I can't answer any of what you write below because the world of music is in a very strange state and I've no idea where it's going. My own view is that singing is such a healthy pursuit that I can't ever see it disappearing. But whether what survives is church singing or community choirs or neighbourhood pop concerts or even grand opera doesn't really matter in my view. Each to his own. I've just been printing material for a concert in Bath of Estonian music. Now they're singers for you! They have choral conventions where 50,000 people meet together to sing. Whether these will survive the westernisation of Estonia is another matter. I doubt it. They'll learn, just as we've learned, that modern civilisation is a pretty shoddy game. However, they've got to pass through it, just as we'll have to -- and maybe come out on the other side.
By the way, the music situation in England is nowhere near as healthy as the Economist article I posted implied. I think he must have been high on something when he wrote it. Also, from what I hear from German contacts, the position over there is not much better either. State subsidies to music are likely to be chopped back soon. As their unemployment mounts (already twice as much as America), even the country of Bach and Beethoven can't keep on subsiding the middle-class music world at the expense of the untoiling masses. At least not without the risk of riots in the streets. (Mind you, Germans don't riot like the French or the English 'cos they're much more law abiding. They gradually build up steam until the pressure is so high that something really formidable happens.)
Keith Hudson
At 10:07 12/06/2003 -0400, you wrote:
I don't know about that Keith,
The one thing we can say is that the Communists in a perpetual war with the West were not able to do it at home. Who knows what would have happened if they had tended to their own people instead of being so evangelical. The same problem with the churches here. They are being run ragged with the policies of outreach that fail to minister to the needs of their own congregations. You should go on the Music Ministry lists and listen to the decline in graded choirs for example. That's your constituency. And I don't see where private enterprise has done jack sh... when it comes to the "music of the spheres" here in a huge market with weekly performances. They have to keep running back to their manual because they aren't doing much thinking about home for themselves. . Eventually it will all break down, because at its heart even their manual doesn't support them in their economics. Also, the Americans' who have immigrated to Germany to work in the Arts speak of it being a heaven while here is a hell. They aren't immigrating, I might add, to England either in spite of your 14 orchestras in London. Do you have labor laws that keep our instrumentalists and the Russians out? We have absorbed a body blow here from the very institutions that the American propaganda machine demeaned, the old Communist arts system. They have flooded our market with superb musicians, superbly trained and have driven down an already low standard of living that is only lower in Capitalist Russia today. And finally, why are all of those people marching in France and what about the articles that Tor Forde keeps sending from Norway and we don't have any Chinese, Swedes or Danes on this list. I deal with them in my business and they aren't crying the same tears you and I talk about all the time. So maybe the issue is cultural. Maybe Soros is right. Or maybe you are a fundamentalist after all?
REH
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
