Hapkidoroll10

This user is a participant in WikiProject Classical music.

Who I Am (Abridged)

I am currently a music student pursuing a M.M. (Master of Music) in Piano Performance at the Longy School of Music, where I study with Ludmilla Lifson. A life-long resident of California until the past couple of months, I have also previously studied piano with Tatyana Mikhaylenko at the San Francisco Community Music Center, and with Marilyn Swan at UC Davis, where I received a B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) in Music. I began my musical training on violin, however, with the Suzuki method, and continued to play the violin throughout college with the UCD Symphony Orchestra.

I started becoming an active Wikipedia user because of a class I am currently taking at Longy School of Music called "The Future of Classical Music". So far all we have is a user page, but we will be working on a wiki page for the topic up through the middle of December.

"Opinions"

I was just on violinist Hilary Hahn's official website, and she has a page entitled "Opinions" in which she shows a few interviews that she gave to several other musicians who she has worked with on projects and on tour. I thought that 2 of the questions that she asked people were particularly interesting in regards to some of our class discussions over the course of the semester, which were about classical music in schools and applause between movements. I'll post them on the blog, since I don't think Wikipedia would allow me cutting and pasting from her website onto here.

Just for Fun

Here is a picture I took a couple of years ago near my old house in San Francisco, CA:

And here is the glass turtle that lives beneath my mom's coffee table, a.k.a. The Little Turtle That Could:

I guess it's time for me to try to organize info for a wiki page.

Sandbox

                         My Sandbox

There has been some concern in recent years about a decreasing attendance by the younger generation in Classical music concerts as well as a decline in classical music record sales, at least in the U.S. This has been attributed to the vastness of the varieties of music available in these times as well as the distinct absence of Classical music education in the school curriculums. Many classical music audiences are even averse to the direction that composition has taken in modern and contemporary music, such as new tonal and atonal languages, rhythmic concepts, and other radical musical developments presented in serialism, polytonality, minimalism, aleatoric music, etc. even though Classical music has been developing in that direction for the past century, which shows how out of touch much of the public has become with the genre. This is partly a result of a decline in public sponsorship that has been replaced by institutional sponsorship, namely university sponsorship, connecting Classical music with the circles of higher education and academia and alienating those who may not have been exposed to such music through formal education.

“Proper concert etiquette” is another issue that is up for debate. While the current practice is to refrain from clapping between movements, saving applause until the end of an entire piece, many newer audience members who do so anyway because of unfamiliarity with the practice are met with scorn by more experienced audience members. Supporters of the practice consider it disruptive to the concert experience and coherence of a piece to interrupt the silence between movements, while others believe that the rule is too stringent and unnecessarily promotes a haughty, disdainful image of classical music that is unappealing to many potential new audiences. Historically, clapping between movements was not considered bad etiquette, and in many cases it was actually expected. This trend, of course, changed over time due to the dislike by musicians such as Arturo Toscanini and Igor Stravinsky of the unruly behavior of audiences; they worked at ensuring that audiences treated the concert with more reverence. Some people argue that such expectations for audience behavior is proper and should be upheld out of respect for the music, while others believe creates an impersonal concert atmosphere that distances audiences from the performers and disinterests them.

In order to reach out to a wider audience, many musicians and groups have tried different methods of outreach, including pre-concert lectures and lecture-concerts, educational outreach programs in schools, audience question-and-answer sessions, casual concert settings, and so on. Some groups have found that discussion of the music helps the audience to follow it better and appreciate it more, while other people believe that too much explanation is unnecessary and excessive and that it is better for the music to stand on its own so that audience members can enjoy it on their own terms.

The popularity of Classical music among the younger generation is different for various countries. In European countries, for example, Classical music education is a much bigger part of general education than in the U.S., and in China, Classical music concerts are very well attended, even outside of big cities, and most children study one or two instruments at some point.