{"id":224,"date":"2005-10-30T16:40:00","date_gmt":"2005-10-30T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/wordpress\/?p=224"},"modified":"2014-01-15T20:59:58","modified_gmt":"2014-01-15T20:59:58","slug":"classical-music-sucks-just-ask-the-people-paid-to-promote-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2005\/10\/classical-music-sucks-just-ask-the-people-paid-to-promote-it.html","title":{"rendered":"Classical music sucks: just ask the people paid to promote it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/\">Greg Sandow&#8217;s blog<\/a> often discusses the problems of promoting classical music to a wider audience, and every now and then produces a particularly bad (or, less frequently, good) example. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/2005\/10\/ghastly_ad_followup.html\">Just now<\/a> he cites the San Francisco Symphony&#8217;s publicity for a performance of Shostakovich&#8217;s Symphony No.13, a setting of Yevtushenko&#8217;s &#8216;Babi Yar&#8217;, a poem concerning the slaughter of millions of Jews during the Second World War, poverty and starvation, and the spectre of the resurgence of Stalinism. The SF Symphony&#8217;s marketing director plugged it as the musical equivalent of a date flick. In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/sandow\/2005\/10\/ghastly_ad.html\">a previous post<\/a> he says:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is yet another way in which classical music is drained of all meaning. Who cares what Shostakovich really is? It\u2019s classical music! It\u2019s a celebration! It\u2019s big, grand, and colorful! Can anyone imagine talking about any other serious art this way?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Coincidentally, I just happened to visit the Australian Broadcasting Corporation&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/classic\/\">Classic FM radio<\/a> website, and found that they still apparently do their own marketing:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/blogpix\/abcrap.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>See? Classical music doesn&#8217;t suck so hard if you don&#8217;t listen to it too closely! It can inspire you to accomplish menial chores! Note also the non-ironic use of the word &#8216;joyful&#8217; outside of an Xmas context for the first time in 40 years.  Shostakovich would be proud to know that his terrors and deprivations weren&#8217;t suffered in vain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greg Sandow&#8217;s blog often discusses the problems of promoting classical music to a wider audience, and every now and then produces a particularly bad (or, less frequently, good) example. Just now he cites the San Francisco Symphony&#8217;s publicity for a performance of Shostakovich&#8217;s Symphony No.13, a setting of Yevtushenko&#8217;s &#8216;Babi Yar&#8217;, a poem concerning the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5883,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/5883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}