Steve Schwartz writes:

>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.  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.  Movie houses, for example, are not bastions of classic
>repertory.

We've always been beholden to the past, because that's all there is.
The present is fleeting, ephemeral, and the future hasn't yet arrived.
Efforts to break radically and suddenly with the aesthetics of the past
are therefore ill advised.  "Music of the past," as Messrs Copland and
Schwartz term it, is an organic whole, the music of the one period smoothly
developing into the music of the succeeding period.  Or at least that's the
kind of music that has a fighting chance of attaining wide and enduring
public acceptance.  The trouble is that modern music, or at least the pushy
part of it, has been/is composed in deliberate and flagrant rejection of
what went before.  As Anti-Music, it seeks to be the very antithesis, the
in-your-face, to yesterday's music.

The movie business isn't nearly what it once was precisely because the
heaven stormers insisted on making films that the general public could not
abide and therefore ceased to attend.  And let's face it, there's really no
reason to put up with Birtwhistle when you can have Beethoven or Orlando.
A great deal of modern music is simply not fitted to fill large halls or
to have large sales in the form of recordings.  When it is performed in
large halls or played as recordings on classical radio stations it may
occasionally provide a welcome a change of pace.  But when it's force-fed
to audiences in the cause of cultural correctness it provides at best
yawning ennui, or at worst the feeling that one is being stuffed like a
Strasbourg goose..

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]