One flaw in Prager’s argument: He’s not a conservative.
It's also worth noting that safety in numbers is also at play. Moldylocks wrote of fear before heading out to Berkeley (where she got clocked) but she was comforted by the (alleged) numbers of equally-deranged secularists (who also got clocked).
I have been to the opera and punk shows. I find the punks to be pretty normal to fairly right-leaning while many opera-goers are pompous beyond belief.
Classical music is a dying genre - it would behoove the orchestra members to grow their audience. Alas, their mistaken quest for a liberal theocracy coupled with their belief that there are more of them than us Deplorables will lead to them living in a van by the river, while rockers at least can make the rent.
If you can’t win on your own merits ..rig the game.
Michael Chwe?
Sounds like a damn dirty foreigner to my ear.
There’s nothing wrong with Santa Monica that couldn’t be cured by a significant tsunami.
Did I live in that end of the country I would make an effort to attend. I would love to see Prager at his best.
Conservatives could not conduct a full orchestra.
A conservative would conduct strings or brass but not the whole.
I learned long ago to lead musical groups with only one hand, since I always wanted to be a semi-conductor.
To be serious, it is one of the ironies of the present age that the bulk of political conservatives are not musical conservatives. This is in large part because of the massive shift from piano/orchestra based to guitar/band based music beginning in the 1950s.
Concert orchestras now serve two functions. One is as musical museums, performing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, the same way art museums display Rubens, Rembrandt, Ingres, and Degas. The other is as performers of avant-garde compositions only in vogue with the cognoscenti, the same way art museums display Duchamp, Pollock, Ofili, and Serrano. The problem with the latter is that there aren’t enough cognoscenti to fund avant-garde music, and this is solved by government money, either direct through grants or indirect through university positions. The problem with the former is that there are enough alternatives to hearing classical music (everything from radio to Youtube) so that the concert is no longer the special experience it once was, and moreover there is no classical music equivalent to the hi-tech, pyrotechnic, choreographed popular music concert to draw in people who care little about the music and much about the wild-and-crazy experience. The difficulty here is that while art museums do not have to pay their paintings to display, orchestra have to pay their musicians to perform, so cash flow is a perpetual issue with orchestras.
I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of the LA symphony orchestra members may be liberals-by-default (it IS California), but they don’t care whether Prager is conducting a summer concert, especially since they can probably play Haydn’s 51st in their sleep. The academics who happen to be orchestra members are the ideologues, and like most liberal ideologues they love mucking it up for the rest of us.
Herbert von Karajan
I’m listening to Dennis right now. He hopes to have as a show guest today, one of the people who want him banned from the orchestra.
Dennis is talking to Andrew Apter right now.