The hit television show that your parents probably watch will give its real-time orchestra the boot next season.
Say it isn't so.
The Dancing With the Stars band--known as the Harold Wheeler Orchestra and Singers--have been sent their final notice to pack up and move out. Instead of paying for a big band ensemble, the producers of DWTS have announced that they will replace the group with a "small electronic band" of recorded music.
If it wasn't too much for the general public to denounce live musicians, now a TV show that is, ahem, lauded for its dance routines and celebrity guest appearances is bidding farewell to their legitimacy.
It's true. Orchestras seem to be on-the-out in school curricula and mainstream music, being replaced with less-than-talented button-pushing apes.
Perhaps the show is cutting costs, no? Understandable, yet questionable, as music plays such a central role in the art of dance--if not its entire execution.
Maybe it's because our world continues to globalize in terms of mediascapes? (Thanks, Appadurai.) Thus, we're forced to deal with the computerization of music, but we shouldn't see the sacking of orchestras as a means to an end.
On the heels of Renée Fleming's canned appearance at the Super Bowl, the rediscovery of art in relation to the world at large sure seems doomed.
Is classical music, even at its most base and populist, really dead? On the set of DWTS, it certainly looks that way.
To remember the good times, here's Apolo Ohno and Julianne Hough with the full band still in tact.
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