Mark Landson:

>IMO, it's more the lack of contemp.  music that most classical music
>lovers can get excited about that has turned people off to looking.

You know, I keep hearing this quite a bit, and almost every time I ask the
question, "What contemporary music have you heard?" I get silence.

>When one expects to find something, one looks for it.  When one believes
>there is little chance of finding, what's the point?

How did you find the music that now matters to you? You looked for it,
and you probably didn't find it right away.  Yet, for some reason, you
persisted.  My guess is that most people are turned off by what little
contemporary music they've heard and by, essentially, hearsay ("It's *all*
like that").  As someone who on occasion has taken the trouble to listen
to contemporary music, music by living composers, and music by living
composers under 60, I can report that very little of it sounded to me,
at any rate, all one way.  Furthermore, I liked, disliked, and was bored
by what I heard, just as I am by works by Tchaikovsky or Brahms.  The
point is, I suppose, if you don't make the effort, you don't find.  If
you don't care, that's quite okay by me, but don't blame it on music which,
in effect, you've never heard.  After all, what little Bellini, Rossini,
Donizetti, and early Verdi I've heard, I don't care for, and have no desire
to explore.  But I don't say that bel canto opera sucks and that only
freaks listen to it.

>Quality is one thing.  Relevance is another.  To plagarizes a professor of
>marketing: If you were the best vinyl record producer in the world today,
>would it matter? No. It doesn't matter how good you are in an eroding
>industry.

Relevance is an incredibly insidious criterion.  I remember when it
provided a magnificent excuse for undergraduates not to learn anything.  I
was an undergraduate myself at the time, but, even though such an attitude
would have saved me a good deal of effort, it never really appealed to me.
It would have left me as empty as if I had never gone to school at all.
What's meant by "relevance," of course, is guaranteed relevance:  things
like eating, breathing, and sex.  There were lots of things I was exposed
to in school that weren't particularly relevant to me at the time.  It was
a simple matter of intellectual pride that forced me to pay attention.
Eventually, some, though not all, of those things became relevant, because
I thought long and hard about them.  But I shouldn't have done that if
I hadn't encountered them in the first place and realized that a simple
encounter was not enough.  How on earth can Mozart be relevant to a
self-indulgent, instantly-gratified mall rat? The mall rat has to find the
relevance.  Believe me, it's not Mozart's fault -- or at least it's not his
fault alone.

We all make arguments like this for music we like which has limited appeal.
In our case, we mostly find ourselves making it for classical music in
general.  My feeling is that if we resort to this reasoning, we can't cry
foul when a subgroup of ours makes the same argument.

Steve Schwartz