Bernard Chasan wrote:

>>>What is true is that classical music, poetry, serious fiction, are all
>>>minority tastes today.

Steve Schwartz responded:

>>I would say you're right about poetry and CM, but not about fiction.  For
>>some reason, that art still seems to matter culturally.

Steve is correct.  In some sense novelists have the power to address
"relevance" in a very direct way- the way we live within the world that
is the context of our lives.  I am thinking of the recent work of Roth,
Updike, Busch, Godwin, Dixon, Ontaadje, Baxter, just to name a few.  But
the top fiction best seller is a meshugana thing about the rapture.  And
Roth estimates a serious reading base of 60,000 in this country.

Then Rose Rogers responds to two older but not wiser list members:

>In response to all that, I must say they are both quite wrong.  I am
>actually surprised to learn that there is actually a renewed interest in
>CM as well as poetry.  I am eighteen (am I the youngest person on this
>list?), and recently graduated from a school that was well known for its
>"trendiness".  However, I have had plenty of discussions with friends about
>the symphonies of Shostakovich, composing as an art form, problems in
>composing, orchestration, etc.
>Maybe none of you are aware, but CM is entering and enriching the lives of
>many young people out there.  CM is very much alive. . . and well.

Rose, I devoutly hope that you are right and I am wrong.  But even if that
is not the case, I am encouraged that SOME young people are very interested
in classical music.  But that is not altogether a surprise.  A substantial
fraction of my quantum mechanics course seemed to be very interested in
Mahler.  One of my daughters is interested in ALL forms of music, including
classical, the other interested in selected c.m.  After seeing it danced by
the Alvin Ailey Dancers she loves "The Lark Ascending" above all other
classical music.

But it could very well be that classical music has always been a minority
taste where it was not actually functional, as in church services.  We
read that Haydn was lionized when he went to London to present a set of
late symphonies.  Never, it seems, was an audience more in tune (no pun
intended) with the new work of a master.  Yet, how deeply did this interest
go? Was it in fact limited to a coterie? Did all of London wait for the
next symphony with the eagerness that kids and their parents wait for the
next Harry Potter book? (And of course, the Harry Potter appeal is probably
much stronger in certain settings than in others - mores the pity.)

I (aka Bernard Chasan) wrote:

>>But, as I have said on other occasions, the classical music community
>>(performers, composers, listeners) surely can find ways to spread the word
>>about their passion.  The POETS are doing it.

Steve responded:

>In my experience, almost the only people interested in poetry are people
>who think they write it.  I have very rarely met a disinterested poetry
>reader.

Well, you can add me to the collection if membership on the same list
in equivalent to "meeting." And I know others- honest!!!  Poets write for
audiences just as composers do.  Furthermore, poets are being proactive,
at least on some scale.  The late lamented Russian- American poet Brodsky
was involved in a scheme to put poetry books in hotel rooms.  The former
poet laureate Robert Pinsky is involved in recording people reading their
favorite poems.  The people doing the reading come from a wide base- they
don't all live on Brattle Street and they are not all graduate students.
How successful are these initiatives? I do not know.  I do know that every
decent bookstore has a sizeable poetry section, even the big, presumably
profit conscious chains.  So I say to Steve:

   Maybe you are hanging out with a prosaic crowd.

Professor Bernard Chasan
who regrets that he cannot remember Brodsky's first name. although he does
remember batting averages of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers

 [Joseph Brodsky.  -Dave]