Music Education
Last but not least, the burning question of repertoire. For classical music as a genre to survive in modern times, renewal of the repertoire is a fundamental requirement: without renewal, the art form petrifies and audiences will stay away because they will have the repertoire of works on CD at
Music Education
If classical music is the art of “therapeutic” interiority, then thinking about presentation, marketing, funding, etc. needs to be developed from this insight. “Selling” music in wrapping paper which belies its nature will inevitably lead to disappointment: the regular listeners will feel their experience is being diminished and dumbed down
Music Education
As Sir Roger Scruton has explained elsewhere, the relevance of classical music lies in its irrelevance in relation to practical, worldly concerns. If classical music has an educational quality, it is to be sought in something like the education of the imagination, as that which helps to humanize and refine
Music Education
Classical music is surrounded by a thick wall of brain activity: an extensive world of analysis and research; a history still being investigated in the remotest corners; an educational field rife with scholarly publications and manuals; a recording science capable of closely imitating the experience of live concerts; a record
Music Education
If we put the last century’s notions of “old” and “new” in a broader historic perspective, it becomes clear how short-sighted these notions were and how wrong it was to give them an aura of absoluteness, since these notions are, by their very nature, relative and flexible, and dependent
Music Education
Sometimes one hears the critique that classical music is no longer compatible with modernity. What “modernity” is supposed to mean always remains in darkness, as if the very word “modernity” were so obvious in its meaning that any further explanation would be superfluous. If “modern” means “of this time, of
Music Education
In the last century, very often the concept of “progress” was projected upon the arts as a measurement of quality: “good art” was “progressive art.” If an artist did not commit some “groundbreaking” artistic deed, his work was considered worthless. While progress in science is a fundamental notion, in the
