David Hurwitz

[Madiel]

It's just about getting clicks.

...working tremendously well right now with your help, isn't it?

[Herman]

I have no idea.

It's a cynical question, if you don't mind me saying so.

[Madiel]

I have no idea.

It's a cynical question, if you don't mind me saying so.

I do mind you saying so, because how is it any different to you being cynical about Hurwitz' motives? All I'm doing is following on from that logically and pointing out that if his aim is to provoke a reaction, it's working very well. ON YOU.

You said it was a waste of time watching Hurwitz and then wrote another 4 reasonable length paragraphs about the experience of watching Hurwitz. Which certainly doesn't give the impression that watching him was boring.

You and Jo have started a whole conversation all about Hurwitz thanks to your outrage, on a thread that had been dead for 4 years. You've got a bunch of other people involved. We're all talking about and thinking about Hurwitz. If YOU think his motive is to get clicks - you said that was his motive, not me - then how can you have no idea whether it's working when this forum is repeatedly talking about Hurwitz? Of course it's working.

And if you don't want it to work, your best strategy is to stop talking about Hurwitz!

[Florestan]

I do mind you saying so, because how is it any different to you being cynical about Hurwitz' motives? All I'm doing is following on from that logically and pointing out that if his aim is to provoke a reaction, it's working very well. ON YOU.

You said it was a waste of time watching Hurwitz and then wrote another 4 reasonable length paragraphs about the experience of watching Hurwitz. Which certainly doesn't give the impression that watching him was boring.

You and Jo have started a whole conversation all about Hurwitz thanks to your outrage, on a thread that had been dead for 4 years. You've got a bunch of other people involved. We're all talking about and thinking about Hurwitz. If YOU think his motive is to get clicks - you said that was his motive, not me - then how can you have no idea whether it's working when this forum is repeatedly talking about Hurwitz? Of course it's working.

And if you don't want it to work, your best strategy is to stop talking about Hurwitz!

You hit the nail on the head. Amen!

[Todd]

General Relativity Theory...

...is in no way analogous to classical music. 

Even with the growing market in East Asia - and here objective data would be helpful to gauge how much it is growing there - classical music remains entirely irrelevant to almost all of humanity, including in the West.  It always has been, and always will be.  Fans typically assign far more importance to their passions than everyone else does.

[Christo]

I'm one who actually loves the Hurwitzer's videos on Youtube very much & all criticism of it leaves me cold. 

[vandermolen]

I'm one who actually loves the Hurwitzer's videos on Youtube very much & all criticism of it leaves me cold. 

I'm only recently aware of them but I certainly enjoyed the ones on Pettersson's Symphony No.8 and Elgar's 2nd Symphony, whilst not agreeing with some of his verdicts. They are entertaining and informative and I don't take them too seriously. I've also realised that I have his book on the Shostakovich Symphonies and Concertos unless it's written by someone with the same name.

[MusicTurner]

   Concerning the Pettersson video review, there was a serious flaw though. The entertaining impromptu style, with only some key points apparently having been rehearsed, also meant that he disclosed himself not knowing how many symphonies P had composed; he suddenly guessed about maybe '11-12', when the reality is 16, plus an unfinished one, plus a symphonic movement.

   If you are to review a composer of a bunch of major symphonies, including characterizing the composer and recommending symphonies ahead of the others, you at least have to know how many that were composed, & something about the later ones ... This was just disappointing.

[Herman]

You and Jo have started a whole conversation all about Hurwitz thanks to your outrage, on a thread that had been dead for 4 years.

Well, I guess that's what quarantine does...

I was not aware this topic was that old; as many do I just responded to the most recent post.

If people enjoy watching a man laughing at his own jokes, I am all for sending them there.

[Karl Henning]

I don't know who else does reviews that go beyond 2 paragraphs.

I'm no Hurwitz, of course.

[Karl Henning]

This feeding of the philistine instinct (including acting as if no normal human being could pronounce a German word  -  or any word outside English) and calling everything outside Beethoven and Mozart 'pretentious' is obviously counterproductive.

All cultural pursuits are to a degree liable to be called pretentious by outsiders. It's about exerting oneself in hopes of getting better and having some fun along the way. It's what parents do with their kids and it's what adults do with themselves if they want to be more than a digestive system on two legs.

I read Sophocles in the original at nights. Super pretentious, except nobody knows or cares. I do it because I like to make things hard for myself and experience beauty occasionally.

Having been a critic myself, I'm very suspicious of reading critics because of their fun writing. I know how easy 'fun writing' is. It leads (in the critics) to cynical posturing and opinion farts, and I believe  what Hurwitz is aiming for in this new channel.

Bingo.

[MusicTurner]

(...)

And I'd rather forget the German education system. It was barely o.k. when I went through it in the 1980s and most of my historical, musical and literary knowledge I acquired through private reading. (To be fair my school education was fairly solid in maths and languages and for me German literature class did not spoil the fun of reading).
Admittedly, as a German (or maybe "old European") I dislike the cultivation of ignorance of foreign languages and anti-intellectual arrogance vs. "high culture" favored by some Americans. I can see that the pretentiousness often correlated with old European high culture does deserve some scorn but for a reviewer and popularizer of old European classical music this seems somewhat inconsistent. And I'd also defend great German poetry or even mediocre poetry like Wilhelm Müller against being set equal to "let's spend the night together, baby, it's now or never etc.
Fun fact: Müller's son Max was one of the founders of Indology (and was active mostly at Oxford university) (...)

As a side remark - when I studied at university in the 80s-90s, German sources (= library books, articles ... this was before the internet) would generally be a guarantee for factual knowledge in depth, and a cultural/societal analysis with substance. Whereas some of the French and English fashionable names, though innovative, were often much more idiosyncratic, vague, relativistic and fluffy in their approach, with the risks and - in the long term - possible deficits that might follow. I'm pretty sure that generally, the German school system is still better at creating a background of factual knowledge, than for instance ours in Denmark. There's a more serious approach, to that, I think.

[Herman]

Denmark shouldn't be too bad...

[Florestan]

most of my historical, musical and literary knowledge I acquired through private reading.

Me too; emphatically so actually. And not only history, literature and music. Heck, when in high school I much prefered to read books about the history of mathematics and physics (George Gamow, anyone?) or books about fun mathematics and physics (Martin Gardner, anyone?) rather than solving the dull and headscratching exercises in the dull and headscratching math and physics handbooks.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education

[kyjo]

I'm one who actually loves the Hurwitzer's videos on Youtube very much & all criticism of it leaves me cold. 

+1 Regardless of whether or not I agree with his opinions, I find his videos enormously entertaining (I legitimately laugh out loud quite frequently during them) and his enthusiasm for music is so infectious. Not to mention he has so much knowledge of and enthusiasm for both the standard repertoire and lesser-known music (mainly orchestral, that is, but understandable since he's a percussionist).

[Florestan]

+1 Regardless of whether or not I agree with his opinions, I find his videos enormously entertaining (I legitimately laugh out loud quite frequently during them)

Yep.

[kyjo]

This one (about Svetlanov's Mahler cycle), in particular, cracked me up: https://youtu.be/UBvECavsdog

[Herman]

How deep you find his knowledge kind of depends on your own knowledge.

As others have noted, he says a lot of ignorant things.

[TheGSMoeller]

I'm no Hurwitz, of course.

Great review, Karl! Well done.
And look at you cleverly grabbing clicks from a thread dedicated to hating on Hurwitz. But be careful, become too controversial and we might start a new thread about you 

[TheGSMoeller]

I subscribe to the Hurwitz video-circus. They are entertaining, sometimes informative, sometimes cringe-worthy, and I wish we had more similar video-discussions on classical music out there. Maybe there is and I haven't found them, or maybe we should start our own, a GMG YouTube Channel