"Jenn" wrote in message
...
I'm in the second day of a 5 day stay at the great Eastman School of
Music in NY. What a wonderful place this is! Highly talented,
motivated, and most importantly, super hard working students all over
the place attending rehearsals and classes in much time in the practice
rooms. The place fairly "reeks" of the spirits of Howard Hanson,
Frederick Fennell, Emery Remmington, Donald Hunsberger, Joseph
Schwantner, John Marcelles, Barry Snider, Walter Hartley, Ray Wright,
and so many other gifted faculty, past and present. And past students
like Frederick Fennell, Donald Hunsberger, Renee Fleming, Gordon and
Mitch Peters, Dale Clevenger, Mitch Miller, William Warfield, Nicolas
Slonimsky, Bonita Boyd, Tom Stacey, and on and on, left their blood,
sweat, and tears on those studio floors. All of this coupled with the
best academic music library in the world, and two world class concert
halls, adds up to a very, very special place.
This is my third visit there; the first without the much missed Maestro
Fennell.

A conversation today with Mark Scatterday, the present conductor of the
much recorded Eastman Wind Ensemble, brought to me a reality of the
present-day classical music recording business: It's really pretty
bleak out there. This ensemble, which has recorded over 40 albums for
Mercury, DGG, Philips, Warner, Sony, and others, basically can't get a
recording released by any of the "majors". Virtually every classical
recording, other than super stars like Yo Yo Ma and cross over acts,
lose money. I know that we all know this intellectually, but it was
kind of brought home to me this week. If we lose this niche of the
record business, we will all be so much poorer for it.

There will always be a market for classical music, but it has never been
very large compared to pop music. Most likely there will be newer ways to
distribute the music you like, very likely through the internet, it's
already being done as I'm sure you are aware. I think that classical music
lovers may not have the same technical skills with that medium and will have
to upgrade them in order to keep up.

Another factor is that with classical music you have a limited supply of
"product," whereas pop music has a new batch of people fresh out their
garage or prefab groups created by record companies to constantly put out
new product, that is trying to copy the older product, etc., etc.

Yet another facor may be the lack of quality education and lack of money for
programs that would create a larger audience for that kind of music. Money
has to be spent in larger amounts just to get kids to be able to read, write
and compute. There are also other media and ways for people to pass their
time such as electronic games and more niche programs on TV. Culture
changes, not always for the better.