview of Technological Solutions to the Arts

Mark Shubin gives one of the most interesting overviews of the technology in the arts--fascinating stuff and do take a look at some of his other blog posts. http://www.schubincafe.com/2013/08/31/historical-overview-of-technical-solutions-in-performing-arts-video/

Dothraki Love Songs and Who is Paul McCartney, anyway?

Occasionally I do weird web searches--it's usually how I find some very interesting things that I would never have come across even while some bemoan that the net has killed browsing culture.  Sure, it's still not the same thing as having the physical and visceral feel of picking out a book and looking at it, …

on dancing while playing the cello… (part 2: Music as Choreography)

In my previous post I talked about the Choreography of the Mouth when learning how to sing in multiple langauges and mentioned I would post about Music as Choreography.  Here is that post.  As I said previously: It’s simply about the choreography of the mouth (my next post will talk about Music as Choreography) which …

on dancing while playing the cello…

Even though my first formal entry into dancing with the cello was nearly a year ago when I worked with my dance/music project, Secondhand, it was in a performance where I played the role of a cello playing Shiva. Since Shiva is the "Lord of the Dance" my role with my artistic partner, Celeste, was …

Arts and Aging Toolkit

I've been coming across a number of organizations designed to address the arts for an aging population.  The Arts and Aging Toolkit talks about the Demographics of Aging (Chapter 1.3) with some implications for what that might mean for arts participation in regions with a quickly rising median age in Chapter 1 (Understanding the Context …

Camera Lucida: Interactive Video/Music and Dance

In a previous post I talked about one of my latest projects, a Community New Music group called the Mothership Ensemble.  This post is about another new project I also co-founded with Roxell Karr.  We call ourselves Camera Lucida, and it's an artistic collaboration incorporating live interactive video and music for dancers and movement artists.  …

The Other Orchestra(s)

It's been some time since I've talked about non-European Large Ensembles.  In my posts, Supporting whose arts anyway? and "Eurocentrism? We Aren't The World by Jon Pareles,  I questioned the presupposition that any particular arts genre is culturally, psychologically or economically healthy for, say, American society.  And if we truly believe we need more arts …

Which Came First, the Music or the Brand?

As I mentioned in a previous post, if you've Branded yourself well, then Marketing (to raise awareness about your music) and Selling (to get gigs) should be much easier to do.  Branding is the totality of your public image and having a good Brand is tantamount to making all other aspects of your business move …

Perspective: The Grammy Awards

So, Greg Sandow says the Classical Grammys don't matter.  Ok, but my retort is that on the whole, the Grammys don't matter. Let's put aside the issue that the Grammys are an awards ceremony for the American Recording Industry, which, on the whole, is a tiny blip on the recording industries in the world. The …

Asian Invasion of Classical Music

So Greg Sandow wrote a post on diversity in classical music and somehow it just left me feeling a little bit betrayed.  Not that what he's saying is necessarily wrong, but it's the typical issue that many of us Asians/Asian-American have with regards to any idea of diversity.  Historically, ethnic diversity talk in the US …

“You can either increase demand or decrease supply”

So says Rocco Landesman, the NEA chairman, earlier this year.  I'd read about Landesman's provocative comment (his response is to decrease supply and prune the arts) some time ago at the Asking Audiences blog (which is, btw, a fantastic place to find info about audience research).  See the two part piece on Supply and Demand …