I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
People perceive opera and classical as elitist - I disagree. I've always tried to mix the two, make it more accessible.
Classical music is something that we're very passionate about, but we always thought it was presented in a stuffy way.
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
I don't have a classical-music mentality. I haven't been taught that way, and it doesn't fit my character, either.
New music is absolutely integral to classical music.
But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.
Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.
I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart.
When I'm in the classical world, I really treat it as exactly classical and I don't try and spruce it up or jazz it up or make it easier for the masses.
It's not that people don't like classical music. It's that they don't have the chance to understand and to experience it.
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