Does Music Matter? A 60-second lecture at the New School

Does Music Matter?

Around age 14, I decided wanted to be a professional musician. My mother warned me it wasn’t a stable path. To some extent, Mom, you were right. (There. I said it.) Since I graduated from Juilliard in 1992, the music profession has suffered debilitating changes.

These days, we blame two familiar culprits – technology, and the economy – but to me, it’s really the same old story: telling us that music belongs at the margins. That music doesn’t really matter, at least not as much as the stock market does.

I teach entrepreneurship classes at Mannes, and in these classes we challenge this story. I argue that we need new language to talk about what music is and what music does in the world.

Tanya KalmanovitchMay 21, 2014entrepreneurship, PressComment

OpEd in the Boston Globe

IMAGINE A world without music. It’s like something out of a soul-deadening, dystopian future. And yet the people of Afghanistan living under Taliban rule in the 1990s were forbidden to sing, play an instrument, or listen to music except for prescribed religious or patriotic chants. Anyone in violation, the mullahs decreed, would have molten lead poured into their ears on Judgment Day – and be subject to jail or beatings here on earth.

The Taliban smashed instruments, burned recordings, and destroyed the archives of traditional Afghan folk songs at Radio Kabul. Even after they were routed from power in 2001, and fatwas gave way to the secular depredations of war and poverty, music has been treated with suspicion. Playing Mozart in Kabul can be a little like reading Lolita in Tehran. So it was an act of bravery as well as hope when the Afghanistan National Institute of Music opened last summer.

NewsTanya KalmanovitchJuly 16, 2011Press, Afghanistan Comment