[Trombone-l] Gilbert Kaplan's guest appearance

[George Carr]

>> But it was during the 1950s and 1960s that
>> 'mindless' pop music took over the American recording industry, and
>> television worked hard on promoting the youth culture that led to the
>> 'generation gap' and undercut support for older forms of culture among
>> the generation we now call the 'baby boom'.
>
> Precisely my point. You asked when public appreciation of the fine
> arts was better than now. Attitudes shifted at that point and the
> public began to turn away from fine wine to the equivalent of sugar
> water. It's only gotten worse.

I guess we're talking past each other; you offered that era as an
example of when discernment of high quality music was more widespread
than it is now; I think Gilbert Kaplan would have been just as popular
then as he is today, and probably just as reviled among folks like
Dave Finlayson.  That era included popular performers like Liberace
("I play Tchaikovsky without the angst") and others, who did not
perform high-quality music despite their association with classical
repertory.

>> I'd argue that things
>> have never been better for classical music than they are right now:
>> I'm only one of thousands who attend my local orchestra concerts,
>> there are more orchestras working in the US now than ever before, and
>> recordings of the masterworks can be downloaded easily for $1.
>>
> None of this is about a discerning public. You're essentially talking
> about the supply, not the demand, and you've moved the discussion away
> from your initial point of contention. I'm not certain, but growth in
> the funding for orchestras might be easily explained by the increase
> in population. The percentage of attendees/contributors is almost
> undoubtedly smaller even though the sheer numbers are higher.

You're right; I got away from my original point.  But I'll reaffirm
it: my local orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, has achieved more
widespread popularity now than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, even
though the market conditions were more favorable back then (less
competition from other orchestras, and before really high-quality
recordings started keeping concertgoers at home).  And it hits those
big numbers with (1) much less government support, which means a
larger number of private patrons and subscribers are keeping the
entity funded, and (2) much more progressive programming of modern
music, which means (I'll argue) the patrons are driven more by quality
than by familiarity.

I take your point about the likely statistics: if 10% of Cleveland
appreciated the Orchestra back in 1965, and only 5% of Cleveland does
now, the trend is bad even if the raw attendance numbers are higher
now.  But the numbers work out the other way, because Cleveland (and
Ohio) has had zero-to-negative population growth over the past 75
years.  So the 200,000 people who appreciate the Orchestra today are
actually a *larger* percentage of the local population than the
150,000 people who appreciated it in 1965.  My numbers are kind of
speculative, but I think the theory holds.

George