Recently, I was a happy guest at the Sheraton Malpensa airport. I had an early enough flight to catch to make overnighting there a comfortable alternative to getting up in the wee hours in Torino for the two hour trip to Malpensa. Oh! How I love to travel.
I decided to try the restaurant, and found a wonderful acoustic space. Restaurants are usually really good for intimate conversation which means something like the environment talkative children tend to create when the “Shut up and go to bed!!!” order arrives from parent central. With a blanket and a flashlight an intimate conversatoin acoustic is found and parent central may never know. The space in which Il Canneto Restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner is a marvel of friendly warmth…… But not the blanket type.
My fun began when I noticed an entertaining mistake in the wine list which I pointed out to my server. A little while later, during my meal, a young man came to my table to thank me for the proof reading work I had done for him. We struck up a conversation, and with young singers still fresh in my mind, I asked if he had ever thought to have live singing in the restaurant. The answer was no, but he was willing to bring the idea to the attention of the administration. His superior joined our conversation and admitted to being a La Scala subscriber in her student days, but had to give it up when she lost her ability to acquire a student discounted subscription. She also expressed interest in the idea of live singing in her restaurant. They wondered how they would be able to know who was good and who was not. I left my card with them and asked them to please let me help if classical singing was something they decided to fit into their marketing plans. An audience for a young singer is essential. Who cares where you find it?
My favorite futurist sent me more relevant quotable stuff just in time for this blog. While Greg Sandow talked about his “Speaking about Music” communications course he is teaching at Julliard School, he let a big cat out of the bag. The first sentence I quote makes reference to a “that”, and here is the full meaning of his “that” in just two words: “self-promotion”. He contracts twenty five words in his blog with “that”:
Now students know they’ll have to do a lot of that on their own, and that they’ll have to do it in new, lively, communicative ways. Of course this is tied to the new stress on entrepreneurship in conservatories, Juilliard included. Classical musicians in the future will be much better off if they can create careers on their own, and being able to engage people about what they do is a central part of that.
Future Past
This is really rich. Mr. Sandow is looking into a future that seems distant but familiar. He sees a future in which highly educated, heavily indebted graduates of his university will be better served by finding work outside the traditional classical music outlets. Does he believe that the future will look like the middle ages when guys with guitars or lutes would sing for change in market cities? Of course those future troubadours will need to take his “Speaking about Music” classes to learn how to use their hand-helds and smartphones to market themselves on Face Book and Twitter. Does he consider that the income level of such pursuits would never be able to pay off the debt to which an un-rich student needs to enslave himself or herself in order to pay Julliard tuition? Maybe Julliard is just looking for a way to stay relevant. In the retail business, I’ve heard it said that when demand is down Advertise, Advertise, Advertise. I guess someone at Julliard overheard one of those conversations. Business is business, but I thought Julliard was a music school. Anyway, Mr. Sandow sounds bearish on the music business when he blogs.
Who needs the stuffy theater?
My eyes are always open for opportunities allowing youngsters to cut their teeth in nontraditional venues. I hope future Julliard grads won’t need them to support themselves. Let’s get real. Sandow gets it right in one of his later blogs that I already talked about. Grow the audience in those traditional classical music outlets, and professional level performers will meet healthy demand for their services from those healthy institutions of Classical Music. It’s frustrating that Sandow doesn’t tell us how he thinks this rosy future can be won. What he does tell us is that he and Julliard want their grads to look to non-traditional venues in which to make a living.
Where you find it..
Sandow would seem to be anticipating an imminent collapse of demand for their graduates. This would create a supply of talent in the music world that main line presenters could not save from starvation. I guess I would be wrong to even encourage young people to strive for a career in Opera if my outlook were so skeptical. I think Sandow and Julliard are worse than wrong. If they really believe in their “new stress”, they are stealing money from students, even from those who have to borrow it.
Sandow does say that the keystone or maybe the corner stone for music’s fabulous future is to: “Create performances so powerful — and so much in tune with current culture — that people just about break down our doors to go to them.” Now that statement is so packed with stuff that I would have to destroy my 1000 word limit to comment.
I will keep reading Mr. Sandow’s blogs, but I wonder if we will ever receive even the smallest snippets of his magic formula that forms the basis of his consultancy to classical music.