Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

---

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Music Lane ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Time to settle the score

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on July 12, 2003 at 07:41:38

Time to settle the score

Sat 17 May 2003

by Bill Jamieson

In America, leading orchestras are in meltdown. In New York, the city
authorities have resorted to staging classical music concerts free of
charge to halt an attendance slump. In Britain, classical music CD and
cassette sales have plunged to their lowest for 15 years, falling
below 6 per cent of total music sales for the first time ever.
Classical record shops are closing. Even well-heeled institutions such
as the Royal Opera House are turning to youth nightclubs such as the
Ministry of Sound for marketing help.
Welcome to the death of music, or that genre of it we define as
classical. For more than a century it has captured the hearts and
minds of millions, inspired the building of great concert halls in
hundreds of cities, sustained thousands of musicians and created a
discography that seemed timeless and enduring in its appeal. Well,
timeless and enduring until now. For, despite private patronage and
lashings of public funds, concert performance and ticket sales are in
free fall.
Little wonder the latest attempts by Sir Brian McMaster, director of
the Edinburgh Festival, to halt and reverse the decline in concert
going are being anxiously watched round the world. For there is a
growing fear that the decline in classical concert attendance now
looks unstoppable.
The thesis of the death of music is scarcely new, but seldom has the
speed and scale of the decline been more evident than now. And this
time it is being felt across every major orchestra right to the top.
Indeed, it is not at all lurid or fanciful to suggest that the
conventional classical music concert will die out within the next
decade, unable to outlive the ageing demography of today's
concert-goers.
Take the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where Daniel Barenboim is music
director. It is rated one of the top four ensembles in the world. It
is now facing the most serious crisis in its 112-year history. Ticket
sales are flat. Subscriptions are falling. New corporate and
individual sponsorships have all but dried up. Nor is this a special
or isolated case. No fewer than 19 of the full-time orchestras in the
US are facing serious financial problems. But the Chicago Symphony's
biggest problem - amplified by the stock market slide on Wall Street
that has sharply reduced sponsorship income - is to halt the shrinkage
of audience. And live audience is crucial, accounting for most of the
company's earned income. Similar pressures are evident in the UK,
deepening the challenge posed for the Edinburgh Festival to break out
of the ageing demography in which classical music is entrapped.
But can it break out? There are two views, neither of them comfortable
for classical music lovers. The first at least offers some hope and is
the one now embraced by concert meisters such as McMaster. This is
that for classical music to survive, either it has to be offered at a
discount to its real cost, with specific incentives targeted at
younger people, or its presentation and performance will have to be
refurbished - possibly a combination of both. It is not just how we
buy tickets, but how we listen to the music, where and in what
ambience and configuration, that has to be re-thought.
This school, though sharply divided between the discounters and the
reformers, is slowly gaining the ascendant in an arts establishment
long reluctant to admit the scale and the depth of the problem.
Economist Professor Sir Alan Peacock, former chairman of the Scottish
Arts Council, has long predicted the demise of the big behemoth
philharmonic orchestras and the rise of the more flexible, fresher
sounding - and cost effective - chamber orchestras. "We may be
seeing," he says, "the end of large-scale, blockbuster classical
performances. I still think there is a market for tuneful 19th-century
music. But we will see more groupings and arrangements of
international music events and programmes at special festivals such as
Verona and Edinburgh."
What's clear is that classical music is not going to go down without a
fight. McMaster vigorously resists any notion of irreversible decline
- as befits a festival director who has deployed a range of devices to
sustain concert attendance levels that are attracting envious study
round the world. McMaster is determined. Last year saw the popular
introduction of low-price, late-night concerts. And this year will see
free tickets for those aged 26 or under. But in his view it is the
quality of the music offer that matters most.
"Nothing has changed since day one in music," he argues. "If you put
on something good, people will flock to it. If you put on shit, people
will stay away."
Even four months from the start of the festival, he proudly rattles
off statistics to confound the proponents of "the death of music": 64
per cent of tickets are already sold for 20 Queen's Hall concerts
starting at 11am, and the Usher Hall concerts are already 41 per cent
sold.
Sceptics would argue that this is to be expected of an international
festival that draws tens of thousands of people from round the world
by virtue of an intense three weeks of concert and opera performance.
But the figures do provide some hope, and cannot be explained away as
a consequence of resort to popular, "easy listening" classics. "People
will respond to great music", says McMaster. "And that is what the
Festival provides. You don't get them hooked by second-rate string
quartets wearing leather with their tits hanging out. It is everything
to do with what is musically lively and exciting."
The second view brings no comfort at all. It is that the classical
concert is over - with no encore. It is so antipathetic to the culture
we are now in that it is destined to terminal decline. According to
this view, it is not the way classical music is sold or presented that
is the problem, rather what the music represents, and the demands it
makes on its audience. Within this school, there is no agreement on
precisely why the decline has become terminal. Certainly education -
or the paucity of it - is blamed by many.
According to a recent UK survey of six to 14 year olds, 65 per cent
were unable to name a single classical composer. Most people leave
school without having had any introduction to classical music. But
then, outside of music specialists, few teachers today have any
familiarity with the classics. Even the guitar-strumming Prime
Minister has got to the age of 50 before expressing a resolve to try
some classical music. Colin MacLean, one of Scotland's most
experienced writers on music and author of a recently published
history of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (NYOS), points out
how very difficult it is for even the most committed teachers to
convey their passion and enthusiasm for music without adequate back-up
and support.
The Scottish Arts Council is giving £7.5 million towards music tuition
in primary schools. It sounds a lot. "But," says MacLean, "this is
spread over three years, leaving just £1 million to be divided between
2,000 primary schools. It's barely enough to afford instruments, still
less a qualified tutor."
MacLean's book tribute to the work of Sir Alexander Gibson and those
who have made the National Youth Orchestra possible is a spirited
antidote to those who claim that the death of music is already upon
us. But one can't help but get the sense that his inspirational story
is the account of an uphill struggle - and that it is not getting any
easier.
Nor does he have any easy solutions. He talks of the "accident" of
good teachers who can encourage an ear for classical music. "It is how
to encourage `the accident' that is the issue. You need to encourage
good quality teachers who are backed up and supported with good
instruments and good tutors. It needs teachers who can tackle the
impossible."
Changing social and cultural values have also played a large part in
the decline of concert-going. In a world that has become markedly more
informal and easygoing, many find the idea of going to a concert
intimidating. They fear the demands that classical music makes: the
need to take the act of listening seriously; to follow the lines of
musical thought and development through a 40-minute symphony; even to
sit still for any length of time - these are activities that
contemporary culture has marginalised.
According to Andrew Clark, music critic of the Financial Times,
classical music is "ill-equipped to survive in a microwave culture.
Its values are those of discipline, concentration, self-improvement,
individualism, and spiritual/philosophical contemplation - the values
of an educated minority.
"Delving into it requires the development of sensitivity, implying
conflict with the value of today's majority - the easily communicated,
easily understood values of pop culture."
Those who believed that classical music should never be the preserve
of a socially exclusive few and that it should be given every
encouragement to acquire a mass audience have had their comeuppance at
the hands of the demos they championed. The technology they hoped
would create a mass following - affordable high-quality sound
reproduction and the mass dissemination of classical works in
ever-newer formats - has failed to lift classical music out of its
niche. Nor have the millions of pounds of public funds poured into
orchestras led to any uplift in ticket sales.
Recent figures show classical music sales slumped to little more than
£60 million last year, a total that includes sales of easy-listening
items such as Classical Chillout Gold, Classical Graffiti and Harry
Potter. Simon Rattle's new recording of Mahler's Fifth with the Berlin
Philharmonic only briefly topped those pop classic combinations sold
as relaxation aids, with music interspersed with the sounds of
twittering birds and crashing ocean waves. Not a single classical item
made the top 50 best-sellers list last year.
Perhaps the more searching question to ask is not why classical music
is in such decline but why it has survived for so long. Indeed, in
Clark's definition, it could never be a mass-market, high-volume
business. It has thus done extraordinarily well to achieve the
penetration that it has.
One of the key developments in recent decades has been the emergence
of the cult of performer - the turning of virtuosos into popular
celebrities so that ticket and album sales are boosted to pop idol
status. An inevitable result is that such sales have become a function
of the performers, not what was being performed. And it raises doubts
as to whether it leads, as enthusiasts claim, to a wider experience
with classical music.
Meanwhile, the renewing spring of the classical genre - composition -
has withered. It has seen itself shuttled off to esoteric dead ends of
contemporary music that seem to have more to do with acoustics than
music. Certainly avant-garde music attracts an intense, if cultish,
following. But Alan Peacock is waspishly sceptical as to whether
contemporary music is even about listening or assimilation at all.
"It's the Schönberg syndrome," he reflects, "where the main reason for
having the audience is to improve the acoustics."
For the present, all now rests with the optimists in halting the
spiral of decline. But this is a divided camp. The recent move by the
Royal Opera House to pep up ticket sales by aping the marketing
gimmicks of the Ministry of Sound have brought a resounding cry of
"grotesque" from Sir Jonathan Miller, flanker marker for the arts
lobby. "One has to have confidence in the art being what it is," he
rails. "You can't lure people into going to see it by dropping
scratch-and-sniff cards into night-clubs and bars." Not a fan, then.
Thanks to the commitment and the imagination of McMaster, the Festival
should stave off the death for music for now. But outside of it, the
signs are not good. Last month one of Edinburgh's biggest classical
music retailers, Bauermeisters on George IV Bridge, launched a
closing-down sale of its entire music department with an offer of 20
per cent off already discounted discs to clear the shelves.
Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler or Wagner: it makes no difference in a
clear-out sale. Scherzo or largo, you're priced to go. If it's not yet
the death of music, it feels palpably, depressingly close.

• http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/s2.cfm?id=557552003   (Open in New Window)

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

VH Audio

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---