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In Reply to: Cycles posted by layman on April 5, 2007 at 06:34:31:
Unfortunately, the patrons of modern "serious" music are the faculty committee members who appoint new faculty members and promote the old. If modern music seems unapproachably abstruse to a majority of educated people today, look to its patrons for the answer. The refinement encouraged by yesteryear's aristocracy has little resemblance to the refinements engendered by modern academia.
Follow Ups:
So many in this thread have lamented the (suppposed) lack of a mass musically educated audience for classical music, but it's clear that such an audience does exist on college campuses everywhere, consisting of student musicians, graduate musicians, student composers, graduate composers, faculty, visiting artists, and music lovers. This represents one of the most vibrant musical communities that I have come across and this community exists in virtually every town on every continent.New music is being commissioned and performed on college campuses everywhere. Academia has provided fertile ground for the growth and development of classical music. Academia is responsible for the creation of the mass audience (for classical) that has now developed in China (and many other countries).
Music has done what all of the arts seem to have done. They have become so esoteric that their appeal doesn't extend beyond the music department. Most people consider "modern architecture" (whatever that really means) to be coarse and tasteless. Needless to say, the architects themselves consider the masses to be ignorant, but limit their music consumption to some Rock variant. I have to assume that the music faculty has a similar view of modern architecture. Anyone want to place bets on poetry or sculpture?The point is that the arts don't try to appeal to an educated audience like they used to. Their appeal generally remains limited to members of their own guild, and it's becoming more and more difficult to fill Carnegie Hall with underpaid musicians and Juiliard educated cab drivers.
Bach, Mozart and Beethoven would also have struggled to fill Carnegie Hall-sized spaces in their day too. There performing spaces were much smaller representing a much smaller music loving "public." Ironically enough, their audiences were exactly of the kind you just described...musicians and educated music lovers.Mass subscription concerts (in vast public halls) did not start until the 20th Century and may not continue past the 21st.
Kings and Bishops, no less.
haven't taken hold of the public's attention in any significant way. I do not believe that the awareness, interest and knowledge that you are citing has translated beyond the confines of academia into the broad society (at least in the West).
That may be true, but I will still give the public time to discover the treasures that are being created.The public discovered Mozart, Mahler, Moussourgsky, Schubert, and Schumann posthumously and rediscovered Bach and Vivaldi generations later, so, I think the cycles of interest/disinterest and discovery/obscurity will probably just continue. When the time is right, the current generation of artists will find their audience.
In the meantime, their work is being performed, discussed, admired, studied and enjoyed in academic settings.
The public will never recover from the hit it has taken in funding and support for formal music education recently combined with the shift of the cultural attention span away from much of what Classical music has to offer. Everything has become disposable, and that trend is likely to continue forever. This planet is an every-more-chaotic beehive. The "academic settings" may be an oasis for now, but that will most likely change in the future. In the end, all educational institutions are either businesses or publically funded entities. These are fundamental shifts -- tectonic cultural plates. We must all find a safe place to hide.
nt
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