Mark Landson:

>I wasn't speaking for myself at all.  I do like Nine Inch Nails.  But it's
>my observation that most people who like CM don't.

It's *my* observation that most CM lovers don't know Nine Inch Nails at
all.

>For me, music is a reflection of a certain philosophy, or abstract
>understanding of the world.
>
>My main problem with classical music of the last 100 years (for the most
>part) is that it does not reflect a philosophy or worldview which appeals
>to me or to most of the other people who are its audience.

I'm sorry, but 20th-century classical music isn't a monolith.  There is no
one philosophy it expresses.  Its philosophies are as many as the composers
who write it.  If you don't care for pessimism, for example, there are
plenty of composers left for you.

According to me, the main problem with the acceptance of 20th-century
music is that amateur music-making has dwindled.  Most people who listen
to classical music can't play it or even read it from score, let alone
analyze it.  In part this is due to the rise of mechanical and electronic
reproduction and, I would add, the decline of school music programs (always
excepting the marching band, which is good for football games).  Every
Beethoven and Brahms symphony, for example, came out for piano or two
pianos (in Brahms's case, in versions made by the composer himself and
months before the orchestral score was published).  This meant that you
really had to come to grips with the symphony through your own work if you
wished to know it, since most people lived away from professional centers
of music.  The 19th-century composer Amy Cheney Beach, for example, lived
in rural New Hampshire.  Yet, because she played piano, she knew most of
the work of the major Romantics before she moved to Boston.  She put in a
tremendous amount of work, far more than buying a CD and popping it in a
player.

Most of the 20th century is unfamiliar to audiences, no matter where on
the tonality spectrum it falls.  Most of the 19th and 18th century faces
the same difficulty with the culture at large.  More people in my town of
New Orleans would prefer to attend a Monster Truck rally at the Superdome
than a classical music concert.  Indeed, most of the time, classical music
doesn't even show up on the radar of the general public, and, if so, it
often is the fun-house mirror version posited by Billy Joel.  You have to
seek out classical music.  You have to exert yourself.  It's not something
that confronts you whether you want it or not, except possibly in the
movies, where composers use it as the basis of their own stuff or adapt it
straight into the background.  Yet even that kind of movie score has become
increasingly rare.

Steve Schwartz