Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’re by now well aware of Glee, the new Fox TV show whose first full season starts this fall. The comedy centers around Will Schuester, a young high school teacher played by Matt Morrison, who tries to resuscitate the school’s ailing show choir, and judging from the one promo episode that aired last May, it is riotously funny—P.C., the show is not. (The creator of the show is Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck and Popular fame.) Fox has waged an unusually long, intense P.R. campaign that started with the airing of that single episode, followed by relentless advertising, online contests, and other promos. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Jane Lynch, who plays a wickedly cutthroat cheerleading coach at the fictional high school, is in the cast—my kids have been endlessly repeating her waterboarding and hepatitis jokes all summer. Yes, in the middle of the most serious economic mess we’ve seen in a long time is an extremely silly television show about … singing. Interesting.
A few weeks before Glee was set to air on television, I spoke with Ralph S. Opacic, who is the founder, president, and executive director of the Orange County High School of the Arts. Matt Morrison graduated from OCHSA in 1997, and went on to do music theater, including South Pacific, Light in the Piazza, and Hairspray.
Opacic and I spoke about how he went about starting an arts school back in the 1980s, the ongoing effort to get funding for his school, what Matt Morrison was like as a high school student, and what on earth “show choir” singing is. Full disclosure: I am old enough that when I attended public high school “show choirs” did not exist. read more
I’ve been obsessing over and worrying about one of my favorite subjects lately: how to get more arts stuff for free. (I’ve written about this topic at SundayArts before: here and here and here and here.) With the economy in its current state, “free” of course is a big topic this year—just look at all the attention Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I’ve been reading that book, whose message boils down to: yes, a lot in the media and tech industries is being given away free that used to be paid for (Hulu/YouTube, Google searches and applications, Facebook pages, webmail accounts, newspapers). And you—the consumer—are the beneficiary. (Another, decidedly less upbeat book on the topic, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell, just came out, though that’s more about physical products like food and clothing than Anderson’s Web and other tech products.)
It is Juilliard’s 2009-10 season announcement that prompted my most recent round of obsessing, with its phrase “almost 700 dance, drama, and music events—most of them are free.” All kinds of great (free and nearly free) events are set for their season, such as pianist Alfred Brendel lecturing and coaching during a four-day residency in November; concerts by the brand-new ensemble Juilliard Baroque, featuring faculty from the school’s new Historical Performance Program; Handel’s Ariodante, Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Conrad Susa’s Transformations, and Copland’s The Tender Land. The world premiere of Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s Paths of Parables II: Woody Allen’s Hasidic Tales with a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar with texts by Woody Allen, for narrator and chamber orchestra. Good stuff, and I plan to get to as many of these events as time permits. read more
If you’ve ever parented, taught, or observed children aged seven, eight, or nine years old, you know that they need to be doing stuff to learn, not just sitting listening.
This was something I observed when I went to see a professional/educational collaboration of Dido and Aeneas last spring at LaGuardia School of Music, Art, and the Performing Arts. On November 19, I joined several hundred first- and second-graders from New York City public schools who were attending one of six concerts taking place over three days at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. The concerts were part of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall’s educational program called “My City, My Song,” a theme meant to evoke a musical expedition through New York City and featuring musicians from Queens (Irish vocalist Anne-Marie Hildebrandt, piano/bodhrán), Harlem (gospel/opera baritone Gregory Rahming), and Manhattan’s Little India (Indian vocalist Falu, joined by vocalist Gaurav Shah, harmonium player Borahm Lee, and tablas player Satyan Shah).
For the most part, this one-hour program had the kids singing, clapping, and moving the whole time, beginning with the program introduction, a spirited call-and-response “I say a boom, chicka boom” with a group leader. read more
When’s the last time you went to a concert where the average age in the audience was twelve?
Last week, I—along with 800 elementary and intermediate public school students—went to LaGuardia High School of Music, Art, and the Performing Arts for a daytime performance of Purcell’s short opera Dido and Aeneas. This was a commission by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, which was joined by professional soloists, as well as the senior chorus from the high school, and it was a collaboration with Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects. Dancers occupied center stage, soloists and orchestra were stage right, and the chorus stood stage left. Each character in the opera had a dancer double who acted out the story, as projections were shown that added the contemporary twist—“Words Are Everything!”—of an ill-fated tabloid couple. It was well done, and it deserved the nice review it received in the New York Times last Saturday.
At 10:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, this auditorium was bursting with energy from kids thrilled to be sprung from their classrooms. So it was nonstop noise noise noise while the orchestra tuned up and kids jockeyed for position to sit next to their friends, as teachers cherry-picked suspected troublemakers from the center seats and placed them near adults at the ends of rows. read more
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