The Carmel Bach Festival is an incredible enterprise. It has lots of volunteers and much of its revenue comes from donations. It is subsidized by the city and the county to some small extent and yet it charges for tickets at about the same rate as Garth Brooks. In 22 days they put on more than 120 events.

We went to a performance of the Brandenburg Concertos which was excellent. It was made even better by a lecture we attended before the concert. In the lecture David Gordon talked for an hour about Bach, his era and how the concertos came to be. We wanted to learn more. And then it was upstairs to the concert

All of the musicians were excellent but the standout to me was Edwin Huizinga, a great big guy who played a beautiful violin.

The concert and its structure made me ask a big question. Why is it that older people who like classical music won’t pay for it directly, while Garth Brooks fans who have much less money on average will attend his concerts in such numbers that they can pay everyone involved plenty of money?  It appears that music fans are voting with their dollars for the new music over the old.  Since the invention of the printing press almost no one attneds the recitation of epic poems anymore.  Change is.