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Greg Sandow

Composer, consultant and writer

USA

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About

For many years, Sandow was best known as a critic, both of classical music and pop. As a critic, Sandow wrote for The Village Voice in the 1980s. His column was on new classical music, though he also wrote about the mainstream repertory, typically challenging traditional assumptions about its function and its meaning. In recent years his writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Opera News, and the Wall Street Journal, where for a long time he was a regular contributor. In pop music, he became chief pop critic of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1988, and in 1990 joined the staff of Entertainment Weekly, which had just begun publication, and where he served first as music critic and then as senior music editor.

During his years as a critic, Sandow abandoned composition, but later resumed it. His works include four operas, one based on Frankenstein, music from which he incorporated into an orchestra piece, A Frankenstein Overture, which has been performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony and the South Dakota Symphony. Others who have performed his work include the Fine Arts Quartet, the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, and the pianist Jenny Lin.

Sandow has made public appearances throughout the United States and also abroad, and has also done consulting work and other special projects with classical music institutions, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra[ and the New York Philharmonic. Since 1997 he has taught at the Juilliard School as a member of the Graduate Studies Faculty, and from 2006 to 2009 also taught at the Eastman School of Music, where he gave the commencement address in 2008. He blogs about the future of classical music on the ArtsJournal.com website.

Sandow has also extensively written and researched unidentified flying objects, notably for the International UFO Reporter, a quarterly publication of the Center for UFO Studies.

Sandow is married to Anne Midgette, herself a former classical music reviewer for The New York Times and now chief classical music critic for The Washington Post. Sandow dedicated his "Quartet for Anne" to his wife. They live in Washington, D.C., and Warwick, New York. They have one child, Rafael Aron Sandow, born October 15, 2011.

http://gregsandow.com/

Sheets

Interview

What does music mean to you personally?

It’s a feast for my ears, my heart, and my mind. There are so many varieties of it! Which makes music also an adventure, something to explore. Something that can teach me about things in the world — cultures, people, and much more — that I don’t know about.

Do you agree that music is all about fantasy?

Well, I think music is many things. It can be fantasy, but also thought, logic, emotion, expression, a way to reach out to the world, and understand the world. It can be a feast of wonderful details! A meditation, an adventure, something exhilarating for my mind and body.

If you were not a professional musician, what would you have been?

A lawyer, a filmmaker. A monk, a meditation teacher. A life coach.

The classical music audience is getting old, are you worried about the future?

Classical music has serious problems, with an aging audience and declining relevance in our culture. I used to worry about that, used to make helping with these problems the center of my professional work. Now I don’t care as much. If I look at all the problems our world faces, the survival of classical music doesn’t rank very high. In any case, I think our art and our culture are in good shape, even without classical music. Other kinds of music can be profound art. That doesn’t mean classical music doesn’t have great value, but I don’t think it’s necessary for our society’s health. And in any case, classical music is changing, and will find ways to survive, whether or not I worry about it.

What do you envision the role of music to be in the 21st century? Do you see that there is a transformation of this role?

Do we mean classical music, or all music? I think we in the classical music field sometimes say “music” when what we’re talking about is only classical music. So if I’m asked what the role of classical music might be in the 21st century, I’d say that classical music should transform itself into a contemporary art, one that reflects the world around it, and that fuses with other kinds of music (as they all fuse with each other). If this happens, I think classical music can again be central to our culture, as it was in generations past. It seems clear, even obvious to me, that the most important piece of American music in our time is Hamilton, the wildly successful Broadway musical, because by picturing the founders of the US as Black, it reimagined America as a truly multicultural place. And because it used hiphop as a musical embodiment of this reimagined history, fusing it expertly with the style of Broadway musicals. And because, by any measure, its music is powerful, with far more sweep and deeper quality than the new classical music I hear. If classical music becomes a truly contemporary art, then maybe it can produce something that can speak for an entire generation, with as much power, depth, and imagination as Hamilton. If the question is what the future of all music will be, I have no idea. Except for one thing. I believe that the next artist who truly speaks for our time, as for instance Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and James Brown did in theirs, will be a Black woman.

Do you think that the musician today needs to be more creative? What is the role of creativity in the musical process for you?

I think everyone needs to be creative! One inspiring thing about life today is how creative people are, doing all kinds of things. I could think of children’s books, for instance, since I have a kid. They’re wildly imaginative. Or the things people do with knitting, which I know about because my wife knits. I don’t think about my own creativity — it’s just there. Ideas come to me while I compose. That’s all the creativity I need. If I stopped to think about it, I’d be in a bad place. Asking, maybe, whether an idea I just had is truly creative. Then I’d be self-conscious, and couldn’t create. I get ideas when I compose, and that’s enough for me.

Do you think we as musicians can do something to attract the younger generation to music concerts? How would you do this?

I’d start by rephrasing the question. Can we as classical musicians can do something to attract the younger generation to classical music concerts? Because, as I said, we in the classical music field sometimes say “music” when we’re only talking about classical music. The rest of the world, of course, likes music of other kinds. Which can be as artistic as classical music at its best can be.

So, to attract new people , we need to come down off our pedestal, and rejoin the rest of the world. One way we do that is by joining with all the other music around us, which we can do in many ways. By getting to know other kinds music (if we don’t), by talking about other kinds of music. by collaborating with musicians doing music of other kinds, by incorporating other music styles into our classical work…there are many ways to do it. We have to stop pretending we’re special, and act in ways the rest of the world does. This is just one of many things we can do, but I think it’s an essential step.

Tell us about your creative process. What is your favorite piece (written by you) and how did you start working on it?

It’s hard to name my favorite piece, but one that’s important to me is a string quartet called The Remembered Song. It’s based on a passage from a spiritual book, The Course in Miracles, imagining a song we all very dimly can remember, from a vision of Heaven we had before we were born. In our lives now, we only recall fragments of it. In this piece, which I was commissioned to write for a festival in Prague, Prague Summer Nights, I wanted to start with soft fragments of the song, separated by long silences. Then I wanted to show episodes from our earthly life, ranging from relaxed and happy love to the turmoil and despair of war. Finally I wanted to end with the complete song. My first job was to write the forgotten (but now remembered) song. This was difficult! More than half the time I spent writing the piece was simply this part, the song itself, an unaccompanied melody. Not easy, to write a memory of paradise, that seems like a fresh creation, with no references to ways that Heaven and paradise have been depicted in other music. Once I’d written the song, to at least my own satisfaction, the rest of the piece wasn’t hard to write. I was surprised by how short the episodes from earthly life were, but that was OK. I always feel I’m discovering my pieces, and that the episodes were short was a discovery. It all worked as I wanted it to, and in a few places I asked the musicians to tap on their instruments, something I’d never done before, in two previous string quartets. I was also happily surprised by how the remembered song (or bits of it) got embedded in the episodes, most often in imperceptible ways. But it was there. I hadn’t done this consciously, but it seemed deeply right that the song should be with us throughout our lives, in everything we do, whether we notice it or not. Finally I came to the final section, in which we hear the complete song. And then I got stuck again. I knew what the melody was, but how should I present it? I tried harmonizing it. Not hard to do (I have reasonable technique as a composer), but it sounded terrible to me. I decided there wasn’t any harmony implicit in the melody. So I tried writing a contrapuntal treatment. This was harder — the melody didn’t readily lend itself to counterpoint — but I did enough to show, at least to myself, that this also wouldn’t be a solution. Finally I just let the melody play three times through without much adornment, accompanied by only by very light tapping on the body of the instruments. And by ghostly echoes of occasional melodic notes, and by soft, ethereal descants in two places, high in one of the violins. That seemed to work, and I let a fourth repetition fade away into a repeat of something heard earlier in the piece, when the opening fragments of the song faded into a haze of sound, held out for a long time softly, and then vanishing into silence. That seemed like the perfect ending for the piece, rounding out its musical form, and also showing how the remembered song — so important to us — can’t truly be remembered in our lives, but always fades away into silence. I wish I had a recording of this piece. The Prague performance, by a student string quartet, was magical! But the recording didn’t come out. The score, for anyone curious, is here: www.gregsandow.com/media/GregSandow-RememberedSong.pdf. I’d love for people to look at the score. I’d like the piece to be played again.

Can you give some advice for young people who want to discover classical music for themselves?

Don’t be intimidated. Don’t think you have to know anything about classical music before you start listening. And remember that there are many kinds of classical music! So if you hear Beethoven and don’t like what you hear, maybe you just don’t like Beethoven. Doesn’t mean you don’t like classical music. Other suggestions. Start with classical music that’s very rhythmic, that has a steady beat, since most music in the world today has that. Two ideas would be Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. If you listen to one of the Brandenburgs (there are six), and you like it, try another one. They’re written for different combinations of instruments, so they all sound different from each other, in ways you’ll spot in just a few seconds. Remember that classical pieces — the long ones, anyway — change a lot as they proceed. That’s the biggest difference between classical music and music of other kinds. A composer writes a classical piece before it’s performed, writes down every note, plans the progress of the piece the way a novelist plans a novel, or a filmmaker plans a film. So follow the changes. They won’t be hard to hear. Something happens, and then something else does. Maybe the changes tell a story, one you can imagine in your mind. Or maybe they’re just like a trail that you follow, if you’re walking in the mountains or the countryside. Or they’re a route through a city. Go with the changes, and see where they take you. Finally, a lot of the most famous classical pieces are romantic, full of surging emotion. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Rachmaninoff, many others. Most of the popular operas. You may or may not like that! And you’re not required to. That surging emotion seems normal to the established classical audience, but it’s not at all the norm in our current culture. There are romantic movies. Maybe you like them, and maybe you don’t. If you don’t seek out romance in the culture you know, maybe avoid it, at least at first, in classical music. That’s why I recommended Bach and Steve Reich. Very not romantic, those two. Other choices might be Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (or, in its original French title, Le sacre du printemps), which is far from romantic, since it’s about a pagan sacrifice. Or lots of music by Bartok, which (this is one way to look at it) combines the musical equivalent of 20th century painting with sounds taken from Hungarian folk music. Explore, using YouTube or your streaming service. And if you don’t like the first few minutes of something, turn it off, and try something else. You can come back to it later (as I often do with music I don’t like), to try to see why you don’t like it, or to learn if you might see it another way. But at first, stick with what you like. Don’t think you have to like something, just because people think it’s a classical masterpiece.

Do you think about the audience when composing?

Not at all. I don’t want to block my creative ideas. And I’ve learned that I can’t predict which of my pieces people will like a lot. Sometimes I don’t even know which ones I’ll like best!

What projects are coming up? Do you experiment in your projects?

I’ve been rehearsing two short piano pieces, variations on one of our American patriotic songs, “America the Beautiful.” This was commissioned for a large project, called America/Beautiful, in which 75 pianists were asked to write variations on the song. I wrote two, one in the style of 1950s rock & roll ballads, the other a happy little 12-tone piece, a gentle joke, since the song shouldn’t really lend itself to 12-tone treatment. But I made it work. :-)

The music will be streamed and performed live early in July, then later on taken on tour. The pianist doing this is an extraordinary woman named Min Kwon. The website for the project is https://www.america-beautiful.com. I have a longer piano piece I’ve written for another pianist, who should be premiering it soon.

Other projects: my Juilliard course on the future of classical music, which just ended. http://www.gregsandow.com/popclass/popclass.pdf.

And I’m on the advisory committee for the Boulanger Initiative, an organization in the Washington, DC area, which fosters music written by women. What they do is joyful, and they’re about to have their third annual festival, under the title Revelry. https://www.boulangerinitiative.org

Do I experiment in my projects? I feel like every moment of composing is an experiment. I never know what’s going to work!

I also change my Juilliard courses a lot, the one on the future of classical music and the other one, called “How to Speak and Write About Music,” http://www.gregsandow.com/crit_class/assignments.pdf I can’t really say whether my changes are experimental, but I never feel I can say for sure what effect they’ll have on me and on my students. They seem to work well, but even though I’ve been teaching them for more than 20 years, I feel I learn something new with every class I teach.