Andrys Basten writes:

>I enjoyed David's note, and while one composer dismissed the piece as some
>kind of command to composers, it was, to me, a plea.

It's a plea, but it's a plea with absolutely no incentive.  Almost every
composer subsidizes himself or herself.  If there's so little chance of
earning a living, let alone supporting a family, on what a composer makes
from writing classical music, why should a composer cater to anyone else?
Why shouldn't a composer write according to personal interest?

>The further call for David to study music theory did not help.  There's no
>question why performance of new music was greeted with great anticipation
>in the older days - when composers didn't demand of their audiences that
>they study music theory to understand them.

This is a misconception.  Read Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective to
find out all the nasty things in print written about now-beloved composers
by their contemporaries.  Brahms was condemned in much the same terms as
Andrys slams present-day music.  Furthermore, no composer that comes to
mind - with the possible exception of Xenakis - demands that the hearer
know music theory.  I'm always amazed when I hear this asserted.  I liked
Schoenberg and Webern, for example, before I had any idea what they were
doing technically.  I had, on the other hand, heard a lot of modern music.
It seems reasonable to me to expect a listener to have some acquaintance
with music written in the past hundred years.  Many listeners do not and,
furthermore, don't care to try.  For example, if I'm a composer and some
of my favorite pieces include Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and
Celesta, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, Stravinsky's Threni, Hindemith's
Mass, Webern's Variations for Orchestra, and Stockhausen's Gesang der
Juenglinge, it's really not much of a surprise to me that most of the
audience will probably be angry or bored stiff.  It's like expecting an
audience of monolingual Anglophones to appreciate a reading of Chinese
poetry, exclusively in the original language.

We can also turn this around.  There are plenty of people who have the
necessary breadth of listening as well as superb technical knowledge who
dislike some contemporary music.  After all, contemporary music isn't
monolithically forbidding.  There's a tremendous variety.  It would be odd
if someone liked all of it.  In other words, there are no guarantees to
anybody that familiarity and learning will breed something better than
contempt.  At the same time, it's equally odd to hear people castigate all
of it in terms only slightly less excoriating than Jeremiah harranguing the
people of Israel.  This happens, as far as I know, for no other period of
music.  For these, people tend to judge individual composers or individual
works, strangely enough.

>Let composers write for other composers for the joy it does bring,
>but don't expect that the audience will want to go study more to help
>composers make a living.

It may be that other composers have the breadth of listening that
makes appreciating a contemporary piece more likely.  As I say, very few
composers not working in the movies - even composers of Lovely Tonal Music
- make a living.  The audience isn't helping them either.  Until this
situation changes, that segment of the audience who prefer to whine for
the Next Rachmaninoff (I like Rachmaninoff; I may even like the Next One),
rather than pull up their socks and make a serious effort to engage what's
out there, can spit in the wind, as far as I'm concerned.

Steve Schwartz