Posted by Me on March 17, 2002 at 08:50:30:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: War Requiem posted by js on March 15, 2002 at 20:15:32:
'Classical' music is not music that has become a classic. The term emerged with a description of the music of a specific period (i.e., Mozart, Haydn, very early Beethoven), but later was for some reason used as a collective term for all western art music. Hence that contemporary music composed in a western art music style can therefore be called 'classical', whether it is good or bad.
In my opinion, there are two problems with contemporary art music:
1: Most of it is crap. This has always been the case, but nowadays we only play the GOOD music that once was contemporary. The sifting through all the insanely bad music to find the rare gems have already been done, so we don't hear all the crap that Mozart's contemporaries spewed out to find out (again) that Mozart, Haydn and a very few others were the only substantial there.
2: The audience. Most concertgoers are musical analphabets with money. They want to hear cheesy unoffensive stuff. Anything out-of-the-ordinary-sounding is by definition bad. That also applies to anything they don't understand (refer to the statement about analphabetism) - bad without any closer thought.
My opinion, therefore is to try and educate the audience more. Yes, give them a concert series of olden goldies, but please not all the time, you'd loose the music-loving audience. I personally wouldn't go to those concerts. Neither do I by records with blind 'singers' who sound like amusical goats.
enuff 4 now