It seems that every year, at least one major article appears that either mourns classical music’s death or seeks to dance on its grave. What’s wrong with classical music? Can it still be important, or is it dying?

(Classical music comprises a wide spectrum of music, but this article only deals with orchestral music to keep focus.)

It seems that fewer and fewer people like it. They complain it’s old and boring music of long-dead composers. How can anything that old still be relevant today? (Never mind that plenty of people enjoy literature, theater, and visual arts of the same vintage.)

I remember a thread on an email list for music librarians. One librarian said that when he was a child, he figured Elvis Presley was classical music. Why? Because it was the boring, old-fashioned stuff his parents listened to.

Classical music fans, according to many critics, are overbearing, elitist, and snobbish. And, according to others, the audience has grown so small that its institutions can only survive with massive subsidies. In that case, classical music cannot be important.

Before we look more closely at these criticisms, though, we need to be clear on what we’re talking about.

What is classical music?

Strictly speaking, classical music means music written during the classical period, about 1750-1820.

Helpful? I didn’t think so. The best works of Haydn and Mozart hadn’t appeared yet in 1750. Handel lived past 1750, but he’s Baroque. Beethoven lived till 1827, and isn’t he a classical composer?

None of those composers knew they were writing classical music. Audiences found their music very attractive at first hearing, but connoisseurs heard new subtleties and delights the more they listened to the same pieces. Plenty of less sophisticated music appeared on all the same concerts, so everyone listened to and enjoyed the same kinds of music. But enjoyed it differently.

The whole idea of classical music didn’t come along till after the “classical” composers were all dead. But concert life ceased for about 20 years in the most influential cultural centers. Connoisseurs could hear music of these masters only with great personal effort, such as forming their own rehearsal orchestras to play it.

Other music lovers, who didn’t consider that repertoire important,  contented themselves with whatever music was most easily available. Which means they drifted into popular music.

What, for that matter, is popular music?

The popular music industry was born during the classical period. Music became a commodity, a commercial venture. It’s based on the observation that the general public wants music that’s easy to understand and that they lose interest in songs they’ve heard too much.

So the popular music industry began to churn out a constant stream of new songs and other pieces. Each one was enough like everything else to be familiar, but different enough to be novel. It continues to operate much the same way to this day. Occasionally, of course, some of the novelties have been revolutionary in scope.

Popular music fans flock to buy products (sheet music at first, then recordings). And successful popular musicians, publishers, and promoters can make a lot of money.

We can therefore think of classical music as music that repays listening to the same music over and over—art music for connoisseurs. We can think of popular music as music intended for entertainment and amusement. Unpretentious music (usually) with no artistic aspirations.

These days, of course, we think of popular musicians as artists. That’s actually fairly new.

The relationship of popular and classical music

Please don’t think that I’m saying that classical music is somehow inherently superior. The past two hundred years have produced some wretchedly bad classical music and some wonderful popular music.

But a funny thing happens after a while. Popular tastes change. The general public moves on to something else. And the classical music world adds the most worthwhile (formerly) popular music to its repertoire. So classical music is important for preserving the best of popular music after it becomes old-fashioned.

Here is a partial list of music that started out as popular music and is now heard only in the context of classical music:

• Rossini’s operas
• Virtuoso music of Paganini and Liszt
• Strauss waltzes
• Operettas of Offenbach or von Suppé.
• Sousa marches
• Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers

Tin Pan Alley songs and Broadway musicals of the same era have not entirely become classical music, but they seem headed in that direction.

Again, it doesn’t take any special education or training to appreciate classical music. It just takes the desire to listen to music that repays repeated hearings. That lasts longer than the typical pop song. And has outlasted most of the other music of its time.

What’s wrong with classical music today?

There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the music. Not everyone likes it, but then, not everyone likes anything. Not being universally liked is not a problem with the music.

But classical music faces real threats now.

In some cases, the problem comes from failure of classical music culture to keep up with the times. In others, it comes from administrators, corporate executives, and others showing contempt for what they have no interest in understanding.

Concert ritual

You go to an orchestral concert and the men are all wearing tuxes. The whole orchestra sits on stage playing random stuff. Then, when they’re quiet, another violinist comes out to great applause and tunes the orchestra. Finally, the conductor comes out to great applause and the concert begins.

The audience knows not to make a sound until a piece is over. And some pieces have three, four, or five separate movements. No clapping between movements!

Where else does anyone act that way? Nowhere!

People who aren’t used to all these rituals might find them intimidating. Who likes everyone to glare at them if they rustle their program too loudly or clap at the wrong time?

And where did all these ridiculous rules start, anyway?

As it turns out, wealthy people in the 19th century wanted to show off. Much of being at a concert was being seen at the right places by the right people. And all of them had servants, who wore tuxes as they worked. Orchestras started out as servants of the nobility, so they might as well dress like servants to keep their patrons comfortable.

These aristocratic beginnings have led many people nowadays to consider classical music elitist, or even racist.

But it has nothing to do with the music, really. Philippe Musard started the first promenade concerts in the 1830s to cater to a working-class audience. He and successors played some classical music because they knew that audience would enjoy it.

There seems no good reason to maintain practices that haven’t made cultural sense for generations. Unfortunately, much of society has a limiting objection to change: “but we’ve always done it that way.”

Music of dead white men

All the composers of classical music are all dead, or so it seems. Where is anything written today? That’s the chief evidence that classical music is dying.

Concert life resumed in the early 19th century specifically to give connoisseurs a chance to hear the great masters, especially Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven again. Beethoven wasn’t dead yet. These three masters above all came to be known as classical music. And classical music was important to a lot of people.

Beethoven had no immediate successors, but eventually a new generation began to provide new orchestral music. Concerts contained a mixture of the old masters, pieces by the established new masters, and music by new composers hoping for acceptance.

As time went on, however, the balance began to change. The new masters eventually died, but concert audiences still loved their music. Younger composers still provided new music, but the percentage of music by living composers began to drop.

After the Second World War, a new generation of composers led by Karlheinz Stockhousen, Pierre Boulez, Yannis Xenakis, and Milton Babbitt came on the scene. They had open contempt for classical music traditions and classical music audiences. Babbitt wrote a magazine article the editor titled “Who Cares if You Listen?” He hated the title, but it perfectly captures his attitude.

Arnold Schoenberg had already tried to force audiences to listen to twelve-tone music, but most people didn’t like it.

So new music became poison at the box office.

Not enough new music

Most of that truly offensive generation of composers are all dead now. Younger composers (including lots of women and people of color) have again started composing classical music with the hope that audiences will like it.

How many can you name? And if you know the names of some of them, how much of their music is really familiar to you?

Some orchestras, it’s true, stick to performing the old war horses. Many others program new music frequently. Lots of grant money is available to commission it.

But therein lies the problem.

By definition, classical music is written for people who appreciate hearing the same pieces a lot over their lifetimes. And for all the premieres, there aren’t nearly enough second performances.

When an orchestra presents a new piece, it ought to play it twice the first season and at least several times more over the following decade. Its audience will come to like some pieces but not others. Other orchestras ought to take note of successful pieces and present them to their audiences. And maybe some of the less successful ones, too. Who knows, but an audience in Texas may love a piece that didn’t impress an audience in Ohio.

If new classical music is important enough to commission, it ought to be important enough to promote and get the commissions performed widely and frequently enough for audiences to become familiar with it.

But there is one class of orchestral music nearly everyone already knows: movie music. Orchestras play it. And draw large audiences when they do.

Classical music on the radio

Radio is by far the dominant medium people use to listen to classical music—not concerts, not recordings. And people are far more likely to hear music by unfamiliar composers over the radio. But will they hear the same piece often enough that they can begin to relate to it?

Nowadays, people can easily listen to classical music any time day or night if they subscribe to Sirius radio. Or if they get a classical music station through their cable subscription.

Unfortunately, the situation for traditional broadcasting is very different. There are fewer and fewer classical music stations available.

I used to live in the Chicago area and enjoyed two classical music stations, WFMT and WNIB. The latter was privately owned. It subsisted largely on subscriptions to its program guides. At about the turn of the century, the founding owner decided to retire and sold the station.

The new owners decided that one classical music station for Chicago was enough. Apparently it didn’t consider classical music or the station’s audience important enough to deserve a choice. They changed the format to rock. I guess there can never be enough rock stations.

At about the same time, I also enjoyed two all-news stations, WBBM and WMAQ. They wound up under the same ownership. That company decided that one news station for Chicago was enough and changed WMAQ to sports.

So part of the problem with commercial broadcasting is that corporate interests have no interest in what their audience wants to listen to. If they can make more money by dumping one audience for another, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Active opposition to classical music

When I was born, most people seemed to assume that classical music was somehow superior even if they didn’t much care for it themselves. At the very least, liking and supporting it generated no controversy. No one doubted that classical music was important.

In 1956, Chuck Berry introduced “Roll Over Beethoven,” declaring that everyone would start listening to rock instead. He always hated that his sister played classical music on the family piano, which kept him from playing what he wanted.

It took a while for Berry’s attitude to enter the establishment, but eventually it did.

Thirty or forty years ago. I read an article by an NPR executive who disapproved of classical music. He made it a matter of policy to get stations to change format. He was just one of a number of active opponents to classical music that arose about that time.

Of course, I can never find that articles I remember after all that time when I want to look at it again. But for whatever reason, more and more public radio stations started to abandon music for talk.

An aging audience

A lot of people look at audiences for classical music and notice a lot of gray heads. It looks like younger people have no interest in classical music. Younger people who decide to try it out might look around, feel out of place, and never attend another concert. Evidence that classical music is dying?

While it is true that the audience at symphony concerts is getting older and older, it is not true that you have to be old nowadays to like classical music.

Schools that still have orchestras have no trouble finding members. College and university music programs are graduating record numbers of students who play orchestral instruments.

I attended a concert in a library where the intended audience for a string quartet (another hoary classical music institution) was pre-school and school children. It played Beethoven, Britten, and Ravel—one 19th-century composer and two from the 20th century.

Actually, younger people might relate better to 20th-century composers—even Xenakis’ generation––than the great masters. It’s more like what they’re used to hearing. Not that Britten will ever supplant Beethoven, but the tastes of an aging audience shouldn’t limit what classical music means for everyone else.

By the way: I often see the criticism that concerts are so expensive younger people can’t afford to attend. And concerts by pop music icons are cheap?

That may be true of concert series by major orchestras. But it’s not hard to find cheap or free concerts. Look for community orchestras, college and university orchestras, or whatever high school orchestras are still left.

Music education

And that last point explains why older people make such a large percentage of concert audiences.

Schools don’t teach as much music anymore. Like the decline in classical music on radio, this trend has developed over several decades. I don’t have space to try to explain why, but the decline in music education mirrors the decline in classical music on the radio.

Schools are under more and more pressure to have students score well on standardized tests. I suspect that has something to do with it. My ex-wife taught English as a Foreign Language for several years. She and teachers of other electives (the arts, foreign languages, gym) had to supervise the lunchroom. Teachers of real academic subjects got duty-free lunch times.

And of course, administrators who grew up without exposure to classical music and other arts don’t know much about it. When it comes to preparing budgets, it’s hard support constituencies that you don’t understand. But too many of them seem not to regard electives in general, not just classical music, important enough to support.

The idea of many people that something that happened a long time ago can’t be relevant today shows a much deeper educational crisis than just lacking electives.

Signs of classical music’s health from a radio interview

In 2007, Neil Conan, host of the NPR program Talk of the Nation, considered the status and fate of classical music. His guests were Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; composer John Corigliano; and Fred Child, host of the radio program “Performance Today.” Among people who called in, Michael Cristie was then conductor of three professional orchestras.

Conan started the program announcing that Washington, DC public radio station WETA had reinstated classical music programming due to popular demand after two years of being news and talk only. That audience obviously kept letting the station know that they considered being able to listen to classical music important.

Dana Gioia’s perspective

Gioia said that classical music is thriving, but that we need to be vigilant to keep it that way. He pointed to three trends: the broad decline of classical music on commercial radio stations, the decline of classical music on public stations, and the stability of the audience for classical music on radio. That is, stations have not stopped broadcasting classical music because their audiences have stopped wanting it. Audiences still consider it important.

Conan asked whether the government should subsidize listeners of classical music. Gioia responded that it’s part of the larger issue of whether airwaves should be subsidized. And he said that the marketplace puts a price on things, but some things are beyond price. In a democracy, the arts have a role in society that the market should not entirely determine.

I think that the whole vision of public radio is to provide in a sense those things which radio can provide for free to America and not be determined by the commercial environment. And for me those things are quality talk and quality music – especially the kind of the music like classical music and jazz and to a certain degree folk music – that isn’t really available in commercial formats. Diversity of programming I think should be one of the fundamentals of public radio.

He grew up in a working-class family, by the way. He listened to classical music on the radio as he worked in manual labor long before he had the chance to attend a live concert.

Michael Christie’s perspective

Christie commented that there has never been a better time in the US for arts organizations, and classical music organizations in particular, to develop relevance with their audiences. All the organizations he led were always developing collaborative ventures to deal with local issues. But all the education and availability issues always came up against the fixed costs of providing the services: salaries, maintaining the venues, etc.

Ticket sales for all three orchestras were strong, and in Phoenix, the strongest in the history of the organization.

By the way, some critics of classical music say that classical music is dying and can’t survive without massive subsidies. Classical music has always needed subsidies. Opera has needed them since the first public opera theater opened in 1637. The need for the National Endowment of the Arts to promote and fund classical music does not mean it’s dying. It means it’s important.

John Corigliano’s perspective

If classical music audiences recognize the names of only a few living classical composers, they surely include John Corigilano.

On his part of the program, he saw not so much the dying of classical music but its reestablishment in other venues than the concert hall. That is, young composers all have blogs and websites where they put their music. They use social media, iTunes, Sirius Satellite Radio.

Classical orchestral music may be declining some, but young classical musicians have many other healthy outlets. And, let’s remember, many other kinds of classical music for them to compose.

Fred Child’s perspective

Performance Today started on NPR and moved to Minnesota Public Radio. It presents a lot of contemporary music and young performers.

Child noted that a 10-year study by the Knight Foundation concluded that 25-30% of American adults describe themselves as having a relationship with classical music. A much larger portion than some people might have expected.

Modern composers of concert music introduce elements of popular culture, but then, classical composers always have. Think of all Beethoven’s variations on familiar tunes. So Childs insisted that “crossover” is nothing new and not a bad thing.

A 21-year-old woman called in to comment that she loves classical music even though her parents don’t listen to it. She encountered it through the local high school orchestra.  Just another reminder of the importance of music education in schools.

So is classical music dying? Of course not. It’s as relevant and important as ever. It just needs protection against threats that have arisen only recently.