Greg Sandow to Visit JSO

On October 1 and 2, Greg Sandow will be in Jackson, talking with the board, guild board, and students and the orchestra sharing his thoughts about where classical music is going and the potential impact of an orchestra on a community.

Greg Sandow was best known for many years as a music critic, one of the few with a national reputation for writing about both classical music and pop. He’s also been one of the few classical critics who challenges the old assumptions of the classical music world.

But in recent years, he’s moved journalism to a back burner, and revived a composing career that he began in the 1970s, and then abandoned in the 1980s. He also spends much of his time working on questions about the future of classical music, pursuing these questions in an influential blog, in a book he’s been improvising online, in public appearances, and in consulting work and other special projects with major orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

He’s also a member of the Graduate Studies faculty at Juilliard, where he teaches courses on music criticism and on the future of classical music. For the past two years, he’s also taught that second course at the Eastman School of Music, under the auspices of Eastman’s Institute for Musical Leadership.

As a critic, he wrote for The Village Voice in the 1980s, when it was New York’s leading weekly paper, and was read all over the country. Lately his writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal, where for many years he was a regular contributor. In pop music, he was chief pop critic of the Los Angeles Herald‐Examiner, and both music critic and senior music editor of Entertainment Weekly.

His music has been played by the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Fine Arts Quartet, and St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Major premieres are coming up this season and next with the Pacifica Quartet and the South Dakota Symphony. His music tends to be tonal, but with unexpected twists, including eruptions of 12‐tone music, jazz, and pop. (Sometimes cheesy pop.) His blog is at www.artsjournal.com/sandow. His book is at www.artsjournal.com/greg. You can read some of his writing on his website, at http://www.gregsandow.com/. And you can hear some of his music there as well, at www.gregsandow.com/music.