The title "Creative Destruction" doesn't imply to me a sense of "building community," but John Thomas Dodson's blog is about the forward movement of classical music and the assimilation of the "old system" into a modern world. It's awesome!

John Thomas Dodson is the music director of the Adrian Symphony Orchestra in Adrian, Michigan. The city apparently has an area of 7.3 miles and a population of approximately 21,000 southern Michigan inhabitants. My first reaction to the Wikipedia entry was far from assuming any type of cultural depth, but later I read that the Adrian City Band is the oldest in the country, Thomas Edison was included in one of it's notable residents and the city's cultural history and architecture has many connections to the 19th century. The city is also the home of the third oldest opera house in the country, which continues to boast over one million dollars in revenue each year. It's no surprise, then, that such a visionary blogger would be the music director of the symphony in such a lovely cultural place.

His latest blog caught my attention, as he discussed his thoughts about his recent visit to New York for the Met's free, outdoor festival. Over ten evenings, recent Met productions were projected on a large movie screen outside in the Lincoln Center Plaza. His entry addressed the exact thoughts I had after reading the title, "Drive-by Opera." Opera, in it's earliest form, was meant for royalty exclusively. It, like the history of many of the arts, was more of a cultural and social statement of wealth and worldliness than it was meant for emotional fulfillment. Obviously the art evolved, and by the early 19th century, certain operas were performed for middle class citizens, but still, the idea of opera, an art that often requires international understanding, is now being broadcast to the masses at no cost, is a remarkable notion even in the 21st century.

Dodson loved it, because the whole atmosphere added new meanings to the performance.

"The individualized noises cut into the listening experience. You had to NOTICE them. Reading the sub-titles in Stephanie Blythe's Elysium scene, I remember seeing something like "All around me are blissful sounds." As the sirens, car horns and street noises continued, I couldn't help but think that New York's capacity for irony is simply endless. Gluck would have smiled."

Traditionalists might argue that the capacity of the outdoors does not lend itself to the nature of the performance that the composer would have intended. At the same time, composers of their time were visionaries. Their ideas were often far passed their audience of the time and their patrons. Heck, Beethoven probably would have loved the extra dramatic element of fireworks at the end of his 9th symphony just as the chorus sang: "Such ihn über'm Sternenzelt! Über Sternen muss er wohnen." (Seek Him in the heavens; Above the stars He must dwell).