Is classical music dead?

When it comes to classical music and American culture, the fat lady hasn’t justsung. Brünnhilde has packed her bags and moved to Boca Raton.

Classical music has been circling the drain for years, of course. There’s little doubt as to the causes: the fingernail grip of old music in a culture that venerates the new; new classical music that, in the words of Kingsley Amis, has about as much chance of public acceptance as pedophilia; formats like opera that are extraordinarily expensive to stage; and an audience that remains overwhelmingly old and white in an America that’s increasingly neither. Don’t forget the attacks on arts education, the Internet-driven democratization of cultural opinion, and the classical trappings—fancy clothes, incomprehensible program notes, an omerta-caliber code of audience silence—that never sit quite right in the homeland of popular culture.

Let’s start by following the money. In 2013, total classical album sales actually rose by 5 percent, according to Nielsen. But that's hardly a robust recovery from the 21 percent decline the previous year. And consider the relative standing of classical music. Just 2.8 percent of albums sold in 2013 were categorized as classical. By comparison, rock took 35 percent; R&B 18 percent; soundtracks 4 percent. Only jazz, at 2.3 percent, is more incidental to the business of American music.

What about the airwaves? There are only a handful of commercial classical music stations left in America. Even public classical radio is in trouble. The number of noncommercial classical radio stations—on the air and online—has risen. But much of that growth is due to commercial stations switching to a public format. Actual listenership continues to decline.

And some public classical stations have ditched the music. One such station, WUIS in Illinois, added an online classical channel after switching the main station to talk and news. As the station’s manager put it, “[C]lassical radio is one of those things that's slowly going away.” Sirius XM, the satellite and online radio provider, has nine jazz channels, 20 Latino channels, and eight Canada-themed channels—but only two traditionally classical stations. One, called Symphony Hall, has 3,500 Facebook likes. Sirius’ all–Pearl Jam channel has 11,000; their D.J. Tiesto-curated channel has 89,000.

Now let’s look at classical concerts. Live classical music is less commercially viable than ever. Attendance per concert has fallen, according to Robert Flanagan, an emeritus professor at Stanford. But “even if every seat were filled, the vast majority of U.S. symphony orchestras still would face significant performance deficits.” Live orchestral music is essentially a charity case.

A Bloomberg story on the recent wave of orchestra bankruptcies (an unheard-of phenomenon outside of the U.S., says Flanagan) notes that by 2005, orchestras got more money from donations than from ticket sales. The New York City Opera, once hailed as the “people’s opera,” filed for bankruptcy in October. If the “people” want opera, they’ve got a funny way of showing it.

Which brings us to demographics. Back in 1937, the median age at orchestra concerts in Los Angeles was 28. Between 1982 and 2002, the portion of concertgoers under 30 fell from 27 percent to 9 percent; the share over age 60 rose from 16 percent to 30 percent. In 1982 the median age of a classical concertgoer was 40; by 2008 it was 49.

If classical music was merely becoming the realm of the old—an art form that many of us might grow into appreciating—that might be manageable. It seems that younger fans are not converting to classical music as they age. The last generation to broadly love classical music may simply be aging, like World War I veterans, out of existence.

What about making music? In 1992, 4.2 percent of American adults reported performing or practicing classical music at least once in the previous year. By 2012, the number had dropped to 2 percent (compared with, say, the 5 percent of Americans who reported they created “pottery, ceramics or jewelry.”)

What about music education? The story of how the ax of school funding cuts falls first on arts education, especially in poorer school districts, is an old one now. Yet despite all the studies that show the broad benefits of music education, many school systems will now have “no music specialists serving elementary schools,” notes James Catterall, a professor at UCLA. As for adult education, when the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., decided to shutter its amateur education program, an outraged citizenry compared its importance to that of a hospital emergency room. But even the picketing, petition-signing populace of the People’s Republic couldn’t stop the program from closing.

Finally let’s look at the general cultural positioning of classical music. Many publications no longer retain full-time classical music critics. Yvonne Frindle, a music blogger, notes that Time has featured 64 classical figures on its cover—but the vast majority before 1956 (though Bach made the cover in 1968) do not. The last, featuring Vladimir Horowitz, came in 1986. Today the notion that a pianist could culturally sideline a story about aircraft carriers sounds nothing short of quaint.

Classical music does retains overtones of, well, classiness. But in contemporary America, that’s arguably its biggest problem. Classical music isn’t like broccoli—something Manny’s too young to love. Most americans are unlikely to back proposals to tax the NFL in order to fund symphonies. But are there any bright spots at all? Despite the worries over music education, instrument purchases for schools have remained fairly constant at just under one instrument for every 50 kids, each year. That’s not a lot, and instruction time and quality is another question. But at least instruments are physically in the classrooms.

And it’s not as though the classical music world isn’t trying to address its image problems. Kudos to Groupmuse, for example, which arranges informal but high-quality live classical performances in Boston-area private homes, and markets them to a young audience (“halfway between a chamber music concert and a house party … Jam out on the air-violin if that’s your thing!”). Greg Sandow also notes that America’s population growth will continue to buy time for classical music. Some strong institutions, like Tanglewood, will endure—maybe even thrive—on a declining share of a growing pie.

While classical music may not be dead yet, it is most certainly on life support, as the genre is being forced on to the rough shoulder of the information superhighway.  Who could have imagined that the evolution of the Internet and cell phones, once the exclusive domain of universities, government and business travelers, would in twenty years push aside live performances, radio broadcasts and school music programs through their instant access to pop culture and media?

Technology and the instant access to multiple media forms have accelerated the decline of classical music in ways that have yet to be fully understood or studied.  American orchestras who are struggling with managing rising operational costs against the grim backdrop of sagging subscription sales and a decrease in donations and sustaining funds are engaged in a final battle for survival as they try to defend their territory from a multiple-front assault.

The key ingredient that makes any cultural offering exciting and viable is exposure.  In order to build an audience for classical music there must be exposure at several levels.  The largest threat comes from school districts, many that are broke and forced to fund only those courses and offerings that are considered “essential” or “critical” to a student’s academic success.  Ending music and art programs for the sake of math and science may fulfill a state’s narrow definition of basic skills but when has the government ever been a bellwether in the arena of educational excellence and success?  The reality of this trend has already begun to reap disastrous effects on classical music.  Young children are no longer exposed to songs and scales and string classes, orchestra and band practices and children’s concerts.  It is an unfortunate fact that the bow and rosin have been replaced by a smart phone and a data plan.

Seismic cultural shifts in America have also broken the foundations of classical music and in the U.S. particularly there seems to have developed an ignorance-fueled disdain for anything pertaining to dead, western European white males.  While it is a historical fact that the majority of classical music was dominated (composed, performed and paid for) by white males it should be pointed out that today’s planners and artistic movers and shakers have taken the baton handed off by their western European predecessors, pushing the genre into exciting new directions, integrating music from cultures all over the world.  It still is a high art discipline; after all it takes more than a sequencing keyboard and a drum machine to create truly great classical music for live performances and recordings.  It is still an art that requires the courses in music theory, ear training, composition and orchestration, music history and counterpoint, among others.

Even the boldest attempts to reinvent classical music into something it is not has only had the temporary effect of stemming the tide of disinterest and neglect of the art form.  Being an art form also distinguishes classical music from its destructive little brother ‘pop music and video’ which is rapidly fomenting the increasingly hedonistic surrender of American culture.  Classical music takes work, it takes thought and imagination.  Aristotle wrote “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance”.  

Classical music is a socializing art form.  It brings people of all types together to write and create it, then to an audience of people to physically get up and drive to the venue to listen to it.  This process swims upstream against the de-socializing effects of modern technology.  There is nothing social about social media.  As human beings there is no more effective method of communication than face to face, social interaction.  So much more can be said with a smile, a lift of an eyebrow or a grimace than the cold, impersonal text riding in off the cell towers.  So, it should also be that so much more can be experienced by attending a live performance of classical music than by downloading a digital recording of the same works, compressed and processed into metallic, bitter tasting bits and bytes.  There is no PC or smart phone on the planet earth that can evoke the emotions more than a live performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony or the magnificent Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, filling a hall with sounds and vibrations that leave a lifelong, visceral impression.

Classical music will die a slow death for sure.  It will be placed on the endangered species list of dead art forms, kept alive in a few places as living museum pieces where funding still exists alongside the Dodo bird and the Latin language.  Its fate is sealed unless we have the courage to beat back the forces of the simplistic populists and maintain classical music’s place in the cultural pie. One must cling to the forlorn hope that classical music has been down for so long that it must somehow be due for a comeback. More realistically, though, what we need is for a Jeff Bezos to step in. He recently described Amazon as a symphony of people, software, and robots. Maybe he’d like a struggling orchestra to go with his newspaper.