What disturbs me about discussions like this is the wholesale dismissal of
one side by the other.  My side dismisses the other as lazy and ignorant.
The other dismisses me as aberrant and practically non-existent.  I admit
that many people have made a serious effort to like what Denis Fodor calls
(tellingly) "Adorno's Music." I'm embarrassed, since I think Adorno as
a writer both unscrupulous and critically very weak.  The argument that
familiarity will eventually lead us all to the Palace of Carter is to me
pie-in-the-sky.  Familiarity also breeds contempt.  On the other hand, if
I'm truly weird and "miswired" - that is, if tonality is somehow hard-coded
into normal physiology - how does one explain the fact that most of our
tastes coincide? For example, I doubt that we seriously disagree about
Mahler's first, Mozart's Overture to Marriage of Figaro, Vaughan Williams's
Tallis Fantasia, Beethoven's Fifth, Bach's Magnificat, or Brahms's Piano
Concerto No.  1.  If I'm miswired, what does that say about *you*, since we
mostly like the same things? Furthermore, the idea that "people" (whoever
*they* are) haven't cottoned on to dodecaphonic music and its heirs
misleads.  Some people got it from the beginning, and they include not only
great, super-musicians, but common listeners like me.  I've yet to figure
out what's so great about widespread uniformity of taste.

As I've said before, I suspect the numbers game.  Denis Fodor has a point
when he says that concerts need to pay.  There are certainly more people
who prefer 18th- and 19th-century music, and this is rightly the staple
of concert programming, particularly concert programming for the symphony
orchestra, whom this music so beautifully suits.  I wouldn't complain so
much if we had a real exploration of this music, but we don't.  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? What we actually get
in most cases is the equivalent of Top 40 radio.  Programming isn't limited
by time period or tonal/atonal or even "easy"/"hard," but to specific
pieces.  The harm is essentially intellectual and artistic stagnation,
at least for listeners.  I believe this eventually leads (if it hasn't
already) to a drop in ticket sales.

Further, I doubt that increased programming range necessarily leads to
drop in sales.  Every marketing study the Louisiana Philharmonic has done,
for example, shows that its focus groups want the music they go to hear to
challenge them and that present programs are too tame.  These are hardly
the jaded sophisticates of New York and Chicago.  The people in these
organizations who seem to want to limit the rep are those who "know
better." "*We*, of course, haven't the problems of the musically naive with
this work." They are generally the business administrators and the board
members who listen to them.  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.  The
Cleveland Orchestra and the SFSO (to take two premier examples) commit to
new repertoire of all sorts and from more than one period.  As far as I
know, this hasn't hurt sales.  It's of course harder to program when you
don't severely limit your choices to what you think is "sure-fire." It
also, I admit, requires good, committed advocates:  a charismatic pedagogue
like Thomas or Slatkin or a super program annotator like Steinberg.
Classical music in general doesn't click immediately with contemporary
audiences.  You've got to educate the market if you're going either to
broaden it or to ensure its survival.  If you commit to education in the
first place, you might as well commit to all the music.

Steve Schwartz