Miscellaneous dispatches piling up here at Soho the Dog HQ:
From the Fighting the Good Fight desk: Project STEP turns 25. You can wring your hands about the state of music education, or you can quietly, modestly, and effectively do something about it.
From the Hell Is Other People desk: Here’s an article managing to condescend to symphony patrons and NASCAR patrons simultaneously. Never have so many ostentatiously italicized foreign words been deployed with so little effect! And what’s wrong with cowboy hats anyway? (Bonus: this letter, in which a reader brags of stifling a nine-year-old fellow audience member. Fight the battles you can win, I guess.)
From the Kill a Slow Work Day With a Surreptitious Downloading Project desk: just in time for the solstice, Jon Savage picks the 50 greatest teenager songs of all time. (Yes, X-Ray Spex made the list.)
And from the Good Things Come to Those Who Wait desk: Meet the Composer announces their 2007 Commissioning Grants. It’s a lot of the usual suspects, but this one caught my eye: Christian Wolff is writing a new piece for the Callithumpian Consort. Having heard an absolutely bang-up performance of some Wolff Exercises by the Callithumpian’s student wing, [nec]shivaree, I’m psyched.
WRT to music education, do you remember Rachel Barton? She’s < HREF="http://www.rebf.org" REL="nofollow">doing something about it, too<>.