Missouri Classical Music News

Educator Offer: Educators can receive up to a 60% discount on three select Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra series this season. The Thursday Series (5 concerts at 8pm) is available for only $105. Friday C (6 concerts at 8pm) and Sunday A (6 concerts at 3pm) Series are only $135. Call 314/533-788 or visit www.slso.org/educator for more information.

Student Tickets: The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra encourages students to come and enjoy our performances. Through the SoundCheck program, students may order $10 tickets to most SLSO Orchestral Series performances. Students can visit www.soundcheckstlouis.org to get more information or order tickets. Student ID required at the Box Office when picking up tickets. NOTE: Soundcheck tickets are not available until mid-August

Student SOUNDCHECK Concert: For high school and college students only. It's a student sneak preview of the Opening Night Concert with David Robertson hosting (and conducting)and Leif Ove Andsnes as guest artist. Thursday, September 21 at 7pm. Tickets are $10 each and available online at soundcheckstlouis.org (starting mid-August) or at the SLSO Box Office - 314-534-1700.

When the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra hired David Robertson to be its music director, there were high hopes that this rising star in the orchestra world would boost attendance and polish its long-standing prestige. Now that his first season is completed, it's fair to ask if Robertson is living up to expectations. . . .

Is this a good combination of music director and orchestra? "From the buzz in the music world, I would say the answer would be a resounding 'yes,'" says Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, former head of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra - and the nation's pre-eminent orchestra-watcher. "There's no question that words like 'innovative,' 'engaged' and 'imaginative' have come back from people in St. Louis and the (national) music business." . . .

Civic organizations, including the Regional Chamber & Growth Association, regularly use the orchestra's Carnegie Hall concerts as a marketing tool, Adams notes, with special cocktail parties before the performances to talk up what the St. Louis region has to offer. . . .

Robertson wants to do a better job of getting the word out about the special student deals, so young people "will realize that they can actually partake of an exciting concert experience without having to forgo other things - like food."

Working to reach newbies is "more guerrilla and less traditional," Kovalak says. "We're doing a lot online, a lot with word-of-mouth to like-minded people, and we're working on some different partnerships."

8 hours of MP3s recorded live at The Sculpture Center, NYC on June 11, 2006. Vexations was composed by Erik Satie in 1893 and consists of a short motif repeated 840 times. Vexations was first performed publicly by John Cage and several other pianists over the course of 19 hours in 1963. As the title conveys, artists performing in Pianoless Vexations used any instrument except the piano to perform Satie's original composition.

When you want to make music that can raise the roof, when you want to make music that allows you to decide what sounds you want to create, when you want to make music that's complex and multidimensional, there's nothing like the pipe organ.

The chance to discover the organ recently brought a capacity crowd of 25 kids, age 12 to 17 from the Midwest, to St. Louis for a weeklong Pipe Organ Encounter sponsored by the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

All of them had studied piano. Some had several years of organ; others had zero experience. After a week of exploring the organ - sticking their heads into organ cases, putting their hands (and feet) on a variety of instruments, learning how organs are made, getting daily lessons with some of the area's best professionals and taking part in a recital - they went home enthusiastic about the "King of Instruments."

Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor – just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system – major record labels, retail giants – depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era. . . .

technology didn’t just allow fans to sidestep the cash register. It also offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what they could hear. The average file-trading network has more songs than any music store – by a factor of more than 100. Music fans had the opportunity for limitless choice, and they took it. Today, listeners have not only stopped buying as many CDs, they’re also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to bring throngs into record stores on release day. If they have to choose between a packaged act and something new, more and more people are opting for exploration. . . .

When it comes to lost marketing power, nothing compares to the decline of rock radio. In 1993, Americans spent an average of 23 hours and 15 minutes per week tuned to a local station. As of summer 2005, that figure had dropped to 19 hours and 15 minutes. Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most. Since 1998, the rock radio audience has dropped 26 percent.

In the past 60 years, since World War II, we've seen the rise of the early music movement, the rise of musicology as a serious scholarly discipline, explosive new styles of new music, new ways of staging opera, a far better (clearer, less idealized) view of classical music history, an exploration of forgotten parts of the classical repertoire, and much more, including the rise (in the US) of orchestras and opera companies all over the country, along with attempts to make classical music more accessible, and attempts to bring classical music and popular culture together.

But at the same time, classical music began to turn in on itself; it lost its popular touch. In some ways, this was the downside of some of the excitement I've talked about. The expansion of the repertoire brought with it an eruption of scholarship. Anyone willing to buy enough recordings could hear all of Haydn's 104 symphonies, all of Bach's nearly 200 cantatas, and all of Verdi's 26 operas, many of which had gotten obscure even during Verdi's lifetime. But you can't encounter this music without also encountering (in program notes, CD liner notes, and elsewhere) scholarly discussion of it. What then gets lost is the direct appeal of the music. To talk about that, or at least to talk about it without reference to classical music scholarship, is somehow low-rent.

The organ is known to be one of the oldest organs from the Pfeffer Organ Company, which was founded in St. Louis in [1860].

A 20-note pedal board and pedal backfalls instead of trackers are among its distinctive features.

Solo artist Neil Cockburn, who is also head of organ studies at Mount Royal College Organ Academy and curator of the Carthy Organ in Calgary's Jack Singer Hall, will present the organ in an hour-long performance.