If the New York Metropolitan Opera Closed, would you care?

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

<snip>

Or they have it and its a joke. I had music lessons for three years and I can honestly say that every hour I spend in that classroom was a waste of my time. Seriously, instead of actually teaching people something about music, all we got was how to sing some Stevie Wonder song and how to play some other boring song on some boring instruments (not even real ones like guitars or keyboards). 

 

They had three years to introduce me to musical theory, musical history, classical music or just other genres of music that are not popmusic, but instead they wasted it on teaching me how to play one song and sing another. Again, I blame pandering to the lowest common denominator because I think they did this because they were afraid that teaching musical theory or history would be boring. 

 

As usual, you can consider the school system to have failed.  My son, who rebelled at private music lessons, took a music course in grade X.  He learned keyboarding, and after the first day he wandered into the house and demonstrated the "jazz scale".  He was lucky, I guess, to have hit a teacher who was also a trained musician.

 

In my schooling, some 30 years earlier, choral speaking and choir were mandatory.  Instrumental music wasn't in the curriculum in my public schools because of budget, but it was a Catholic school and everyone was enjoined to "make a joyful noise unto the Lord".  In high-school there was a sort of orchestra (extra curricular) but a music course in the first year run by a choirmaster, who also ran the school choirs.  The senior choir was extra curricular, but many of us joined.  Before 1955 there wasn't much to do after school.

 

I hold that there are too many distractions for youth these days and cultural things get short shrift.  Ignorant little bounders!

 

---

 

"real ones like guitars or keyboards":  Really.  What a limited outlook.  I suppose you'd want to use an amplified guitar and a midi connected keyboard?  Can't learn much theory while trying to cope with all those electronics.  As far as music theory is concerned, you can read, can't you (print not music)?

[Ocram's Razr 964]

A key component of culture is education. The public school system is failing. Successful schools are the foundation to an educated workforce and cultured society. The insolvency of the Metropolitan Opera House is not as important as the lowered standards of all schools across the nation.

--Ocram

[LexusInfernus 908]

"real ones like guitars or keyboards":  Really.  What a limited outlook.  I suppose you'd want to use an amplified guitar and a midi connected keyboard?  Can't learn much theory while trying to cope with all those electronics.  As far as music theory is concerned, you can read, can't you (print not music)?

 

An accoustic guitar would have been fine. But we only had Xilophones which is one of the most boring instruments ever. No fun to learn to play music on one of those. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

 

"real ones like guitars or keyboards":  Really.  What a limited outlook.  I suppose you'd want to use an amplified guitar and a midi connected keyboard?  Can't learn much theory while trying to cope with all those electronics.  As far as music theory is concerned, you can read, can't you (print not music)?

 

An accoustic guitar would have been fine. But we only had Xilophones which is one of the most boring instruments ever. No fun to learn to play music on one of those. 

 

Real, live wooden xylophones?  Could have been a lot of fun if you'd bothered.  Trying to get more than a dull slunk out of one of these is a real art.  You have to be fast and accurate.

 

You'd have been better off with a Glockenspiel.

 

Anyway, didn't the classrooms in your school have pianos?

[elavery 1,013]

When you think about it, The Met still does pretty well for attendance and reach into the public. They do over 200 performances each year with a yearly attendance well over 600,000 (granted many of those people are counted more than once!). The Met also reaches more than 3 million worldwide with movie theatre performances. The perception that Opera is a niche which only a handful of old people are following.

 

The reality of the current situation is more based around the fact that ticket sales would be lucky to cover 5% of the budget whereas they used to cover 80%. For a budget of 325 million this is actually good value for money, particularly given nearly half of the budget is from private donations.

 

US cities routinely spend hundreds of millions on new sports arenas and sporting events with almost little guaranteed return. How often do we hear that building a new sport arena is going to lead to greater inner-city development and jobs to only have that fall flat on its face? And then ten years later to hear that the stadium is out-of-date and needs to replaced again or the team is relocating to Los Angeles?

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

^ Good points, but the trick will be to get more attendance, and find some more angels. 

 

COC does some interesting things.  In the summer, there is the Opera Tent at Harbour Front which puts on light operas that are free.  These performances are often done by the Canadian Opera Ensemble which is the COC's grad school for young singers.  {Michael Schade and Ben Heppner are graduates of this program.}  There is also a school program with a travelling company from the Ensemble.

 

I don't know if the Met does any kind of outreach.  If not, they are rather silly.

[elavery 1,013]

The Met does plenty of educational outreach bringing opera into schools and students into the opera. They of course can only make a small dent in the wasteland that is music education in schools these days.

[LexusInfernus 908]

Real, live wooden xylophones?  Could have been a lot of fun if you'd bothered.  Trying to get more than a dull slunk out of one of these is a real art.  You have to be fast and accurate.

 

You'd have been better off with a Glockenspiel.

 

Anyway, didn't the classrooms in your school have pianos?

 

Well, could have been fun if we were instructed to play more than just this one song (I'm serious, just one song) for three years. 

 

And there was only one piano and that was the teachers piano. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

That wasn't musical education, it was deprivation.  You clearly fell into the clutches of what I call educaterers.

 

As for the Met, maybe moving to a smaller house and leasing the big one for other events is one answer for them.  The company does not have to have a big permanent barn to continue to exist.  What venue did the New York Opera use?

[elavery 1,013]

Moving away from Lincoln Center would be a death-knell in my opinion. Lincoln Center is the musical hub of Manhattan. NYC Opera tried performing in other venues and it just didn't work. The Met operate at about 80% capacity so its not like the theater is half-empty.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Yeah, but that empty 20% is the profit margin for a performance, if any.  Because of the size and variety of the demographic in the city they need to find a way to attract young people of every walk of life.  It doesn't seem to be happening, even for things like Amahl and the Night Visitors.

 

What was in the 2013-2014 Season?  How many old war horses as opposed to works that would appeal to a younger audience?  When was the last time they did West Side Story or Candide?  And at what kind of horrible price?

 

Here's a link to this year's season.  It's the same old set of war horses and standards.  Absolutely no adventure in there at all.  And a huge list.  Maybe what they need is fewer selections.  Hell, they don't even have a performance of Peter Grimes.  They've got to stop appealing to the old European immigrants because most of them are now dead.

 

Here's the COC season.  Tailored to a much smaller audience since it shares the house with the National Ballet, but also a much more adventurous repertory 2 comedies, 3 tragedies and one slice from the Ring.  And if you are under 30 you can get cheap tickets.

 

And at Opera de Montreal the season is shorter, but even more interesting.

 

Funny, isn't it.  Smaller companies with less vaunting ambition managed to produce just enough to keep the audience' appetite whetted for more while the Met satiates in one swoul foop.

 

The COC is clearly gearing up for yet another Ring cycle by building productions one at a time, and then the $2,000 per seat dress circle subscription for all four over one week.  They did this before and it sold out. 

 

Some companies, notably Bayreuth, run Parsifal on day three of the week.  I just couldn't take that.  Five days of Richard Wagner would probably lay me in my grave.

[elavery 1,013]

Interestingly enough, NY audiences are notoriously conservative. NY City Opera used to fill the modern music void but since they went under the Met have stepped up a bit to fill that gap in repertoire. The 20% empty seats is a non-factor really as ticket sales cover so little of the costs these days.

[CapTon 592]

The Met does plenty of educational outreach bringing opera into schools and students into the opera. They of course can only make a small dent in the wasteland that is music education in schools these days.

Agreed.

 

Most of music that is taught in high school is based on high school sports, such as football (American) and basketball. No music is performed based off of compositions produced and conducted by musical geniuses such as Mozart or Beethoven (just to name a few).

[Duke87 1,070]

produced and conducted by musical geniuses such as Mozart or Beethoven

 

This right here is a way in which the world in music has changed a lot. Mozart didn't perform his music, he only wrote it. It took a room full of people to perform his music, and it wasn't tailored towards any one particular room full of people. Any orchestra could take it up. The performers were anonymous nobodies, the writer got all the attention.

 

Contrast that to today where it's exactly the opposite. All the attention goes towards the people who perform the music, they are seen as the artists. Often the performers are also the people who wrote it, but in a lot of cases they are not. Indeed, most music that falls under the "pop" hood was written by people whose names no one knows, but performed by people who became superstars performing it.

 

Also contrast that to how now when a different band or person performs a song that another performer was known for, they are said to be "covering" it, and it is held in lower regard compared to a song which is "theirs". There was a time, and this lasted all the way into the middle of the 20th century, where music was written to be performed by anyone, and there was no attachment of a particular song to a particular performer. This changed with the rise of the music recording industry, since now live performances were no longer required to listen to music. You could play the same exact rendition of a song over and over as many times as you wanted. People started to associate particular songs with particular singers, and the people writing music tailored their music towards the personality and voice of a particular singer, such that it might sound weird when anyone else attempted to sing it.

 

Indeed, one of the mental issues I have with classical music is that there is no "original recording" that can be pegged as the "true" version of it. The music was written and first performed before recording technology existed. The same piece may exist in recordings made by a dozen different orchestras, but NONE of them are "the original". This inability to have one true version of the music means it cannot fit in my system, since how am I to determine which version is the proper one to have in my collection?

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Mozart was a keyboardist and did perform.  Not all of his music is orchestral.  When he was very young he used to sneak into the attic and play "mouse music" on an old celesta.

 

I don't think there is any record of Beethoven ever playing an instrument, but he must have.  Interesting thing about Beethoven is that he conducted the premiere of the 9th symphony after he was stone deaf.  His only contact with the music was the beat he could feel through the floor.  At the end, the concertmaster had to turn him around to see the madly applauding audience.  Beethoven had otosclerosis.  Today, he would have been properly fitted with contact hearing aids.

[elavery 1,013]

The beauty of classical music is that you can hear the same piece performed so many different ways. And sure, the composers may be famous, but the performers are famous in classical music too.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

The beauty of classical music is that you can hear the same piece performed so many different ways. And sure, the composers may be famous, but the performers are famous in classical music too.

Very true.  Some composers, J. S. Bach, for example, write music that can be performed on any instrument or set of instruments.  One of the big industries used to be transcribing music between various instruments and making different arrangements.  I don't know that this is still a major occupation or not.

[blade2k5 1,523]

If the New York Metropolitan Opera Closed, would you care?

 

No.  Far more important things to care about than whether or not the NYC Opera closes.