Richard Tsuyuki replies to me:

>>One other reason for Mozart's, Beethoven's, and Tchaikovsky's success
>>(other than their merit, of course) is that, like popular music, they are
>>repeatedly played.  You might argue that they are repeatedly played because
>>they are popular, but this argument doesn't cut much ice.  You can't tell
>>me that the world was waiting for, eg, Britney Spears or Terry Jacks.
>
>So why are Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Britney Spears, etc., repeatedly played?

In the case of Britney Spears, marketing, pure and simple.  Most radio
stations don't listen to the music they program.  They read sales figures
in trade magazines.  If you ask why people buy in such numbers, I would
respond again, marketing rather than music itself.

In the case of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and friends, what gets played is the
result of a process remarkably like the pop radio station, because the
goal -- a non-aesthetic one, by the way -- is to a large extent the same.
Programmers look at play figures.  Some of them, I admit, may even like
the pieces they program and may have heard them before.  However, if you're
trying to suggest that Intrinsic Merit Wins Out or that this shows
something true about the nature of popular classic music itself, we must
agree to differ, since in the non-marketing course of things, pieces drop
out and re-enter and drop out again of the RC all the time, and not just by
composers who happen to be obscure right now, like Spohr.  The problem is
that current programming practice by RC, exclusively preached and relied
upon, turns out to have very little to do with music and much to do with
selling tickets.  It also tends to freeze what gets played live.  The RC
still changes, because so many people get most of their music from
recordings, but it changes less naturally and, I would assert, less well.
The play lists reflect less and less accurately what the real RC is.  I
would say there are many composers in the RC whom you will almost never
hear live in professional venues: Prokofiev, Copland, Vaughan Williams,
Britten, Schubert (with the exception of Die Winterreise and the Symphony
No. 9), surprisingly enough Haydn (very rare, in my experience).

Steve Schwartz