It is becoming clear to me that new classical music is doomed upon conception.
Berlin, for me, is a metaphor for cutting-edge arts. A city filled with great writers, artists, intellectuals, and composers.
But the mainstream cultural musical institutions of Europe are an insult and embarrassment to these incredible artists. These institutions recreate and sell European musical history to wealthy tourists while choking the voices of these contemporary artists. Every city I visit seems to have the same repertoire of musical works and operas in their concert halls. The only thing worse is in the USA as we sell not our own musical history but imported history, as if we must lack self-esteem with our own musical arts.
In all areas of the arts, painting, sculpture, literature, film, and architecture, there is a genuine inquisitive thirst for what is going on now. Classical music is the only genre I know that refuses to join the present with the rest of the world. What if we asked modern painters in the world to copy 16th-century masters all day? How creative would that be for them? But commerce dictates, and that is how wealthy patrons want the classical world to stay. Good or bad orchestras are now just only aural museums.
It's absurd for any critic that is truly a person of arts and letters to partake in writing and perpetuating the status quo. The institutions will kill off the very thing that any business, art, or genre needs to survive—innovation
