on audience arrogance

[acroyear]

sorry.  i'm a pig-headed elitist arrogant jackass, but THIS attitude just takes the cake...

classical_music: when is "classical" not?:

bunrab : so perhaps composers who want to make a living in music ought to at least take into consideration whether I'd ever pay to hear their "music" again after hearing it once.

"opinion" or not, this attitude here did come across a little more condescending and arrogant than you might have expected.

The day that composers choose to take into account the commercial value of their music over their own artistic needs is the day their music has died within them.

I would rather Reich be Reich than have Reich be someone else merely to collect your hard-earned money. If anything, were Reich to change merely to please you, but you don't give him your hard-earned money anyways, then who has gained and who has lost?

The musician does not get to choose their audient, so don't use "money" as a means of implying that they can, or that you as an audient would be willing to negotiate terms of their performance in such a manner.

If you don't like it, FINE, but don't expect that your money is all that important, or that money is the only means by which the composer can value his work.

Comments

[cyberkender.livejournal.com]

I take it Bunrab listens almost exclusively to New Kids on the Block, 98 Degrees, N'Sync, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Linkin Park, eh?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

not really. this was on a classical music forum (and, in fact, i was trying to figure out where the minimalists like Reich fit into the genre and get some discussion going on how the labels the future uses to describe the music of our time will be different from the marketing-based labels we use today).

he's just a product of commercialism that has never really thought about music in any other terms than "i buy what i think is good, and if i'm not buying it, it must not be good".

its much the same dopey commentary Fripp writes about, about how because the audience pays, the audience should get what was expected.

[cyberkender.livejournal.com]

I understand. It's just that those are the sort of acts that the artist(producer) focuses on whether or not the audience will like a given piece, over their own creative desires.

Americans tend to have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement these days...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Fripp's experience as a performer/composer is that Europe is worse.

Though not by much.