Klarinet Archive - Posting 000443.txt from 2003/11

From: "James O'Briant" <jobriant@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Music Museum
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 20:10:16 -0500

Mark Gresham wrote:

> ... being from the American South, I
> understand it well. There are still
> people from "back east" who think we
> are all uneducated, shoeless and ringworm
> infested, living in shanties with tin
> roofs, and therefore couldn't possibly
> be in touch with "things cultural."
>
> Yes, important things can happen in
> small towns, ...

Case in point -- the Ames International Orchestra Festival, held each
spring at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. It's five nights of
concerts by a visiting major symphony orchestra, one orchestra per year.
The first time the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra came to the USA, they
played nine concerts, all to sold out houses. They played one night in
Boston, two nights in New York, one night in Washington, DC, and five
nights in Ames, Iowa.

Then they went home.

During these concerts, you can walk the parking lot outside C.Y. Stevens
Auditorium and find license plates from most of the 99 counties in the
state, as well as from surrounding states (isolated places like South
Dakota). The Iowa Highway Patrol uses the same procedures and the same
number of officers for traffic control during this week as they do for
home football games at Iowa State University.

There are many other examples of "culture in places where Easterners
think it can't exist." When the Metropolitan Opera was still doing its
spring tour, there was always a week in Minneapolis, and it was always
sold out. (I generally went there for 3 or 4 nights of opera that
week.)

The Midwest has quite a number of Frank Lloyd Wright homes and other
buildings -- some still in daily use -- and many of them are open for
public tours. Wright built Taliesin, his home, workshop and school, in
southwestern Wisconsin.

California has gutted its school music programs, so that high schools of
2000 students have to struggle to have a 45-piece band. But there are
Midwestern high schools where 50%, 60% or even 90% of the students are
in the band or orchestra program.

One of the finest university Music Departments anywhere is at the
University of Indiana, in Bloomington.

Authors from all over the country are thrilled to be asked to be a part
of the Writers Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

No, the land between the Appalachian Trail and the Continental Divide is
not the vast cultural wasteland that many on both coasts would like to
believe -- and belittle it.

Jim O'Briant
Bayside Music Press
Gilroy, CA 95020

http://www.baysidemusicpress.com

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