Can a Conservative Conduct an Orchestra?

Townhall.com ^ | August 1, 2017 | Dennis Prager

[nickedknack]

One flaw in Prager’s argument: He’s not a conservative.

[foreverfree]

On what grounds?

ff

[DoodleBob]

As noted elsewhere, Liberals have made politics their religion...What they really want is liberal Sharia law, a secular theocracy....for them, politics is the means to secular salvation. The minimum wage, gender equality, nationalized health care, and global warming—whatever their practical virtues—are not just expedient policy prescriptions. They are essential aspects of the liberal fatwa...Question them and you are not just wrong—you are a heretic.

It's also worth noting that safety in numbers is also at play. Moldylocks wrote of fear before heading out to Berkeley (where she got clocked) but she was comforted by the (alleged) numbers of equally-deranged secularists (who also got clocked).

I have been to the opera and punk shows. I find the punks to be pretty normal to fairly right-leaning while many opera-goers are pompous beyond belief.

Classical music is a dying genre - it would behoove the orchestra members to grow their audience. Alas, their mistaken quest for a liberal theocracy coupled with their belief that there are more of them than us Deplorables will lead to them living in a van by the river, while rockers at least can make the rent.

[Ann Archy]

OMG....idiocy.

[Truth29]

This country is headed for a divorce. The only question is how many heads have to be be spit to restore sanity or die on the battlefield as the US break-up.

[Kaslin]

That is your opinion, noobie, to which you certainly are entitled

He's probably more a conservative than you are.

[safeasthebanks]

Kiss off.

[Leep]

If you can’t win on your own merits ..rig the game.

[T-Bone Texan]

Michael Chwe?

Sounds like a damn dirty foreigner to my ear.

[cymbeline]

Artists and entertainers are different from the rest of us. Don’t forget that.

[reg45]

There’s nothing wrong with Santa Monica that couldn’t be cured by a significant tsunami.

[arthurus]

Did I live in that end of the country I would make an effort to attend. I would love to see Prager at his best.

[bert]

Conservatives could not conduct a full orchestra.

A conservative would conduct strings or brass but not the whole.

[onedoug]

Defend your statement. Or are you just a flamer?

[certrtwngnut]

You are right. From what I have seen and heard from Mr. Prager he is 90% conservative. Which is a heckuva lot better than a lot of so called conservatives. I consider noobies opinion null and void. But I am happy that he can still have his opinion.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

Or are you just a flamer?

Just a flamer, big boy. But that doesn't mean he isn't nice!

[onedoug]

I wouldn’t just throw out such a line without the will to back it up.

Nice, eh? To you it seems.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

I’m not too sure what you’re on about, but I suspect you have a tin ear for sarcasm.

[chajin]

I learned long ago to lead musical groups with only one hand, since I always wanted to be a semi-conductor.

To be serious, it is one of the ironies of the present age that the bulk of political conservatives are not musical conservatives. This is in large part because of the massive shift from piano/orchestra based to guitar/band based music beginning in the 1950s.

Concert orchestras now serve two functions. One is as musical museums, performing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, the same way art museums display Rubens, Rembrandt, Ingres, and Degas. The other is as performers of avant-garde compositions only in vogue with the cognoscenti, the same way art museums display Duchamp, Pollock, Ofili, and Serrano. The problem with the latter is that there aren’t enough cognoscenti to fund avant-garde music, and this is solved by government money, either direct through grants or indirect through university positions. The problem with the former is that there are enough alternatives to hearing classical music (everything from radio to Youtube) so that the concert is no longer the special experience it once was, and moreover there is no classical music equivalent to the hi-tech, pyrotechnic, choreographed popular music concert to draw in people who care little about the music and much about the wild-and-crazy experience. The difficulty here is that while art museums do not have to pay their paintings to display, orchestra have to pay their musicians to perform, so cash flow is a perpetual issue with orchestras.

I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of the LA symphony orchestra members may be liberals-by-default (it IS California), but they don’t care whether Prager is conducting a summer concert, especially since they can probably play Haydn’s 51st in their sleep. The academics who happen to be orchestra members are the ideologues, and like most liberal ideologues they love mucking it up for the rest of us.