Why Do People Believe Classical Music Will Die?

In her essay ‘The Lost Art of Listening’. Anna Goldsworthy talks about the various elements that point to the looming death of classical music. One is the fact that classical music concerts are today largely attended by older audiences. That our audience is older than us is old news. It has been like that since we started playing together, 21 years ago. Occasionally, backstage, one of us might report the sighting of a brunette amid the sea of silver – a peer! – like a rare and glorious bird. These occasions are rare; the interloper is typically revealed to be a music student or a family member. Via The Monthly She also argues that while the digital age does not necessarily translate to the death of classical music, it does not facilitate the provision of the demands that classical music makes on its audience. We're simply too 'occupied' to pay attention. The musicologist Lawrence Kramer dates the “invention” of listening to the 18th century, alongside the concept of the inner self. In his 2007 book Why Classical Music Still Matters, he writes, “All music trains the ear to hear it properly, but classical music trains the ear to hear with a peculiar acuity. It wants to be explored, not just heard … it trains both the body’s ear and the mind’s to hearken, to attend closely, to listen deeply, as one wants to listen to something not to be missed.” Via The Monthly Goldworthy even shares a personal experience in which she and her trio did a surprise performance of Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio in Campbell Arcade. Since people were unlikely to step into the concert hall, they wanted to bring the concert hall to them. Although many of the pedestrians took out their smartphones to snap pictures of the performers, they barely removed their earphones to listen to what was being played. Another observation the author makes is that classical music has been banished from the mainstream and been drafted into the luxury industry – an upscale niche product, in the words of Taruskin. In fact, concert presenters are guilty of promoting this idea by marketing classical music as proof of taste. “It’s all part of beautiful living,” a woman gushed to me earlier this year, at an “exclusive chamber music weekend” in a winery, after one of Beethoven’s eviscerating late quartets. My teacher, Eleonora Sivan, is unsentimental about her childhood in Stalinist Russia. “And yet,” she tells me, “when materialism is not an option, other things flourish.” In 1942 starving musicians performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in Leningrad while the city was under siege. The musicians were given an hour-long ovation, and the concert was broadcast to German forces as a form of psychological warfare. Even today, Russian audiences consume art music with a particular urgency, a hunger. It is not part of beautiful living. Via The Month Goldsworthy also points out that the piano was the gathering point of the middle-class home in the 19th and early 20th [...]

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