Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Classical music: Why bother?

"One day we might wake up and find that all the young people who dreamed of becoming composers had done the calculation, seen that it was a poorly paid and undervalued profession, and gone into medicine, banking, management consulting or law. It's easy to assume that art has always been with us and always will be, but this is ultimately naïve. The classical repertoire cannot exist in a museum, without a continuing tradition. "

I am not sure that Fineberg has got the right answer, but I think he is asking the right question.  The inaccessability of classical music -- both in the sense that it is difficult and the sense that it costs too much to hear it -- is robbing the tradition of the vital popular support necessary to nurture new composers.  It is a vicious cycle.  Classical music needs an audience, but the audience also needs to be educated in the music.  For too long, the tendency of the audience to turn away from complex music and the tendency of the composers to withdraw into the academy have reduced the exposure of the public to new music to a thin trickle.  The tendency of the record producers and the radio stations to succumb to the standard Fineberg decries -- popularity -- means that even devotees of classical music are numbed by the endless repetition of a limited number of of very popular works -- what my mother calls the Classical 400.  Under these circumstances, is any wonder that there is no young audience, when the range and power and mystery of the classical music is effectively locked up?

Google It!

Was Satellite Radio a Big Waste?. An FCC decision to let analog radio stations make the switch to digital signals was music to their ears. Good news, perhaps, for commuters trapped in cars with only a local DJ for company, but it spells likely doom for satellite radio. By Brad King. [Wired News]

As this article eventually points out, the real problem with commercial radio is limited, stale, repetitive selections -- and satellite radio promised a way out through a wide variety of specialized channels.  The hope was that satellite would do for radio what cable has done for television.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. "One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Amen.