I thought BBC programme was very good. I was surprised by their perception and balanced view. I am generally usually impressed with BBC. May be it has to do with English character (more balanced view).
There are as many different views as there are people. I can say from my family point of view. It was very difficult to lose life savings in banks when they went down. The whole thing was appauling. They survived somehow, but noone prospered. Many lost everything in banks and MMM (pyramid) and became destitute in old age. It was sad.

I could concentrate on better points (which are fewer) or on bad points. One of the bad points for me was the crash of health system. They would not even try to help older people, they were suppose to die out and fade into history. If I concentrate on facts like ambulance will only come if one pays in advance or no medicine unless one pays. It is bad enough to get sick to deal with this sort of things. My grandmother could have a few more years. As it happened she asked her son to call someone for euphanasia  because nobody could even look after her and she was afraid to be in pain.
My mind took me too much into negative points. I don't like to be one sided. I spend almost all my adult life thinking about two systems, pluses and minuses. I have many Russians here who are working in computer industry or from former Republics. The ones I know are so greatful they could escape. There is one couple who descided to go back.

Hopping back a few messages, I've been mulling over the Beethoven-IP-lddf correspondence and trying to get my thoughts and feelings in alignment re this topic.

These are some of my beliefs:

That a composer who produced a perfect Beethoven pastiche today would be writing music of less value than Beethoven's.

That Beethoven's music is a product of one man at one time with a personal and cultural history which is unique, although certain features are shared with his contemporaries, and certain others are shared with many people today. This explains (a) his individuality (b) the points of contact between him and other composers writing at the same time and (c) the "relevance"/ "universality" (nothing like the latter, of course, and the former is a hateful term) of his music today.

The perfect Beethoven pastiche is - a pastiche. It is a forgery. If it were possible - which it is not - because even the most skilled forger is dealing with externals, and most importantly, they will be secondhand. Any originality will by definition dilute the mix.

My objection to "new" music which is "audience-friendly" is not to do with its friendliness (or otherwise). It is to do with the adoption of gestures and manners which, to a lesser or greater extent, are secondhand. OK, when a Schnittke mixes and matches there is a collision of styles, and the secondhand gestures there are essential for the collision, which is, in part, the point of the music. When a Stephen McNeff writes a Sinfonia such as that we heard on R3 last Friday, I don't hear any meaningful dialogue with the language; I don't hear any particular skill in the construction of the piece or the use of the material; I suspect that there is a degree of sincerity there (unlike Mr Nyman's latest effort), but a naivety in compositional technique which renders the piece of negligible value.

And here we come to the crux, and a contradiction. Beethoven and his contemporaries were, in a sense, privileged. Not many people had the opportunity to become "professional musicians" - ie performer-composers - and those that did were of similar background, took similar posts and therefore wrote "of a style". Some - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven - were more gifted than others and took the prevailing style as a springboard. But, the style itself was a product of a particular point in history, in a particular place, in a particular social setting. Leaping on two centuries, and we find many more people with pretensions towards being "professional musicians". That doesn't necessarily mean that they earn their living from it, just that they (we) have the opportunity now to make music, record, publish, perform, without having to be employed in the service of whichever Prince or Count; we can come from any background, have an infinite range of personal histories and cultural histories. That is the true reason for music's present diversity: there is no longer a single route to creativity, or even the splitting of ways that we can point to from the early 19th century on. There are now almost as many ways as there are creators. How then do we value what is being created? I think I've indicated one such way with McNeff (because I think it has pretensions towards being judged and valued in a certain way); and I'm sure that others can find ways of constructing similar (or not?) ways of valuing other new music.

Much as part of me applauds and wants to celebrate the more egalitarian world of music-making we live in now, I feel bound to look for quality as much today as ever before. It is all too easy to reject or accept wholesale, when we should instead be questioning our responses and trying to find the same inner logic that many of us value in the music itself. And that, most emphatically, does not have to do with how "nice" a piece sounds.

Just a couple of comments on roslynmuse's excellent post.


That is what I have to doubt. Not least because of the precarious financial situation for a composer, and also because of the necessity of having to establish contacts in certain milieu, such a profession is far more open to those of higher class backgrounds than others. And, certainly in recent times, that is borne out by the evidence, if one considers the backgrounds of rather a lot of leading composers. Also, one should consider the vast gender imbalance in contemporary composition, compared to that in some of the other arts.


Is it so 'egalitarian', though? Equality of opportunity on paper means very little unless one has the financial wherewithal to exercise that opportunity. And might the nature of the music itself in some way reflect such a less-than-egalitarian situation?

     ///I don't understand your angle, Bryn. Of course I know that Havergal Brian is no longer with us. I can't try any harder with analysis because I am not an intellectual. i know what I like and don't like. Yes, Ian Pace's analysis was not just a bit Marxian, it was thoroughgoingly so, but I was trying to use the "softly, softly approach" being urged on us in other parts of these boards. OK, would you have preferred me to denigrate Ian Pace as an effing pinko liberal? That would perhaps even have been an understatement. By the way, I met Havergal Brian about three times, the last one being at his home at Shoreham-by-Sea when he was in his mid-nineties. Given that that was some time in the 1970s I could hardly have imagined that he was still "with us". And yet, he is still with us in his music. What were my "stick-in-the-mud commonplaces", by the way? Perhaps I can justify and amplify them if i know what they are!

I duuno, ac, the "liberal" part seems a bit insulting.

  ////////<<<<<<<<< What are all those funny little red things for? And is there any significance in there being 32 of them?

   //////<<<<<< Surely it is obvious that the political system in the USSR and its European satellites was that of a military dictatorship which had simply hi-jacked the concept of communism (or socialism - to me both these concepts are pretty similar) as a smokescreen to cover the fact of the military dictatorship. We know now that there was a privileged upper class of party members, and a "proletariat" of workers. I visited the USSR in 1991, its last year, and on the way up from the Moscow airport on looking down could see hidden in woods housing developments which resembled little bits of rural Surrey stockbroker belt. This was presumably where the elite lived, well hidden away from the hoi-polloi. No-one should write about the USSR as if it was a genuinely socialist society.

Yes, I meant to say many women in USA were still only housewives. Immigrants from Russia (women) were often first women in corporations who were engineers.
Now even here in Ireland women are working and families become smaller. Many young women have at most two children. How strange that in Italy (another catholic country) many women have no children at all. This is off topic, sorry.