Robert Peters replies to Janos Gereben:

>>Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley could just stand there, looking like a
>>perfect Barbie-and-Ken couple.  Fortunately, headlining the San Francisco
>>Symphony's New Year's Eve concert in Davies Hall, they also sang as
>>mighty an operatic duet as Broadway can allow before the dreaded specter
>>of Crossover ruins the music.
>
>Does it really? Some weeks ago I listened to Vanessa Mae and found her
>music awful but everyone is still allowed to just stop the one CD and
>begin to listen to another. What ruins music, in my opinion, is elitist
>thinking (and your remark, sorry, sounds elitist). Teach children that
>music (classical, folk, pop etc.) is fun and music won't die - teach
>them that only classical music is good music and music will die.

It's really hard to know where to draw the line.  The problem with
everything is fun and good is that classical music will die just as
easily, as seems to be happening right now.  It isn't dying because its
adherents are elitists, or that reason is simply one among many.  It's
also dying because for most people, it's not fun, at least not fun right
away.  Also, crap is crap, whether classical crap or crossover crap.
I've no bones to pick with Crossover, but I don't delude myself that
it's the same thing as pure classical.

I keep coming back to the example of Charlie Rose's (a US chat-show
host with pretentions) panel on Greatest Composer of the Twentieth
Century.  Not one classical composer was nominated, and the panel
members all had jobs in the arts.  We got Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan,
Lennon-McCartney, Ellington, and so on, but no one mentioned Mahler,
Stravinsky, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, etc.
I suspect very strongly that no one knew enough of the work to mention
it.  I love Armstrong, Dylan, Ellington, and the Beatles and believe
that they accomplished a lot.  But why do I know more about that side
of things than the populist knows about mine?  In the face of such
ignorance (and I use that term neutrally, with no moral overtones),
the danger of crossover is that people will tell themselves that they're
listening to classical and pat themselves on the back.  Classical will
die in a minute.

Steve Schwartz