Robert Levine has an excellent post today that goes along very well with my post of a couple days ago. It’s a response to a recent posting by Greg Sandow, which you can find here.
Here’s the first two paragraphs of Robert’s excellent response:
Greg Sandow recently wrote a typically insightful and provocative post on “ways that classical music doesn’t connect with the world we live in.†It’s worth reading. And it’s definitely worth a response. So here’s mine.
1.   Most of the music at classical concerts comes from the past. So we’re rarely engaged with contemporary life. (Is this one reason the people who go to these concerts like them?)I could be snarky about how very little music comes from the future. But I won’t; Greg is right that most of is played at classical concerts (orchestral ones in particular) predates WW II. There are good reasons for this. One is that orchestras have learned that programming contemporary music is like a restaurant making all its patrons eat liver; people stay away in droves. There are anecdotal tales of orchestras programming “new music†to great box office success, but I’ve not heard of any that really stand up to hard-headed analysis. (The idea that LA has been successful with such programming ignores the poor houses they experienced prior to building Disney Hall, for example).
I think that orchestras have an obligation to perform and promote new music. But they also have an obligation to play what people want to hear. And they have an obligation to survive. These are not easy to balance. Simply stating that orchestras need to play more new music is not proposing a solution to this problem.
2.   Formal dress looks archaic, and out of touch.
Yes. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. The New York Pro Musica achieved great success when performing the old medieval passion plays by getting it right musicologically and visually – and that meant both using original instruments (or as close as they could come) and appropriately archaic costume. What’s the appropriate costume for performing Beethoven for paying patrons? It may not be tails. But I doubt it’s street clothes either. This also is hard to get right.
When I joined the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1978, the guys wore blue velvet suites with white cravats (and good luck trying to find one even in 1978, by the way). That wasn’t appropriate costume for performing anything.