On Dec 20, 2013, at 2:51 PM, Christopher Wilke <chriswi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> This would make sense only if there were a single >> 20th-century aesthetic preference. > > Who is to say there is not? Those alive during a historical period are too > sensitive to the trees of plurality to discern the forest of ideology > motivating seemingly disparate activities. If you really want to argue that a single 20th-century aesthetic encompassed The Descendants doing "Everything Sucks" and the Berlin Philharmonic doing Mahler, nobody will stop you, but I don't think anyone will be convinced. >> The important thing about "20th-century aesthetic >> preferences to past music" is that the 20th century >> preferred past music. Audiences turned out for music >> of the 18th and 19th centuries more than for the new >> stuff. That had never happened before. > > Hardly. Audiences turn out in droves for new popular music: "product" > intended to be enjoyed for a while before being discarded in favor of the > next hit. It may come as a shock to us on the list, but very few people in > the general population pay attention to classical music at all. I suppose I was being imprecise, although you appear to have correctly understood that I was talking about classical music. I don't think the lack of attention to it in the general population will shock anyone. > Consider how many early music performers today improvise in concert. All the competent ones, if you mean ornamenting and playing continuo. If you mean getting in front of an audience and making it up from scratch or asking the audience to suggest a theme for improvisation, I imagine it's pretty rare, which is not surprising. Listeners who paid to hear Mozart in 1785 were paying to hear Mozart improvise as part of the experience. Listeners paying to hear Mozart two centuries later were not. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
