Jazz

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Jan 18 15:43:54 PST 2001


John Halle wrote:


>Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg, Shostakovich, Ives, or the Beatles (for that
>matter) etc. are not on the LBO map, it seems. (Quincy Jones just got the
>national humanities medal. What about him?)
>
>Perhaps Doug wants to put in a word for Madonna (after he gets done with
>Edward Luttwack on the radio.)
>
>Are these opinions representative of the intelligentia?

The "intelligentsia" just doesn't listen to canonical classical music anymore - Bach, Brahms, or Berg. It - they? - seem to listen to jazz (not me, don't like the stuff much). Call me a philistine but I'd rather listen to Madonna than Charlie Parker, whose genius has always eluded me.

My neighbor, a serious classical pianist who teaches at Juilliard, told me that something like half the classical records sold in the U.S. are sold in Manhattan - mainly, apparently, to classical musicians. The median age at a classical music event in NYC seems to be about 62 these days. They're doing a worse job of reproducing the audience than are radical economists!

Doug



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