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frank j pipp's avatar

Well written essay. I initially discovered you on Kickstarter for your movie On A String.

Didn't realize you were a talented writer too. I think you should pitch a show idea to NPR where you would host, play music, do a monologue, some interviews, tears and jokes -sorry, I know this sounds a lot like A Prairie Home Companion. You definitely have the smarts to juggle this. Good luck. I love that Kickstarter brings so much talent to viewers like myself.

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Chris Jesu Lee's avatar

Watching Amadeus at 6 years old "saved" classical music for me.

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Mike Mills's avatar

I remember going to a rock concert a few years ago and the Headline Band talking about how "Rock is Not Dead." and it's perhaps helpful to think of music as part of a cultural conversation. A lot of artists have listened to Classical Music and adapt it.

Or if you watch the movie La La Land and see similar problems for Jazz. Music is about the connection to people. There are enthusiastic music lovers all over. It's when it's shared with joy that I think people really "Get it"

I'm the type of person to stop a movie that I'm watching with my wife to tell her about some bit of trivia here or there. I'm not sure how annoying that is but she puts up with it. But a lot of the time she'll end up watching things with me not because she's interested but because I am. Enthusiasm for something is infectious.

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Gérard Mclean's avatar

I’m “saving” classical music by adapting pieces for the diatonic harmonica and holding concerts for my subdivision neighbors from my front porch. I’m now trying to recruit 100 other idiots to join the band.

We’re gonna get a bigger front porch; some of us are in the trades. We’re a little bit crazy, not stupid 😀 … 100Harmonicas …

Education, that long-tail hard-sell ROI. I had a job twenty years ago where we tried “saving” newspaper journalism by creating life-long readers at the 4th-8th grade through Newspapers in Education efforts at a newspaper. NYT is still trying … 🤷‍♂️ We were really good at it for about 6 years until the shareholders got impatient and greedy. Ah, well… we tried.

In case you were wondering what radicalized me to the harmonica… (j/k, I’ve been playing since I was 5 or younger..) I lost the plot here, feel free to feel your way out…

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JOHN STALEY's avatar

Well said all of it. Maybe Classical music is more “undead”. You know, like Brahms Stoker or something.

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