Double bassist Ausberto Acavedo sent me a link to the following story, which echoes many topics I’ve discussed in my Road Warrior blog series and book:
Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and other titans, conforming them to their own allegedly superior musical understanding or to the narrow taste of the public.
Read the complete article:
Classical Music’s New Golden Age by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Summer 2010
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GREAT article.
Heather Mac Donald works for a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute and believes things such as that racial profiling is myth and that colleges are inflating statistics about rape on campus. About gay marriage she’s said, “A community without the marriage norm is teetering on the edge of civilizational [sic] collapse, if it has not already fallen into the abyss” and has blamed gay marriage for the black illegitimacy rate… just google her name if you want to find out more about her.
So why anyone would read this article is beyond me. Read Greg Sandow’s response to the article on his blog: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/