The current state of classical music
The classical music industry is doing just fine, thank you.
It seems as if for the past few years all we’ve heard from music critics and culture-promoting groups has been the same old doom and gloom story: audiences are aging, attendance is declining, orchestras are shutting down, young people don’t care about good music anymore. And when we take a perfunctory look at the stats, all that appears to be true; indeed, the age of the average concertgoer is somewhat on the high side, attendance at concerts was down for quite a while, a few orchestras did close up shop, and there has been a general dearth of interest among younger people.
But let’s take a closer look at what’s actually happening. Sure, a good deal of the audience is made up of old folks. But most of our generation either isn’t able or isn’t willing to sit down and quietly work at digesting an hour-long symphony. Active listening takes work, and today’s popular music generally doesn’t require any thinking. But the good news is, as people age, they tend to migrate towards a genre of music that actually has a bit of depth to it. It’s like going from viewing a commercial to admiring a Vermeer; the commercial is more immediate, in-your-face, but the painting requires time and some effort on the part of the viewer.
I remember the big hubbub when the San Jose Symphony had to close for financial reasons. Naysayers everywhere predicted that, like so many dominos, many other orchestras would follow suit. But that simply isn’t happening. I would dare to say that in many instances, the bubble burst; for decades, we pretended that the public was terribly interested in another (!) recording of the Mahler 2, when really only a handful was needed. And sure, there’s a specialist market for such things, but not for the masses.
Lately we’ve seen an effort at ‘crossover’ concerts, which aim to entice the public into the concert halls with music that’s almost classical. Singers like Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman make albums of (mostly) soothing, feel-good music, and sure, they sell fine, but they’re really not classical, in the traditional sense of the word (just because Bocelli sings in Italian and with some vibrato doesn’t mean that he’s dyed-in-the-wool classical! And a recent editorial from Chandos suggested that in a concert featuring both singers, Brightman made Bocelli sound like Caruso). It always seems to surprise everybody when, in a daring move, concert promoters give us the real thing, and it goes well. Recently, the National Opera of Washington, D.C. has offered free simulcasts of operas on the Mall. When Porgy and Bess showed, it was a stunning success. Another example of opera’s marketability is shown by the Met’s decision to broadcast live feeds of operas in movie theaters; due to their huge success, the number of theaters subscribing to the service is growing rapidly. This after frantic wondering if the Met radio broadcast could survive without Texaco underwriting! And while we’re on the subject of opera, let’s look at the example of the National Opera: it somehow survives without government support!
Good music is an integral part of good culture, and a good, solid culture is absolutely essential to a civilization; thus, I’m thankful for the concern shown for good music. But let’s face it: classical music, as we know it, will be around for a good long time.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Well written article. To be honest, I dont mind some of Sarah Brightman’s “soothing, feel-good” type of music. Some of the less pop-ish of her recordings are a nice blend between true classical and music that a normal person can appreciate without having to be “artsy.” All that being said, however, it’s not the type of music that I buy. I stick with Chanticleer, Choir of King’s College - Cambridge, and even a little Libera. And most definitely Polyphony and Eric Whitacre choral music.
What we really need is a resurrection of professional bands that perform more than just Karl King and J. P. Sousa marches!
June 10th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
And you know, much of the music performed by Chanticleer and Polyphony is quite dissonant; I wonder if, when we heard those same dissonances in a piano work, we would immediately dismiss it as too complex and unapprochable. Sure, timbre has a lot to do with it, since dissonances in choral music are less ‘biting’ then they are in other types (a string quartet, for instance, or solo piano work). But the massively popular Whitacre and Lauridsen have written some of the same dissonances that we find in Boulez and Carter, with (in my opinion) roughly the same effect; after all, a minor second is a minor second, wherever it’s located. What distinguishes Whitacre and Lauridsen (and of course, many others; think of Adams, Kernis, Pann, Corigliano and to some extent Nico Muhly) is their ability to use dissonance as a tool, and keep the listener firmly rooted to a general tonality. This is not to diminish in any way the skills of Boulez and Carter, of course, but something does have to be said of modern music that forsakes the rugged starkness we find in traditional ‘modern’ composers. It’s as if we’ve rediscovered beauty after a sojourn in the desert. Composers of the twenty-first century no longer need fear consonance! I feel that a new era is beginning, one in which American music leads the way; a music of comfortable dissonance and near-consonance. We’ll see.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:48 am
To be honest, I am not familiar with most of the composers you wrote about, but I know the concepts of which you are speaking.
I am glad composers like Whitacre and Lauridsen use both dissonance and consonance. Some of which a normal, untrained audience could listen to. Other songs of the aforementioned composers an untrained audience would call “weird.”
I will never forget when my mother went with me to a Chorale concert a few years ago. It was the “Alleluia” concert, which I thought was a very strong concert, both performance-wise and repertoire-wise. I turned my my mom with a big grin on my face and asked her, “What did you think?!?” She looks at me with a confused look and said, “Umm…it was…interesting. I guess I am just not used to it.”
My mom is a musician who plays organ and sings a solid alto, but the Chorale sound was not pleasing to her ears. I think when it comes down to it, some music, no matter how well performed or written, will always be foreign and unpleasant to a normal person’s ears. It is, in my opinion, the duty of the composer to write music that brings a person up (i.e. increases his learning and comfortableness), but does not leave them in the dust culturally either.
This is why Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach continue to be popular. If you ask a person on the street to name a classical music composer, I would imagine these three names would be at the top of the list. They wrote stuff that was a musical foundation for years to come, while still being incredibly complex, and easy to listen to.
But that’s just my two cents worth
June 20th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Music that is unfamiliar is often unwelcome; music critic Tim Page used to host a weekly hour-long program for a radio station in New York. The program was dedicated to airing modern, unfamiliar works (so desperately needed on classical radio!), but one day Page decided to play works by 12th-century French composer Perotin. Perotin’s music often features parallel (and relentless!) fourths, so it sounds somewhat ‘ugly’ to our ears. Page soon recieved a call from a listener who berated him for playing all that terribly modern music, ending with the declaration that Page had ruined his entire day!
Another thing that strikes me as very interesting is perusal of critical acclaim for works now in the general repertoire; for instance, critics of Monteverdi’s day attacked “L’Orfeo” for grating on the ears, and critics in Chopin’s day berated his relentless use of dissonance in the Mazurkas. Even Beethoven had to put up with naysayers, who had a heyday with his third symphony! Now, I doubt that in 300 years Joe from off the street will listen to Boulez in all of his totally-serialized glory and revel in the experience as we do listening to Rachmaninoff or even some Whitacre (Sleep, Lux), but I sincerely believe that listeners of the future will love Adams, Corigliano, Reich, Kernis…