On 'Any Questions' today the issue of the 2 Titians lately bought for the nation came up. Unusually the panel achieved some consensus that there should be public subscription towards 'saving' works of art,and ,byimplication,other arts endeavours. Richard's point seems tobe that passive funding via local elections
isnt reliableenough.Ken Livingstone,on the panel incidentally, suggested lottery money should goto building more localarts centres (perhaps also meaning artists in residence?)
I'dsuggest that subscription,asit notionally does with the bbc licence fee, influences content and is a route to apolitical voices getting a seat on the board.
In Switzerland you have all those buglering referenda,including potentially racist agendas such as the recent attempts tocurb islam/ists there, but it seemstoyield a senseof participationwhich we don't have here unlessits labelled 'amateur'.

I agree with you on the Olympics,Reiner,although it seems tohave been some contractual obligation for readmission to,er,New LabourMafia. But Boris as the alternative, all the deputies bar Hoey resigned already I believe,etc...

What I thought was interesting was the cross-party consensus on this point and audience approval in radical far-out Maidenhead(location of many a dodgy enterprise in Ealing comedies it has to be said,but the Norden Farm centre ain't bad in my experience)

An interesting message! But it has to be said that if the music is good enough finding an appreciative audience will not be a problem. Mozart Beethoven Brahms Chaiceffsci Scryabine and Rachmannineff had listeners clamouring for more! Those collections that Bach did publish were enthusiastically received. (Schubert stuffed his Unfinished into a drawer of course.) Of the modernists, people seem to be "going for" Lindberg do not they? If one looks at his web-site one finds him working away at commissions given several years in advance.

The main thing for any composer is: write the best music of which you are capable! The rest will take care of itself.

I'd say that, for a composer, the perfomance is the desirable end simply because that's where they've been heading. They get to hear their music for real in a concert hall. I'm not really bothered about my CV personally. I don't maintain it very well. I love working with musicians, and I love hearing my own music (and hate it at the same time).

One of my favourite interactions with an audience was at Cheltenham, when I had a piano piece played. I'd been asked to have an on-stage interview with Michael Berkeley but he was too busy to come (I think he was having his cello concerto played by Isserlis, so was at the rehearsal for the concert that evening), so I was asked to say a few things about the piece. Completely off the top of my head, I explained what I had been thinking about when I wrote the piece and what I thought that it was all about. Totally informal, and it was clear from their faces that they not only understood what I was talking about but they wanted to understand. And this was 3pm on a weekday at the Cheltenham Festival. These were not hard-core-new-music-audience types. Afterwards they asked me perceptive and musical questions and made perceptive and musical comments. I was really pleased that a few years later the Friends of the Festival chose to commission a new piece from me, based on that performance. And I don't think it had anything to do with the way that I wrote the piece, but rather it had to do with the way that the audience felt invited into the piece. I'm not saying that's something that must happen at every concert (because there are occasions where that would be inappropriate), but that I remember those (for example) Proms where I heard the composer talking beforehand, and felt I'd been granted a 'way in'. Going to concerts with my parents, they have also been helped by pre-concert talks. My mum remembers Gubaidulina and Carter especially.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if a work is being commissioned by a community, they probably have a 'right' (whatever that means) to talk to the composer and find out what's going on in the piece. I wouldn't like to see any seminars given that tell composers what to write in order to attract audiences (enough of that happens in some university music departments IMO) because I think that this is beside the point.

This is maybe a bit offtopic, but I've always had a big problem with that formulation ("having a piece played") and I never use it. To me it implies that the fact of the piece of music being played makes the composer rather than the music central. (Not to mention the associations with phrases like "I'm having my car serviced", in other words where one has "commanded" that event to take place.) For the same reason you'll never find me referring to "my music", that might just be an eccentricity of mine but to me that implies a proprietorial relationship to the music I've written and/or performed which I don't feel. Does this make any sense? It's not that I'm trying to create a "distance" between me and what I do, since, as my earlier post made clear, that isn't really the case, it's that I think it's important that it doesn't "belong" to me any more than it does to anyone else, and the fact of my involvement with it is principally of relevance to myself rather than having to be a defining feature of it for others.

So why do you use the term?

I see. Very amusing. But if I may draw your attention back to exactly what you wanted to tell the "civilians":


... perhaps you could also inform them as to which facts and indeed which composers you are basing this assertion upon, if any, since those "civilians" may be under the impression that you are speaking from a position of having researched the subject rather than merely giving vent to unfounded supposition.