No Future

Over at the Denver Post, Kyle MacMillan embarks on The Death of Classical Music 5: Assignment Miami Beach. Evocation of a lost Golden Age of American classical music? Check. Passing citation of NEA participation statistics? Check. List of gripes from Greg Sandow? Check. I'm just being a curmudgeon because, to be honest, I'm burned out on this whole discussion. To his credit, MacMillan spends at least as much time focusing on those subsets of the overly-general "classical music" category that are not dying as those that are. And I've pretty much said my piece on this (this post and this post hold up passably well after a few years).

Still, a list of tips from the rock and pop world by Ronen Givony, one of the music directors at Le Poisson Rouge, had this amusing counterpoint:

4. Promotion. Unlike rock bands... classical performers have traditionally relied on managers, publicists or presenters to market their appearances.

5. Entrepreneurialism. Rather than waiting for a grant or somebody else to initiate change, artists need to take things into their own hands. "What if the Beatles had said, 'We're going to wait until we get some funding and then we're going to go on the road'?" Givony said. "What if the Sex Pistols had said that? Nothing would have changed in music history."

The ghosts of Brian Epstein and Malcolm McLaren would like a word....