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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.

I tend to listen to XM Underground Garage because that is the ONLY place where I've heard new AND compelling music. Yes, there is no classical (nor jazz) but at least I have a fighting chance of hearing something other than Stairway or Foo Fighters.

I am willing to take a chance and listen to new bands. As for avant-garde music I love Zappa and am willing to listen to something unusual. The fact of the matter is, there aren't many outlets for that product outside of college radio. The other fact is, there is a LOT of bad music out there.

If we froze symphonic music in 1910, we'd have missed the Rite of Spring - which is an AWESOME piece. Thus, I want my Stravinsky AND new Wagner. Nonetheless, as this excellent Slate article documents, classical music is in a death spiral. Liberal purges will only accelerate the process.

Oh, and semi-conductor....

Pardon me for coming late to this discussion but I have a few thoughts on the matter.

In my humble opinion, good, if not great orchestral music is entering a golden age due to the ability of just about anybody who has the desire to make classical style orchestral music thanks to having access to the necessary tools of music production via the PC. I myself have whole sampled orchestras at my disposal along with the ability to write musical scores that these samplers can play and record and mix my work on a very capable multitrack digital recording studio.

In the past only a small percentage of musicians were able to take advantage of such a wealth of technologies due to the extremely high cost of studio time and access. Few musicians who were not stars had home studios.

Classical music also requires a massive investment of time and effort to become proficient enough to play as a professional and the job openings are minuscule compared to other genres. Additionally, classical music stations on the radio have always been rare so a small proportion of the population was exposed to it.

Conversely, popular music is everywhere on the radio and it didn't take much to get experience playing in a garage band or a local bar, the end result being that a large percentage of folks with musical talent wound up going down a different path than the classically trained musician.

Over the last decades classical music has split into the modern experimental form but the more melodic branch which borrows heavily from the romantic era has morphed into orchestral music, a musical form using traditional instruments in pieces that depart from traditional structure, short pieces that typically run from four to ten or so minutes long as well as film music. In fact I think you will find that yesterday's great composers have become today's film soundtrack composers, John Williams and Hans Zimmer amongst others.

In addition, the ability to express oneself through the home studio allows total amateurs to try their hand at composition, and, I myself have managed to produce some listenable orchestral snippets. Youtube has become the distribution channel for the amateur composer and allowed many amateurs to monetize their work.

Google Epic Orchestral music and you will find a wealth of talent on Youtube.