The State of Classical Music

Is concert music dead or dying out, or has it settled into its own little corner of the musical world where it thrives with an, albeit tiny, audience? Is its audience much bigger than we realize, do we even need to grow it? Is the "silver-headed crowd" really the only crowd classical music attracts?

There seems to be this never-ending conversation about the "dying out" of classical music, so what can be done about it? What, as composers, can we do to attract more people and do you agree with the approach of Wordless Music (or similar things -- So Percussion working with Bjork and Matmos, for example, or Andrea Bocelli's and Rene Flemming's "crossover" work) or performing concert music in clubs as a way of trying to attract younger and different audiences?

And, in today's day and age, what is our role as artists? If classical music has such a small following (as is alleged), and "new music" even smaller, how is what we do relevant to the more severe global issues of the day? How does what we do impact the world we live in? What is our purpose as composers? Does "pop" music address these problems better than concert music (or at least speak to it's listeners more directly)? How does music education play a factor into all of this?

I've posted some links that are relevant to some degree. Do you agree with Bernard Holland or Leon Botstein, "that composers, not listeners, are the servants" or that "we need to rescue classical music from its own defenders"? Do you think writers like Alex Ross (who's 2007 book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century has sold around 200,000 copies world-wide and was a NYTimes Bestseller) are helping attract new audiences -- I'm pretty sure those 200,000+ people are not all avid readers of The New Yorker, though they may all be classical musicians.

I think that as composers and musicians this is probably one of the most important issues that we face.

Also, as a side question, how many of you keep a finger on the pulse of the music world by regularly reading Journals, NYTimes Arts section, NewMusicBox.org, Sequenza 21, etc.? Do you think it's important to be "in the know" in terms of current advancements in theory, analysis, performance, and compositional trends? As well, how important is the role of the musicologist, critic, etc. in terms of what we do as composers and in terms of the musical world at large?

From http://bigthink.com/ideas/20556:

Question: What is the future of classical music?

Leon Botstein: The audience is not dying out. I think the audience is very hard to replace because it’s always been older. This has always been an older person’s entertainment, as far as concert-going is concerned. And so what we need to do is find a way to capture the interest of people in their late 20s and their 30s, early 40s, who’ve never been at a classical music concert—or once when they were children. So you have to re-introduce them. It’s similar to re-introducing a child to vegetables they hated when they were children. So we’re not dealing with a group of people who learned to play an instrument all through childhood the way I did or my grandparents and parents’ generation. And then decide to become professionals.

So take baseball, all right? People who do a lot of amateur baseball playing love the professional game. People who ski love to watch skiing. People who golf are worried about Tiger Woods. No sane person would watch a televised golf game. Would you? No, I wouldn’t watch a golf game, unless I played. Because when I play golf, which I don’t, I would probably understand why Tiger Woods is good. For me Tiger Woods is some kind of conspiracy. Famous guy hitting small ball long distances. I don’t understand it, it makes no sense to me. It has no particular value. So I’ll never watch golf, I’ll turn the channel away from the golf game.

So the audience has always traditionally been built on amateurs who are fascinated. Tennis is the best example. There are a lot of tennis clubs out there. People hitting the ball, and they, when they see a real good tennis player, they know what that person does. Now we don’t have that audience anymore in classical music, by and large. So we have to find a way to connect music to their lives, the way museums have done with painting. The people who watch art shows, or go to museums, aren’t amateur painters. They have never tried to paint, but they understand it.

The people who read books and literature haven’t tried their hands writing novels or poetry, but they love to read. How do we do that with music to a population where it’s new to their adulthood? That’s task number one. And I think we can do that. It has to do with changing the concert format, changing what we play and how we play it. In terms of the context of performance. The other odd thing about classical music, which is a great thing, is that it is an international rage. There are more young people out there learning to play instruments than ever before and they play better than ever before.

The level of play is much higher than it ever was, and the number of people studying violin and piano and western classical music in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, Venezuela, all over the world, is fantastic. It’s a growing business in terms of the people learning to play it. Young people, as children and as adolescents and young adults, learning to play the instruments very well. So we have a very vital growing group of instrumentalists. We have a lot of people writing music for the concert stage. The trouble is actually convincing the audience. Now there are not enough young players who are not going to become musicians to make up the audience. Because they are studying the instrument at too high a level.

In other words, there are too many people in the minor leagues, so to speak. Or going through the college pipeline, and there are not enough slots in the NFL. That’s more or less the idea. So the question is: "Can you get a lot of people who have never played football to watch the game?" People who think it’s an enjoyable time to sit and listen to a concert? And that’s our task, which is capture the interest of the adult, young adult, and one of the places to start actually is in college. One of the real failures, in my view, is the failure of music departments in universities to make music appreciation really enjoyable to college students. And they’ve gone into the very arcane fields of musicology and they’ve made a profession out of their expertise, so we need to rescue classical music from its own defenders.

Recorded on May 10, 2010

Interviewed by Jessica Liebman

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/18bcculture.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/arts/music/05cont.html?_r=1&scp=11&sq=bernard%20holland%20contemporary%202006&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/arts/music/04holl.html?scp=3&sq=bernard%20holland%20compose%20for%20the%20audience&st=cse

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/01/the_death_of_th.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2200716/

http://www.wordlessmusic.org/

http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-310/_nr-762/i.html

http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Creativity-Artist-Modern-Vintage/dp/0307279502/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277145034&sr=1-1

As artists, I think these are questions that we need to be addressing constantly, as they directly concern our art. Does what we do have serve any real purpose or are we just masturbating -- and if so, can or should we really be content with that?

(If this sort of thing has already been posted, sowwee!)

I find it fascinating to see what other people think about this (like the Botstein part), but I don't have a clue. Not even an honest opinion. I want to advance as a composer and in about 10 - 20 years from now I'm going to ask myself these exact same questions. We'll see what has happened to the world of music by then...

"Classical music" is special and will never die-out. Not only concert-goers, but as performers we must keep it alive. We must not succumb to the ignorance of our audience, and play in a popular style, but we must play for those who really listen.

It'll never completely "die". There's still people who listen to Gregorian chant, and love it. There will always be a variety of different cultural institutions, because, even if those institutions have no worth inherently, people need to individuate themselves, and the easiest way to do that is to associate yourself with 1)unrelated cultures 2)obscure cultures. Not only that, but people are doing this constantly, throughout their lives, because their identity is always at risk, and in order to continue acting in the patterns which keep them comfortable, they must maintain a separation of identity (otherwise there is no point in acting, if you are not a person at all).

This might not be true ACROSS THE WORLD, but I think in individualist cultures like America (but due to globalization, most cultures are being assimilated into this sort of logic), one's identity is always at risk.

Now, "Classical Music". I certainly think that it is loosing momentum and support. Predominately because of the social domination of the consumerist value system, with which the artist values associated with "Classical music" (primarily coming from monarchist, and later nationalist, then modernist authoritarian [which is the same thing as monarchist, really] value systems) are mostly incompatible. This is true for several reasons:

1) the time it takes to produce a finished work of music, especially a work which will have lasting cultural impact. I assume this self-evident to anyone on this forum, so I'm not going into detail here.

2) the time it takes to understand ANY of the music. Many people who play Clasical era music don't realized it's inaccessibility to people used to dealing with modern technology, as they become accustomed to it's difficulties. I'm not just talking about modernist/atonal/extreme minimalist or whatever other genre of art music you consider inaccessible, I mean Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms etc. While the surface of the music is often not hard to deal with: triads, melodies which are easy to follow, mostly simple rhythms, the things that appreciators of classical music often notice are not things obvious to the modern ear. Text painting in Schubert, long term application of tendency tones in Beethoven or Wagner, surprising formal tricks in Haydn, elaborate counterpoint in Bach or any number of famous "classical" music pieces (the same could be said for all examples listed), lightness of harmony in Mozart (or Webern), or richness in Strauss, subtle irony and absurdity in Satie. All this example are things which are not obvious to the modern, untrained ear. It takes money and resources to train people to appreciate these things. It is more profitable to produce music which people will consume without any prior investment. Not only that, but many "Classical" concert works are extraordinarily long compared to light music, which both challenges the attention span of the listener and costs more money to put on.

3) It's just very expensive in many ways. The instruments are expensive. Paying all the players in an orchestra is expensive if you pay them fairly. Paying the composer fairly would be expensive if that happened. Nice halls are expensive to build. The list of expenses could go on. Because of this, ticket prices go up, often way up, and only the upper class can afford to attend. Because only the upper class can attend, less tickets can be sold, and it's once again not profitable.

Now, I don't really think that it's a bad thing that this tradition is become less popular. It opens room for other traditions to develop "serious" music of their own. Classical music has been around for a long time anyway. And just because the culture is fading, doesn't mean the knowledge gained will disappear, it will just be applied to new musics which don't arise predominately from the "classical" tradition. And I think that newer modes of refined music, like Jazz for instance, are often more accessible (both due to more accessible content, and availability) to a broader range of people. And besides, "Classical" music will always be around for us who do love it. I probably wrote way too much.

Just to clarify, we're talking about "classical music", right? Meaning, the umbrella term for musics not featured on the MMVA's, yah? (But also not those that incorporate swing or clavé-type rhythmic devices)...

;)

Anyway... the state of "ART MUSIC" in general is thriving. The trouble is that our society has become so ingrained with instant-gratification and omni-accessible media that Art Music is harder to find and no one wants to bother looking for it.

There's some seriously heavy and creative music happening RIGHT NOW in YOUR CITY... but it's hiding, waiting for those with the passion and energy to appreciate it to seek it out.

I believe that art in general is becoming more and more of what one could call an "old person's hobby", in that, as ll said previously, many people in the younger demographic today tend to prefer instant-gratification, simplistic entertainment. I don't see many people my age strolling around museums, listening to "non-MMVA" concerts (thanks for that one Robin :P ), or reading classic literature. I see them watching bad CGI-filled movies, listening to the same song over and over again, and reading the simple adventure novel that lacks any subtelty or feats of language to be expected from Dickens, Hemingway, Dumas, Hugo. Culture and art have become a commercial commodity like the majority of everything found on this planet, and as a commercial product they have to be easy to consume and based on effective methods.

Still, I find it hard to explain why I got told The Godfather was a boring movie the other day. :(

Just to clarify, we're talking about "classical music", right? Meaning, the umbrella term for musics not featured on the MMVA's, yah? (But also not those that incorporate swing or clavé-type rhythmic devices)...

;)

Anyway... the state of "ART MUSIC" in general is thriving. The trouble is that our society has become so ingrained with instant-gratification and omni-accessible media that Art Music is harder to find and no one wants to bother looking for it.

There's some seriously heavy and creative music happening RIGHT NOW in YOUR CITY... but it's hiding, waiting for those with the passion and energy to appreciate it to seek it out.

That's another problem, "Art Music" people are always hiding. They should be forcing their art down people's throat's if it really is superior art. Otherwise they're just being selfish, and in doing so, they're defeating themselves! Contemporary music performances should take place on the street rather than in the conservatory!!

That's another problem, "Art Music" people are always hiding. They should be forcing their art down people's throat's if it really is superior art. Otherwise they're just being selfish, and in doing so, they're defeating themselves! Contemporary music performances should take place on the street rather than in the conservatory!!

That's interesting.

I would like to see modern music invade the urban landscape more, rather than being bottled up in conservatories and such. But probably a lot of people won't like that, hur hur.

... and the effect is that they don't get exposed enough to it, don't have the opportunity to get used to it and start appreciating it.

Contemporary music performances should take place on the street rather than in the conservatory!!

Xenakis wanted to make a piece involving all alarm sirens of Paris. I'm sure that would have been one hell of a cool performance! (Like a Vuvuzela concert, just more gigantic!)

Sadly, the government of Paris rebuffed him :(

That's interesting.

I would like to see modern music invade the urban landscape more, rather than being bottled up in conservatories and such. But probably a lot of people won't like that, hur hur.

An old professor of mine took his free-improvisatory combo and played for rush-hour traffic on a freeway once - he said they appreciated it. Maybe it's just a question of finding the right situation: a bully pulpit, or a captive audience.

I must admit that I'm guilty of the former; when I play church services as a guest artist (meaning that I'm basically unregulated), I tend to stick in a few pieces of contemporary art music. Most recently, it was Schoenberg's Kleine Klavierstücke (not truly contemporary, I know), but I've also done some Cage, Crumb, Webern, Rouse, Rakowski, and the like. I think not being able to escape makes people like things a little bit more, because the choice is "listen or don't listen," instead of "listen or do something while not listening."

Maybe a drive-thru would be a good place to set up an ensemble.

It's kind of sad that there's no equivalent in music to stuff like graffiti and sculptures that you can do in the street. I like street art, so it's kind of annoying that I can't do anything like that. And of course "street art" in music is always interpreted as hiphop or rap or whatever like that, which doesn't always have to be the case. I mean composers have always had an interest in architecture, urban landscaping and so on, like you can see with Xenakis there or Varese, etc.

So it's I think a pretty "natural" mix, but I dunno how it would be put in practice. But at least as a concept I'm very much digging the concept.

It's kind of sad that there's no equivalent in music to stuff like graffiti and sculptures that you can do in the street[...]

Mysterious Noises on 46th Street

New mural, video, sound installation for Times Square

http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/nmd/per/kla/en4090690.htm

Etc.

Classical music is dying out. It used to be you'd go miles and miles to see a concert. Not anymore.

I do think, however, that classical musicians and composers are a group. A group that just got a bit smaller, but it sill thrives in this group.

The "silver-haired" comment is something I really find annoying. I don't have silver hair! I mean, sure, the older people LIKE it better than all that rock music, and yes, they say "I hate that god forsaken blasting," but there are more people than that in the classical music crowd.

Our role nowadays is just to write for whomever may wish to hear the music, or to write it for it to be used in something, say a play or a movie.

I say that composers SHOULD NOT be servants. If I was trying to appeal to the rest of the world, I would be writing VERY different things.

I'm glad that there is a thread like this. It's very important that we listen to other kinds of music, and don't just think of classical music as Mozartian.

Hekla

It's kind of sad that there's no equivalent in music to stuff like graffiti and sculptures that you can do in the street. I like street art, so it's kind of annoying that I can't do anything like that. And of course "street art" in music is always interpreted as hiphop or rap or whatever like that, which doesn't always have to be the case.

You could go busking.

Classical music is dying out.

What?

What's dying out? "Classical" music (...from 250 years ago?) ... or "Art Music" ? If the latter, you're clearly mis-informed.

(If "dying" means a 1.5% drop over a decade in consumer record-sales market-share, maybe you're right) :whistling:

Xenakis wanted to make a piece involving all alarm sirens of Paris. I'm sure that would have been one hell of a cool performance! (Like a Vuvuzela concert, just more gigantic!)

Sadly, the government of Paris rebuffed him :(

What a wimp. He should've just done it without asking.

I believe that art in general is becoming more and more of what one could call an "old person's hobby", in that, as ll said previously, many people in the younger demographic today tend to prefer instant-gratification, simplistic entertainment. I don't see many people my age strolling around museums, listening to "non-MMVA" concerts (thanks for that one Robin :P ), or reading classic literature. I see them watching bad CGI-filled movies, listening to the same song over and over again, and reading the simple adventure novel that lacks any subtelty or feats of language to be expected from Dickens, Hemingway, Dumas, Hugo. Culture and art have become a commercial commodity like the majority of everything found on this planet, and as a commercial product they have to be easy to consume and based on effective methods.

Still, I find it hard to explain why I got told The Godfather was a boring movie the other day. :(

But wasn't this always the case? I don't know this for sure, but didn't the mainstreamers of the 1790's rather listen to folksongs then to, let's say,a new Haydn symphony? Weren't the simple humoresk opera not much more popular then the Mozart opera's?

I wonder if Beethoven would have been a millionair if he had made a nice video and uploaded his 5th symphony on Youtube.. He probebly would, right?

Well, it's hard to define how much is needed for something to be considered "the mainstream". Obviously, most people in the world living in Mozart's time never heard anything by Mozart their entire life. If we just judge it by their time's standards, it depends a lot on the actual pieces: Symphonies and even more so operas were still rather popular by their time's standards, but things like string quartets much less so. An opera buffa was generally meant to be enjoyed by a "great" number of people, but chamber musical works were often much more an "aficionado" thing, which most people only came in contact with if they played them themselves with friends (and amateur musicians would pretty much never dare to play anything like Beethoven's late quartets, so things like those never really became "popular").