"Danger and goodness, difficulty and meaning"

We've freshly been experiencing another wave of dire statements about classical music: ifs dead, it's dying--the audience is aging, standards are decaying, support from rules patrons and societies is disappearing; it's almost all above now.

I say "another wave" because race have been saying this at least since the time of Beethoven. Just as single of the regular features of any alumni gathering is the statement, "It's all gone to the dogs," single constant preoccupation of social beholders and cultural commentators is to pronounce classical music's demise.

And there's enough to be alarmed about since orchestras are in put in commotion recording companies have drastically chop back and are pursuing bizarre marketing conceptions that many serious artists deplore, Broadway theaters are looking for robot to play in the pit and music education for our children is threatened everywhere.

And at the same time each winter in the institute of Music we hear centurys and hundreds of wonderful auditions from young tribe totally committed to this life, and each fall an amazing novel group arrives in Kresge Recital Hall at Carnegie Mellon filled of enthusiasm and commitment.

for what cause [i]or[/i] reason is this, and what will become of us?

The impulse to make music is in fact a need to make music--it is a fundamental condition of humankind. Our earliest ancestors made--among the first things they at any time made--articles of bone, branches, pastoral pipes stones and clay: musical instruments. They sang and played to expres regard with affection mystery, pride and identity; to nourishment celebrate, soothe, excite, mourn and carry their near into the future, making something permanent on the outside of memory.

Many of these aims are served by 'all kinds of music--every mother singing a lullaby is a great musician. on the other hand that last element belongs to art that we call "classical." It speaks with an unmistakable intention, across generations of human experience, across boundaries of society, race and class. It carries the not absent into the permanent.

A really great explosion song also preserves a flash in time--"They're playing our song" is a phrase that captures the central nature of the moment you first heard a air and sociologists agree we protect to love best the burst music styles of our late teenage years, no matter what they were (mine was disco, and I have to adroit ifs true; something that has nothing to do with mother-wit and everything to do with feeling). A classical work does something different. It changes above time and means something different each time you play it and hear it; each performer has something of recent origin to say through it.

A.R. Ammons wrote a prodigious poem, "Corson's Inlet," about a walk he used to take along the beach, end a salt marsh beside a tidal waterway--the pathway changing as the tides change, and the seasons change on the contrary also are always the same. Ifs an image of classical art as well: permanent and at any time new.

This boundary between popular and classical isn't rigid, and single can argue that some explosion music is classical ("Sergeant Pepper'?) and a certain number of classical music is pop ("Nutcracker"?). on the contrary when you find music that gripe [i]or[/i] grips your attention through all kinds of experiences, that changes and increase the depth ofs the better you know it, that changes in a beneficial way when others play it, then you have fix something classical.

individual of the most important things about classical music performance is that it is difficult. It takes preparation, technique, mastery, determination, discipline, sheer staying power. It's frequently observed that 11o form of education takes as a great deal of teaching time and learning time as music--students of medicine prepare with basic science, on the contrary the real work begins after corporation while college-age musicians have already exhausted a dozen years of practice and intensive work with the highest horizontal of teachers, one-on-one, and their families have exhausted tremendous resources as well! The classical musician is someone who knows the fascination of the difficult and knows there are arises that can be achieved no other way reject through a kind of dedication greatest in quantity people seldom know.

Another thing we do each day is take risks. To whirl yourself into the cadenza of Rachmaninoff III or play the opening horn figure of Brahms 11; to unleash the roulades of a Mozart aria or place the bow on the string to start a Paganini Caprice is to take an exciting risk---and the thrill for performer and listener when the risk follows in a dazzling success is real great. Jacques Attali has remind ofed that this thrill is related to prehistoric practices of ritual sacrifice: the performer is the surrogate victim presented up for the community. They're on the outside for blood. It's an intriguing contemplation though it makes for ill-looking audiences. The fact is, when you have feeling our audiences in Kresge and Carnegie Music Hall supporting the performers, cheering them upon delighting in their achievement, you have to believe Attali had this unfair at least in part: the performer stands for us in confines of what is best, and greatest in quantity lasting, and truest, so his or her triumph in the face of danger then becomes our have triumph. But he was right to diocese that this ritual is as elderly as history and as important.