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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#15323 Post contents: I'd like to develop a few thoughts that have been running through my head since reading Mr. Stove's excellent essay. As a boy I remember spending a lot of time at my grandparents' home, where an old 78rpm record playert occupied pride of place. My grandparents were solidly middle class, good, church-going Southerners. But like most folks of their ilk they had a modicum of appreciation for serious or classical music. I inherited a number of old 78s, including Tchaikowsky serenade and some arias sung by Amelita Galli-Curci from them. On Saturday afternoons the large, stand alone Bendix radio would be tuned to the NBC affiliate in Raleigh (WPTF---there weren't but two, maybe three radio stations in the city at that time) for the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, and classical music was part of the NORMAL daily radio fare. NBC broadcast live opera on Sunday afternoons. My grandparents were not in any way substantially different, I think I can say, from a large number of "regular" Americans who lived in the 1930s, '40's, and '50s. Classical music was taken for granted as a PART of everyday life. It wa not consigned to elitist realms or niche programming. While most American would certainly not have been able to discuss the different versions of Mussorgsky's BORIS, on the other hand quite a few would have been familiar, at least to some degree, with Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Jussi Bjoerling, Lily Pons, and Marjorie Lawrence. Mr. Stove makes the point that since 1945, and particulary, I would say, since the 1960s, government grants have played a significant role in what classical musicians produce. That it very true. Indeed, at least in the USA prior to the 1950w, it was generally up to wealthy private patrons and the public at large to support muisical endeavors. And in fact the public did so. The Met and important ensemble like the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, for instance, suffered during the Depression, but they did have several things going for them: a large base of support among the general public, a widespread view that what they did and what they presented was significant for our culture, and a connection to that public, a connection that has become much more tenuous and less general, I would suggest, since the 1960s. Although I agree with Mr. Stove that Wagner is certainly not the culprit in the decline of serious/classical music, I do think E. Michael Jones is on to something when he highlights the 1960s, with its vast and radical cultural revolutions, as a watershed period in our history. The assumptions of my grandparents (and my parents) about the "goodness" of classical music, like other assumpitions, went by the wayside during the 1960s. And, add to this the alacrity among the commerical music producers and recorders to seize the (hoped for profitable) moment. Voice of Firestone could make a profit for the networks in the 1953, but, even if the company was willing to pay to keep it on the air in 1963 (which they were), grasping execs pushed the newer formats of rock-n'-roll. And the sense of "cultural responsibility" that had at least, in part, motivated earlier media moguls? "Revolution" and "the profit motive" joined hands in a mutually agreeable arrangement. Meanwhile, serious music was, in effect, exiled by and large from mainstreet to "high street," to the academy, to universities, to university" towns, over to PBS, government life support, with the accompanying bureaucratic control. Disconnected in many ways from a general public, no longer regarding it as an essential ingredient of our culture, increasingly it became the preserve of pedants, inaccessible martinets, and the like, or even a John Cage, who could write (1952) his magisterial work, "4'33" (four minutes & thirty-three seconds of silence) for any Instrument," to the admiring purrs of the critics!! Talk about cultural disconnect! Certainly all is not bleakness, however. I remain hopeful. Sent at: 2008 07 06