What's Being Played

The Baltimore Symphony had an interesting idea: to embed a journalist with the orchestra who would write, not just about what was going on in their orchestra, but in classical music generally. As a big part of the problem these days is with the audience's unfamiliarity with classical music, this seems like a great idea. Here is the link. One of the things the reporter, Ricky O'Bannon, did was to compile some statistics for Baltimore and a lot of other American orchestras about what was being played. Here is the summary. One thing that I found interesting is that there is more music by living (and women) composers played than you might think. Not a huge amount, but more than you might think. Here are the top pieces played, in order. Some surprising things on that list. Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition is the most popular piece after the Messiah? Holy cow! Lots of Beethoven, sure, but the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 beat out each and every Mozart piano concerto? I wonder if this kind of tabulating simply disfavors a composer who wrote twenty great piano concertos, any single one of which is performed less than, say, the Brahms? There is no Mozart at all on this list, but he comes as the second most-performed composer on the other list. He just wrote too many great pieces, obviously.

A composer like Mussorgsky, who wrote a few fine pieces, but only one that has become really popular and famous, has, not only statistically, but also in public perception, a prominence that is really out of proportion to his real musical significance. Looking at the lists, you can see that composers like Mozart, who certainly get the performances, are probably still underrated in the public mind compared to composers who did not write hundreds upon hundreds of masterpieces, but just one or two. And poor Haydn, who also wrote hundreds of masterpieces, is even more ignored!

The most-performed living composers is an interesting list. Extracting from the graphic, they are:

1. John Adams
2. Mason Bates
3. Jennifer Higdon
4. Christopher Rouse
5. Esa-Pekka Salonen
6. Thomas Adès

I wonder why they only chose the top 6? In any case, the second on the list, Mason Bates, I don't think I have even heard of before. He is young, in his early 30s, and currently composer in residence with the Chicago Symphony. Checking around, I see that I have heard him before--he contributed a short piece to Hilary Hahn's encore album.

Let's see what orchestral music of his we can find on YouTube. The only one I can find is the orchestral suite "The B-Sides", here performed by The Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Octavio Mas-Arocas: