This was written by a modern poet, but seems to draw on such ancient and rich ideas of the cosmos that I imagined these truths to already have been uttered by some older poet, famous or forgotten-- I still think this is the case, though I wouldn't know how to begin looking for him.

THE BIRTH OF LANGUAGE
C.S. Lewis

How near his sire's careering fires
Must Mercury the planet run;
What wave of heat must lave and beat
That shining suburb of the Sun

Whose burning flings supernal things
Like spindrift from his stormy crown;
He throws and shakes in rosy flakes
Intelligible virtues down,

And landing there, the candent air
A transformation on them brings,
Makes each a god of speech with rod
Enwreathed and sandals fledged with wings.

Where thick with notes of liquid throats
The forest melody leaps and runs
Till night lets robe the lightless globe
With darkness and with distant suns.

Awake they spring and shake the wing;
And on the trees whose trunks are flames
They find like fruit (with rind and root
And fronds of fire) their proper names.

They taste. They burn with haste. They churn
With upright plumes the sky's abyss;
Far, far below, the arbours glow
Where once they felt Mercurial bliss.

They ache and freeze through vacant seas
Of night. Their nimbleness and youth
Turns lean and frore; their meaning more,
Their being less. Fact shrinks to truth.

They reach this Earth. There each has birth
Miraculous, a word made breath,
Lucid and small for use in all
Man's daily needs; but dry like death.

So dim below these symbols show,
Bony and abstract every one.
Yet if true verse but lift the curse,
They feel in dreams their native Sun.

Increasingly, the traditional model of funding classical music through the philanthropy of little old ladies is proving unsustainable. As these aging donors die off they are not being replaced because younger philanthropists have many more charitable options than existed 50 years ago and are more likely to donate to those causes they find most interesting. If we don't make classical music more interesting to younger generations it will no longer be able to fund its own existence. One of the ways that we can continue to engage younger audiences is through the programming of works that exhibit some relevance to modern experience. In his day Bach didn't have to compete with Jimi Hendrix, Metallica, Green Day, what have you, but in the present day he must! So, if we are to maintain the "classical" music idiom as a museum of the common practice music we must subsidize Mozart through the programming of modern music. True, this will usually mean playing a pops concert, but wouldn't you rather challenge yourself and your listeners by giving them something substantive, current, relevant, interesting and engaging? Personally, I would rather spend my time on Xenakis than on Hoagie Carmichael--but that's just me.

You, as a performer, have a responsibility to educate your audience. They aren't going to demand what they do not know, but when you open their eyes to something new they will remember it. The more we can impact audiences in new ways, the more likely they are to support us. We need to stop seeing modern music as a nuisance and begin seeing it as a path to our continued relevance and job security!

1. The claim that "new" music cannot be learned because so much time is invested in learning and preparing music that "audiences want to hear" is problematic for a few reasons. It assumes too many things about who audiences are. I am frequently part of an audience, and while I do enjoy hearing Beethoven and Schubert, I would love to hear some of the quartets from this course (not to mention other recent compositions) live. Two recent events on this campus, the Jack Quartet's performance of Xenakis's Tetras and Noriko Kawai's premiere of James Dillon's Book of Elements stand out as examples that performances of new music can and do draw interested listeners.

2. Audiences can change. Just because the current system appears to place a lot of power in the hands of orchestra subscription members (to pick one venue) does not mean that those people are limited to enjoying Mozart and Brahms. Artistic directors need to be willing and able to program new works, and performers need to be willing and able to perform them. To step briefly on my own little soap box, here, music criticism and analysis can help enable the average audience member to better understand the aesthetic and ideological position taken in a new work, possibly helping to expand their view of music. There has never been anything wrong with being able to appreciate more music.

3. Audiences will change. Eventually, a new generation will take over the orchestra subscription reins (if that system remains the dominant one, that is), and this generation will have vastly different life experiences and musical tastes than the one before. As this change occurs, orchestras will have to adapt to maintain the support and interest of their audience, without (again) falling into the trap of what they believe their audience wants to hear.

It has come to my attention that there are a good number of string players in this class--and rightly so given its topic matter--so I primarily pose this question to them, but others may feel free to respond.

In my nearly 5 years at this university I have noticed that String Quartets do not seem to exist. "What?", you may say, "I heard one while walking down the hall the other day," and I suppose that you would be right. Certainly, a quartet's worth of string players do, on occasion, pool their efforts to work up some piece from the repertoire. However, these ensembles are usually short-lived projects assembled for the purpose of a recital and rarely last for more than a semester or two. I know of only a few that have been around long enough to begin to mature as an ensemble to the point that they might try to tackle some of the repertoire addressed in this class. I find this curious lack of regular string quartets puzzling given the talent that seems to be running around this place and I'm left wondering why anybody would pass up the fun of playing in a quartet.

You see, before I began my graduate studies I had a decade-long performing career with several ensembles. One of these was a quartet that met for 5-10 hours a week for four years. In that time we built the familiarity and instinctual connection that can only come from years of contact with the same personalities. We worked up an extensive repertoire, played festivals, won awards, etc. but most importantly, we had a lot of fun surveying the landscape of pieces written for the idiom. Nobody made us do it; we did it because we loved it.

Maybe I've gotten it wrong and Ferguson hall is crawling with mature string quartets who have elicit copies of keys to the building and get together in the middle of the night to read down Radelescu. I hope they are out there. But I'm often here into the wee hours and I have yet to find them. I guess I'm looking for the answers to the following questions:

1) What is keeping our string players from forming quartets?
2) When quartets do form, why do they dissolve so quickly?

Thanks in advance. This question has been bugging me for years.

Jeremy Wagner