On Jan 27, 2006, at 3:40 PM, dhbailey wrote:
How about composers who had been dead 50 years? Did they receive retrospective concerts? I don't think so.
Handel, at the very least.
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.
One of the major points of my previous posting was that most of our programming time is *not* filled with such music. Since about 1980, the *oldest* composer whose music is frequently programmed in symphony concerts has been Haydn, and the second oldest has been Mozart. Since the turn of the millennium, all-20th-century programs comprise nearly half the programming of the Philadelphia orchestra, and, I think, of many other major orchestras as well. In fact, I think you will find that throughout the past century, the mean age of pieces programmed by both orchestras and chamber groups has been roughly 100 years, not 200. That is, the emphasis is on composers recently dead, not long dead--and the reason for that was explained in my previous posting.
This of course does not entirely obviate your complaint, but you need to understand what ultimately drives this focus on the old: it is precisely that the status of composers in general has risen. It is now universally believed--even in pop music--that music of high merit is of permanent value, and therefore permanently worthy of a hearing. Young composers have *always* had to struggle--and parents have always objected to their choice of profession--but at least nowadays they know that they are reaching for the stars. Would you, or any of us, willingly go back to a time in which music simply went out of fashion, like clothes, and became of merely historical interest, and when a composer's fame was no more than that of a couturier? Not me, that's for certain.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
