Jocelyn Wang writes:

>>The overt hostility to non-tonal music is amazing.  You'd think that its
>>existence has caused lasting damage to classical music lovers.
>
>It has.  It has rendered a large number of listeners unreceptive to almost
>anything post-Ravel.  I understand being wary (I am), but unwillingness
>to give something new a shot IS closed-minded.  The worst of the damage is
>that composers who do write melodic, tonal works (and they do exist) have
>audiences that often react like an animal that flinches as soon as it sees
>someone do anything that even resembles raising his hand.  That, sir, is
>lasting damage.

The question really becomes whether atonal music "caused" this.  I'd love
to see something other than a parade of anecdotes on this point.  Right
now, it's simply a point of faith.  I don't expect you or anyone else on
this list to provide that kind of study.  I can say that you'll also have
to account for how atonality turned people off to *all* classical music.

>Bernard Chasan <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
>>Ms. Wang unhappily exhibits a dogmatic intolerance which a bit surprising
>>in a person who runs a concert series.
>
>Ah, there's a bit of the old atonal-lovers' mantra: I don't like what you
>want me to like, therefore I exhibit a dogmatic intolerance.

Again, you do have a dogma and it has made you intolerant.  There's nothing
necessarily wrong with dogma - in fact, there are definite advantages.
It's made you intolerant in the sense that you don't judge or even have to
listen to the individual work - in short, just what you were complaining
about the intolerance of audiences against most modern music.

>Secondly, someone elsewhere described it as a 20th-Century concert series,
>or something like that, and it is not that.  We do perform a lot of works
>by living composers.  We have an enormously talented Composer-In-Residence
>in R.C. Barrows. Many unknowns send us their works, and if we and the
>performers like them, they get played.  (So much for being closed-minded.)

Only so far as atonal works (and repeats) are concerned.  I made that
claim, because the programs you've posted that I remember have been that.
I was trying to actually point out that you had no animus toward the 20th
century as such, just a piece of it.

Steve Schwartz