Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]> responded to me:

>...  For my money, Antje Weithaas is a far better violinist than Mutter.
>Has anyone here heard of Weithaas, let alone heard her?  I realize that
>good people as well as bad get thrown to the top, but good people as
>well as bad also stay at the bottom or beyond the Pale of recognition.
>I simply don't see a real correlation.  To me, it's a large matter of
>luck.

Again, I would attribute this discrepancy to the power of marketing
forces, which I mentioned are a skewer to fairness.  The fact that I've
never even heard of Antje Weithaas until now is kind of my point.  In
a fair musical world I'd know who she is and be able to find her CD as
easily as Mutter's, assuming that she's really as good or better.  Perhaps
it's impractical of me to even discuss a theoretical setting where market
forces don't exist.

>Running CM as a business - which is essentially what the mega-mergered
>companies have been doing for the last twenty years or so - hasn't
>really helped CM either as an art OR as a business.]

I would argue that these mega-mergered companies have simply run the
business _badly_.  For instance, they seem to want to run CM like they
do pop music, and it just doesn't work.

>...  For example, I have no desire at all to see The Hours, not even
>on video.  From what I've read, it's a Literary Movie, a genre I pretty
>much despise.  On the other hand, I will probably see Elf (on video),
>just because I enjoyed the movie Old School (also seen on video).  So
>I'm a slob.

Not at all, because both were highly rated.  And to me that's the sign
of a good group of critics, a group that can properly evaluate something
on its own merits, and not just approach everything with the same high-brow
mindedness.


>>Statistical sampling has become a cornerstone of capitalism, and seems
>>to have been used with some success
>
>This puzzles me.  What success?  How do you know if you don't roll the
>dice?

Not everything is a roll of the dice, and some things are predictable
up to a certain point.  I was thinking of politics and internet polling,
just for starters.  If statistical sampling was only successful 50% of
the time, then I think that by now it would be obsolete, but it's not.
As for the Broadway shows we discussed earlier that were axed before
they could get off the ground, perhaps a fraction might have actually
enjoyed some success had they continued.  But I have enough faith in
this field to trust that most would have not.

hector aguilar