The popular notion of new music?

I love this video. It's a remarkable parody not only of a good amount of actual music, but of the new music stage aesthetic/presence we've seen so often. (I especially love the way Carol Burnett turns and walks to the piano).

The Carol Burnett Show was on from 1967-1978, and had a live audience. As I see it, the video can be interpreted two ways, depending on the viewer's exposure to new music. One, it can be very simply silly, a bunch of very serious "artists" who have no idea what they're doing, but are putting everything they have into it nonetheless. Two, it's a spoof of atonal music. But in order to know that, you'd have to have some exposure to the original. (We had a Carter piece on last summer's In Frequency concert, and one of the musicians felt that there was a strong resemblance between it and this...) My question is, would a television studio audience in 2010 react the same way? Would they understand why it was so funny? I'm sure there are no actual statistics, but how many studio audience members in, say, 1972, had been to multiple classical music concerts, enough to hear a range of repertoire? And how many in 2010?

This is not a lament about some mythical by-gone time in which audiences were enormous, new music was appreciated, patron money flowed through the cities, and unicorns frolicked in fields of cotton candy. I'm just wondering what a "lay" viewer sees when he or she sees this.

Now watch it again. It's still hilarious.

Getting Started

Welcome to the In Frequency blog! I hope you'll visit often. We'll be talking about all kinds of new music issues here, posting and commenting on dispatches from the new music world and and examining the new music scene here in LA.

How does new music fit into the concert world? Who's the audience? What's the repertoire, what's its reputation, and are those two related at all? Is it true, as Allan Kozinn recently wrote in the New York Times, that "drums are the new violins"? Can we assess complex new music on first hearing? What are the best ways to reach new audiences, and who are the most likely new audience members - are they classical music people, are they people with a significant interest in other performance genres, are they artists themselves?

I'm Andrea Moore. With violinist Tereza Stanislav, I co-direct the In Frequency concerts. I love the process of programming concerts - among other things, it keeps me current, and also allows me to explore a lot of music from the last 50-60 years that I don't know. I love handing a really gnarly score over to the musicians we work with, knowing that they'll play the hell out of it on concert night. And I love connecting with the small but passionate audience for the more recent repertoire, people who feel, maybe, that as former San Francisco Opera general director Pamela Rosenberg once put it, "Difficult times call for difficult music".

Hope to hear from you here.