A reader sent me this excerpt from Piano Notes, a book by the pianist-author Charles Rosen:
Before one played a new piece in London, Berlin, or New York, it used to be possible to try out the program for a small audience. (Composers, of course, prefer that a premiere of their work be held in an important city with proper press coverage.) It is not, as one might think, easier to play in a small town than in a large capital, and the stage-fright that is magnified by playing a new work is more or less the same wherever the recital takes place. But confidence increases naturally with successive performances. The concert series that used to be held in hundreds of small communities is dying out. It is not that the public for them is diminishing, but it has not grown as rapidly as the public for rock concerts, and does not attract investment. Above all, the expenses of travel and publicity have mounted almost catastrophically. Only in large cities is the public concert still a normal constituent of social life.
I know what Rosen is talking about, though more from what an economist might call the demand-side point of view. I grew up in a small Missouri town that had its own Community Concerts series back in the Seventies, and was located just 30 miles from a larger town that had a more ambitious series of the same kind. As a result, I got to hear live performances by artists of quality (including David Bar-Illan, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the St. Louis Symphony) at a relatively early age, and the experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Such small-town performances, alas, are a thing of the rapidly receding past, as is classical music on commercial TV. It now seems barely believable to me that I first saw Vladimir Horowitz in a Carnegie Hall recital telecast in prime time on CBS.
All of which makes me wonder: would I have become interested in classical music had I not been exposed to it in such a way? I like to think so. I mean, I didn’t start looking at paintings until long after I moved to New York. In the church of art, there is always room for late vocations–but earlier is better, and in large parts of America that’s no longer an option.
Dark thoughts for the day before a vacation, I supppose. (No pun intended–I wrote that line before the power went out!) But if we don’t think them, who will?