Jon Gallant wrote:

>In the current issue of Commentary, Terry Teachout summarizes a recent
>book ("Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall" by
>Joseph Horowitz) which explains this dreary phenomenon.  The argument
>is that classical music in the US is a 19th century European transplant
>with shallow roots that is "more about the New York Philharmonic than
>Charles Ives, more about the Metropolitan Opera than Aaron Copland".
>It is, in short, a "culture of PERFORMANCE".  As Aaron Copland wrote
>in 1941: "Very often I get the impression that audiences seem to think
>that the endless repetition of a small body of entrenched masterworks
>is all that is required for a ripe musical culture."

I find the US notion of "subscription series" peculiar, even pernicious;
to me it would encourage mechanically signing up year after year and
expecting to receive the same "product" in return.  (I wonder how many
people continue to receive magazines they don't really want because they
can't be bothered to cancel, for example).

Here there is not the same routine, apart from the odd "two concerts for
the price of one" offer and similar, so orchestras, for better or worse,
have to fight for every performance, aided and abetted by considerable
competition between them in London in particular; granted, this still
leads to too many Beethoven/Brahms/Dvorak/Mozart symphonies being turned
out like sausages, but they are usually seasoned by something a bit more
interesting.

PS Copland need not have worried; there is quite a lot of US music played
here, although it tends to be restricted to Copland/Bernstein/Ives/Barber
and occasionally Adams/Reich.  After considerable prompting several years
ago my (Scottish amateur) orchestra put on a programme of:

Ives: The Unanswered Question
Harris: Symphony no.3
Macdowell: Piano Concerto no.2
Ives: Central Park in the Dark

which, I suspect, would be fairly standard in the US but caused a
sensation here (rather a few people thought Macdowell was Scottish:)

Alastair