“If you’d like to discovery some new music and do it in a visually appealing way, TuneGlue let’s [sic] you explore the relationship between artists and bands in a connection-based web… We went from Iggy Pop through Patti Smith -> PJ Harvey -> Tori Amos -> Alanis Morissette -> The Craberries -> Garbage.”

This looks like 1) a really fun way to kill time and discover new music and 2) a potentially-useful educational tool. This could be used to plan historical, genre-related, or other types of sequences for lesson plans. It could even displayed on a SmartBoard or projector as an in-class activity. I’m excited to play around with this and see what it can do.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that though the Lifehacker review only mentions pop music examples, I tried out a few art music composers and it worked well! Jazz too. It seems Western-centric, though, which is one disadvantage.

A piece on Alec Baldwin’s new gig as the radio announcer for the New York Philharmonic’s radio broadcasts. There are some really interesting insights here: how “orchestras, opera houses and other musical institutions engage in a sometimes desperate-seeming search for relevance in a society that has increasingly marginalized serious music”, how Mr Baldwin tries to match his voice to the emotional quality and general timbre of the music, Mr Baldwin’s love for Mahler (which I completely understand and share).

Do I think that things like this will save the struggling art music industry? No, not if we’re going to keep calling it “serious” music; that type of moniker isn’t really going to call out to anyone who isn’t already familiar with this type of music. I realize what these institutions are attempting to do by these sorts of publicity stunts, and yes, it’s worked to some extent (seeing as they’ve landed themselves in the NYT for doing this), but are people actually going to tune in and listen in significant numbers?

The question here seems to be, still, how music educators make this music relevant enough that students want to be interested in it and will consume it with the ferocity that they consume what they deem “their music”. Mr Baldwin was fortunate enough to have such a formative experience in his K-12 education and I really think that this is the kind of thing that art music institutions should really be spending their time on rather than emphasizing celebrity involvement in their programs. Youth-geared concerts and school partnerships can go a long way and can benefit students in other ways as well.

That said, though, I am totally going to see if there’s a podcast for this. Like I said, young people who will be interested in this kind of thing are going to be young people who already do have an interest, especially in both classical music and in Mr Baldwin’s work…!