Being a young-sprout, my enjoyment of classical (ie, Baroque-Romantic) music is often mocked by my peers. Fortunately, I like many genres to varying degrees, so I can still fit in somehow. Anyway, I never get how the kids these days think classical music is all boring and so on. I think that if they really open their minds to it and listen, there’s no way they can say it’s not interesting. It doesn’t need to be obscure pieces, but some of Chopin’s etudes, for example, are short enough to fit kids’ attention span, and also are melodic and intriguing and cool. Why do teenagers not see this? Is there any chance it could ever become popular again, where kids say “Did you get the new recording of Beethoven’s 5th by the St. Louis Symphony? It’s tight!”? Or is it dead, finished, only appreciated by “old fogies” and classical musicians?
(I guess to broaden the question newer guys like Reich, Cage, Mahler, and Bartok can be included.)
Well, Gregorian chant enjoyed quite a revival as a sort of “New Age” genre not long ago. It’s not “Classical” strictly speaking, of course, but strictly speaking neither is Beethoven or Bartok.
It’s because Classical pieces are always performed in stuffy old concert halls where you don’t even get to clap between the symphonic movements.
Mozart’s music was not performed in such a setting in Mozart’s own time, and darn it, it shouldn’t be performed that way now. Demand your right to stage-dive and crowd-surf to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik! Woo!
I don’t know if the ignorance of Classical music will end anytime soon. I am considerably older than you, and I got lots of crap growing up for listening to Classical when I was a kid. My parents listened to it, so my sisters and I were exposed to it growing up. And we grew to love it.
Oh, the crap I got when I was a kid. I think it was because we were in a “poor” neighborhood, and the neighbors thought we were “puttin’ on airs”. As a child I was subjected to a constant campaign by my peers to “give Rock music a chance” and “start listening to our radio stations” but it never occured to any of these people to expose themselves to what I liked to listen to. Such a thought never passed their minds. It was all about “deprogramming” me from Classical. (I got to a point where Hell would freeze over before I’d listen to Rock music. Not because it was bad, but because when you are nagged that aggressively to do something, that’s the last thing you will do - you know what I mean?)
I started a thread a few months ago about this - it seems like a lot of people have a knee-jerk dislike for Classical. Even if they know almost nothing about it, they know they don’t like it, and they don’t think you ought to either. It’s amazing ignorance, if you ask me. Hey - different strokes for different folks, I don’t care if someone doesn’t like Classical. But they better well not give me, or anyone else crap because we do like it.
OK, slight hijack there. To answer the OP, no, I don’t know if Classical will be in vogue for a while. The ignorance about it goes back at least a generation, so today’s youth are learning from their parents to mock Classical. Sure, some people will always love it. And there will always be a market for it, thank goodness.
Classic FM, voted UK Station of the Year 2000, has reported another set of record-breaking audience figures.
Best ever audience reach
Best ever hours
Best ever market share
Best ever ABC1 reach
Best ever women’s listening
Best ever 35-44 year olds
Best ever children’s hours
As a life-long fan of both classical and rock music, I find the lack of interest in serious music a depressing sign of the dumbing down of our society. there several reason that classical music is dying.
People today don’t have the ears to hear with. To appreciate an art form, you have to understand its conventions and nuances. Just as old fogies say Metallica and Pink Floyd sound the same, young folk can’t tell the difference between Bach and Beethoven because they have not been trained to appreciate and understand the forms of classical music. Unfortunately, music appreciation classes in school have long since gone the way of the dodo.
2)Class barriers also get in the way. Most Americans believe that serious music is only for rich snobs and the elite. As
Yosemitebabe put it, people think you’re putting airs and aspiring above your class if you appreciate classical music.
3)Our society places value on “keeping it real” and avoiding any art form that requires effort to appreciate. Rap is simple and appeals to the libido, so it sells. Classical requires an educated ear, so it doesn’t sell. Our cultural patrimony is dying of neglect because, metaphorically speaking, most people can’t tell the difference between a cheeseburger and filet mignon. But don’t get me started on the death of education and culture in America.
I disagree with you on a few points in your post, goboy, although not with the general thrust. I also am a fan of both rock and classical (or orchestral, strictly speaking) music. (I also question your limit of the term “serious” to classical music, but that’s a semantic and personal thing that’s neither here nor there).
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Certainly, the folks for whom Mozart wrote “The Magic Flute” or “Cosi fan Tutte” were not the most well-educated or upper-class members of society. Appreciation of art is a matter of taste, and if something doesn’t hold an aesthetic appeal for someone, no amount of induction or education is going to change their mind. I understand the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism, for example, but I don’t find the works appealing, in general. Similarly, I’m not much interested in opera; it just isn’t a form that I enjoy.
This, I agree with. Unfortunately, the hemming and hawing about the NEA in recent years has harmed one of its better purposes, which was funding for arts education. Whenever school budgets are suffering, the arts invariably get cut, usually to the benefit of the football team.
Again, I disagree. I think it might be more a question of exposure more so than education. A good melody is a good melody, and someone who enjoys music will recognize it if exposed to it. Will they get as much out of the experience as a music scholar? Maybe not. Nevertheless, I have no music education aside from what I’ve taught myself, but I love my Tchaikovsky and my Mozart.
Because culture changes does not mean that it dies. If you want to get into the death of civility, that’s a whole different thread.
i think the media wants to brainwash people into being stupid, 'cause it’s easier to make money off them.
i bought 3 versions of Beethoven’s 5th but this was years ago. i’m not particularly interested in buying another. so where is the money to be made? music that changes style and gets used up serve the system better. had someone get on my case once for listening to the music from THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY because it was OLD, and this was only a few years after the movie came out. i still play the LP occasionally, gotta burn it into CD someday.
the snobbishness of the classical music crowd is a turnoff also.
I should have been clearer. I agree 100 % with Phil. By “educated ear”, I meant being accustomed to the form. The opening to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is a simple melody, but if you’re a teen used to N’Sync or Sisqo, Mozart will sound like noise at first until your ear gets accustomed to it. Similarly, someone transported from the 18th century would think our pop music sounded like noise until they got the groove on.
I agree that culture changes and we have to be flexible and open to new things, but I’m sad that Chaucer, Milton, and Dante, among others, are just relics, unread and unknown even by the educated.
Overall I tend to agree with you. Further, I think that the above three points can be generalized to all of the arts, not just music. To me it seems like modern western societies have become so “rational” that many “right-brain” forms of thought have been ignored. Not only are art forms such as dance, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, storytelling, etc, under-funded IMO by both private consumers and government, but also in many areas of the society there’s almost a backlash against art’s admirers. This backlash was especially real in the white, blue-collar neighborhood where I grew up.
But after probably a decade or so of believing that intuition and aesthetics were “bad”, while rationality and logic were “good”, I recently resumed a childhood love of mine, painting. The “feeling” of painting again after all these years is similar to what I imagine using my left hand would feel like if I neglected it for many years. It’s fascinating that it actually works, and I thoroughly enjoying observing its movements, almost as if it’s a new sense. Yet, it’s painful because it doesn’t “work” like my rational brain wants it to work.
Anyway, getting back to the OP. Modern forms of music like rap or heavy metal almost seem like pure emotion. They seem formless, spontaneous, animalistic and irresponsible, but on the other hand they’re dualistic. On the debut album from Limp Bizcut there’s a track where the musician is basically playing feedback with his guitar. It sounds loud and chaotic, a large mass of incompatible sound waves blended together, but surprisingly it sounds interesting. You can hear an interviewer’s comments overdubbed onto the track, and he’s commenting on the rage and sheer frustration of the musician. He then asks the musician what it means to him, and the musician replies by saying it’s his way of “getting off”.
In this way I think that classical forms of music, with their emphasis on proper form and function are incompatible with the emotional undertones of today’s western society. Life today has become so routine, rational and iterative, that it’s constraining. The art forms that are popular exist solely for “getting off”. People as a whole feel like a society of caged monkeys, and they’d rather abandon the aesthetics of art as long as it allows them immediate gratification. In classical music the apex of response happens afterward, upon reflection. Modern music, on the other hand, is like an incision into your mind that relieves all the emotional pressure. And music isn’t the only medium like this; modern cinema, photography, dance and visual art all show some undertone of this phenomenon.
I’ll weigh in as a recent product of the education system and a long-time fan of classical and rock music. I admit that I am musically trained, so I do not wish to presume to speak for those without any training.
I agree in part with just about everyone. I am an educational fossil in many ways. As open to cultural change as I am, I do regret the loss of some of the greatest works of literature and music.
Damn right. To go back even farther, does anyone remember Homer, Sophocles, Cicero, or Virgil?
I agree with that, too. Classical music is an acquired taste. I remember the first time I heard any classical music. I must have been about 8, and my parents played their venerable record of Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music. I just didn’t get it. But with more exposure and more listening, I did start to understand, and then grew to love it deeply. That required some delay of gratification, which is becoming more and more difficult in the “information age.” When everything a young consumer junkie needs is within instantaneous reach, there is simply less incentive to wait for anything.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not mean to be putting on airs. In many ways this can be a good thing. I am just trying to strike a balance between instant gratification and patience in my own life.
But anyway, the disappearance of general musical education is sad but true. The only recourse is for parents to expose their children to music themselves.
I disagree with the idea that there is no emotion in classical music. Sure, it may not have
been written as such, but some songs have a very heavy overtone, or mood to them.
I myself enjoy the Russian composers most of all, such as Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev and Borodin, to name a few. I also like Debussy and J. Strauss II (Yes, the Blue Danube!)
A lot of it is also ballet, and ballet has many emotions. Simply, I think many compositions are trying to tell a story through song.
But the thing that urks me is when I say I like classical, everyone’s like, “Oh, it’s boring”
Or if they claim to like it, they’ll say “It’s relaxing.”
Boring? Um, not really. Listen to the 1812 Overture, or the Montagues and the Capulets…
Relaxing? Same as above, or with something like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Marche Slav,
Or the Nutcracker Suite…some of it is moody, dark, some of it is light, airy, etc.
To find “emotion” in certain pieces of classical music is not difficult. But Guinistasia already pointed that out. Much of classical music is marvelously lyric, or enraged, sarcastic, melancholic, etc. The list goes on and on.
But much of it is magnificently rational. Right now I am listening to a CD full of Bach concerti. They are perfect. In every possible way. They do not sound like some tortured musician “getting off.” If you want to find emotion in what ordinarily would be a straitjacketed musical form, the baroque concerto, all you have to do is listen. Bach manages to blend his technical perfection with a restless, straining energy: he at the same time masters the concerto grosso yet is bursting to cast aside its restraints. Every time the harpsichord grows louder and the basso ostinato becomes more complex, I can feel Bach trying to break out.
I suppose my point is simply that distinctions between “rational” and “emotional”, or more tellingly “gratification” and “aesthetic” are not so cut and dry. I don’t think the character of our society has changed so much that classical music is inherently not appreciated. I just think it’s losing in the culture war for much more mundane reasons.
MR
A raving Prokofiev fan, with plenty of room for Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov on the side.
I think you all have made some excellent points, but I still believe that it boils down to giving something different a chance, whether it is music, art or literature.
I never had any training on how to enjoy or understand classical music, I think my interest was first piqued by going to church and singing the classic hyms. I started out wanting to listen to “upbeat” classical and my love for the form grew from there. I may not know the proper terms or phrasology to discuss it in learned company, but that in no way takes away from my appriciation or my support.
I do disagree that this is a “money sport” as a past holder of season tickets for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (one of the best in the world) and now of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (very good for the size of the area) I spend a lot less money than the people seeing the latest pop fad or some touring retro-regurgitation that is far beyond there prime. True you will want to invest in some nice clothes out of respect for the musicians, but you don’t have to break the bank, and especially us guys, we can use the same suit.
Also, I disagree with the notion that people who attend these functions are snotty, sure just as in high school you have certain cliques, but far and away these people are dynamite. I have no concern about asking what might be considered stupid questions, they have never made me feel stupid, just the opposite, most of them are so glad that you are also supporting something they cherish, we are all considered birds of feather.
Just as I love classical (ok orchestral) I also love classic rock, and just as I despise country music I have a rabid dislike for ballet, but hey, we all have our particular tastes.
Getting back to the original thread, classical music is more popular now than at any other time in the last one hundred years, don’t believe me? Check any music sales history and ask any concert hall for sales and attendance records, you will be pleased!
I am, as many of you know, a big Phish fan. Much of Phish’s music is lyrically sparse and unfolds over a period of ten or twenty minutes, sometimes tightly composed and sometimes improvised.
It is impossible to listen to a minute or two of a Phish song and understand what they’re doing. To someone who doesn’t understand it, it’s all just a bunch of aimless noodling. It is the same way with classical music–you can’t grasp it all at once, or hear it all at once. You might have to listen to it a few times before you can really “hear it”. A lot of people just aren’t willing to put in the effort.
Music these days has increasingly been packaged into three or four minute songs that change very little from beginning to end. Instrumental music is just the space between verses. It can be really hard for people to appreciate music that breaks the pattern, whether it is Mozart or Debussy or “Slave to the Traffic Light”.
If it makes you feel any better, Phish packed 25,000 people into Deer Creek for three straight nights, with about 10,000 more outside trying to get tickets. Acts like Phish and Zappa, not to mention jazz in general, have been a jumping-off point for many into a much broader exploration of music. It’s an awfully long way from Britney Spears, though.
Exactly! I grew up loving straight Classical music, and then branched out to film music. Sure the elitists may look down their noses at Williams and Goldsmith, but I think that such thinking is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Hey - maybe it’s a little commercial, but it’s beautiful to listen to, has a basic orchestral Classical sound. Where else could orchestral film music be categorized? The only radio stations I ever hear Goldsmith, Williams, Morricone, etc. are on Classical stations. And, I might add - a person might be drawn to a particular soundtrack composer at first, and then branch out to Classical music. A little Copland here, a little Rimsky-Korsakoff (sp?) there…and before you know it, they’re enjoying it all. That’s a good thing!
I grew up listening to Classical (my dad was a rabid fan of Sibelius and Bruckner) and then “branched out” to film music - particularly Jerry Goldsmith. I LOVE Jerry Goldsmith! My dad tried to act snobby about my love for film music, but he couldn’t quite conceal his pleasure that his daughter was rabidly, enthusiastically crazy about a composer who wrote “Classical sounding” music.