A short essay about composers

Quite by chance, I came across a thriving worldwide network called Yahoo! Answers. Someone had recently posed a question with an interesting premise:
"How do you think the great classical composers would have fared these days?"

I started to write a response, realized that it would take quite a while to express my thoughts fully, and stayed up long into the night to finish it. Two days later, the answerer chose my response as the best one (scoring me ten points, and bringing me that much closer to attaining Level 2 status - some people take this Q&A thing very, very seriously...)

I thought that all of you might like to read my answer as well, so here it is:

Elaine C has given a well-thought-out and imaginative take on how some of the well-known composers might live and work, given what we know of their personalities. I have the position of being a living composer of "classical" music in the modern age, and find that I must put forth two additional questions - "How did the great composers fare in their own days?" and "How do composers of today fare?"

In their own days, those who we now recognize as the masters enjoyed quite varying degrees of fame and success. Some were much more famous for their performing or conducting than for their composing (Bach, Bruckner and Mahler among them). Some were quite well-known, and audiences were curious to hear what new symphonies they'd written (consider Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms) - but still, no one cared when their birthdays were! No one organized music festivals in their honor or named music schools after them. Others never gained any sort of fame in their lifetime (Zelenka, Schubert, and Webern are the prime examples).

We must remember that composers have quite rarely had it as cushy as we might imagine. If Mozart showed up today to cash in on the music he wrote in the 18th century, he would be swimming in royalties from millions upon millions of concert tickets, scores and recordings - but in his day, there were no recordings to sell, and he was lucky if he had fifty performances during one year (nearly all of which he would have organized himself), and his income from the sale of sheet music to publishers wasn't even enough to live on.

(As an amusing aside, I must admit that a precious few composers *did* have it pretty cushy - Haydn seemed quite happy working for the Austrian prince and writing hundreds of pieces for his own talented orchestra and chamber musicians to perform. Liszt had the ear of the world, and plenty of money from his concert tours, but was known more for his phenomenal skill as a performer than his considerable but uneven skill as a composer. And Wagner...well, Wagner created his own universe in life as well as theatre - you can dream as big as you want when you have a King footing the bill.)

On to the second question - "How do composers of today fare?" Composers of today have the unique and lamentable position of essentially "competing" with not only other composers of today, but the most famous - and dearly beloved - composers of the past 500 years. This is an absolutely new situation! Prior to 1915 or so, all audiences were both interested in what composers of their day were doing, and what composers of earlier generations had written. People were curious about what Brahms's next symphony would sound like, and about Wagner's new opera which had sparked so many rumors - there was a very healthy interest in "Modern Music" of the time.

Compare this to the situation of today, where the audience for classical concerts appears to be dwindling, and the vast majority of that audience would be perfectly happy hearing only music written before they were born. Even among young musicians, in conservatories and on concert stages worldwide, those who frequently bring their talents to modern works (not just Stravinsky and Bartok, but composers who are writing pieces in 2007!) are a minority. An important minority, and much-valued by composers, but a minority.

Here is the point that I'm trying to make: What if there ARE great composers in our midst - AND WE DON'T EVEN KNOW IT? Do we really believe that the canon of classical masterworks extends only up until Copland's Appalachian Spring (1944) and then stops? Have we put the compositional titans on such a high pedestal that we don't realize that if Beethoven were alive in 2007, he would not be writing *those* nine symphonies, but he would be writing nine different symphonies of what we now label "Modern Music" - which the fans of modern music would rave about, but the rest of the public would probably not ever get to hear, because modern music is treated as its own category, separate from "Classical Music" - and performances and recordings of modern music are truly harder to come by.

As a living composer, and a thoroughly dedicated lover of ALL music, I can honestly say that yes, in my opinon, there ARE great composers active today. (To name only a few: Gyorgy Kurtag, Veljo Tormis, Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin.) And I believe that many of them WOULD be enjoyed by a wide audience, even with their modern style and unfamiliar innovations, if that audience simply had the fair opportunity to hear them. Living composers have thousands of dedicated fans, but will probably never reach millions of people - that is, unless something in the the system that we call the classical music business is changed.

And I hope to be part of that change. If you've read my tirade and you think there might be something to it, please let me know - visit my website (www.chappellkingsland.com), read my blog, send me an email. If you disagree with my conclusions and want to debate, I'm happy to listen - any dialogue is welcome, as long as it's sincere.