Bernard Chasan replies to me:

>>The very large trends are a decline in amateur music-making, the rise
>>of a consumer-oriented, passive listenership dependent on recorded music,
>
>Is there any reason for thinking that there is less amateur music
>making now than in, say, 1900?

Sure.  At one point, to hear music, most people had to play it themselves.
Technology has eliminated this requirement.  Of course, I don't know for
sure and would be happy to find myself wrong.  How many on this list - not
academic or professional musicians - read music? How many can play a Bach
two-part invention or the slow movement of a Mozart sonata? If someone
handed out full scores to a Beethoven symphony, how many people could
follow it?

>I have read that most people who knew Beethoven's symphonies in the
>nineteenth century knew them through piano transcriptions, but what
>percentage of the population was involved?

I've no way of knowing for sure, but I do know that Brahms published his
arrangements of all his symphonies and major orchestral works in two-piano
form *before* he published the orchestral scores.  He made a very good
living from these sales.  I doubt Aaron Copland made much money off the
score to even Appalachian Spring.

>Today there is a fair number of amateur chamber music players and very
>accomplished community choruses, but I have no idea of percentages.

Again, my thoughts on these matters are conditioned largely by the fact
that I live in New Orleans, rather than in Boston, New York, Cleveland, San
Francisco, or Chicago.

>>an increasing irrelevance of classical music in general to the culture at
>>large, and ancillary to some of this, the weakening (perhaps to oblivion)
>>of major recording labels, who no longer seem to know exactly what their
>>business is or who their audience is.
>
>I started my academic career in the early sixties.  A few years later- say
>1967, relevance became the buzz-word- education HAD to be relevant.  But
>it turned out, that when you asked students what they considered relevant,
>there was a whole range of responses.  I am not sure that anything has
>changed, and I really have little idea of Steve's definition of relevance.
>For those on this list, classical music has a personal relevance which is
>all each of us can vouch for.

I hate the buzz-word "relevance" myself.  It seems a very strange aesthetic
criterion to me, and for the reasons you mention.  However, I meant the
word in the sense that most people, even most college-educated people have
very little use for classical music.  For example, Charlie Rose (a US chat
show with intellectual aspirations) falls all over himself to get novelists
like Paul Auster or Dom DeLillo or Toni Morrison on his program.  When he
has anyone from classical music on, it's a performer.  He doesn't ask
Pierre Boulez about his music, but about other things.  He doesn't talk to
composers as composers.  He barely talks to them at all.  It doesn't have
to be Boulez or Carter.  How about Adams or Rouse or Lees, people
relatively more accessible? For Rose, as for most others, a "composer" is
a pop songwriter like Springsteen or, God help us, Jewel.  Those who would
be embarrassed if they didn't at least know the title of the latest by,
say, even Kingsley Amis or Beth Henley, feel absolutely no shame at all
knowing nothing about Milton Babbitt, including his name.  That's what I
mean by relevance.  CM, to a very large extent, simply does not exist as a
living art, even to educated people.  It's performances of music roughly
100 years old and older.

>What is true is that classical music, poetry, serious fiction, are all
>minority tastes today.  The causes are complex and have been discussed at
>various times on this list.

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 Schwartz