The Sunday Times, 30 December 1962

Dissatisfaction with the repetitious nature of our concert programmes has been frequently expressed of late by critics and other writers in the Press. To these, Mr T. E. Bean, the General Manager of the Royal Festival Hall [1951–65] has recently replied in an interesting and spirited article giving facts and statistics concerning the effect of programmes on concert attendance. He shows that while the largest audiences are still drawn by programmes containing only frequently performed works, others which include one less familiar, or even one contemporary piece, have been better attended in the last year. This is good news, but the fact remains that the proportion of contemporary works in public concerts is still lamentably low.

It is hardly fair to lay the whole blame for this upon concert promoters and managers whose business is to fill the hall. Since the majority of concertgoers show a marked reluctance to attend performances of new or modern music, they themselves are in some measure responsible, for it is largely their refusal to make the effort of getting to know the unfamiliar, and their lack of any desire to savour a new musical experience that result in its exclusion from most programmes.

This has surely not always been so; an eighteenth-century audience, or even one of a hundred years ago expected to hear, and did hear, the music of its time; its reactions may have been variable, but it did not rely exclusively on music of the past.