On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 21:44:38 -0800 skip Heller wrote:
on 11/11/02 9:08 PM, D Dvb at d_dvb@hotmail.com wrote:
Sometimes I think the reason why some "difficult" music doesn't reach more people isn't because the average person can't understand it but rather the average person picks up on the snottiness and self-importance that radiates from SOME of the music/performers.
I'd agree with that point if the audience was filled with more people who had not been exposed to that artist before. I think the reason it doesn;t reach more people is because it doesn't get on the radio.
The usual excuse... I have plenty of examples of friends dragged to concert of (allegedly) "difficult" music and who never came back on their own. And I won't talk about lending records, playing the music, talking about it, etc, with the naive expectation of creating some excitement (for artists I believed deserved more). Most of the artists I was listening to twenty years ago still have trouble to fill a small size room (even with hundreds of records in their discographies). You should expect that after so many records, so many concerts, articles, the word of mouth would work and some (relative) fame would come, no? Since that's not the case, maybe the problem is somewhere else. The problem of "difficult" music is the music itself. Once you say bye to melody and/or rhythm, you practically end up alone on the road... The second problem is the mass of music produced with the fragmentation of the genres that make practically any non-mainstream artist invisible on any radar screen. The offer of music has simply grown faster than the audience, and since so much of this music barely goes beyond the "interesting" category, this music simply reaches the member of the church and the rest of the world lives fine ignoring it (since the rest of the world does not have money to buy "interesting" records). Now I am a little bit confused about what people on this list call "difficult" music. The NYDS music of more than ten years ago was definitely in that category. But there is practically nobody in the NYDS these days who does "difficult music" (unless you identify sparce audiences with "difficult"). All I see is nice compositions, "a la maniere de", relectures of folk music, klezmer variations, etc. Which means that if the NYDS has visibility troubles, it is certainly not by being "difficult". Patrice.