Dave Hurwitz, the online sphere’s most prolific commentator on classical music, has thoughts on its perennially predicted demise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0JnFEaOno
Like Hurwitz, I don’t think classical music is dying; but I’m less sanguine than he is about the challenges that classical performers and presenters are facing now.
The good news for classical music, a niche interest, is that every other kind of music is a niche interest, and has been for years: https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/your-niche-or-mine/
The bad news for classical music is that it must adjust pretty rapidly to an environment of low-overhead production of low-cost or free entertainment.
It costs me nothing to watch Hurwitz praise or pan classical recordings, and then to access most of those recordings, on YouTube. For the price of a middling seat at the opera, I can buy a year’s worth of ad-free access. And I would invest in quality speakers or headphones if I didn’t already own them.
I can access well-made concert videos of A-list soloists and orchestras playing some favorite concerto. So what’s my motivation for spending a week’s worth of grocery money to see and hear the latest competition winner playing the concerto in my local concert hall? At a set date, time and location, which is a long drive from home? Among people who are in bronchial distress or forgot to turn off their phones? In a not especially comfortable seat that’s half a block from the stage?
Will I be compensated with an unforgettable live musical experience? I’ve been that lucky maybe a dozen times in 50-plus years of concertgoing; but the prohibitive odds are that the experience will be OK at best.
My real motivation wouldn’t be to experience this or that performance, but to support the organization that employs local musicians, whose work extends from the concert stage into schools, community events and places that otherwise wouldn’t have access to classical music.
Or would they? Updating Virgil Thomson’s quip, “Every town in America has two things – a five-and-dime and a Boulanger pupil,” every town now has a dollar store and a Juilliard graduate playing for donations. Such low- or no-cost performances are some of the most memorable live music I’ve heard.
Musicians who don’t have a trust fund or wealthy patrons, or aren’t keen on constant travel to free-lance gigs, had better find a non-musical job that pays the bills. (Some things never change.)
If I were an ambitious young classical musician today, I would work almost as hard on becoming a camera-friendly performer able to speak conversationally (i.e., non-technically) to an audience, and figuring out how to monetize those skills, as I would on mastering my instrument. And on mastering more TikTok-length solo pieces than concertos. We got a preview of this trend during Covid lockdown.
Alongside those challenges to artists, there are challenges to classical and other fine-arts institutions. The most significant is the passing of a generation of big individual donors and the disappearance-by-merger of hometown corporate sponsors.
The very rich of the 2020s are less prominent patrons of arts groups than the very rich of the 1970s, let alone the 1920s. Maybe they’ll grow into that role, or maybe they’ll just be aging gazillionaires-at-play. Collecting sports cars may get you through a midlife crisis; endowing the principal cellist’s chair probably won’t. If you own homes in four places, you might have a real stake in the cultural vitality of just one of them. Or none: Why settle for Scottsdale when your private jet can whisk you to Salzburg?
On the corporate philanthropic front: A national/international firm that has absorbed local/regional ones is less likely to make big donations to arts organizations or to buy naming rights for venues outside its headquarters city. Even there, putting its name and logo on an arena is a more visible and popular sign of community investment than doing so on a performing-arts center. Elsewhere, the best that most arts groups might anticipate is support from branch-office executives.
Given all that, a lot of classical-music institutions, big and small, are facing serious downsizing, changes in programming, and, for more than a few, bankruptcy.
And more classical musicians will be on their own, liberated creatively but seeing their vocation turn into an avocation.
Letter V 