Karl Miller and others raise the question of what concert-goers REALLY WANT. Do they REALLY WANT to hear only endless repetitions of the top 40 Vivaldi-Mozart-Beethoven-Brahms-Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninoff chestnuts? I think it was Aaron Copeland who long ago commented that American performance culture had developed, from the 19th century on, as a sort of musical museum, dedicated to RE-creation of a standard, venerated, European repertoire. This outlook presumably originated from the absence of a native musical tradition in the New World. It may seem strange that such an attitude could survive for 150 years, but then again we are still burdened with the Electoral College, among other vestiges. But there are at least faint signs of change. Is the concert-going public still unwilling to listen to the unusual, or even the contemporary? Steve Schwartz commented: "So we get this gap between serious music and the audience that continues to grow. It has gotten to the point where not only do people not listen to Wuorinen or Boulez, they don't listen to Nielsen." In my own mediium-size urban environment (Seattle), I don't think this stricture applies any longer. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra plays a moderate amount of the mid-20th century, tonal modernism, such as Shostakovich and and William Schuman, and some easy-listening contemporary stuff, like Golijov: as far as I could tell, these pieces are invariably greeted with enthusiasm. The SSO even premieres mildly challenging works from time to time, for example by David Stock or Samuel Jones. I was unimpressed myself by some of these works, but the audience responded enthusiastically to them too. In short, my impression is that the SSO audience would be thrilled to hear Nielsen, or some Higdon, although maybe not Wuorinen. On the other hand, the local commercial "classical" FM station specializes in boredom; it only rarely broadcasts anything as daring as Debussy, and absolutely forbids any music more radical or recent than that. I gather this is true of most commercial stations, which are thus far more reactionary than the programmers of symphony orchestras. What is the explanation of this difference? Could it be that radio is the source of our seemingly retrograde musical culture? If it is not the source, but rather a reflection, then what is it reflecting? The concert-going public is already, it seems to me, far ahead of the audience that commercial radio thinks it must pander to. Cheers//// Jon Gallant Department of Gnome Sciences *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html