paucity of modern music in concert performances.  There is also a more
economically heterogeneous audience who, in Europe, are provided with a
means of enjoying modern and contemporary music outside the concert hall.
One Listmember illustrated this as follows.

Nadine Meylan-Meertens <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I myself discovered music completely on my own, and I loved contemporary
>music I heard over the radio better than the very classical one which
>bored me from the start on.  ...  Anyhow, my favorites didn't change:
>my preferred composers are still among the Shostokovitsh, Gubaidulina,
>Janacek, Martinu, Bartok, Ligeti, Schonberg, Berg, Vasks, etc (would take
>at least 4 lines to make a noncomplete list)."

Nadine's post could bring a tear to the eye of an American musiclover.
On our commercial "classical" muzak stations, the works of Schonberg and
Berg (and Webern and Varese) are banned entirely, as are those of Ligeti
and Gubaidulina.  Vasks is out too, despite his harmonic conservatism,
because he is not well-known.  Name-familiarity is almost as important as
harmonic familiarity in the canon of commercial broadcasting.  (Martinu
is broadcast from time to time, no doubt due to his genial style AND the
similarity of his name to that of the familiar American cocktail.) The
basic rule, obviously, is that the listener must be soothed, indeed
tranquilized, between commercial messages.

Once upon a time, public radio provided a modest alternative to the regime
of Commercialist Realism, as it does in Europe.  Alas, in the 90's, many
NPR stations stopped broadcasting of music of any kind, except for the
little bluegrass number at the start of "Car Talk".  Does anyone know why
NPR abandoned us to the regime of muzak?

Jon Gallant
Genetics Department
University of Washington