I’m often asked what I think the future of classical music will be. Here’s a summary of what I think. It’s been sitting quietly in the Resources section of my blog, but it’s time to give it some bigger play.
Here we go:
I
Classical music is in trouble, and there are well-known reasons why. We have an aging audience, falling ticket sales, and — in part because our audience is shrinking — persistent financial woes.
And behind the numbers lies a deeper problem. Classical music has grown distant from our wider culture. We don’t connect well with the world. Most of the music we play is from the past, while the people around us are connecting with the culture and concerns of the present.
No wonder, then, we’re losing our funding and our audience.
But we’re changing — dressing more informally, playing in clubs, talking to our audience at concerts, in a thousand ways moving closer to the world around us, beginning to adapt to the present day.
And so I don’t think classical music will die. I expect it be reborn, to find a new audience, to reconnect with our wider culture, and to become a truly contemporary art.
II
About the ways classical music will change…
The changes will be large. And — I say this with sympathy — very likely troubling, for some who deeply love classical music the way it is now. But the old ways aren’t sustainable. Classical music can’t survive without major change.
Here are some of the changes I anticipate:
We’ll perform less music from the past, most likely much less.
We’ll no longer think that classical music is somehow sanctified, that it’s specially blessed in our culture (or should be specially blessed). Or that it’s better than music of any other kind. And our world is greatly varied now. Classical music needs to stand beside many other things, all with value of their own.
We’ll present performances more vividly, and talk about them — both in conversation and in our promotion and marketing — with genuine excitement.
We’ll reconnect with classical music’s past, with an age when it was more informal and spontaneous, when musicians improvised more, when the music had more contemporary relevance, and when the audience responded with far more spontaneity. If that’s how it was when Mozart was alive, why can’t it be that way now?
We’ll learn to speak the language the rest of our world speaks, to talk about the things it talks about. Too often we think of classical music as a refuge from the wider world. But it can’t survive that way? How can we attract a new audience, if we turn away from the world the new audience lives in?
III
And now, a warning. Many people in our field believe that we can bring classical music back by restoring classical music education in our schools. And by bringing classical music into our communities.
I don’t think these things will work.
Schools: If the problem is that not enough people care about classical music, how can we build support for teaching it in our schools? Where will the money for it come from, at a time when school budgets are being cut? In an age of diversity, how can we justify a focus on classical music, when schoolkids also don’t know jazz or the blues?
Communities: If — in its present form — classical music is focused on the past, and out of touch with current culture, it will remain out of touch, even if we make it friendly and accessible. So how many people can we truly reach? How can we hope to recreate the large audience classical music had in the past, when it fit far better into the culture of its time?
And in an age of diversity, shouldn’t our communication with communities go two ways? Shouldn’t we be learning their culture, even as we teach them ours?
IV
So the major changes that I’ve outlined are our best hope. But they have to go further. Here are some things we have to do:
We have to redefine what classical music is. In our minds — and in the minds of people in the outside world — classical music means the old masterworks, Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms. We have to blow up that idea. We have to redefine classical music as something that goes beyond any style or sound, beyond any repertoire. To me, it’s (very simply) music that’s composed in advance of performance, and thus, as we listen, can unfold with the careful flow and detail of a fine novel or film. No other musical genre works that way. Understood like this, classical music can have any sound, incorporate any musical technique. And thus it can be contemporary, can open itself to all the cultures of the world.
We need to be more diverse. How can we fit into a greatly varied world, if we’re not ourselves diverse? How can we ask support from people who don’t hear themselves in our music, and don’t see themselves among the musicians we put onstage?
We need to be more creative. We may not seem creative to the world outside us. We seem to do the same things, play the same music, over and over. We may know that this can be creative, and needs great, focused discipline. But it may not seem creative to the outside world. Because, outside our concert halls, new things are being done with music and with sound, while older music is reinterpreted in new ways. We should join the larger world in doing all these things.
We need to be entrepreneurial. To attract a new audience, we need to reinvent the way we do business. We need to perform in new places for new people, and to find new ways to inspire new people to come.
If we want to be creative — and entrepreneurial — we need to change the way we educate classical musicians. We need to teach it more creatively both to children and to aspiring classical music professionals. Everyone should be encouraged to create music, to compose pieces, discover new sounds, and play old in ways all their own.
When we play the old masterworks, we have to do it with more individuality, more fire, and more conviction. We have to treat these works as if they were new. What goes on inside them — their narrative, contrasts between one moment and the next — should be unmistakable to everyone listening, even to people who don’t know classical music at all.
We have to reinvent the financial structure of classical music. Not everyone who studies classical music can make a living from it. But those who do succeed have been decently paid, making more or less the same money as accomplished professionals in other fields. Can this continue? The old ways are wading, and with them the established ways of making a classical music living. We don’t yet know how classical music will finance itself after it’s reborn. But we’ll have to figure it out, so that classical musicians of the future can be financially secure.
And, one last time, we have to fully join the culture around us. That may not seem easy. And — as once more I say with sympathy — it may not please everyone who loves classical music now. But it’s something we have to do, and, beyond that, it’s a natural impulse for younger people in our field. It will lead them to new places, giving classical music new excitement, new conviction, and new artistic depth.
You can always find this post in the Resources section of my blog, at this address: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2014/08/the-future-of-classical-music.html.
Already I’d make a few changes. I’d talk more about conservatory education, and how that needs to be freer, and far more creative. (See my posts on the conference at DePauw: Here, here, here.)
And I’d give more weight to my growing conviction — and this is radical — that the familiar classical masterworks are a millstone hanging round our necks, preventing us from changing. There’s nothing wrong with them, but our constant focus on them, our constant performance of them, prevents us from reaching the contemporary world.
Further reading:
Before the Crisis: What classical music was like in the old days, when it was popular.
Timeline of the crisis: How the classical music crisis grew, from the 1970s till now.
Age of the audience: How the audience has aged, as shown both in statistics and in anecdotal data
Four keys to the future: Four steps we can take right now, to make things better.
A few thoughts on “classical”, “music” and “we”
The perspective you present is about the challenges “we” have, what “we” “have to do”, and how “we” “have to change”. A different perspective might be looking at “classical” “music” instead of “we.”, and the challenges it faces. You stated about the familiar classical masterworks, “there’s nothing wrong with them”,
Yet they are “a millstone stone hanging around our neck”, so I begin to wonder, who is “we”?
Who is the “we” that you set forth to save by flinging the millstone of masterworks over the side into the deep? And as a listener to said masterworks, how do I compare the value of “we” to the value of the masterworks? What is left of “classical” “music” that hanging the millstone of the culture du jour instead of masterworks around our necks (whose necks?) will solve. Should I not recognize an objective quality difference between Mozart, and anyone creating music today or the last 50 years?
All that said, you are on point with many things. “Classical” “music” is not of the culture as it might have been 200 years ago, or even of the elite culture as it might have been 50 years ago. It is no longer sanctified within society. Funding won’t be what it has been for 50 years (see Teachout column today which hints that it may have not been that either previous to 50 years ago either).. So yes, I think your observations are generally sound.
What I struggle with, good doctor, is your prescription. Pre-composed music simply doesn’t have a unifying theme to attract. Even though I enjoy both Vivaldi and Zappa (and even if the additional unifying themes of Italian blood and vowels at the end of their name), when I want Vivaldi I don’t want to accept Zappa…and vice versa….regardless of their pre-composed nature Telling me that because I enjoy and value Beethoven, there is not predictive power whether I will enjoy the avant garde of today.
Which brings me back to “we”. I think the challenge is your core question is “how do “we”…the suppliers of music that is primarily pre-composed…maintain cultural and economic relevance at the center of society today? Whereas for me, previously a performer but now primarily a listener, asks what music resonates with me, emotionally and intellectually, so that I will travel 30 minutes each way to hear it, spend a decent chunk of change to park, drive, attend (and probably eat…to make an evening out of it)…and have a reasonable probability that I will enjoy it? Meaning you’re focused on the supply side, while I’m asking about the demand side.
And, I fear, seeking a chimera that no one is demanding.
Excellent article! The ‘key’ to creating the needed ‘crescendo’ of vitality to classical music’s future health, truly ‘rests’ on integrating music ‘dynamically,’ with academic subjects, and bring ‘fun’ back to the whole process! This will bring interested future audiences to concerts, and support for the arts back to prominence.
The StringQuest — virtual music curriculum project was created this goal. Currently there is a contest to ‘make the case’ for learning music, wishing to bring attention to the current challenges. Please take a look. 🙂
CONTEST — Why Learn Music? — ‘Make the Case!’ Info here: http://www.stringquest.com/make-the-case
I’ve made this comment before, but I don’t feel it has been adequately addressed here.
When you say that the classical works are a “millstone around our necks,” that simply ignores the fact that music has to be performed and listened to live. If you acknowledge that these works are great works of art, they have to be constantly performed. Listening to them on YouTube, CDs, or other types of recording is not just enough. As I like to say, musical organizations are to music what museums are to art: you hang a Rembrandt on the museum wall and preserve and guard it well, and it stays there. A Beethoven symphony has to be performed, often and everywhere, to survive.
But this raises an obvious question, which I don’t think can be evaded: if organizations continue to perform these works often and well, and at the same time perform lots of new works, how will they simply have the time for all of this? I’m afraid that giving lip service to the value of the classical works but emphasizing contemporary music will cause the old stuff (and by old, I’m talking about going back to Palestrina or before) to be lost.
When you write, “When we play the old masterworks, we have to do it with more individuality, more fire, and more conviction,” I fully agree. But you talk as though that is not happening.
Last night I heard a concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra: Stokowsky arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s string quartet 1 andante cantabile and Boris Godunov synthesis, Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, and the 1812 orchestra. A big (or bigly?) audience with plenty of people who didn’t have grey hair and didn’t limp up and down the stairs included, and of course the orchestra played with great individuality, fire, and conviction.
So the solution to that problem is for every musical organization to play with the skill and passion that the Phillies always display. Easy-peasy!
Your museum analogy is very appropriate. Paintings by old masters hang on museum walls. Anyone who wants to can look at them. But in fact — as a recent story in the NY Times made clear — what’s bringing the largest number of people to museums is contemporary art. Similiarly, contemporary art (and not the old masters) is what collectors are buying, and what art history studehnts (future curators and gallery owners) are studying.
So despite the old masters on their walls, art museums have already been through the change I expect classical music to go through. What’s become clear is that there isn’t a sustainable audience for the old classical music repertoire. It just doesn’t speak enough to contemporary life.
So we need to do things differently. As just about every other artform and every form of popular culture does! Theater companies present plays by living playwrights in maybe half of their productions. That doesn’t make Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill suffer. When people go to the movies, they go to see new films. That doesn’t mean they love Casablanca any less, and it doesn’t diminish the value of great art films by Antonioni and Godard.
If the change I’m imagining does happen, it’s true that your experience of classical music will change. You won’t have as many opportunities to hear Brahms and Beethoven live as you do now. But maybe you’ll find that’s a good thing, and you’ll be stimulated by the new work you hear.
I guess I’m really not the person to make comments on this blog. Living in Philly, I get all sorts of opportunities to hear “classical” music performances, of both old and new pieces. So my view of the concert scene is undoubtedly biassed because I am in such a privileged location.
Out in flyover country (“flyover” in the classical music sense), where orchestras and other organizations are really struggling to attract audiences, it might be a good idea to drop the 3 Bs almost entirely and focus on new stuff that speaks to the Now Moment. So I guess you’re probably right that these places need to go your way.
However, I wonder whether programming mostly works from the last 50 years or so (I guess that would speak to the contemporary Zeitgeist, but maybe concentrating on the last 10 years or so, or 1 year, might be preferable) will really bring in the audiences. From where I sit, Americans interested in music are interested in pop music almost entirely. That’s what plays on radio and TV, that’s what all the Internet sites, even the ones aimed at young cultured, intellectual types, discuss.
If one is focused on getting more concert ticket money from the average American, I’m not sure that *any* programming by classical music organizations will help much. But it seems to me, who really knows nothing at all about the commercial side of the classical music world, that the 3 Bs are as likely to draw audiences as the latest compositions, *if* they are presented right. (Maybe orchestras should stop dressing formally for concerts, allow audiences to clap, cheer, and dance in the aisles as they feel moved, etc., will do it.) The issue, perhaps, is really one of savvy marketing, which a lot of the traditional classical music organizations haven’t been strong on.
The average American locality is not at all like Philly, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, etc., and my mind is not very well equipped to understand the average American mind, unfortunately. So I guess that your view of how to make classical music organizations prosper is right and mine is wrong. I’ll just go on subscribing to the Philly Orch., going to the Curtis concerts a few blocks from where I live, and keep my mouth shut.
A lot of pop music is very sophisticated, much like some of contemporary classical music. Though I don’t think much of the concert music of the past 50 years would be much of an answer to classical music’s problems, since it’s written too much in the classical music tradition. I’d look at what’s sometimes been called alt-classical, at the kind of music you’ll hear at a Bang on a Can All-Stars concert, or a concert by Roomful of Teeth. This is music that can connect to any smart, musically curious person — which would include most educated pop music listeners today.
As for what you see in Philly, or could see in NY, or in DC, where I live…yes, it’s still happening. But do you think the organizations that play it are in great shape? In DC, orchestra concerts have acres of empty seats. Likewise, I’ve reliably heard, performances of the Washington Opera’s current production (I was at the opening, which was well-attended, but then it featured a cameo by Ruth Bader Ginsburg).
The old classical music ecosystem really seems to be fading. Most of the big classical music institutions see the writing on the wall, whatever position they might take in public.
Greg, I agree. Thank you for posting this eloquent summary!
I also agree with some of the comments. One aspect of current culture is that it is becoming less centralized, more diverse. For most activities and art forms, there is no single “we” anymore. So if “we” means “the classical music field,” then yes, change is happening, and it has to happen. But the field includes so many different kinds of projects that no prescription or prediction fits them all. Even now, some performing groups focus on a particular kind of old music or a specific approach to new music, while other groups play multiple styles from multiple time periods. I expect (and I hope) that in the future there will be even more diversity of approaches.
So in one sense it is misleading to predict what “we” will do in the future, because classical music people will be doing so many different things. The changes that are coming will manifest in many different ways. For example, some people will certainly spend less time performing music of the past, and maybe the field as a whole will be less obsessed with past music, but this will not be true of every organization, every ensemble, every musician, or every listener. Some subsets of “we” will continue to focus on music of the past. I’m saying this partly to reassure listeners who love past music, and also because I think it’s true. But no matter what the musical emphasis, I agree with Greg that composers, performers, and presenters will more often operate as contemporary people involved with current society, rather than as people who keep their music insulated from contemporary culture.
For a while, “classical music” has mostly meant “orchestral music,” and in most places orchestras have done more or less the same music in more or less the same way, they have worn similar clothes, and they have performed in similar settings. I’m excited by the possibility that each orchestra might be quite different from the others, because of living in its own place. This has already started to happen a little. I hope it happens much, much more. I’d like orchestras to be much less interchangeable.
About relating to fellow citizens: a student in my music appreciation class recently attended a wonderful day of new music at Disney Concert Hall, called “From Noon to Midnight.” The L.A. Phil presented its own players and many other groups, a cross section of new music activity. A large and interested audience roved between different spaces at the venue, listening to wildly different kinds of music. The student, African American, was disturbed to see so few people like himself. The audience, the performers, and the composers were almost all white.
Compared to typical orchestra programming, the event was astonishingly daring and unusual, but by the standards of the wider community, the event’s reach was pretty narrow. Of course there’s nothing wrong with a particular sub-community making music for itself, but if classical organizations aspire to speak to the wider community or to represent it somehow, then “we” in big cities are going to have to become more inclusive in every aspect of “our” work. People have been saying this for a long time; I look forward to seeing some changes.
Your reference, John, to increasing diversity in the approaches being taken in different places is very important. It’s not surprising, of course, that this would be happening in LA, but even in staid, old Philly it’s starting to show up bit by bit.
As for the overwhelming whiteness that still characterizes the classical music field (or at least the lack of African-American participation–Asian-Americans are certainly not lacking), I don’t know what can be done about that. But not being African-American myself, I don’t really have any insights.
One aspect of all this that interests me is clothing. It used to be that people going to a concert felt that they absolutely had to “dress up,” but I notice that this is less and less the case. Still, though, the orchestra players and chamber music players are sticking to formal dress, at least in staid, old Philly. I wonder why this is, since they are quite happy rehearsing in any old things, and play just as well. Perhaps it’s an attempt to insist that “serious music” is really “serious.” At any rate, I wouldn’t mind a relaxation in the musicians’ dress code, though I still draw the line at the audience’s dancing in the aisles, except at a Dudamel event.. (Applause after first movements might be permissible in cases of extreme virtuosity, and of course clapping in the Radetzky March is de rigueur.)
John, very thoughtful comments, as always. And hi! It’s been a while.
Two thoughts. First, of course you’re right about “we.” So many things being done. I’m constantly surprised. And yet there are some constants. Some things seem to work to attract a large new audience. Things that cross into a pop music area, or things that are genuine events (like the one you mentioned in your comment).
Another commonality is financial. A lot of the wonderful things being done don’t make money. And will have to, if they’re going to replace the existing classical music ecosystem (aka the big orchestras, etc.). Many diverse approaches, one financial challenge.
My other thought: You’re so right about diversity. The Kennedy Center here in DC has a program featuring Mason Bates that’s meant to reach young audiences. Lily white. No African-American component, at least so far. And in a black majority city. The Kennedy Center did announce a hiphop initiative, featuring Q-Tip, of the suddenly back with a major surge group A Tribe Called Quest. But this was created with no reference to DC hiphop, which has a flavor and a beat all its own. So it’s a diversity-related mistake, even within a program that aims to increase diversity. (Plus of course that hiphop is a form of black music that’s long had a half and half audience, half black, half white. To do something at the Kennedy Center that was deep-in-the-community black music would be an amazement.)
An interesting article although I really do not believe that classical music dies. But yes, it has to, and it is changing. I find it fascinating to follow thousands of young artist on http://www.hellostage.com and see where and what they are performing. They are driving change. And this is a constant source of inspiration!
I think this very inspiring. It really goes beyond the musicians, composers, conductors and boards of various classical music institutions. The audiences also need to support new composers and new music. If we want to see classical music thrive, then we have to change as well.