Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]> as usual offers a masterful rendering
of his point of view.  Therefore it would only try patiences out there to
attempt more than to deal with a couple of his specifics:

>I suspect that there probably isn't five years of programming in the
>repertoire that actually gets played.  How much Hugo Wolf or Max Bruch
>or Hermann Goetz or Franz Schmidt has shown up on programs, for example?

Wolf and Bruch continue to figure signficantly in repertoires in
German-speaking areas of Europe.  Also on classical radio programs here.
As long as audiences are given a chance of understanding something, and
Wolf & Bruch pose no great poroblem in this regard, they'll attend (and
pay).  It's the composers that leave them eyeless in Gaza that they'd
just as soon bypass.  And quite rightly so.

>This not only means no Webern and Babbitt, but no Vaughan Williams or
>Nielsen or Stravinsky or Britten or Hindemith or Prokofiev or Shostakovich
>or Vainberg or Martinu or Bloch as well.

All of the composers you mention are programmed here (i.e Germany, Austria,
Switzerland), both in the large concert halls and, of course, in big
time-speciliazed presentations such as that part of the Salzburg Festival
program that caters to the avant garde taste.  However, in the big
repertoire concert halls the avant garde numbers tend to be presented as
entremets, not as main courses.  And that, in all good sense, is precisely
what the traffic will actually bear.  Incidentally, the Bavarian State
Radio on its classical music channel broadcasts avant garde stuff, as
well as new composition of more conventional form, regularly and not
infrequently at prime time.

But, at bottom, the mass of CM attenders, or what will have to suffice the
description, consider Adorno Music ugly.  (And I couldn't share more deeply
Steve Schwartz's feelings about him and his turgid works.)

Denis Fodor