Classical Music as Relics for easy listening

While I basically agree with your list Flex, most of the modern composers you list compose music that is pretty small scale and simplistic in comparison with the masters.

There has been literally hundreds upon hundreds of "classical" composers over the last few centuries. Most have been long forgotten for the same reason.

Hey, DC-area radio pretty well sucks all the way around the dial, not just classical. Only a small number of decent shows on WPFW and WAMU, no really good rock or r&b stations, no college music-oriented stations of any kind, no all-jazz stations since WDCU folded. WRNR's version of the old-HFS "Homegrown Radio" is for the most part hugely disappointing. If you can get 91.5 from Baltimore, it's a better classical station. Or just record Jeff Esworthy's "Music Through The Night" on WETA latenights. Even AM lost "The Music of Your Life" WWDC of yore. Every major city I travel to reminds me that DC is the most boring and impoverished radio town imaginable. I know radio has gone way downhill everywhere, but most cities still manage to retain more regional radio identity than does DC. We're culturally aware here - what did we do to deserve this fate? I usually just listen to NPR and WAMU talk in addition to WTEM sportstalk.

Shubertmaniac, I take your thoughtful question very seriously and have no answers. Here nevertheless a couple of strewn remarks:

While I see Sugarbrie's point regarding "small scale" -- to Flex's list I would also add Krzysztof Penderecki and György Kurtág (say, String Quartets) --, I would suggest that some of the temporally short works, or even "studies", for ex., those of Anton Webern, Alban Berg, are the antithesis of much of (bad) pop music (all repetition, no information, little of interest going on, except reiteration of some groove with a hook): compression, concentration, difficulty. To be sure, many of these short works are, initially, not melodic, but that is not the point; they create their own rythmic and tonal structures against our natural expectations.*

Rather than the commercial purveyors of music -- or even radio --, I check in from time to time into the best-stocked university-town library I can find, or, better yet, a department of musicology (with literally archival tons of vinyl). Usually I arrive with some hand-scribbled notes which have been gathering dust over time on the proverbial back-burner and leave with even more freshly scribbled notes which I then use, among other things, to guide music acquisition. The process of discovery is a bit of a trial --one has to "make time" and be a bit systematic (however) -- but is invariably highly rewarding.

Although the Canadian wing of the Republican Party, called up here in Canada the Canadian Alliance, since the Refoooorm Party and its nasal leader did not fare too well in uniting the right (there is a God!) would rather see the American Way triumph and no public money ever going to culture, we can still rely on the CBC. Both the English and the French services actually produce radio worth listening to, although the French is far ahead insofar as serious music is concerned. Another reason to bask in Canadian culture. At least part of our tax dollars are well spent, I believe. Better than spending on WMDs and such... Maybe globalization will put an end to that damn socialist radio and all the great US hucksters will be able to invade the Canadian market and bring us sanitized everything... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

What all of you are saying is correct, but my point, and maybe I did not state properly, is other than dedicated music companies that produce living composers music, how can
one hear and appreciate modern music, if the radio stations nor the symphonic orchestras will not play modern classical music? It is like going to a Museum of Music. It was not until Mendelsohnn (or was it Beethoven?) looked at the scores of Bach that composers seriously looked at past musical performances. And the cult of the conductor that developed from Mendelsohnn and after, created a situation in which the conductor only specialized in a certain dead composer. And perhaps on a societal-historical plane the decline of the subsidized artist to a free lance composer caused the decline of new music. Brahms catagorically stated he wrote for the masses, not for fine art, though I would beg to differ on the assessment of his work. Perhaps when the middle class, the conductors and the musical directors looked towards the past and not the hear and now, let alone the future, did classical music become a museum of the performing arts. And to the modern composers, they are subsidized again, either as professors at music schools or grants from the government. The exceptional few, are free lance. Just look at any textbook for Music 101. Three quarters of the book takes you to 1910. A few pages on modern classical music, the rest on jazz, blues, musicals, pop, and rock. Maybe that is what it should be, but then again maybe not. I guess it depends on your perspective of what you consider music as art. Of course what is a good definition of art?