In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Dennis Bathory-Kitsz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >My point is simple and you give it too much credit >in your details.
I think you make several points. Three that I get from your recent posts: 1) Your taste in music is largely confined to the contemporary. 2) Non-pop music in the US is not flourishing. 3) Organisations that might address this are not doing so. All one can say to the first is that there is no argument concerning taste and some of us will listen to the best music of almost any period. In my limited knowledge, you seem to be right about the second, though better communications inevitably result in changes to industries that are concerned with information flows, which broadly encompass musical performance, so we may merely be witnessing the sort of rapid adjustment that has happened before in musical history, without leading to total meltdown. I can't give you advice on the third; IMO your problems are acute because of the culture of individuality and dislike of government intervention that was always characteristic of the United States, but seems to have accentuated in recent years. You have to find your own way through that morass (we are more concerned about other aspects of it), but I shall illustrate the differences that can arise from a more collective (European?) way of doing things. A) Looking through last Saturday's broadcast schedules for BBC Radio 3, I gathered the following approximate statistics of time devoted to various sorts of music: Renaissance 20m early baroque 1h late baroque 2h10m classical 2h30m early romantic 2h10m late romantic 4h30m impressionist 40m mid 20th C 40m contemporary 2h Messiaen 30m minimalist 1h world* 1h25 jazz* 2h30 * Both of these will have included contemporary compositions. The days vary. On Monday, for example, you could have heard Webern Six Bagatelles, Op 9, and Berg's "Lyric Suite". Saturday is Radio 3's best day for jazz, though there will be an hour discussing the late Artie Shaw at 1600 GMT next Friday, and jazz occurs on Radio 2 on other days. Light music, including show music from 1920 to 1960 occurs more on Radios 2 & 4. B) Secondary education in UK state schools now includes musical composition from age 11 to 16. This is mostly done with electronic sequencers, and rather few of the students are ever going to produce anything of value, but the opportunity is there for the exceptionally talented to realise that they have compositional capabilities. C) The organisation "Contemporary Music for Amateurs" (still only in the UK, AFAIK) runs workshops and summer schools at which both performers and composers can learn together. I believe it also commissions works from established composers. A parallel activity, more noticeable over the last ten years or so, though it had happened before, is the foundation of community orchestras for adult instrumentalists of limited or zero experience: "late starters" and "rusty returners". Since these orchestras rarely have standard configurations they need specially arranged or written works, so some, at least, offer outlets for composers, though few, if any, can actually pay a commission. D) In the UK, performances of contemporary compositions are still supported by the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and the London Sinfonietta still specialises in it, though they probably keep solvent more by making CDs of old Broadway shows (I love their 3 CD set of all the surviving music from "Showboat", with Frederica von Stade, Teresa Stratas and Paige O'Hara etc.). E) Some top orchestras (most notably, recently, the Berlin PO) have decided not to leave cultivation of their future audiences to the dubious capability of their national educational systems, and have started "Outreach Projects" in which their instrumentalists go into schools to demonstrate and perform, and the orchestra invites schoolchildren to an appropriate performing space to join them in co- operative music-making. The world is changing and the musicians who know how to adapt will be the ones who survive. -- Ken Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web site: http://www.mooremusic.org.uk/ I reject emails > 100k automatically: warn me beforehand if you want to send one _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
