I'm trying to think back to "Tweedie" on the other board, and his lines in the sand. A set date will always cause problems because composers don't advance as a united front, so Richard Strauss in the 1940s is acceptable whereas Stravinsky post 1910 might not be (though certain of his works thereafter might be again). With composers who underwent major stylistic changes I've tended to find that if one introduces them chronologically, then people have less trouble accepting them, though in certain cases it's necessary to bend the chronology: so if you start with early Tippett (Concerto for Double String Orchestra, or maybe Child of Our Time) and work forward in steps, you can normally get people as far as the Second Symphony without too many problems, though arrival at the Concerto for Orchestra and King Priam may seem as daunting as a cliff face for some. The Stravinsky trajectory, on the other hand, usually requires a bit of dodging backwards and forwards, though I know plenty of people with relatively little classical experience who have taken to Le Sacre first time.

Neverthless, this means that by 1913 there are works which will start to cause some listeners problems although there are others written later which are almost automatically considered safe for pop classics concerts (Ravel's Bolero of 1928, for example). In the same way that nobody will ever be able to judge how good Hi-Fi equipment sounds from a mere perusal of its specifications, so it is that the actual year in which a piece of music was written within most of the last century will, of itself, give very little indication of how acceptable it will be to the average concert-goer.

I'm aware that this is at something of a tangent to the original subject, yet also feel that it's of major importance. Perhaps we need to establish a 'stepping stone' sequence which might lead in easy stages from the last of the Romantics to the present day...

Making the orchestra sound like a piano...

you mean relatively limited in terms of timbre, more limited in terms of density, completely inflexible in terms of intonation, and presided over by a single all-powerful figure rather than being the result of a large-scale collaborative effort?

I suppose there might be something in that... 

Thank you for taking the trouble Mr. Dough. The sound is still much better than anything I have heard before, but not quite as good as the examples on their web-site - partly a matter of vibrato is it not?

There is a rather "boxy" quality to the sound - as if the violin had a few extra holes knocked into its body, or strings insufficiently taut. It must be very difficult to get solo string sound just right. Nevertheless all this is very promising indeed.

Still, you did leave out 'cheaper'.

No (and why would he have done? - he was not Strauss, Schönberg or Stravinsky, after all), but then he did write the Fourth Symphony, which raised an eyebrow or three when first it emerged. That's hardly the point, however; my reference to the three works above was about some people's past reactions to the music as music, so the excuses (or whetever else they are supposed to be) are simply not relevant here.

Best,

Alistair

Alistair,

Despite the abuse heaped upon Chopin at the time, the E minor piano concerto, if not exactly a repertoire war-horse, slipped comfortably into the repertoire as 'acceptable' long ago, whereas there is an ever-increasing number of 20th Century works which seem to create barriers for a sizeable percentage of what has come to be accepted as the concert-going public. In effect there used to be a certain number of years after which most works, once thought difficult, gained acceptability, where now that point seems largely stuck in time with more and more works written thereafter queueing up outside the 'Regular Acceptable Repertoire' zone. Composers, musicians, and what I suppose we'd call specialists are moving forward at a much faster rate than the general audience, which is surely putting them into an ever more rarified position.

 When the growth in audiences for classical music as a whole has virtually stagnated, and the rump of those who remain are struggling with (or ignoring) music already nearly a century old, then the question of where orchestral music goes now, and whom exactly it should aim to engage, becomes a very complex one indeed.

Regards,

Ron

Exactly, Ron. Syd, may i reccomend Bernstein's 1973 Harvard Lectures entitled The Unanswered Question (after the Charles Ives piece) where he gives a closely-arguied exposition of why music (and incidentally poetics, he
was occupying I think the WH Auden "poetry" chair at the time? not as a poet of course)...had evolved as it had from Mozart 40 to thus far, and some thoughts on the future. Even if you don't like the Bernstein schtick the erudition is there.
I'd like to invite Smittins, Martle, Harmony Harmony indeed(I suspect he's proof-reading/ rehearsing now) to say
a bit about how they're approaching their orchestral projects lately. Richard mentioned he's a year or two off his
next commission, but likewise of course. I am just about ready to start on a half-hour score which is going to
continiue to vex me technically, but in a grist to the mill kind of way.