Joyce DiDonato: The music industry is one of service, not stardom
NewsThe American counter-diva has come up with this brilliant quote in an FT interview on the eve of her Eden tour:
“The music industry is one of service, it’s not one of stardom,” she says. “You chose to get into this, you chose to do the work, you’re not owed anything from this industry, you’re there to serve.”
That is some epitaph.
Read on here.
Dear God. What will this girl come up with next.
Behind a paywall.
She’s now ready for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s SUNSET BOULEVARD
Brava! The paywall is not a barrier for me. She talks much sense in the article.
Here’s an extract:
“One of the reasons DiDonato has incorporated an educational element into Eden is her frustration at how schools and governments have allowed music to vanish from the curriculum. Performing is “confidence-building, it’s esteem-building, it’s team-building and it’s empowering to those kids that, especially after the last two years, haven’t had the chance to go out into the world and go, ‘Here I am!’””
The point is, how the word ‘service’is to be udnerstood. The classical music world is not a restaurant.
In reality, the ‘music business’ is, in general, a world of commerce and prostitution. The very word ‘business’ says it all.
Only when the idea that people working in the music world, will function best when they understand their function as serving a higher goal than merely making money and ego trippery, is more widely circulating, the art form may be preserved within a developing modernity.
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Norman Vincent Peale
“We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking to the stars.” Oscar Wilde
That’s a really lovely quote. So true?
She’s “serving” some really bad sounds on her new album..
Callas already beat her to it. You can hear it in her interviews all over Youtube. Didonato has only her name left and nothing new to say. Unfortunately this profession is in need of a serious shake and it won’t come from her or any of the Opera stars on this time.