Steve Schwartz:

>So why not pull up one's socks and start doing the work? The reason I
>don't learn Chinese is because English translations satisfy me right now,
>and I'm fundamentally lazy.  The reason, I suppose, most people don't try
>to understand contemporary music is because they have other music readily
>available that satisfies them, and they're lazy or have limited time and
>funds.  That's fine, but don't look wistfully off into the distance and
>wonder why "composers aren't writing for us."

There's the other point of view.  It's the one from the loges inhabited
by the initiates, the ones with the mortar boards and the scarves tied as
butterflies.  They hear a John Williams and they wail in disharmony about
why "composers aren't writing for us."

For a hundred years now, by Steve's count, composers have tried frenziedly
to make it with modern music, as radically distinct from truly classical
music; for fifty years now, again by Steve's count, they've tried it ever
more radically with contemporary music.  The only thing they have proved to
anyone but those ensconced in the loges is that globally we need maybe 50
new composers every year rather than 5,000--the latter being the number I
estimate that alone the conservatories of this world disgorge onto this
otherwise sufficiently plagued planet.  Nono, or Ligeti, or Carter, or Cage
fit very badly on concert stages catering to a large audiences; less badly
on an opera stage; and would fit quite well in ballet, were they to choose
to work exclusively in that idiom, an idiom in which trendiness is widely
accepted, as it is in the movies.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]