Christopher Webber:

>...  After all, if art music is to have any future to add to its rich
>past, it has to look beyond the tired and stale formula of the 19th
>century orchestra and its formal straightjackets.
>
>Put crudely, it's becoming ever more apparent that these marvellous
>old vessels are punctured below the waterline as truly creative forces,
>artistically as well as economically; and no amount of theorising about
>the need for emotional and intellectual stimulation from music (surely
>so obvious it doesn't need harping on at any length, specially as the
>distinction between the two is false anyway) can deny the fact that -
>for many people - Glass's best music gives precisely these pleasures.

I think that Christopher is overstating the case.  Composers are
still writing symphonies and concerti, after all- and (IMHO, of course),
eminently worth listening to.  In fact one such contributor is Phillip
Glass, who has, in recent years, written a very attractive violin concerto
(recorded by Gidon Kremer) and a symphony I have not yet heard.  Apparently
those marvelous old vessels are not ready to go down.

As a recent exercise on this very list revealed, there is a good deal
of good music written in the last fifty years, much of it which is in a
context apparently both tired and stale and waterlogged, Reminds me of a
story about a recently deceased physicist.  He gave a colloquium on his
new and revolutionary stellar interferometer - the most brilliant person
in the room told him it wouldn't, couldn't work because it violated basic
physical laws.  Well, he said, I built it and it worked.  And it did, as
the brilliant person graciously conceded that evening.

Bernard Chasan