Tim Mahon <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>I think the same applied to music in the much earlier days of patronage
>and aristocractic support -- those who had a good lobbyist got the gravy!

Those Who Know assure me that such was precisely the case with Monteverdi.
Other people were writing music just as good or better, but his PR machine
was in a different league, and he got the name and the big commissions.

Why not? Music is tied up with communication, and PR is one very vital
communication skill.  As I've tried (unsuccessfully) to convince Those
Who Know, his PR is one reason Monteverdi was - not just more fiscally
successful - but actually a better composer than his contemporaries.
That is, he was a more effective communicator to his contemporaries.

My lord, I suggest that the selfsame plea should be entered when it
comes to the current defendant, Mr Glass.  The critics used to revile
Albert Ketelbey for the same reason in 1930's Britain - how dare he be
richer and more popular than Elgar or Vaughan Williams!  His music was,
wrongly, ridiculed for this very reason by Those Who Knew.  Alas, their
aguments have vanished even more terminally than Ketelbey's music.

Amidst yet another spattering of posts pointing to Glass's compositional
inadequacy (by what yardstick?), it's all hype, it's corporate America's
fault, etc.  etc.  I have yet to see anyone even attempt to explain the -
pardon the word - popularity of this music.  Now, that would be interesting
...

Let me try to start this (hopefully) more positive ball rolling.  Glass's
success has nothing to do with "easy listening".  That's not what draws
people to it.  I think it has much more to do with musical energy, focus,
a sense of drama, and - most crucially - that indefinable feeling that,
somehow, this music was out there just waiting to be written down.  We hear
snatches of it in Sibelius, Smetana and Orff, but Glass frees something
fully armed, like a genii from a bottle.

It may be more fashionable amongst Those Who Know (modern edition) to
prefer the subtler tinklings of a Reich or an Adams, but like it or not,
they simply don't have Glass's inevitability, or therefore his popular
appeal.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"