From Slate.com … an interesting email dialogue between two New York writers regarding composer/artists, audiences and perceptions of jazz and classical music.
People tend to listen to various kinds of music over the course of the day: rock at the gym, jazz on the drive home, maybe a little Vivaldi while waiting at the dentist’s office for the root canal. There’s a long tradition of mixed-genre listening in American culture: As Joseph Horowitz notes in his book Classical Music in America, opera houses in the 19th century would offer Don Giovanni together with “Ethiopian songs, choruses, solos, duets, jigs, fancy dances, etc.” Yet conversations about music always seem to take place within a particular genre. Our concept in this Slate Dialogue is to converse for a day or two across the walls of specialized taste. I write mostly about classical music for The New Yorker, though I’ve touched on pop. You write about various kinds of music for the New York Times, with an emphasis on jazz. You have an excellent new book on John Coltrane, telling the story of his sound and analyzing his complex place in the wider culture.
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