Steve Schwartz writes:

>Nowadays people go to concerts to hear music they already know and
>love, in live performance, because it's an experience that is qualitatively
>different from listening to a recording in one's home.  Why this upsets
>so many people is beyond me. Why is it considered damning to analogize
>the concert hall to a museum?  People don't go to museums to see the
>latest paintings or read the latest literature.  Does that mean museums
>are to be ridiculed as the venue of philistines?

Back in the Mid-to-late '60s, when I lived in Chicago, Columbia Records
released a huge slew of 20th Century music by mostly living composers,
and WFMT broadcast all of it over a few weeks.  I taped many of these
pieces off the air.  They included such items as Terry Riley's "In C",
"Suntreader" by Australian composer Carl Ruggles, Colgrass's piece "As
quiet as...", and other pieces I considered very adventurous and
avant-garde.  About a year or so later, I moved to Memphis Tennessee for
a while, and discovered that Memphis State University was putting on free
concerts every Tuesday evening.  Much of what they performed was also in
the avant -garde, and several concerts included some of the very pieces
mentioned above, as well as others from the series.  So I had the best of
both worlds: an opportunity to listen and own and re-listen, and then the
chance to see live performances as well.  One piece I recall was performed
by a string quartet in one corner of the stage, and a jazz group in the
other; another piece was accompanied by an actor/dancer in costume, who
excruciatingly slowly, over the 30 minutes course of the music, moved from
a crouched position to fully upright.  There was another piece written for
something like 20 percussionists, and I was amazed they could assemble so
many talented artists on the stage.  And "In C" was also performed, with
the pianist intoning those octave Cs as a constant pulse throughout, while
the dozen or so groups of three or four performers worked their oceanic
magic on the various sound bites, doing each one, as I recall, for the
length of a breath, then picking up the next, etc.  Altogether, a wonderful
experience.

Dave Wolf
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