Quote of the Day (Matthew Aucoin, Redefining ‘Classical Music’)

“Western classical music is an unusual case. The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven's symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same scores. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage…. If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of ‘classical’ music.”—American conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin, “What Is Classical Music?”, The Atlantic, May 2025

The image of Matthew Aucoin accompanying this post was taken Apr. 22, 2022, by Beehivesspaghetti.