Quick Takes: How about thinking INSIDE the box? and request time!

A completely overused statement “thinking outside the box” needs to be reworked and soon.  I used to love using it, but now I feel it is a cop out statement as if to say we are going to try something new and different and if it doesn’t work, well at least we tried! Also my new Audience Connections class has begun (16 students!) and like I do every year I am asking for requests of arts related topics and current events for us to discuss in class, and I will post the audio!  Bottom left is the Audience Connection tab if you want to listen to podcasts and read related articles…now to the box….

Two things got me thinking about the commonly used box analogy.  We discussed in class this week my post Context not Urtext, and next week we open our season here in Springfield with an all Beethoven concert.  The point in my post was to make suggestions to take music to not a level of understanding in the pure artistic sense, but to make it relevant to people by applying it to their interests with genuine connections back to the music.  When studying Beethoven, I don’t think of him as someone who broke barriers/boundaries, broke rules, or who reinvented music.  I think of him as someone who expanded barriers/boundaries, who added to the rules (he still used Classical forms)  and who re-purposed music.  He made the music about us, he didn’t go outside the box, he just took the box that already existed but made it much much bigger so that we could all fit in!

So much marketing is about being exclusive, being different and about being (cue deep movie trailer guy voice) like nothing you have ever experienced before….. Now not that there is anything wrong with that (life is just one big Seinfeld episode!) but I say music should be inclusive, feeling like it could become familiar and like EVERYTHING you have experienced before….but in a new way!  Now that is exciting to me because it promotes relevance, which I believe is the key to sustainability.

We need to not re-build but instead remodel with innovation that connects back to what we do and who we are.  That to me is a way to move forward.   So like Beethoven, instead of thinking outside of the box,  let’s start to work out how to make the box big enough for everyone to fit inside.

Please send topic requests!

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