Thursday, September 13, 2007

"Funny" Orchestral News

I don't know whether its hypocritical or not, but occasionally I read cnn.com to make sure I'm not missing anything really important thats going on in the world (usual online sources (the ones that I have bookmarked) being BBC World and The Guardian Online (although I should really be spending more time reading German online newspapers, not British ones)). And occasionally, on cnn.com, one comes across ridiculous things. Like this article. It's actually an important issue - what is being lost in classical music when a government decides to put limits on decibel levels?

It's actually something thats been hotly debated for the entire 21st Century - when these EU decibel level controls were first proposed it became a hot topic in all symphonic performance contexts. I recall discussing it, for instance, to great extent in my brass class at CMU. My problem with the CNN.com article? It's listed as "Funny News"! What the hell is that? Since when did major issues in symphonic music become funny? Who the hell, reading cnn.com's "Funny News," would be find that with this article, that their need for some oddball news was satisfied?

Seriously. And incidentally, Doug Yeo, the bass trombonist of the BSO, is quoted there at the end of the article, saying "Do you need the nanny state to step in and say, 'No, you cannot play the bass drum fortissimo in the Verdi Requiem?'" If you run over to the BBC Proms webcasts, you can hear the BSO playing Berlioz' Damnation of Faust. If you fast forward to the 2 hour, 27 minute mark of the webcast, you can hear who I assume to be Doug Yeo (& co.) clearly trying to get himself fined for excessive loudness. Awesome!

1 Comments:

Blogger nate said...

Yeah, there is something mildly obnoxious about pallid attempts at joking about the existence of reasonable policy questions just because they apply to a limited domain. But then CNN.com is a completely lost cause these days. It's far less bothersome to me that their funny news isn't funny than that their newsworthy news isn't actually newsworthy.

9/13/2007 10:42 PM  

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