Editor's Note: Andrew Balio of the Future Symphony Institute interviews architect Allan Greenberg, whose philosophy of "canonical classicism" challenges the postmodernist school of architecture. ANDREW BALIO: Among America’s music schools, Rice University’s Shepard School of Music is one of the standouts, up there with Curtis, Yale, and Julliard. And both Julliard’s and Yale’s areas of greatest [...]
We spend so much time in these giant buildings—shopping malls, monstrous office complexes, big box stores. Classical music should bring people together in a more social, intimate way. We’re hoping to design the whole concert experience from the beginning to be smaller. It’s about shrinking the scale, bringing classical music into the human scale… [...]
Classical music must find its place in love—love of home, of community, of neighbor, and of the culture that binds all these things together. In all but the most exceptional cases, our orchestras won’t survive if they don’t get this part right… Editor’s Note: This essay was presented as the opening address at the [...]
Classical music is born of the accumulating wisdom of the ages, with a canon that represents, like all canons, the mind of a civilization. And yet we have not learned to articulate our own defense… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Andrew Balio as he explains how [...]
In the second part of this series, I introduced the theme of Creativity as perhaps the most persistent of the ideas inspiring the reformation of our institutions of higher music education. The fact that “music study has long been predicated on the subordination of creativity to technical proficiency and interpretive performance” masquerades as an accusation—or at least as [...]
In the first part of this series, I acknowledged the growing consensus that there is something wrong with higher music education today, and I discussed Entrepreneurship as the first of three themes around which the most enthusiastic and popular suggestions for reform seem to converge. In this installment, I will address the second and [...]
Since at least the 1920s, America has done a fine job of nurturing its budding classical musicians within a large and well-funded network of conservatories that function either as independent institutions or as colleges within larger universities. The grand venture of transplanting this pinnacle of European artistic achievement into the fertile soil of the New [...]
It may be the greatest challenge facing those who love classical music in our modern age is the one facing those who do not also love Beauty. Those who reject the idea of Beauty, who deny its value, or who relegate it to meaninglessness—as in fact so many of today’s most vocal proponents of classical [...]
In the first part of this series, I acknowledged that there may be something wrong with the pursuit of luxury as exclusionary and materialistic, and that orchestras, at least, are right to be suspicious of it. But I also suggested that the things we most highly value are often those things that are surplus [...]
It shouldn’t surprise up that orchestras are distancing themselves from the idea of luxury. We generally, and perhaps rightly, sense that there is something wrong with it. The most obvious reason is the uncomfortable fact that luxury represents a category that might necessarily exclude us—or indeed anybody. That, of course, does not describe classical music, [...]
Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris Jansons and Munich’s musical community—that, despite their protracted efforts, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra will not be getting a much-needed new hall—came the triumphant announcement that Sir Simon Rattle, appointed as London Symphony Orchestra’s new chief, has secured a commitment from the city’s [...]
As I sat on the front steps of our downtown row house writing this essay, police and National Guard helicopters circling overhead, several dejected neighbors came by to chat with me about the sorrowful setback our city has suffered. This week, as riots and demonstrations ravaged parts of Baltimore, business-as-usual came to a stop for [...]
Andrew Balio Professional trumpeter Andrew Balio explains how to save the symphony orchestra . . . and classical music itself. I founded the Future Symphony Institute as a think tank, modeled on the many think tanks that study complex issues in sciences and economics and that through their findings eventually influence policy. [...]
Sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor. 1 —Virgil Perhaps our modern world is not so far gone as yet, but it is easy for us to imagine the painful longing in Petrarch’s heart as he stood on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter Sunday in 1341. Looking around him at [...]