I have first-hand experience in this, as for some years I was a producer at our national classical radio. It is tough for me to have an -as much as possible- objective take on this, as the target audience is not really fellow practitioners, but conservative concert-goers. I know, for the calls I answered during the season of one of my broadcasts (the one with the largest audience - 2 hours daily prime time live programme), were over 90% from lay people. I wouldn't play anything by, say Cowell (let alone Stockhausen) during that programme.
On the other hand, many local performers and composers flooded us producers with their CDs, hoping we would include them in our broadcasts. Some of the composers' CDs were digitally realised, and I never played any of them for two reasons: a) I thought the compositions did not merit airing, and b) The instrumental/chamber/orchestral simulations were frankly rank... Thinking back though, I think I played some of Guy Bacos' Christmas piano music some Decembers ago. Piano as a percussion instrument is not the hardest to simulate digitally, Guy does a great job of this, he writes professionally for that instrument (or any other), and I loved his variations. Ah! I just remembered, I played Andy Blainey's incredible rendition of Jeux des Vagues once, just to see whether anybody listening would actually realise it was not an orchestra they were hearing. Nobody called claiming so, or enquired about it. Come to think of it, I may have played one or two of Bill's songs - I can't be sure, too many years ago...
So having said that, and speaking in my capacity as a radio producer, I would be open to including sampled performances in my broadcasts, so long as they were of a certain standard of realism and above. Perhaps you can use me as an example Jasen (after all I did work for the equivalent of BBC3 in Greece - not just some local station, we transmitted nationally), and renew your petition to be programmed and, why not, interviewed.
Bill: You are right of course; I should not just target this film-muzak competition. As a 'serious'-music composer I am very familiar with the industrially cloned free-atonal works that are submitted by the thousands/year in 'serious' competitions. There is no more variation there than I claimed for that competition in the first post. Same complexity-without-a-cause, same extremity of ranges, same boring "extended" instrumental techniques (without a cause again). They too actually believe they are expressing themselves, when it is impossible to find one bar -not one- where that is evident. The "winners" of these get council grants, university appointments, and professional performances. And here I am complaining about some film-muzak mouse-riding, inspiration-patches layering amateurs...
