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Entry: The Death of Music by the Spirit of Government Subsidies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_death_of_music_from_the_spirit_of_government_subsidies#15284 Post contents: It may not be necessary to drag in religion and bureaucracy to identify what went wrong with classical (?) music in the twentieth century. Meredith Willson pinned it very neatly in his "And There I Stood with My Piccolo" many years ago. The problem is that composers quit writing for real-world audiences and started writing to impress critics and each other. As William Henry Vanderbilt is so often quoted out of context: "The public be damned!" The works written to one-up the in-crowd may be interesting indeed as intellectual excercises aimed at those with the esoteric knowledge to appreciate them, but they lack the tonal and rhythmic qualities necessary to appeal to homo sapiens' simian nature. I.e. they don't appeal to our visceral as oppposed to purely cerebral senses. Indeed they can be visceral turn-offs. the philistine audience who rebelled at the premiere of Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps" had a legitimate beef. And I once felt good about walking out on Bernstein's "Kaddish Symphony" even though Mrs. Bernstein herself was doing the vocal. Sousa had the right idea when he remarked that he tried to write music that would make a man with a wooden leg want to march. Sent at: 2008 07 24