As Mainstream Outlets for Classical Music Criticism Shrink, Blogging, as an Alternative, Grows!
Verbatim:
Champions of music claim new cyber-turf
By Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News, 2/20/05
In a post last month on his popular blog about classical music, Alex Ross wrote that the music he loves "exists off the radar screen of the major media'' these days. But "it's actually kind of exciting,'' he added. "If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I'd make a virtue of this. Classical music is the new underground.''
Classical music as the new underground: That compelling image hasn't really surfaced in mainstream media writing on the arts. But Ross, the New Yorker magazine's classical music critic, plows fertile ground all the time on his own blog, titled The Rest Is Noise, a daily read for a couple of thousand classical music fanatics.
On any given day, Ross may fire off an essay on his favorite Finnish conductors (the Finns are in); or he may send shock waves through the blogosphere by challenging the idea that dead silence in the concert hall -- no clapping allowed between the movements of a concerto, for instance -- is a good thing. He can be a learned cheerleader for the music, likely to declare that an opera singer or chamber ensemble rocks or is severe -- though, on a slow day, he simply may post photos of his cats.
As the number of column inches devoted to classical music dwindles in many print publications and as major television networks continue to ignore the music, its advocates happily are grabbing the reins and riding into the blogosphere. By one count, there are 45 English-language blogs -- short for "Web logs'' -- devoted to classical music: CD and concert reviews, musical and historical analyses, musings, rants and assorted pokings into looming issues including the economic downturn's impact on symphony orchestras and classical music's very survival.
Suddenly, a whole new world of writing about classical music has cropped up. Not everyone agrees, but some plotters of this revolution predict the blogosphere will create an entry point for new listeners, because blog writing often is informal, energetic, underground-ish -- without the deadening preachiness that infects much classical music writing, driving people away.
Seasoned journalists and critics blog, but so do musicologists, composers, performers, arts administrators, amateur writers and everyday concertgoers: "There are a lot more people out there who can write intelligently about music than have outlets to write about it,'' says Lisa Hirsch, an East Bay tech writer and jujitsu instructor who did graduate work in musicology. Her blog, Iron Tongue of Midnight mixes informed commentary and hot opinion.
After panning a concerto performance in San Francisco by pianist Garrick Ohlsson the other day, Hirsch asked Ross, in an "Iron Tongue'' post, whether -- if he now thinks it's OK to applaud during a good performance -- it would be OK to throw tomatoes at the stage between movements of a bad one.
Hirsch and Ross started their blogs less than a year ago, as have most classical music bloggers. In addition to the contraction of coverage by the pop-obsessed media that has almost necessitated another venue for writing about classical music, there's the increasing availability of easy-to-use software for blogging.
Most classical music bloggers also theorize that the recent attention paid to political bloggers is triggering an unconscious copycat movement in their world: "It's just in the air; everybody is talking about it,'' says Terry Teachout, a well-known freelance arts writer whose blog, About Last Night receives about 2,000 hits every weekday. He likens his online outlet to a "little magazine, an intellectual magazine.''
Teachout began thinking about blogging four years ago, when he came across a blog by Andrew Sullivan, the political writer. "I looked at it,'' he remembers, "and said, 'I could do this and make it about the arts.' ''
About 18 months ago, he started "About Last Night'' on the artsjournal.com website, which also hosts blogs by Greg Sandow, a penetrating essayist on the music's future, and composer Kyle Gann, whose blog links to his "post-modern'' Internet radio station.
It didn't take long for Teachout to recognize the "amazing velocity'' with which ideas travel from blog to blog as one blogger links to the next in a classical music daisy chain.
In a fragmented culture full of niche markets, blogs connect lovers of the music around the globe: "One of the big problems in classical music is that it just isolated itself, and this is a way of redressing that a bit,'' says Helen Radice, a 25-year-old British freelance harpist, whose twang twang twang blog is a much-discussed up-and-comer. "You get a sense of classical music -- or classical music writers -- as normal,'' she says.
Radice's posts include semi-comical reportage: her gig playing at what turned out to be a sexual swingers' Venetian masked ball in Shropshire -- and being asked to participate (she didn't); her performance for a London spiritualist society, whose members relegated her to a hallway next to the men's bathroom once their guru began speaking. She remembers sitting there thinking, "I am so going to blog this when I get home.''
"The dry musicology that exists on library shelves, it's not for me,'' she says. Yet she also posts artful mini-essays on contemporary British symphonists and on the technical capabilities of the harp.
That last posting happened at the request of Ross, who had written about the "twang of death'' conjured by the bass strings of the harp in Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde.'' He wanted to know how that sound gets produced, and Radice supplied the explanation.
This sort of discussion may be too "inside baseball'' for some people, but for bloggers it signifies the free flow of information, as well as the chumminess, that exists in the blogosphere. Ross likens it to "a fantasy village occupied by people who love music and love talking about music, who sort of lean over their white picket fences to chat a couple times a day.''
Spend some time scanning the blogs and you may come away with a conflicting sense of what this village is like: The bloggers' constant cross-linking can seem closed off, a bit incestuous. On the other hand, the bloggers are opening up discussion across an enormous range of subjects that bear on the music's future: "It's a way of talking about the actual role of the musician as creator, today,'' says Houston-based composer Marcus Maroney, whose blog is called Sounds Like New. "Do people really care about us? What's going to support us? The world is changing.''
For Radice, blogging is a way to project some "positivity'' about the music profession, which is fraught with depressives who can't find work. She wants people to know that "classical music is this marvelous and vital art form and there's a lot to be discussed.'' In fact, she hopes to discuss it over drinks with Teachout, Ross and other bloggers in New York next month when she visits Manhattan for the first time in seven years.
Bloggers have their routines. When she isn't working, Radice blogs in the evenings, after she practices. Teachout often blogs at midnight, after returning home from performances, though he tries to blog spontaneously, whenever the Muse calls. Ross blogs mornings, as a rule.
A busy guy to begin with -- in addition to his New Yorker job, he is writing a book on 20th-century music -- Ross blogs for a couple of hours most days. He sounds liberated talking about it: It lets him play with language, to be "snide or snippy'' or to "just be innocently enthusiastic.''
It's a way of evangelizing for the music, of "spreading the word. I just love the serendipity of it,'' he says, "seeing what kinds of wacky Google searches bring people to my site. I can just read them in the daily log and see what brought them to me. I found one today where 'we hate Richard Wagner' brought them to the site. Or 'pure Stravinsky sunglasses' -- it came from Sweden or somewhere. Maybe there was a language problem.''
There are practical reasons for blogging, too. Ross started "The Rest Is Noise'' in part as a place to talk about topics related to his upcoming book, which is due next year and has the same title. Since then, he says, the blog has "taken on a life of its own.''
Teachout, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and other publications, hails the birth of a virtual community and the rise of a new form of journalism. But he also hopes, ultimately, to earn an income through blogging. That's not an impossibility, according to some bloggers. "I can pretty easily imagine a model where people will pay to read blogs,'' says Hirsch. "Would I pay $25 a year to read Teachout? Of course.''
Hirsch doesn't necessarily have the same expectations. For now, she hopes her blogging will attract the attention of editors and increase her freelance writing assignments. (She writes for the San Francisco Classical Voice website).
For Ching Chang, blogging has become an alternative to the freelance life. A technical project manager for an East Bay medical clinic and an opera maven, Chang spent a decade reviewing Bay Area classical performances for editors who didn't always understand and sometimes seemed hostile to the music, he says. A little less than a year ago, he "got a little tired of dealing with them. . . . I just thought it would be great to have total control over what you say, what you cover.''
So he launched The Bay Buzz a blog. His literate and sometimes barbed reviews of the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony and other ensembles appear unadulterated and are as long or as short as he wants them to be. He hasn't made a dime -- well, he's made $25 on a single advertisement. But Chang is running the show.
"It's very satisfying,'' he says. "It's a lot more fun, I must say.''
Richard Scheinin can be reached at (408) 920-5069 or rscheinin@mercurynews.com.
Champions of music claim new cyber-turf
By Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News, 2/20/05
In a post last month on his popular blog about classical music, Alex Ross wrote that the music he loves "exists off the radar screen of the major media'' these days. But "it's actually kind of exciting,'' he added. "If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I'd make a virtue of this. Classical music is the new underground.''
Classical music as the new underground: That compelling image hasn't really surfaced in mainstream media writing on the arts. But Ross, the New Yorker magazine's classical music critic, plows fertile ground all the time on his own blog, titled The Rest Is Noise, a daily read for a couple of thousand classical music fanatics.
On any given day, Ross may fire off an essay on his favorite Finnish conductors (the Finns are in); or he may send shock waves through the blogosphere by challenging the idea that dead silence in the concert hall -- no clapping allowed between the movements of a concerto, for instance -- is a good thing. He can be a learned cheerleader for the music, likely to declare that an opera singer or chamber ensemble rocks or is severe -- though, on a slow day, he simply may post photos of his cats.
As the number of column inches devoted to classical music dwindles in many print publications and as major television networks continue to ignore the music, its advocates happily are grabbing the reins and riding into the blogosphere. By one count, there are 45 English-language blogs -- short for "Web logs'' -- devoted to classical music: CD and concert reviews, musical and historical analyses, musings, rants and assorted pokings into looming issues including the economic downturn's impact on symphony orchestras and classical music's very survival.
Suddenly, a whole new world of writing about classical music has cropped up. Not everyone agrees, but some plotters of this revolution predict the blogosphere will create an entry point for new listeners, because blog writing often is informal, energetic, underground-ish -- without the deadening preachiness that infects much classical music writing, driving people away.
Seasoned journalists and critics blog, but so do musicologists, composers, performers, arts administrators, amateur writers and everyday concertgoers: "There are a lot more people out there who can write intelligently about music than have outlets to write about it,'' says Lisa Hirsch, an East Bay tech writer and jujitsu instructor who did graduate work in musicology. Her blog, Iron Tongue of Midnight mixes informed commentary and hot opinion.
After panning a concerto performance in San Francisco by pianist Garrick Ohlsson the other day, Hirsch asked Ross, in an "Iron Tongue'' post, whether -- if he now thinks it's OK to applaud during a good performance -- it would be OK to throw tomatoes at the stage between movements of a bad one.
Hirsch and Ross started their blogs less than a year ago, as have most classical music bloggers. In addition to the contraction of coverage by the pop-obsessed media that has almost necessitated another venue for writing about classical music, there's the increasing availability of easy-to-use software for blogging.
Most classical music bloggers also theorize that the recent attention paid to political bloggers is triggering an unconscious copycat movement in their world: "It's just in the air; everybody is talking about it,'' says Terry Teachout, a well-known freelance arts writer whose blog, About Last Night receives about 2,000 hits every weekday. He likens his online outlet to a "little magazine, an intellectual magazine.''
Teachout began thinking about blogging four years ago, when he came across a blog by Andrew Sullivan, the political writer. "I looked at it,'' he remembers, "and said, 'I could do this and make it about the arts.' ''
About 18 months ago, he started "About Last Night'' on the artsjournal.com website, which also hosts blogs by Greg Sandow, a penetrating essayist on the music's future, and composer Kyle Gann, whose blog links to his "post-modern'' Internet radio station.
It didn't take long for Teachout to recognize the "amazing velocity'' with which ideas travel from blog to blog as one blogger links to the next in a classical music daisy chain.
In a fragmented culture full of niche markets, blogs connect lovers of the music around the globe: "One of the big problems in classical music is that it just isolated itself, and this is a way of redressing that a bit,'' says Helen Radice, a 25-year-old British freelance harpist, whose twang twang twang blog is a much-discussed up-and-comer. "You get a sense of classical music -- or classical music writers -- as normal,'' she says.
Radice's posts include semi-comical reportage: her gig playing at what turned out to be a sexual swingers' Venetian masked ball in Shropshire -- and being asked to participate (she didn't); her performance for a London spiritualist society, whose members relegated her to a hallway next to the men's bathroom once their guru began speaking. She remembers sitting there thinking, "I am so going to blog this when I get home.''
"The dry musicology that exists on library shelves, it's not for me,'' she says. Yet she also posts artful mini-essays on contemporary British symphonists and on the technical capabilities of the harp.
That last posting happened at the request of Ross, who had written about the "twang of death'' conjured by the bass strings of the harp in Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde.'' He wanted to know how that sound gets produced, and Radice supplied the explanation.
This sort of discussion may be too "inside baseball'' for some people, but for bloggers it signifies the free flow of information, as well as the chumminess, that exists in the blogosphere. Ross likens it to "a fantasy village occupied by people who love music and love talking about music, who sort of lean over their white picket fences to chat a couple times a day.''
Spend some time scanning the blogs and you may come away with a conflicting sense of what this village is like: The bloggers' constant cross-linking can seem closed off, a bit incestuous. On the other hand, the bloggers are opening up discussion across an enormous range of subjects that bear on the music's future: "It's a way of talking about the actual role of the musician as creator, today,'' says Houston-based composer Marcus Maroney, whose blog is called Sounds Like New. "Do people really care about us? What's going to support us? The world is changing.''
For Radice, blogging is a way to project some "positivity'' about the music profession, which is fraught with depressives who can't find work. She wants people to know that "classical music is this marvelous and vital art form and there's a lot to be discussed.'' In fact, she hopes to discuss it over drinks with Teachout, Ross and other bloggers in New York next month when she visits Manhattan for the first time in seven years.
Bloggers have their routines. When she isn't working, Radice blogs in the evenings, after she practices. Teachout often blogs at midnight, after returning home from performances, though he tries to blog spontaneously, whenever the Muse calls. Ross blogs mornings, as a rule.
A busy guy to begin with -- in addition to his New Yorker job, he is writing a book on 20th-century music -- Ross blogs for a couple of hours most days. He sounds liberated talking about it: It lets him play with language, to be "snide or snippy'' or to "just be innocently enthusiastic.''
It's a way of evangelizing for the music, of "spreading the word. I just love the serendipity of it,'' he says, "seeing what kinds of wacky Google searches bring people to my site. I can just read them in the daily log and see what brought them to me. I found one today where 'we hate Richard Wagner' brought them to the site. Or 'pure Stravinsky sunglasses' -- it came from Sweden or somewhere. Maybe there was a language problem.''
There are practical reasons for blogging, too. Ross started "The Rest Is Noise'' in part as a place to talk about topics related to his upcoming book, which is due next year and has the same title. Since then, he says, the blog has "taken on a life of its own.''
Teachout, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and other publications, hails the birth of a virtual community and the rise of a new form of journalism. But he also hopes, ultimately, to earn an income through blogging. That's not an impossibility, according to some bloggers. "I can pretty easily imagine a model where people will pay to read blogs,'' says Hirsch. "Would I pay $25 a year to read Teachout? Of course.''
Hirsch doesn't necessarily have the same expectations. For now, she hopes her blogging will attract the attention of editors and increase her freelance writing assignments. (She writes for the San Francisco Classical Voice website).
For Ching Chang, blogging has become an alternative to the freelance life. A technical project manager for an East Bay medical clinic and an opera maven, Chang spent a decade reviewing Bay Area classical performances for editors who didn't always understand and sometimes seemed hostile to the music, he says. A little less than a year ago, he "got a little tired of dealing with them. . . . I just thought it would be great to have total control over what you say, what you cover.''
So he launched The Bay Buzz a blog. His literate and sometimes barbed reviews of the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Symphony and other ensembles appear unadulterated and are as long or as short as he wants them to be. He hasn't made a dime -- well, he's made $25 on a single advertisement. But Chang is running the show.
"It's very satisfying,'' he says. "It's a lot more fun, I must say.''
Richard Scheinin can be reached at (408) 920-5069 or rscheinin@mercurynews.com.
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