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Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: How does a composer forge an online identity in the 21st Century?

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By Mandy Hogan

HoganComposers continually forge new roads into artistic wildernesses. How does a composer forge an online identity in the 21st century? YouTube, Facebook, PureVolume, InstantEncore, and MySpace are large commercial sites that provide platforms for emerging and established artists to shine. They allow users to access and discover new music and musicians instantly. So perhaps the more important question is, how can musicians form a unique identity in the midst of millions of artists without being conflated with someone else or swept into an unwanted genre?

The medium that people use to enjoy music has changed from vinyl records to CDs to iPods and YouTube videos, but the music remains. What will remain in our psyche? What types of composers will we become? But ultimately, the question is: how will what we make become who we are? And that is the question for all of us.

Composers in the 21st century range from Jay-Z to Jennifer Higdon to Philip Glass to Esperanza Spalding. Some write Pulitzer-Prize winning violin concertos, others perform, produce, create, and design hip-hop albums, and still others jam in the garage with their friends. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Composers in the 21st Century and the question of “selling out”

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By Meghan Farnsworth

FarnsworthComposers of centuries past and present have sought various avenues to maintain the particular brew of their craft. Whether these roads have guided their careers towards writing music befitting of the demands of a patron with two-thousand francs to spare, or for a pharmaceutical company, like Pfizer — the producers of that jagged little pill, Advil — composers have always needed to meet the bidding of a greater power in order to survive in the music industry.

For twenty-first century composers, however, does this mean sacrificing the aestheticism of beauty in art for the demands of the almighty dollar? Nowadays, it’s inevitable to avoid commercial venues — i.e. film, TV, radio, etc. — as a way towards meeting a financially stable career in composition. In some respects, many classical music elitists would find this route clichéd and unworthy of high art. So, one ultimate question comes to mind: is music composed in the style of the commercial route considered to be “sold out”?

How classical music is viewed today is much different than it was in centuries past. Music never reached the possibility of being categorized as “sold-out”. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Clearing up misconceptions of Juke

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By Sam Rosenberg

RosenbergOn the Internet, history gets written backwards. Network consciousness starts on the periphery, as independent dots connect around the edges filling in the unknown piece-by-piece, reaching back to create a history and molding a collective impression. The cliché is that information travels on the web at near instantaneous speeds, but collectively piecing together the history of a scene from afar takes much longer than you would think, and leaves an uneven and distorted perception in the collective consciousness. The rise of interest in, and popularity of Chicago Footwork and Juke music outside of Chicago, particularly in England over the last two years, is a case study for the messy, complicated tangle of network historiography.

By comparison, the actual history of Juke and Footwork in Chicago is fairly simple. It’s easy to connect it to the long lineage of African-American music traditions and to see points of connection with popular dance music. Disco leads to House leads to Ghetto House leads to Juke and to Footwork. This chain is a timeline but also a pyramid with each step up growing smaller in terms of resources available to it and the size of the communities involved. By the end of the 90’s, Dance Mania, the premier label for Ghetto House, shut its doors and a corporate takeover sanitized Chicago radio, implementing national programming formats with little room for local music. Pivotal figures like DJ Deeon dropped out of the scene and younger producers and DJs waiting in the wings to join them now lacked the infrastructure and platforms to release their music and gain exposure outside of their communities. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Metamorphosis of the Concert

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By Charlotte Dutton

DuttonThere are those who welcome change and those who resist it. Classical music patrons who fall into the latter category would have everyone believe that their choice of music is dying. When asked to elaborate, those dejected, averse-to-change listeners will cite the same signs of its imminent death that have been listed ever since the birth of rock and roll: aging patrons and half-empty concert halls. For them, classical music is engaged in a losing battle. However, forward thinking classical music lovers, who welcome and even embrace change, see opportunity rather than wreckage. It is not the music that is dying but rather, the tradition in which audiences receive it.

Although classical music tends to draw an older, “graying” crowd, not all of its enthusiasts are dropping like flies. Therein lays a flaw in cynical patrons’ point of view: their information is faulty due to its subjectivity. Perhaps older audiences appreciate and understand classical music better than other genres; maybe they were exposed to it or found interest in it later in life. Could it be that their current life experiences draw them to classical music just like the current life experiences of energetic college students draws them to pop or techno? That is not to say, however, that classical music does not have a footing in younger generations. Simply look at the myriad conservatories and music schools dotting the international landscape – it seems that almost every urban center has at least one decent to excellent music school. [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Dressed to impress?

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By Susan Lee

LeeLady Gaga’s meat dress is now on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What a shame that the matching headpiece, clutch, and heels (also made of raw meat) to the sirloin sensation that the pop singer wore to an awards ceremony in 2010 didn’t make it to the exhibit. I guess a morals-challenging raw meat concoction is what it takes to get people talking in the 21st century. It also appears that not everyone hated it because people are actually making their way to the museum to get a look at the newly taxidermied dress, which now, in effect, looks nothing like what the idiosyncratic singer actually wore that day.

This is the type of century we live in, whether you find it revolting or intriguing. Social networks define human interaction; it is the age of digital media and a booming pop culture. It is a time where people aren’t afraid to express themselves and controversy is no longer an element of surprise. How, then, does a world-renowned classical pianist wearing a mini skirt on stage fit into all of this? [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: Redefining an art form—Style change in Barbershop Music

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By Chad Putka

PutkaThe culture of barbershop music is in peril. Many readers may be puzzled by the notion of any kind of modern barbershop culture, let alone one that’s seen better days, but trust me, it’s out there.

Today, about 30,000 people across the world make up the men’s barbershop community alone, including representation in New Zealand, Sweden, Great Britain, Japan, and many other countries, and even more women sing barbershop music than men do. But as the men and women who participate in barbershop music-making have gotten older and begun to die off, barbershop music organizations have begun to make recruitment of new and particularly young “barbershoppers” a top priority.

One job that some barbershoppers feel is related to this recruitment work is the responsibility to preserve the barbershop style in its purest form. As the early Barbershop Harmony Society grew, preservation of its musical style quickly became one of its chief goals. But what exactly is barbershop? What isn’t it? [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: The Classical Pianist’s Dilemma

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By Matthew Young

YoungC.P.E. Bach’s Solfeggio in C Minor is not a difficult piece for the classical pianist. During my middle school years, it was both technically and musically challenging, but now, with more developed technique, I find the piece is easily playable at the composer’s fast tempo markings. As an experiment, I played the piece for my friend, an occasional classical music listener who mainly listens to music of the non-classical genre. He listened intently to my purposefully obscene performance of the piece — faster than Bach’s demands and replete with missing notes and ignored editorial marks. The music made almost no sense, but he was amazed.

Later, I sent him a recording of Georgian pianist Eliso Virsaladze’s dark and sensitive performance of the second movement of Prokofiev’s second piano sonata. “It sounds like she is playing wrong notes…but she isn’t,” he remarked, reacting to the movement’s dissonance. After explaining to him that it was both technically and musically difficult, he said, “I still think Solfeggio sounds harder.” In a moment, all the years of work at the piano since I studied Bach’s piece flashed through my mind. Are notes all that people hear? [Read more…]

Oberlin Rubin Institute Preview: It was destiny

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By Megan Emberton

EmbertonIt was destiny. I was a weary piano student, disenchanted with life at a music school, home for an entire summer because I had felt far too wretched to land myself a spot at any summer festivals. And then we met. The accordion was waiting for me, behind the jewelry counter at a local junk shop. It was very 1960s, gold accents, ridiculous, smelled like mildew, and it was the answer to all of my problems. I hemmed and hawed for a couple of hours, then blew three hundred bucks on an instrument I couldn’t really play. My visiting aunt chipped in because when I strapped that box on my shoulders, my gloomy face lit up for the first time all summer. We were made for each other, the accordion and me.

My instrument and I were relegated to playing outside for the first few weeks. With every push and pull, the bellows would billow a musty plume of dust. My mother said that sunlight exposure is key for getting rid of mold and mildew — oh, and accordions are loud instruments whether or not you can play them properly. I spent a lot of time sitting on a stool in the driveway, getting used to playing a keyboard sideways and negotiating the mysteries of the 120 bass buttons my left hand had to contend with. I am still not sure what the neighbors thought. [Read more…]

Intoducing the Oberlin Rubin Institute Fellows

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Rubin Fellows

Rubin Institute Fellows. Front Row, L-R: Jacob Street, Sam Rosenberg, Mandy Hogan & Chad Putka. Second Row, L-R: Meghan Farnsworth, Susan Lee, Megan Emberton, Gabe Kanengiser, Matthew Young & Charlotte Dutton.

As part of Cleveland Classical.com’s continuing coverage of Oberlin’s Stephen and Cynthia Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, we feature the Rubin Institute Fellows who were selected to participate in the January 18-22 institute by the teaching panel leading the Oberlin Conservatory’s new fall course, Introduction to Music Criticism. The panel included Brian Alegant, Professor and Director of the Music Theory Division at the Oberlin Conservatory; Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway of ClevelandClassical, and Donald Rosenberg, Plain Dealer Music Critic and President of the Music Critics’ Association of North America. The fellows also spent two class sessions with guest speaker Charles Michener, author and former senior editor of The New Yorker.

As the final assignment for the class, each student was asked to write a “Think Piece” on a topic of their choice. The ten essays will appear in subsequent posts.

Cooper International Violin Competition: Top Prizes Awarded

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Huang with TCO

Sirena Huang with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra. Photo: Roger Mastroianni

Cleveland, OH — August 20, 2011

Following their performances with Jahja Ling and The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday evening, the judges named the top three prizewinners in the Cooper International Violin Competition. Awards were presented on the stage of Severance Hall by Oberlin Conservatory Dean David H. Stull and Thomas Cooper, a 1978 graduate of Oberlin College and the sponsor of the competition.

First Prize to Sirena Huang (17, South Windsor, CT), for her performance of the Mendelssohn concerto;

Second Prize to Alexandra Switala (17, Grapevine, TX), for her performance of Prokofiev’s second concerto;

Third Prize to Laura Park (17, Des Plaines, IL), for her performance of the Sibelius concerto.

In addition to cash prizes of $10,000, $6,000 and $3,000, all three performers won full, four-year scholarships to the Oberlin Conservatory, pending admissison. Ms. Huang, who won the audience prize for her recital round on Wednesday, will also have the opportunity to perform with orchestras in Shanghai and Beijing.

Judges for the competition included Gregory Fulkerson, Professor of Violin at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and chairman of the jury; David Bowlin, assistant professor of violin at Oberlin and founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; David Cerone, former president of the Cleveland Institute of Music; Fan Tao, conductor of the China National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra; Tong Weidong, director of violin studies at the Central Conservatory Middle School in Beijing; and Milan Vitek, professor of violin at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

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