Perhaps Gunther Schuller was projecting his own situation, after all, the CIA’s propping up of all sorts of modern artists and composers, with the desire to show off the USA’s artistic superiority,has been fairly well documented.

Those remarks by Schuller are totally off-base. If you trace Stockhausen’s successive falling-outs with Darmstadt, UE, DG, the Musikhochschule in Cologne (where political pressure essentially forced him to give up his professorship), the steady decline in support at the WDR studio, and a series of cancellations of planned performances that would have crushed most of us, then note how he had to replace each institutional setting with his own resources, essentially forming a cottage industry around his own music, teaching it, publishing it, recording it, performing it, and archiving all of the activities. The net costs to Stockhausen of buying back his score and recording catalogues surely offset any income he once may have derived from them.

There is a steady trope about how much better the Europeans (and the Germans in particular) have it with the assumption that publishing and commissioning were functioning more or less as they had in the 19th century. It’s far from the case, and at best only somewhat true even for composers who produce work in the most traditional formats (Henze, for example). The three chief sources of support for new music here have essentially dried up — the radio stations, GEMA, and the German Music Council. And Germany does not have several hundred professorships in composition to make up for this, as in the US, but perhaps only 40-50. And the teaching situations here are far from comparable with the States, rarely, for example, does a Musikhochschule have an auditorium as good as one found in a typical Jr. College in the US! When the institutions here function, they can do so superbly, for example the Tonmeister tradition of recording, but this comes at great cost and is ever rarer. So the next time someone puts on the poor mouth about US versus Europe (and the above, with Germany, illustrates only the best situation, with most countries performing at a far lower level of support), take it with some salt.