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The Downtown Noise Machine

September 1, 2005 By

Over at Sequenza 21, composer Galen H. Brown has written an essay explaining where my blog fits into musical politics, and arguing eloquently for my continuing it. He transplants into the musical realm David Brock’s argument from his book The Republican Noise Machine that the Republicans took their own lunatic fringe overly seriously in order to alter the public perception of where the center of the political spectrum lies, moving it far right from where it used to be. Therefore, argues Brown, substituting the concept of Mainstream Classical Media for that of Mainstream Media, I need to be pushing the most extreme Downtown elements in music, no matter how much resistance I encounter, in order to move the public perception of the Uptown-Downtown spectrum Downtown-ward so that it more accurately matches the current reality – since the MCM (Mainstream Classical Media) has the perception skewed way in the direction of Uptown. And the time to do this is now, while internet coverage of classical music is still in a nascent and malleable state. It’s an elegant argument. I acquiesce to my fate.

UPDATE: Brown had called me “the Rush Limbaugh of Classical Music,” but Jerry Bowles now pipes in and claims that I’m not a “fat, stupid druggie.” Shows how much he knows.

09/1/05 7:55 AM | filed under: main |

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