Thus, excellent movies that make little money at the box office fail to become famous; and excellent composers who produce work primarily for chamber ensembles seldom become household names in America.

A useful metric for a composer’s fame involves whore-hours. High-end prostitutes today apparently make somewhere in the range of three thousand dollars per hour: therefore, three thousand dollars equals one whore-hour. A composer will inevitably become famous if hi/r music requires many whore-hours to perform, while a composer whose works require nearly zero whore-hours to perform gets showered with acid contempt and relegated to the status of an unperson. A modern orchestra typically costs around $50,000 to rehearse a new piece, so that’s 16 2/3 whore-hours. By contrast, a string quartet costs only a fraction of a single whore-hour to rehearse, so string quartets fail to impress anyone, while the sight of big orchestra sends a thrill through every American who can make change and count up all those hundred-dollar bills in his mind that the orchestra must represent.

Current movies typically cost many thousands of whore-hours to produce, and this makes them hugely important in American culture. A orchestra may cost a couple of thousand whore-hours for its entire concert season: still impressive to your average Americano, but much less so than a movie. String quartets cost nearly zero whore-hours, and thus make no mark on the popular consciousness.

Remember: to the Americano, nothing matters but hard cash. Children, religion, aesthetics, architecture, all pale into insignificance before the majestic splendor of Big Money. When an Americano catches a glimpse of a billionaire, even from a distance, he sinks to his knees in spontaneous adoration like a peasant witnessing a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes–because a billion dollars represents millions of whore-hours.. But a composer who produces pieces of music for chamber ensembles utterly fails to incandesce with the unearthly radiance of Big Money…and consequently the Americano fails to notice such a nonentity.

Erik Satie understood this, and this explains his 4 December 1924 performance of Relache: “for their curtain call Satie and Picabia drove onstage in a tiny 5CV Citroen car, resplendent in jewels and furs.”

If Ben Johnston arrived for each concert of his music in a limo surrounded by high-end hookers sporting expensive furs and if he wore 24 carat gold bling around his neck reading JI IS THE BEST TUNING, Johnston would today be more famous than John Coolidge Adams and more revered than Elliott Carter.