From arts news reports of the last couple weeks come these tidbits of pressing importance:

1. The Atlanta Opera recently commissioned a Gallup poll about clientele preferences and got some rather surprising results. Drive time from home to venue was a factor, yet some respondents were angry about Atlanta Opera’s recently announced move from midtown to the suburbs. This seems to indicate a split between those who find an urban location central to the opera‑going experience, and those who want the convenience of less drive time.

Here’s the real shocker: The stature of the singers at the opera counted less–far less–than the availability of good restaurants. Not only did the names of major singers such as Deborah Voigt mean nothing to the vast majority of those polled, even the names of singers who had recently appeared with the company were not recognized.

You wonder if this is true for Phoenix, and for that matter for any American city outside the great opera centers–New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Phoenix, like Atlanta, doesn’t exactly boast a high number of opera buffs who carry on about their Maria Callas collection. It’s safer to say that the average person going to an Arizona Opera production just wants to see (and hear) what all the fuss is about, what these Verdi and Mozart guys sound like, and if the tenors really do sing that high. And before, or afterward, they’d like some nice pasta primavera or a grilled seabass. (Note to downtown Phoenix restaurants: You want to make some bucks? Stay open after 10 p.m., for crying out loud.)

2. The director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, reprinted thinly disguised versions of Austen’s novels, including the perennial “Pride and Prejudice,” and submitted them to 18 different UK book publishers. The result: 18 rejections. Writing in London newspaper The Independent, publisher Andrew Franklin frankly stated the reason. Was it the changing taste of the reading public? Nope. “Publishers turn down masterpieces every day,” Franklin admitted. Why? Because there are just too many submissions for readers at the various publishing houses to deal with. Some 200,000 books are published every year, Franklin stated, and for every one of those, “20 to 30 others” are rejected.

“It’s a numbers game,” he concluded.

“No one can be surprised to learn that not every manuscript gets the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.”

In other words, getting published is largely a matter of luck.

I can attest that; in the much smaller world of symphonic composition, a very similar phenomenon holds sway. If you were to list the most performed living composers, you would be shocked–as I was, when a friend in this dubious “business” informed me–that more than half of them are supported by seven‑figure trust funds. To be a composer takes such an enormous amount of time for such little financial reward, that to be successful heavily favors the wealthy. After all, they can spend all their time soliciting publishers and performers, and if they fail, what’s the difference? They don’t have to go back to their day jobs–they don’t have any!

In other words, the new books and the new classical compositions that reach your eyes and ears have at least as much to do with the sheer good fortune of being born to wealth and/or the dumb luck of having your manuscript one of the few that actually gets read.

I ask you: Is this way to run a culture? If practicing medicine was a profession available only to those born rich or those whose applications just happened to be picked up from among the thousands otherwise discarded unread, wouldn’t medicine suffer? How can we care so little for culture as to leave it to anyone but the most talented, whatever their bank account or luck quotient?

3. The New York Philharmonic has named Alan Gilbert, 40, to the position of music director, commencing in 2009. He is the first New York‑born conductor named to the post, and the second youngest. (The youngest was also the first American‑born: Leonard Bernstein, back in 1958.) This follows a trend actually anticipated by The Phoenix Symphony in 2003, when it named Michael Christie, then barely 30, as its music director. “Get ‘em young” is the new cry, just as “Get me a European geezer” was the cry a decade or so ago. These things come in waves, determined by powers unseen to us within the American Symphony Orchestra League.

And by the way, the league, in order to stop the joking about its unfortunate acronym–ASOL–will change its name this fall to The League of American Orchestras.