Programming 20th/21st century music

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I'm curious to see how much is programmed in other orchestras/ensembles from the places everyone else is from. I've been wondering what would be disproportionate, what your estimates would be, and other things like that. I just looked through the list of composers featured in the current Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert season and just about 55.4% of composers fall into the 20th/21st century category, not including the one or two new commissions of young local composers to be featured in the upcoming new music festival.

I'm going to have a look at other orchestras in my area to see how they compare.

[jochanaan]

I just glanced at the Colorado Symphony schedule for the rest of this season. There does seem to be a fair lot of 20th-century music on the programs, but most of it is the usual suspects of Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein and Rachmaninoff. The most recent piece I found is Richard Danielpour's Celestial Night from the late 1990s, apparently a worthy piece with some minimalist tendencies. 

[some guy]

Well, if we're talking the music itself, it's being played all the time in all cities, just not at symphony hall.

As jochanaan points out, symphonies play "the usual suspects" if they play anything. New pieces by Lachenmann, say, are not played, not in the US, anyway. New pieces by Gibello and Noetinger and Ferreyra and Mandolini and Avram and Boyd and Null and Kasem, for example, aren't for orchestra.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Well, if we're talking the music itself, it's being played all the time in all cities, just not at symphony hall.

As jochanaan points out, symphonies play "the usual suspects" if they play anything. New pieces by Lachenmann, say, are not played, not in the US, anyway. New pieces by Gibello and Noetinger and Ferreyra and Mandolini and Avram and Boyd and Null and Kasem, for example, aren't for orchestra.

Well this goes without saying though doesn't it? The huge variety of acoustic and electronic mediums a composer can work with, the many different events new music would be written for etc. would always result in a huge amount of new music being performed all the time if one knows where to look. Orchestral music is just one branch of music, and it's one which I am currently interested in as a composition student because of my own recent experiences, and hence the reason why I was compelled to create this thread.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I complain about Muti's play-it-safe programming with the CSO, but he's just one conductor and only here for part of the year. Other CSO conductors, as well as other ensembles in the Chicago area, play enough modern/unusual material to keep me happy.

In the last couple of years I've heard major works by Carter, Adams, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Lindberg, Webern, Berg, Schuman, Ives, Martinu and a few others, not to mention the usual "traditionalist" 20th c. composers (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Nielsen). I've also missed performances of major works by Stockhausen, Berio and a number of others. If I were more centrally located, and had endless amounts of money and time, I could probably spend most of my time going to such concerts. The music gets played, you just have to know where to look.

[Gurn Blanston]

Well, there is always this;