instrumental music in crisis and a book in progress

Alex Ross opines on the unnerving graph below:

You can see clearly how various generations experienced a bump in participation as they got older. The so-called Generation X, however, has yet to exhibit an upward spike as it moves into middle age. Every classical organization in America should print out this graph, pin it on the bulletin board, and ponder what is to be done. If the light-gray line doesn’t reverse direction in the next ten years, those organizations may begin to fold.

 

This is one of those cases where you know something's bad and then you see actual data and your heart sinks because it's worse than you dared dream. I'm an X Gen kid, and what this says is we not only started out less involved in classical music than any American generation in a century, we're growing increasingly alienated from it. 

Now I don't think everyone has to love classical music to be a complete person or that it's more "serious" music than folk or jazz, which I clearly spend more time around. But to me this graph and the anecdotal evidence of the decline of instrumental music in general is a truly troubling trend. To me this shows that the music industry, which set out to sell us the idea that pop songs are the same thing as music rather than one entertaining strain of music, have won. It says that the younger you are, the less likely you are to have been exposed to serious instrumental music in a positive light, along with some of the education necessary to make it really live. It shows me a society captured by the superficial and the noisy and one badly in need of remedial listening skills. 

Ross writes that "classical musicians essentially need to be in the business of adult education if they are to keep their audience and their livelihood." And I agree. Which is why I've started writing a book that's been gelling in my brain for years now. It's going to be a short and energetic primer in the rules and principles of instrumental music, with chapters on harmony, timbre, structure, phrasing and dynamics. My strong belief is that I found my path into ALL music and my eclectic tastes by being informed about the elements of music. And that didn't just happen at an early age. Every year I learn some new insight about why the miracle of music actually works on us. 

From my draft introduction: A life in music should be a series of epiphanies. That sounds supernatural, but it’s really just the amazing feeling when a leap of imagination or insight happens. Biologically speaking, it’s your brain snapping a new set of connections in place, electric signals leaping across synapses in new ways in brain realms as diverse as memory, motion, planning, reasoning and reward. But really they’re special leaps of growth, leaps that sound and feel good.

As I wrote in a previous post, we live in an America where pop music is ubiquitous and where everything has a soundtrack, but we are dirt poor in context, commentary and backstory about the bedrock principles of music. Certainly people don't need education to be moved by good music, but every bit of knowledge only deepens the experience. Music divorced from story is just sound. I'll be posting passages from and ruminations on this book as I go. If anyone is interested in the topic or how to invite a generation that was cheated on the front end of life into worlds of music that could give them great solace in the second half of life, please get in touch. I'm all ears as they say.

Comments

[George]

My first thought when I saw the graph is that it says more about concert attendance than instrumental music. Simply put, people are attending fewer live concerts. Generationally. Previous generations saw more live music. Part of that is the expense of attending a live concert. The other part may be the experience. What makes a live performance of Beethovan's 9th different from a recording? Not much, except you're in the room as it happens. If the goal of the clasical musician is to faithfully reproduce the composition as it was written, then my CD accomplishes that. This goes back to the fears the AFM had 100 years ago when recording began. Why see Caruso when you can hear him on record? The challenge here isn't for the music industry, but musicians, to find ways of getting the public to experience live music.