The Sounds of Silence

Sorry for the silence here - it's just the whole end-of-semester crush as much as anything. Also, I put some of my blogging energy into some comments over at Greg Sandow's blog. I really like his blog and the questions he's asking about the future of classical music, even though I find his conclusions problematic at times. However, I don't have time to flesh all that out right now - there are so many intersecting issues and, though to some degree I think he and I just want something different from music, I think there's a lot to be learned exploring the challenges he's put out there. I've probably multiplied enough words at his place, so I'm hoping soon to tackle some of the same issues here, especially regarding meaning in music. For example, this kind of Sandow statement drives me crazy: “The classical music business, as we know it today, is among much else a glorious basking pool. We can love that, if we want, but we shouldn't confuse this with art.” So much to say about that!

My far-from-polished comments on Sandow's blog can be found here (one short and one long comment) and here, although you'd have to trace your way through many months of his posts to get the full context.

[Oddly, comments to his posts are presented from new-to-old, which is a little confusing, since often the comments are commenting on comments below. In other words, read the comments from the bottom up.]