Andrew Stiller wrote:
>It's time we start celebrating the LIVING composers, those who are
>chronicling OUR TIMES in their music, reflecting OUR LIVES in their art.
The trouble with LIVING composers is that they don't write music that
the "average" concert goer wants to hear.
<sigh>. Several comments.
1) The second of these two statements is certainly not true here in
Philadelphia. Eschenbach has been programming tons of new music this
year (including a commission for Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday),
the Kimmel Ctr. is sold out, and there hasn't been a peep of complaint.
Admittedly, this all wasn't true 6 years ago, but when the Millennium
turned, the audience apparently decided that "that dreadful modern
stuff" wasn't modern anymore, and therefore wasn't dreadful either.
Happened virtually overnight, and I still haven't gotten over my
surprise, relief, and disorientation. I am quite certain this phenomenon
was not limited to Philadelphia, tho perhaps they haven't heard yet, out
in the provinces.
2) The problem with the first of the quoted statements is that great
music is not immediately diagnosable--by anyone, ever. It has to sit out
there for decades and interact with the culture before what it is can be
really known. Furthermore, the stature of any piece is to an important
extent determined by the stature of its creator (minor Mozart gets more
worshipful attention than better works by lesser composers), and the
stature of any composer cannot be fully known until death--which in turn
is why dead composers are more highly valued than living ones. It is
possible for a composer to blow it late in life, as for example Milhaud
did, so to a certain extent everything remains on hold as long as the
composer is contributing new works.
You may rail against this as unfair, but the situation is as it is. The
very concept of "masterpiece" is intimately tied to the concept of
"master," and you can't have one without the other.
I agree with all you said, Andrew. But music must first get out there
to then sit out there to stand the tests of time and taste and fashion
to hopefully receive its just ranking along the greatness scale.
Could you please list the 200-year-dead composers that Mozart had to
compete with programming space?
Could somebody please list the composer that everybody celebrated the
250th anniversary of his birth while Mozart was trying to find
programming space? Or that he himself mounted concerts to honor? I
don't mean just a list of composers who had been born 250 years before
Mozart, but to whom actual programming space was given instead of
peforming the music of Mozart and his contemporaries. How about
composers who had been dead 50 years? Did they receive retrospective
concerts? I don't think so. The musical world had moved on and was
looking for fresh contemporary music to listen to. Not stuff they were
already familiar with.
The whole notion of playing music in public performance by composers who
had died 200 years ago is something new, something foreign to Mozart's
whole outlook on music, which was that music written by living composers
should be heard.
Mozart didn't expect to have to wait for 200 years before his music
would be heard, and I think he would laugh at our notion of filling most
of our programming time with music of composers 200 years dead.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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