I just puked

The rewards (monetary and otherwise) for success can be enormous in American culture. To say it's disproportionate can start that slide down the proverbial slippery slope. 99.99% of the world's population would argue that the audio systems of Audiogon members are "disproportionate" and reflect the excesses of people with way too much money for their own good. Imagine if the majority of people in the world restricted us few audiophiles to Bose Waves and made us donate our disproportionate excess to some worthwhile charity like clean drinking water in the sub-Saharan or eliminating AIDs in southeast Asia? The world would be more proportionate (and healthier), but would it really be more fair. Free choice can be a double sided sword, but it's alternatives are far worst.

Onhwy61: I disagree concerning that A'goners spend to much money or a disproportionate amount on audio equipment. In fact we spend too little. A'goners are the last remnants of the cultural elite. We need to hone our skills as the last outpost in this fast becoming vast wasteland of culture. Hegel once pondered whether high art was historically conditioned. That is in only in a particular time in a particular place, and perhaps for only a short time frame, high art would be nurtured and flower only to fade away like all ideas and civilizations. High Art at one time had something to say about the condition of man or mankind. Beethoven's 9th Symphony, definitively and decisively made a statement about the then curent condition that man/mankind was in. The music communicated. After Mahler's titanic symphonies
and Wagner's music dramas, music was frustrating to everyone, composers, audiences, critics. In a way Beethoven legacy haunted all composers: Schubert envied him so much that he was buried nesxt to him. Wagner could not write a symphony because the 9th said it all. The symphonic form was used up, Mahler just made it more titanic and personal at the same time. Schoenberg came along saw the mess that music was in. The diatonic scales had been corrupted, everthing was chromatically disfunctional. He set it straight by going to absolute atonality ( Schoenberg prefered pantonal, then he developed the 12 tone system, almost perfected by Webern). Of course, some of the astute composers loved it, but it surely lost its audience. The music no longer communicated to the masses, or to society. So in some ways, this situation, created "new music". The composer was no longer constrained, to concern itself with the masses, the high art of music could become autonomous, truly absolute music. It no longer became consumable art, it no longer had to have one eye on the consumption by the masses. It freed it self. But the cost was high, mass culture assumed the mantle of all culture not because high culture had anything to say, but said it in a very negative way, it was longer a utopian future, like Beethoven's 9th, but a more profund inward, almost psychologically focused aesthetic. ( it is interesting that in Vienna in the 1920s you had both Schoenberg and Freud, meeting in coffeehouses, you wonder what they talked about!) Is there high art now? YES! It is there if you want it, it is not hard to find. It is not on the Billboard's TOP 200 of clssical music, but it is there. So is it selfish to want to have the "best" audio equipment? The real question for you, is high culture to be stamped out, and trampled upon by the culture industry. Is it not worth saving too. If there is no higher ground to take, or a higher cultured life to save or be a part of then what is the worth of that charity if the very civilization
and culture you cherish is polluted, diluted and destroyed?

Shubertmaniac, there is another dynamic at work here which you're not giving credit to. In the 20th century, for the first time ever, music become recordable. This probably CREATED 'classical music'. That is, in previous times, people concerned themselves almost entirely with the music of their own day, and there was a demand for new composition. Remember that Bach was already considered archaic by the time his sons were writing, and although later composers acknowledged the intellectual contributions of their forebears, the music actually heard was mainly that of the present, not the past.

Since recording began, we have certainly been more backwards-looking than forwards-looking. One reason, for the slowdown of interest in classical music is that it has, I think, (gulp) become a little boring. How many times can you worry about rerecording and reinterpreting the same work instead of getting on with something new.

To an extent, this is the collective fault of recordability, which inhibits new artists and new music from exposure, which as you say, has a money-basis. Look at the RIAA, which is backed into a corner at present trying to uphold what has developed for the past 60 years.

What is now going on is a backlash against the bind we've been in, and music seems about to break out again in different forms. The internet, downloadability of the works of small groups without recording contracts, the reemergence of live performance over recording - these may all change the nature of music again, and with it, allow a new cycle of high art music.

Music is never stagnant and high culture doesn't disappear - it just keeps changing forms.

Shubertmaniac, I think you misread or misunderstood my earlier post. I cherish and respect an individual's right to make their own choices, but I also understand that even the smallest individual choice has the potential for vast societal wide impact.

Flex: Beethoven was one of the first to look back on the past. He read the scores of JS Bach. I will accord you the fact that the phonograph is one of the compelling reasons for the downfall of classical music. However,the mass media led it down the golden path of monopoly capitalism. It turned the high art of music from a user value into a consumptive exhange value. Only modern classical art music is the only viable alternative to the stagnant repetitive classical music environment which pervades now. How many
Mahler cycles do we need? How many Beethoven cycles can you endure? The culture industry, and its sidekicks, mass media and advertising make sure there are enough. However I must admit, classical music sales are < 3% of music sales. And even of that 3%, 97% retreaded warhorses. But as Isaid above there is an alternative to the tired warhorses, there is modern music. I am talking about Schnittke, Ligeti, Berio, Penderecki,Rihm, Xenakis. Their music is not boring, it is extremely engaging, it is freely atonal, though as Schnittke once said about one of his works which did have a tonal center: I guess I can write in "the old style" if it suits my purpose.

Perhaps the internet will emerge as the forum and stage for new forms of music, however monopoly capitalism may have the last word. Any way capitalism can make a buck it will do it, culture or no culture, its the nature of the beast, like a weed it grows wherever it can.