{"id":3453,"date":"2014-09-30T07:04:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T11:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rockwellblake.com\/blog\/?p=3453"},"modified":"2014-11-27T09:14:11","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T13:14:11","slug":"road-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/30\/road-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"Road Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I was a happy guest at the Sheraton Malpensa<\/a> airport.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Oh! How I love to travel.\"Road<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201cShut up and go to bed!!!\u201d order arrives from parent central.\u00a0 With a blanket and a flashlight an intimate conversatoin\u00a0acoustic is found and parent central may never know.\u00a0 The space in which Il Canneto Restaurant<\/a> serves breakfast, lunch and dinner is a marvel of friendly warmth\u2026\u2026 But not the blanket type.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0We 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.\u00a0 The answer was no, but he was willing to bring the idea to the attention of the administration.\u00a0 His superior joined our conversation and admitted to being a La Scala<\/a> subscriber in her student days, but had to give it up when she lost her ability to acquire a student discounted subscription.\u00a0 She also expressed interest in the idea of live singing in her restaurant.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 An audience for a young singer is essential.\u00a0 Who cares where you find it?<\/p>\n

My favorite futurist sent me more relevant quotable stuff just in time for this blog. While Greg Sandow talked about his \u201cSpeaking about Music\u201d communications course he is teaching at Julliard School<\/a>, he let a big cat out of the bag.\u00a0 The first sentence I quote makes reference to a \u201cthat\u201d, and here is the full meaning of his \u201cthat\u201d in just two words: \u201cself-promotion\u201d. \u00a0He contracts twenty five words in his blog with \u201cthat\u201d:<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"jdbro13\"<\/a>

Future Past<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u00a0by finding work outside the traditional classical music outlets.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Of course those future troubadours will need to take his \u201cSpeaking about Music<\/a>\u201d classes to learn how to use their hand-helds and smartphones to market themselves on Face Book and Twitter.\u00a0 Does he consider that the income level of such\u00a0pursuits 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?\u00a0 Maybe Julliard is just looking for a way to stay relevant.\u00a0 In the retail business, I\u2019ve heard it said that when demand is down Advertise, Advertise, Advertise.\u00a0 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\u00a0bearish on the music business when\u00a0he blogs.<\/p>\n

\"Road<\/a>

Who needs the stuffy theater?<\/p><\/div>\n

My eyes are always\u00a0open for opportunities\u00a0allowing youngsters\u00a0to cut their teeth in nontraditional venues.\u00a0\u00a0I hope future\u00a0Julliard grads won\u2019t need them to support themselves. Let\u2019s get real.\u00a0 Sandow gets it right in one of his later blogs<\/a> that I already talked about<\/a>.\u00a0 Grow the audience in those traditional classical music outlets, and professional level performers will\u00a0meet healthy\u00a0demand for their services from those healthy institutions of Classical Music.\u00a0 It\u2019s frustrating that Sandow doesn\u2019t tell us how he thinks this rosy future can be won.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"Where<\/a>

Where you find it..<\/p><\/div>\n

Sandow would seem to be anticipating an\u00a0imminent collapse of demand for their graduates.\u00a0 This would\u00a0create a\u00a0supply of talent in the music world that main line\u00a0presenters could not save from starvation.\u00a0 I guess I would be wrong to even encourage young people to strive for a career in Opera if my outlook were so skeptical.\u00a0 I think Sandow and Julliard are worse than wrong. If they really believe in their \u201cnew stress\u201d, they are stealing money from students, even from those who have to borrow it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sandow does say that the keystone or maybe the corner stone for music\u2019s fabulous future is to: \u201cCreate performances so powerful \u2014 and so much in tune with current culture \u2014 that people just about break down our doors to go to them.\u201d<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 Now that statement is so packed with stuff that\u00a0I would have to destroy my 1000 word limit to comment.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0will keep reading\u00a0Mr. Sandow’s blogs, but\u00a0I\u00a0wonder if we will ever receive even the smallest snippets of his magic formula that forms the basis of his consultancy to classical music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I was a happy guest at the Sheraton Malpensa airport.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Oh! How I love to travel. I decided to try the restaurant, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3476,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,85,54,51,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured","category-opera","category-philosophy","category-singing","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Il_Canneto_Restaurant.jpg?fit=1600%2C900&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2kj1l-TH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3453"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3488,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3453\/revisions\/3488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}