Re: The Death of Classical Music (da capo, con brio)
On Apr 3, 2007, at 11:50 AM, Colin Brace wrote:
On 4/3/07, Doug Henwood dhenwood@panix.com wrote:
The bigger problem might be that younger people are not taking up classical music, and even boomers rarely listen to it except as upscale mood music. That’s sad, but aside from blasting out some old- fartism, I don’t know what to say about that.
I have no data to draw on and can’t make generalizations, but here in the ‘nether’ parts classical music seems to be thriving (generously subsidized by the State purse of course!) At the Concertgebouw, about twenty minutes walk from my house, you can hear classical music practically every night of the year and two or three concerts a day on the weekends. The opera is as busy as ever and has improved a lot over the years I’ve lived here. Tickets for popular productions are hard to come by.
We live 20 mins from Lincoln Center, and I could say the same thing.
Most cities of any size in the U.S. have lots of live classical
music. Ditto university towns. But the audiences skew fairly old -
though that may be a function of ticket prices. At the New York
Philharmonic, prices run from $30 to $96.
I also think evolution of classical music in the 20th C is partly to blame for its loss of popularity. For me, the party ended around about Stravinsky; thereafter it became sterile and academic. For me, I’d rather listen to various jazz groups, tango orchestras, and Latin big bands from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, rock and and soul from the 1960s, salsa from the 1970s and 1980s, and some of the groovy ambient chill-out stuff from more recent years than any “serious” music from those respective time periods.
Shostakovich was great into the 1970s. And what about the atonal
power trio - Schoenberg, Berg, Webern?
Doug