Denis replies to me:

>C'mon Steve, it's clear enough what the Received Canon is, except to those
>who are obsessed with doing their own thing.

I disagree.  The RC keeps changing, except to those obsessed with
permanence in their lives.  The acceptance of much of Brahms, for example,
is about 70 years old.  Raff is no longer the genius the 19th century
thought him.  Hindemith has been devalued.  Tchaikovsky keeps going up and
down.  I would also argue that Beethoven's stock rises and falls from
"genuine appreciation" to "lip service," but that's for another post.

But, to continue.  I suppose Beethoven's 9 symphonies would be part of
the RC.  Does this also include Symphony No.  2? I guess we could judge
this by numbers of performances.  Or does somebody hold meetings? On the
other hand, the idea of an RC based on numbers of performances has several
things wrong with it, including the fact that the culture at large, even
the relatively miniscule classical-music culture at large, has nothing
to do with programming.  It's very often a matter of marketers trying to
figure out what people will come to.  This isn't unreasonable from the
standpoint of marketing, but it strikes me as, at best, a rather shaky
approach to finding out the values of the culture.  Then there's the
problem that the culture at large is really an agglomeration of the tastes
of individuals.  I don't know how one finds out individual taste when one
calls for the conformity of true taste to the Deep Values of the Culture at
Large, as the concept of an RC often does.  The advantages of orthodoxy are
many.  One big disadvantage is stultification.

>And, yes, there must be some fun in "not knowing." As a testimonial to
>this let's have a chorus of We Don't Need No Education.

Education? I'm for it.  Obeisance to the "taste" of marketers I can do
without.

>Concerning the Munich Philharmonic, eat your heart out that New Orleans
>can't offer any classical group to match it--and to demonstrate to the
>folks there what the Canon sounds like and how modern accretions to it
>either develop that heritage or deliberately seek to supersede or even mock
>it.

Well, with the exceptions of Cleveland, Chicago, London, and Berlin, we all
have disadvantages.  That's what recordings are for.

Actually, the Louisiana Philharmonic does very nicely by 19th-century
Germanic music.  In fact, the best reading of the Eroica I've ever heard
was by them.  Munich, unfortunately, has to suffer Levine.

Steve Schwartz