A cello with a window seat.
Here’s something I wrote for today’s Globe and Mail newspaper.
Years after the snakes have been defeated, modern aviation has found a new nemesis: cellos.
Boston-based cellist Paul Katz recently bought a pair of seats – one for himself and another for his 1669 Andrea Guarneri cello – on an American Airlines flight from Calgary to Los Angeles. Only when he arrived at the airport did he learn that American Airlines “code-shares” with WestJet. His flight on American turned into a flight on WestJet – which, unlike AA, doesn’t allow cellos in cabins.
Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich.
The sad truth is that there’s not a lot of recently composed music that I like very much.
I could go on at some length about all that I think is wrong with new music nowadays. Suffice it to say that I have very little patience for high modernist composers still fighting the battles of the mid-20th century. Similarly, I don’t have much interest in backward-looking composers whose scores are little more than unimaginative exercises in musical nostalgia for pre-modernist eras.
What I do like is composers who find fresh new ways to work with musical materials and ideas authentically embedded in our culture. Such composers are, unfortunately, few and far between – but they do exist. (And I can’t help noticing that they don’t generally come from the European countries that historically formed the “core” of the classical music world: France, Germany and Italy.)
In Renoir's day, students played new music.
September will soon be upon us, and students across the land will return to conservatories, universities and private studios, to resume their musical educations.
If you’re a music teacher, and these are your students, you should know that the place of classical music in our culture’s future is largely dependent on what you teach – and don’t teach – your students.
I recently had an interesting chat with the violinist Barry Shiffman – who runs the Young Artist Performance Academy, and also the Glenn Gould School, at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music – about music education. And in our conversation he emphasized the effectiveness of musical training in a studio environment.
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