At 2:59 PM -0500 30/11/03, Kenneth Wolman wrote:
>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?
Fascinating discussion, guys. And absolutely true, Kenneth, unless
the patrons discern some status in being up with the cutting edge,
which can be the case (I think it is much more the case in Europe,
where there is still that bourgeois idea of a cultured person).
Contemporary music is a bit like contemporary poetry, in that only a
small percentage of people bother to attune their ears to it. Only
it's more expensive to produce: the musicians with the skills to play
this stuff don't come cheap.
Wozzek is one of my favourite operas too. There was a brilliant
production here in Melbourne a couple of years back, directed by
Barrie Kosky, who has since fled to Vienna to run a theatre there.
It's one of my favourite plays too, and Berg's genius is in not
adapting the play, apart from a few cuts, but just setting it.
We are moving to a less and less subsdised situation here as far as
arts funding goes, and consequently all our performing arts are more
and more conservative. And our culture is currently being sold out
thoroughly to the US in so-called "trade discussions". It's a grave
artists here dug for themselves 15 years ago when they so
enthusiastically embraced the model of an "arts industry". But
that's such a grim situation from almost any point of view that on
the whole I'd rather not think about it today...
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
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