Hi Jos,
Congratulations on the piece once again. Your willingness to experiment and bring out the best qualities of the instruments is to be commended. We're all students on a journey, improving our craft, and I see those sharing music on this forum as giving us a gift...a very personal one, so even if a piece of music doesn't resonate with someone, it should still be seen as a valuable and heartfelt contribution.
Reading your words on Fiala being a contemporary of Mozart, reminded me of an experiment conducted many years ago by CBC Radio (our national public broadcaster). They suggested a correlation between an audience's willingness to accept a piece of music that they'd never heard as "great" or "poor" simply due to the name recognition of the composer. They essentially said audiences suffer from the "placebo effect" which might explain why it is so difficult for a composer to gain recognition in their lifetime.
They took a large focus group comprised of a cross section of "regular people" and broke the group up in to two listening groups. They played a piece by a contemporary of Mozart (can't recall who, but it wasn't Fiala) and told one group that it was Mozart, and the other group the actual name of the composer, largely unknown. The listeners were asked to fill out a survey with many probing questions about their enjoyment of the music. They did this test with multiple groups and the correlation was that consistently, the group that thought they were listening to Mozart was almost unanimous in their praise of the work, while the other group was almost always much more negative toward the music.
This also reminds me of the time I read that Joshua Bell (I think it was Joshua!) was performing at the Lincoln Center one evening, and during the day played in the subway to passers-by, largely unnoticed and uninterested in his music. These kinds of scenarios illustrate how much external forces influence perception of music, rather than simply the music itself. It is this understanding of human behaviour that allows for instance, reality television producers to successfully cultivate an audience, while classical musicians have struggled for ever to be relevant and meaningful to the mainstream...because said classical artists are always focussing on the music, the technical, the artistic, and not connecting with those that are not able to see their art in the same way.
Actually, to that end, I am reminded of yet one more interesting tidbit. I was listening to a chamber music seminar through Chamber Music America, and the speaker was talking about how orchestras can stay viable in this day and age. Through his discussions with orchestra musicians, he uncovered a regular belief that the musicians felt they could improve their subscriber base by improving the quality of their performance. They argued that the elusive 2% missing from their execution would magically win over hard to please people, and improve their attendance! Can you believe how naive such a belief was? He spent a long time trying to prove how flawed that thinking was, but some of the musicians remained convinced that the quality of the orchestral performance was the only real factor determing the success of their concerts.
Sorry for the great diversion, but after listening to your rendition of the Fiala, it really got me thinking about all these things and I wanted to share and see what you all think.
Dave
