Evelyn Glennie: How to listen to music with your whole body

Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie leads the audience through an exploration of music not as notes on a page, but as an expression of the human experience. Playing with sensitivity and nuance informed by a soul-deep understanding of and connection to music, she talks about a music that is more than sound waves perceived by the human ear. She illustrates a richer picture that begins with listening to yourself, and includes emotion and intent as well as the complex role of physical spaces -- instrument, concert hall and even the bones and body cavities of musician and listener alike.

From TED.

When culture gets stuck

"Classical music wasn't always 'classical,'" writes change agent Seth Godin.

Once something makes its way to the mass market, the mass market doesn't want it to change. And once it moves from that big hump in the middle of the market to become a classic, the market doesn't just want it to not change, they insist.

So classical music gets stuck because the new stuff isn't like the regular kind, the classics. French food got stuck, because no restaurant could risk its 3 stars to try something new. A convention can't change cities or formats. Schools can't start their curriculum over... the culture gets stuck because the masses want it be stuck.

Inside most fields, we see pitched battles between a few people who want serious change to reinvigorate the genre they love -- and the masses, who won't tolerate change of any kind.

Read more plus reader reactions in Seth's blog.

Dynamic lifecycle of a musician

Orchestra management consultant Drew McManus examines the impact Yale School of Music’s decision to go tuition-free for graduate students would have on the classical music business. Although Yale’s new policy won’t change the landscape of classical music all that much, it does draw attention to an undeniable fact: conservatories and schools of music are accepting and graduating more music majors than ever before. This trend will likely lead to increased competition for positions in professional orchestras and other groups. As a result, more musicians will need to find other outlets for their talents to generate income.

Systems Thinker columnist Bill Harris gives you a chance to try the associated model to explore these ideas further and to try out various approaches to stabilizing the lifecycle of the typical U.S. classical musician.

Read the article at Pegasus Communications.

Unsuccessful overtures

Judith Dobrzynski writes about a recent Knight Foundation study that shows where orchestras err in reaching out to new audiences.

Here's a test for symphony orchestra lovers. True or false:

1) To woo younger audiences, which are bored by Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, orchestras must play more contemporary works, even at the risk of alienating their aging core audience.

2) By offering free concerts, orchestras will expose more people to classical music and generate new ticket-buyers.

3) Orchestras can create new audiences by designing and offering educational programs for the vast numbers of Americans who know little about classical music.

4) To ensure the survival of orchestras over the long-term, schoolchildren must be exposed to classical-music concerts.

The answers are false, false, false and false.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.

Read Greg Sandow's response in his ArtsJournal.

Music maps

Musicmap is an application for exploring album relationships based on Amazon's similarity results. With Musicmap, you can visualize your map of music taste and discover new albums that are similar to the ones that you already know.

Go to Musicmap.

To applaud or not? Why are we still asking this question?

Letting go of pretentiousness at classical music concerts has been an on-going story for over 30 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that we're still facing unexamined assumptions and habits. Or not clearly understanding the first-time buyer's experience and making the music more accessible. Culture change takes effort.

And yet we still label audience seating areas "Orchestra" when we've heard time and again the first-time buyer's confusion, "Am I really sitting with the orchestra?" Or "Second Tier" which is the third balcony in the hall.

Or "single tickets" when the first-time buyer asks, "Do I have to sit by myself?"

Or identifying composers and solosits by only their last name, as if everyone should know Plishnishkayanaka is a woman and the greatest living soprano east of the Mississippi.

Drew McManus is exploring and surveying this topic. He writes in The Partial Observer:

Among all of the contemporary forms of art, I've always felt classical music has the most potential for growth. Unfortunately, it has a nasty habit of getting in its own way by perpetuating decades old exclusive barriers.

At the same time, many classical music institutions are trying harder than ever before to consciously tear some of these barriers down. However, I find that some of these issues are so entrenched in the behavior and actions of long time classical music enthusiasts; they may not even realize they are unconsciously contributing to the problem.

Two recent events have brought this issue to the forefront in my mind.

Read Drew's article in The Partial Observer

The results are in. Check out the Applause & Pretentiousness Survey.

Read Leonard Slatkin's article "To Clap or Not to Clap?" in McManus' blog.

Bank as lifestyle and music producer

Umpqua isn’t just a financial institution. It’s a lifestyle. And now a music producer.

Certainly the message you would get if you were to visit the Umpqua branch in Portland’s trendy Pearl District neighborhood seems only vaguely related to the mundane business of certificates of deposit, checking accounts and loans. With free wi-fi access, Umpqua brand coffee, a spacious seating area and flat-screen television monitors, the place has been designed to suggest a stylish hotel lobby where you’re tempted to hang out (and, perhaps, read a tastefully printed brochure about certificates of deposit, checking accounts and loans). This and other Umpqua branches also serve as the setting for things like sewing groups, yoga classes and movie nights. Actually, the word “branch” is not used in Umpqua’s official internal terminology: the bank operates 127 “stores” in Oregon, California and Washington. As Lani Hayward, who oversees “creative strategies for the company,” explains, Umpqua sees itself as a retailer.

The reason for this strategy is the same one that leads companies across many sectors to play the lifestyle card: a proliferation of competitors peddling largely interchangeable wares. If a bank wants to stand out, it’s fairly difficult to do so with the financial products it offers. It can, however, differentiate the manner in which it sells and packages those products.

According to Hayward, the central idea of Umpqua’s image is “community hub.” The company trains its employees through a program offered by the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, with the goal of providing service that’s better than what you might expect from a bank. And it gives its managers the autonomy to, for example, stay open during a snowstorm if the manager thinks the customers will want that. But the community-hub notion also plays a role in the curious-sounding decision to start selling CD’s (the kind with music on them) through a program called Discover Local Music.

Read The New York Times Magazine article.

What do your tunes say about you?

A peek at your iPod can reveal clues about you.

The question "What kind of music do you like?" is so revealing, it is the number one topic of conversation among young adults who are getting to know each other, according to psychologists Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge in the U.K., and Sam Gosling at the University of Texas at Austin. Knowing whether a person prefers John Coltrane to Mariah Carey, or Puccini to Prince allows for remarkably accurate personality predictions, their research has found.

Read the Psychology Today article.

Read more about the study at Gosling's lab.

Take the STOMP test (Short Test of Musical Preferences). (pdf download)