Andrew -- It's not a matter of disingenuousness - or my not comprehending your comment; I certainly did. This thread arose out of the comments I made regarding dissemination of serious music in this country in the 19th century. You may reinvent the criteria for what is and what is not an orchestra all you like - but if orchestras WERE playing music and people WERE coming to hear it and the notes WERE being sounded and the composers WERE having their music become known, but the orchestras later disbanded, does that mean - following your defined parameter, ipso facto - that those orchestras <never existed> or (returning to my dissemination of music premise) that the music they played must now be discounted as never having been heard?
I created my own orchestra of 50 players over five years ago. If I run into a tree tomorrow and the orchestra disbands, does that mean there never was a Mariposa Symphony Orchestra? And that all the music we've played, all the premieres, all the rehearsals, the innumerable concerts, all the audience members who have hopefully enjoyed, learned, been thrilled possibly - that didn't happen? All the money I've personally thrown into this little orchestra has been for naught? The cultural broadening of this community hasn't actually occurred in a way; some sort of permanence will not endure because of all those experiences by all those people? Then what am I doing? And we then say that because it's no longer extant, it didn't occur? Andrew: I simply do not buy the premise that (and pardon my simplification of my perception of your premise) if an orchestra didn't offer regular series of concerts and stay in existence for.....how many years? 10? 20? 100? then it must be eliminated from consideration. Does that furthermore mean that if (say) the CSO goes out of business tomorrow - we strike it from having existed in the 1890's? Exactly how many years do you feel an orchestra must exist before it earns some sort of claim on corporeal consideration; is there an existential orchestral probation period? Well......even as I disagree with such a premise, please note the previous e-mail I sent out yesterday in which I noted - following your rather strict interpretation - no less than <seven> orchestras which were in existence in the mid-to-late 19th century in America and are still in existence today - with wiggle room for the two NYC orchestras which merged in 1927, but until then were - two separate orchestras. And which certainly negate your contention that only the NYPhil and Thomas's orchestra existed in the mid-late 19th century. Sorry, but you are just not correct. I really do think your parameters sell short the notion of musical organizations. And really - hasn't this bored everyone else to tears yet? I know I'm nearly there myself. Les Marsden Founding Music Director and Conductor, The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra Music and Mariposa? Ahhhhh, Paradise!!! http://arts-mariposa.org/symphony.html http://www.geocities.com/~jbenz/lesbio.html ----- Original Message ----- From: Andrew Stiller To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 9:32 AM Subject: Re: [Finale] OT: John Cage's/19th century - and beyond! On May 27, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra wrote: > I was responding to Andrew's statement that there was <There *were* > no American symphony orchestras in the mid-late 19th c.except for the > NY Phil and Theodore Thomas's touring outfit.> Period! No > exceptions were made for permanency or length of existence!! This is just plain disingenuous. The idea of permanence is to at least some extent inherent in the concept "orchestra;" Spitzer and Zaslaw include it--with no exceptions whatsoever allowed--in their own definition provided and discussed in their _The Birth of the Orchestra_. I cannot believe for even a second that you did not understand what I was talking about. When we think of an orchestra, our first thought is of an ensemble of at least thirty or so who reliably offer a full season one year after another; anything less is a stopgap or prototype, as the actual history of various cities demonstrates. In Buffalo for example (I pick this city because I know its orchestral history in great detail), Th. Thomas came through a few times--but Buffalo did not "have" this orchestra because it was on tour--no more than Philadelphia nowadays can be said to "have" the Gewandhaus or San Francisco orchestras simply because they come through on tour. Similarly, there were orchestras occasionaly put together for festivals, that disbanded immediately thereafter, but these too can hardly be taken to mean that the city "had" an orchestra, any more than it can be said that a radioactive element that decays in nanoseconds has a chemistry. In the 1890s an actual orchestra was finally founded in Buffalo--but it gave four concerts a year and disbanded in less than a decade. Then nothing till the 1920s, when a summer pops orchestra was instituted for just two seasons. Finally, in 1929, all the local musicians who had been thrown out of work by the advent of sound film began getting together just to keep their chops up and have fun. Under the WPA, this became an actual paid orchestra that gave concerts to the public. Aware that federal support would not continue indefinitely, a Buffalo Philharmonic Society was formed in 1932 to find financial support for the orchestra on a continuing basis. This, and only this, was Buffalo's first, and to this date only, symphony orchestra. The distinction is important. Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://www.kallistimusic.com/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
