Dumbing Down, Or Just Sparing The Audience?

It would be easy to blast the Toronto Symphony for its decision to segregate all the new music it will play this year into a few specialty concerts, rather than to intersperse it within its programming of classical warhorses. But “suppose the mainstream classical audience and the new music audience just aren’t the same people. Then new music might do better by itself, where it could draw the audience that wanted it… Does anyone actually know how many people in the orchestra audience like to hear new music? Some orchestra professionals I know, perhaps with better data than I have, think the number is very, very small.”