Steve Schwartz writes:

>The rise of recorded technology, however, has (with certain other
>things)led to, in my opinion, an abnormal and unhealthy situation.
>The presence of recordings has given rise to almost an exclusive
>interest in the past among the minority who listen to classical music
>and little to none in new music among the minority of the minority
>who even encounter new music.

As I have pointed out repeatedly in the past, the advent of high quality
recordings of an extraordinarily diverse repertoire has fundamentally
changed the role of concert performances.  Those of us who want to
listen to new music listen to recordings of it.  A concert performance
is not the ideal way to hear much modern music, which often needs to
be listened to repeatedly and, to some extent, studied.  Music which is
immediately apprehendible is almost always dismissed as lightweight
or trivial.  You can't have it both ways.  Yes, concert performance may
have once been the *only* way for listeners to hear the latest music,
but that is no longer the case, and it's a nonsequitur to assume that
because it was once the only way it must always be the best way.

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?

>The past should be listened to, and I and my best buddy Aaron are
>talking about degree.  The interest is abnormal in that in just about every
>"natural" or untutored enthusiasm for art, the desire is to hear or see
>something new.

But the new in cinema, literature, painting, sculpture etc. is largely
comprehensible to those familiar with its antecedents.  The same cannot
be said of much modern music.  The situation in music is as if every new
poem were in the style of e.e.cummings' most "out there" work, or every
new novel tried to surpass Joyce's "Ulysses" in complexity and subtlety.
Writers, poets, sculptors, directors, etc. who express themselves in
familiar, traditional modes are not denigrated for being derivative or
insufficiently innovative.  Why is music held to a different standard?

>On the other side, the audience seems to expect to hear pieces they
>immediately understand, to put in almost no work whatsoever.

See above.  The fact is that compared to other forms of expression, today's
music seems seems to require a disproportionate effort to understand.  No
one complains about the best of today's movies or novels being "misshapen
messes".

>Classical music is marginal in this culture anyway, even among the
>so-called educated.

Unquestionably the case. The interesting question is why?

>People embarrassed to admit that they hadn't read the latest Paul Auster
>novel

Who's Paul Auster?  And I read an awful lot.

>couldn't even name the last three winners of the Pulitzer for music.

I can't name them either.  Why?  Because I don't care.  And I listen
to Kernis, Gubaidulina, Rautavaara, Kancheli, Birtwhistle, ...   Winning
the Pullet Surprise seems more a matter of politics than substance.

>I speculate it's at least partly because classical audiences seem stuck in
>the not-even-recent past.  In other words, nothing new's happening, so why
>get interested?

No, most of the otherwise sophisticated people I know aren't even
interested in "old" music.  They're not interested in *any* art music.

len.