At 02:27 PM 11/30/2003, you wrote:
>Bernstein mounted a sales campaign for Ives that actually worked--lots of
>younger patrons, and only mild demurs from the subscribers. It's the latter
>that really control programming, and season tickets go by preference to
>those who held them the year before, etc. So a built-in bias towards
>conservatism.

My dissertation advisor used to refer to the "cash nexus."  I submit that's
exactly what is at work in New York and other large American cities where
programming is only partially dictated by the tastes of the Music Director:
plainly, Art is subsumed by the laws of Commerce.  If you look at the names
of the big-ticket patrons to the Philharmonic and the Met, you will see
among them some of the major investment and commercial banks in New
York.  Do they call the tune?  I've never sat in on a management meeting
but do you take your private client or investor, who's about to drop a
gazillion dollars on the Firm and puts up with music of any sort only
grudgingly...to an Ives and Sessions concert?  Yeah, the client may be a
sissy because he hates dissonance, but he's the sissy who will kick your
profit-and-loss ass around the block and help hose the bonuses for the
little people in the same firm who'd love to go see Lulu.  It won't JUST be
an Ives concert that will sink a business relationship, but it will contribute.

>My mother was one of those seasonal holders. When I was living in New York
>I was an occasional beneficiary, and I got her ticket for a performance of
>Wozzeck at the Met. I was surrounded by elderly subscribers. Wozzeck is one
>of my favorite operas. The subscribers actually listened while there was
>singing, but long stretches of Wozzeck are purely orchestral, and they had
>no qualms about chatting in those stretches--like tv commercials.

Wozzeck isn't just one of my favorite operas, it also was my first.  At age
15, thank you, when kids get taken to Zauberflote and other stuff that
"good for kids."  I lay on my bed listening to the Saturday afternoon
broadcast on the radio.  I am to this day one of the first people to
defend--heresy of heresies--opera in the audience's native language because
without hearing Wozzeck in English, miked from the stage so the words were
understandable over the radio, I'd probably have turned it off.  Instead I
was hooked.  I went to see it a week later, my first foray into the old
theater on 39th and Broadway where I spent the next several years of my
life, at least once a week.

I also love La Boheme and Madama Butterfly.  But God better be singing
because the s-o-s casts no longer interest me.

An opera company in Princeton, by the way, staged Wozzeck this
summer.  This is quite unusual.  It may have been their "screw you" gesture
to the patrons because the company went under because of financial
woes...and their troubles had taken longer to peak than one production.

I didn't realize patrons talked during the orchestra bridges and interludes
at Wozzeck.  I didn't notice.  I notice that sort of thing now when people
in Asbury Park, NJ talk during the opera (a season of tub-thumpers) and
I've actually leaned back and told a few to shut up.

>Probably the same situation would prevail in Europe if there wasn't such a
>high level of subsidy. Without those subsidies tickets would be
>unaffordable for most of the under 40s who might e inbterested.

I don't know why the subsidy system has never taken hold here.  Some fear
of creeping Socialism, I suppose.  After awhile you just yawn and get on
with life.  I suppose people need to form their own musical groupings and
audiences for what they want to hear.

Ken

Kenneth Wolman                          http://www.kenwolman.com

"i had not really expected to find any of the art world populated with
ex-murderers     fascists     green berets and now i know that you can find
anything in the art world and they can even become prophets' -- David
Antin, "Tuning"