Steve Schwartz wrote:

>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.

This is a shot in the dark, but I wonder how many concert subscribers,
especially in places other than New York or San Francisco or (name the city
you consider similarly sophisticated where classical music is concerned),
are at least subconsciously "playing grown-up".  They go to symphony
concerts to hear the music their parents heard, or would have heard, had
they gone to classical music concerts.  Mom and dad listened to Beethoven
and Tchaikowsky and not to Babbitt and they're going to do the same.

Some of you may recall that I've been reading Martin Goldsmith's
*Inextinguishable Symphony*, which I have finished in the meantime.  It
describes the romance and marriage of the author's parents in Nazi Germany
against the background of the Kulturbund (Kubu) orchestra, which was the
only organization in which Jews were permitted to perform publicly and
which only Jews, and the Nazi censor, were permitted to attend.  It
attracted the flower of German musical life, both among the performers
and the audiences.  They were prohibited from performing music by German
composers but were allowed to perform works by non-Aryan composers.
Against this background, I thought some of you might find the following
excerpt interesting:

>"In October [1934, Wilhelm, later William] Steinberg gave a series
>of Arnold Schoenberg concerts in honor of the composer's sixtieth
>birthday.  Public acceptance of this inventor of the twelve-tone method of
>compositions has never been warm or wide, and the Frankfurt audience proved
>to be no exception.  Demonstrating that religious solidarity only goes so
>far, attendance at the Schoenberg Festival was light.  [Kubu concerts were
>usually sold out.] In January of 1935, however, Steinberg and the orchestra
>gave one of their most significant popular performances when they offered
>the world premiere of the Second Piano Concerto (called *Symphony for Piano
>and Orchestra*) by the Austrian Jewish composer Ernst Toch."

Clearly, this passage, while consistent w/ the skepticism w/ which some
listeners view some "contemporary" music, proves nobody's point of view.
We're talking about one small, albeit musically sophisticated, group of
listeners at a time when Schoenberg was still alive and his music may not
yet have had time to "mature".  Interestingly enough, Steinberg even then
thought the music worth bringing to his preselected audience's attention.
While they weren't ready to accept Schoenberg, they accepted Toch and, in
a heartbreaking account of the Kulturbund's last concerts, Mahler's Second
Symphony and a rehearsal of the never to be performed "Inextinguishable"
(Fourth) Symphony.

Walter Meyer