WDAV

by James Hogan

Friday night brought the return of Christof Perick to the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven's marquee, the Fifth Symphony.

A full disclosure is in order: I'm not crazy about the Fifth. Yes, there's the whole Romantic interpretation of Beethoven's growing deafness lurking in his mind, producing the image of Fate knocking on the door--the four note infamy that opens the symphony's first movement.

Ba Ba Ba BOM! We've heard it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. These are the four notes that shot round the world, the notes kids like to pick out on their grandmother's piano for humor, the notes that conjure the memory of an angry Beethoven bust your music teacher kept on her desk, the one that stared out at you throughout elementary school with a peculiar German creepiness. Whistle these notes, and even your crazy brother-in-law, who cannot carry a tune in a bucket but knows the lyrics to every Nazareth song cries out, "THAT's classical music!"

And, by God, it brings the people to the house. Friday's Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performance was packed, with nary an empty seat, and that was incredibly good. It was heartening to see Belk Theater swelling with people.

I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C., and the topic du jour was--you guessed it--the economy. It's on everyone's minds, and everyone wants to talk about it. Regrettably, arts organizations are often most vulnerable to great economic downturns, and regional symphonies across the nation are feeling the pinch, with some already canceling seasons and cutting musicians' salaries. And let's not forget the plight some classical radio stations find themselves in.

It's silly and alarmist to think that classical music stations and performances will disappear completely. That's rubbish. But it's realistic to understand that many of the weaker organizations playing today may not be playing this time next year.

If you're reading this blog, you're probably a fan of classical music. Let's make sure that you and I put our money (what's left of it) where our tastes are. Yes, this is a cheap way of asking your support for WDAV's upcoming spring fund drive. But it's also a plea for you to keep buying CSO tickets, too. And to continue supporting the myriad arts organizations in our community who need us most right now.

And if it's a rallying cry you need, consider this one-- Ba Ba Ba BOM!

Posted by Rachel Stewart at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Leroy Anderson's masterful miniature "The Typewriter " supplies fodder for Jerry Lewis in this scene from the 1963 comedy, Who's Minding the Store?:

Posted by Jennifer Foster at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by James Hogan

Mendelssohn turned 200 years old, and while I'm glad he's still hanging around Classical Music Camp ("Camp Johann" is the name I keep kicking around for fun), I wanted to focus my attention this week on a more recent composer, an American named Eric Whitacre.

He's young (just turned 39). He's hip. He didn't learn to read music until he was in college, where he joined the college choir because the choir girls were good looking. But he worked his way through Julliard, collaborated with Barbara Streisand, and debuted a techno-opera in Los Angeles loosely based on Milton's Paradise Lost. His work is popular across the globe--the cities of Sydney and Venice have each hosted Eric Whitacre festivals. He once wrote a piece entitled Godzilla Eats Las Vegas.

Even with all of this success, Whitacre is hardly a distant, aloof composer. I know this, because he once granted my students an interview five years ago when I was teaching high school English. Whitacre is anything but pretentious. His sensibility as an artist is fueled by his raw love for creating honest music, and his enthusiasm for hearing it performed is contagious.

I always grew up thinking that classical music--or any "important" music, for that matter--was created by composers who were monoliths, institutions of their own, and mostly inaccessible by those on the more humble side of brilliance. And yes, plenty of our classical geniuses were cranky and irritable.

It's different, then, to imagine the artist sitting across from you in a coffee shop. Or chatting with you via instant messenger, as was the case when my students in North Carolina talked with Eric Whitacre at his home in California. I still recall the surprise I felt when I opened my email one morning to see he'd written me back to grant the interview. It felt like talking to a rock star.

So here's to composers who've lived and died and written things we still play today. And here's to our composers who are alive and well, who are writing their brilliance down onto pieces of paper and sending them to big-city orchestras and high school wind bands.

Thoughts about your own encounters with composers counted among the living are welcome below.

Eric Whitacre's blog, SoaringLeap.com

Posted by Rachel Stewart at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)