Yes, as you will see if you read numerous of my earlier posts on the subject of public subsidy. But I'm really losing patience with this thread as it descends into the usual handful of tired old clichés and crude sloganeering that tend to accompany this subject. Almost makes me a little sympathetic to the original article. Suffice to say that I would put money on it that issues of defence spending occupy very significantly more column inches than arts funding, and we might also consider the comparably large amounts spent on social security. And I wonder how many people here (or amongst others who criticise defence spending) know in any detail about specifics of helicopters, tanks, radar systems, and the requisite spending to maintain certain defence committments, or what would be alternative possibilities (other than having no military at all, which hardly any country in the world does)? Not knowing that doesn't seem to be seen to make comments on defence spending invalid, why should it be any different with music?

In terms of the positive claims made for music produced under subsidised conditions, would those who make them thus argue that unsubsidised music (i.e. much pop and jazz, though perhaps not free improvisation which is heavily supported by subsidised European festivals) falls short of these musical possibilities. Is this somehow lesser music as a result of its inevitable subservience to market conditions? I actually do think so, for the most part, though there are exceptions; though conversely there's much contemporary classical music about which Pollard's claims ring very true (those countless numbers of 'festival circuit' pieces that know how to press all the right buttons), and in light of the relative stagnation of contemporary music today, I am starting to question whether the positive benefits of subsidy are really sustainable. But, to pw's last post, do you think all music produced under market conditions (which is all that Pollard is advocating should be the case for all music) amounts to nothing more than 'innocuous entertainment', then?

Issues of subsidy are not just about whether it exists, but also how it is distributed. Stockhausen can get a whole day of concerts at the Proms; Michael Nyman wouldn't. Yet (if CD sales, tickets, public profile, etc., are anything to go on) Nyman has a vastly bigger following in this country than Stockhausen. I would much prefer to hear Stockhausen myself, but I'm just one person out of many millions of the electorate. Yet the sort of preferences I have, taken broadly, concur much more with funding policy than those of those who would prefer Nyman (or Vaughan Williams - they are a minority indeed, and maybe his name isn't that much more well-known than Birtwistle, but what about the likely responses of audiences played one or the other?). I would argue that those preferences come a little closer to the type of music the lack of which is decried in my signature; that type of music is however likely to remain a minority interest (just as are films that are not heavily plot-driven, with the compulsory happy ending, and so on). But I doubt that is the type of reason many people advocate such minority music, and I'd like to know on what basis they think their preferences deserve public money any more than anyone else's?

It's more than just 'crude sloganeering' -- sure it was a little flippant of me. But I really don't know what your position is.

And I'm losing patience with the Socratic method. Perhaps you don't have a position on the matter? That would be OK, as you say it is indeed complex.

I can't speak for the UK, but my country of residence is unbelievably wasteful with its military funds. I thought that was common knowledge, but I'd be happy to go and cull some statistics for you. I don't advocate the dismantling of the military (though I used to), but I do advocate more transparency in government spending on the military. Without divulging state secrets, of course. I would say that the arts spending profile is much more transparent, though no amount of transparency is really enough.

You started your last paragraph with the words
But as I've already said:

Well, I'm increasingly less convinced that, at least as they are currently organised, that subsidised work is any longer able to produce anything that does have a critical function (which is the only grounds upon which I would defend subsidy). Seeing the way that Stockhausen, for example, has been appropriated, through promotion, performance and critical reception, especially during that distasteful period that tends to accompany a composer's death (it was very similar when Feldman or Nono died - Peter Niklas Wilson has written some interesting stuff on the mysticial cult around these two composers and Scelsi) suggests to me no more critical function than can be found in the work of Knussen, Ades, Benjamin, or whoever. There's no progressive social meaning in cults of personality and entertainment shrouded in mystification, much of it of the composer's own making. It's at least possible that Stockhausen had a different type of meaning in the 1950s, though the more I study about that era, I wonder. Certainly not on the level of something like Lachenmann's Gran Torso; though again, I wonder if that hasn't become yet another commodity as well. The contradiction of composers operating in an arch-reactionary field such as classical music, and trying to produce something that does other than lend affirmation and sustenance to that very reactionary tradition (or at least what that tradition has come to represent through processes of appropriation, even if it once had different meanings and functions) is one I'm not sure if it's possible to surmount - maybe it is, but it's harder than ever. Whereas the critical function of punk, or some rap, seems very much more palpable. Of course they become appropriated as well, but I feel some residue of their earlier meanings does not go away, whereas it almost entirely does so in the case of much contemporary classical music, at least in a country like Britain. The decentralised system in Germany (a residue of a wider federal system put in place by the Allies during the occupation period to try and avoid the possibility of the all-powerful centralised state that had been witnessed in the Third Reich) as well as a different type of political and intellectual culture (for which there are fascinating arguments I've read that this was deliberately promoted and perpetuated not least by business/industrial interests in the 1950s as an alternative to a view of 'democracy' as 'mass rule' which could then be associated with the Nazis - an argument that is rot, for sure, but somehow could gain credence during that era) may be different - a cartel-like arrangement (which goes beyond the boundaries of Germany into much else of Europe) between festivals and other new music organisations seems to be working against that very process in a bizarre example of institutions paralleling the tendencies of business towards monopolies.

No disagreement there, but I doubt that even with more efficiency and transparency (hardly that contentious issues from the point of view of public debate, unlike something like unilateralism which played a part in losing the British Labour Party the 1983 and 1985 elections) the sums would be much closer to those for the arts.

If it were public monies supporting particular sub-sections of the press, there would be arguments about how these act propagandistically, and so on. For all that's wrong with the press, I don't see a viable alternative to their being independent of public money. Now, the situation is different with respect to music, I believe, but if it's a subject for debate with respect to the press, then it is also a legitimate debate for music. And how about the question of 'how much' (something which varies very much between different countries)? An attempt to shut down debate on the subject plays into the hands of those who would maintain that this is the preserve of a self-serving elite who hate to have their own particular pleasures open to public scrutiny whilst still expecting that public to pay for them - and I don't think they would be wholly wrong in such a context.

I don't see how in this country subsidised music produces that latter end, other than in the sense of entrenching and institutionalising the interests and tastes of the most reactionary and privileged groups in society. What could be more absurd than the majority of the population paying their taxes to artificially sustain a body of work primarily associated, in terms of producers and consumers, with the public schools? Why does it work out that that minority becomes the special needs group?

I certainly do believe there's a possibility for music's having a critical function, but if you don't, it's not surprising if we would have absolutely no common ground in terms of what we believe to be valuable in music. Music with no critical function at all (in which category I would place most of the British composers you admire and advocate, more so than most popular music) is totally worthless to me, other than as the lightest of light entertainment (for which there is a need and real role, certainly, but almost all such music carries with it rather more exalted claims, plus even very light entertainment usually goes a bit further than that); worse, it actively serves reactionary social ends. In terms of whether critical function is something that 'music has' rather than 'something that a listener can bring to it', I'm not sure if that distinction is meaningful in any sense (can absolutely anything be 'brought' to a piece of music? And if not, isn't what's brought somehow related to some properties of the work prior to a particular reception?). A greater range of music being available, like a greater range of TV channels, seems to produce, MTV-style, a dulling rather than sharpening of critical faculties in the cultural supermarket.

Music for which the only thing that sets it apart from the commercial arena is its snob value is the worst of all possible worlds, and a residue of feudalist aesthetics. McClary's diagnosis of this being the case for much contemporary classical music is potentially devastating and not that easy to comprehensively refute.

In a less reactionary society things might be different. I might conceivably believe that some European societies are as such, but certainly not Britain, especially as far as the role that 'high' art and culture are allocated.

I do 'believe there's a possibility for music's having a critical function', I just don't think it can be underwritten or guaranteed by anything immanent to the work. The vicissitudes of reception are too great for that, and at the same time are unpredictable enough as to leave room for critical hearing of pieces which might seem far from critical in their raison d'etre.

I don't know who you think I admire and advocate, but I really don't think there are any British composers writing music with a critical function that aren't among the British composers I most admire.

Well, that's definitely not what I meant either.

Sure, I know that, just pointing out what is possible taking purely the 'minority interest' argument.