It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
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"It is a sign of cultural defeat when you have to keep on assuring your audience that what they are listening to is wonderful."
Amen. In recent years, CBC Radio 2 (in Canada) increasingly exhibits the same tendency. They've pretty well lost my wife and I (and our daughter is probably more negative than we are).
Yet the Spectator's Charles Moore describes himself as "a musical ignoramus" and thinks "Radio 3 is becoming stupid".
The classical stations have lost knowledgable listeners like you and me. But they are not attracting new listeners, as is confirmed by RAJAR data here in the UK.
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2011/10/bbc-shows-world-how-not-to-do-classical.html
Yet still the dumbing out continues....