dhbailey wrote:
I don't think John was saying that Wind Band music was the way forward
-- he was just pointing out that it is a wide-open marketplace which
embraces new music, so if someone wants to sell some music, writing
music (not necessarily in a pandering or sold-out style) for the wind
band has a greater chance of actually earning money.
As for Dufay or Josquin, they wrote music which their employers liked or
they would have been out of a job. Writing music which someone likes,
or writing music to order, is not the same as selling out, which I
interpret to be more the total abandonment of one's artistic ideals in
order to make some money.
Writing music you detest to put bread on your table is selling out
(think of those horrid German Dances and countless Minuets which
Beethoven and Mozart wrote to put bread on their table) but writing
music which you believe in but is tailored to someone's specific needs
so they buy it is quite different.
And court composers and church composers had two choices -- write music
which their employers liked or go work somewhere else or in some other
field.
I don't think it's correct to compare court employment or the
church-oriented employment of earlier composers, with individual
composers today. In some ways, their dependency on the whim of the
benefactor has *more* in common with modern composers working within
academia. They did not have to write music which appealed to a large
audience, only to a very small, select and often predictable one.
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