![]() ![]() Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that the situation is not quite so dire. The classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old, the white, the rich, and the bored. A complete version of the Death of Classical Music Archive would go back to the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of ars nova were thought to signal the end of civilization. If this be death, the record is skipping. But the same story could have been written ten years ago or twenty. ![]() The Web site ArtsJournal features a media file with the deliberately ridiculous name Death of Classical Music Archive, whose articles recycle a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions orchestras are facing deficits the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible on television, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are so commonplace. You see magazines with listings for Popular Music in one section and for Classical Music in another, so that the latter becomes, by implication, Unpopular Music. When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.” The music is described in terms of its distance from the present, its resistance to the mass-what it is not. If it is worth loving, it must be great no more need be said. They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak the language of high-end real estate. They say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Yet some discerning souls believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an inferior popular product. I can’t rank my favorite music any more than I can rank my memories. This morning, for me, it was Sibelius’s Fifth late last night, Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” tomorrow, it may be something entirely new. The best music is music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Yes, the music can be great and serious but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. Consider some of the rival names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music.” Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music,” and I propose a trade: they can have “classical,” I’ll take “the music.”įor at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre élitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name.
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