Hi Howard, --- howard posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > You accusin' me a' cheatin? Nah, ya ain't no cheater... But I think you have missed my point. > Narrow specialization doesn't mean lack of > interest. No, but by its very nature, narrow specialization does imply a homogeneity that makes it difficult to relate to groups outside of people already in the know. > It's > precisely those programs that sell. "Violin > concertos by Venetian > composers published in Amsterdam in 1725" seems > arcane, but audiences > will come to hear "The Four Seasons." "Viennese > chamber music > written in 1806" sounds bland, but they'll come to > hear Beethoven's > opus 59 quartets. "Italian operas written for > Prague theaters in > 1787" is a loser; "Don Giovanni" is a winner. > Concerts of music by > one well-known composer are safe programming bets. > They are safe bets right now and I understand why they are done. Still, most ordinary symphony orchestras (i.e. not baroque) don't do a specialized program for the vast majority of their other concerts. I think narrow programming will give the field real trouble in the future as those of us in EM become perceived more and more as a one trick pony by the "outside world." > > II can think offhand of all-Weiss CDs by Lutz > Kirchhof, Konrad > Junghanel, Yasunori Imamura, Toyohiko Satoh, > Hopkinson Smith (2), > Robert Barto (8?), Richard Stone, Jakob Lindberg, > John Schneiderman, > Michel Cardin and Franklin Lei, and I'm sure half > the folks reading > this post could double the listing. I could add to your list as well - but I was speaking primarily of specialization in concert programing. To run with your point, however - aside from Robert Barto, most of the performers you named _haven't_ specialized on one composer, one repertoire, one instrument for all of their other recording projects. (Even Barto has the stylistically quite different Hagen recordings.) So, while these guys do structure their recordings around themes, they haven't done so within the context of their careers. This was the past thinking in CD sales: pick a composer or repertoire and make _that_ the selling point rather than the skills or reputation of the performer. In EM, no record company would touch a recording project that featured a little of this/a little of that because it was too hard to shelve in the bins of brick and mortar stores. This is turning out to be a REALLY BAD IDEA nowadays. Its coming back to bite us in the rear end as the music industry moves from a hardcopy-oriented format to online sales. Unfortunately, having a neatly-packaged, specialized CD program ain't gonna help you one bit on iTunes! How will we cope when CDs go the way of the LP? > > > (A somewhat well-known viola da gamba > > player I know claims Weiss is "weird and > > incomprehensible." What the...???) > > He's right. Weiss on the gamba is weird and > incomprehensible, > particularly if the gambist plays directly from the > tablature. > -- No, sadly, the person - a baroque music specialist and international recording artist with a distinguished pedigree from a prestigeous early music program - was speaking of hearing Weiss performed under the capable fingers of qualified lutenists. Undoubtedly, this amounts to personal taste, but if we aren't turning this person on, who ARE we connecting with? Chris > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
