Botstein: Death Greatly Exaggerated

I'm not just brown-nosing when I say that my boss, conductor/musicologist Leon Botstein, just gave the speech of his life, in the Chautauqua Lecture Series produced by public radio station WQLN in Pennsylvania (I listened to it on WAMC in New York) - on the myth that classical music is dying. [UPDATE: Oops, I had tuned in late and have just learned that this was a rebroadcast from an earlier speech.] He developed the point that classical music is not in competition with any form of mass entertainment, and never has been. The world of mass entertainment has grown astronomically, but classical music has never shrunk. The size of the classical music audience, he went on, is as large as it has ever been, and it has always, since the 19th century, consisted primarily of the old, with a secondary contingent of very young listeners. He attributed this to the complexity of the classical music experience, which does not take on full meaning until one's own life has grown complicated enough to match it.

Where the crisis is, Leon argued, is not in the size or commitment of the audience, or the expenses of production, or the education of the audience, or the quality of musical expertise, but in the location of patronage. He gave the history whereby the middle class once gave money to classical music as a way of imitating the older, moribund aristocracy. Today's nouveau riche have no inherent connection to music, as they have to the movies; and as the government increasingly moves to privatize philanthropy, there is a tremendous and understandable pressure to give money to social causes such as poverty and medical research rather than the arts. In short (he didn't put it this way, but I will), the government is robbing us blind, and non-commercial music is one of the first businesses to feel the pinch. And Leon came close to implying what I've often said, that the worst thing happening to classical music is that its supposed fans are running around screaming that it's dying.

With his usual curvilinear logic, which manages to encompass all disciplines and still hone back in on the central point, Leon argued for much greater diversity in programming, the revival of forgotten composers, and the importance of new music as a necessary filter through which to connect with the old. He also felt that we are training so many more excellent classical performers than the music world can possibly accommodate, many of whom will go into other fields professionally (especially Asians), that we are, in effect, creating in these people a new type of classical music patron. He made an interesting argument, more in-depth than I can relate from memory, for the uniqueness of what symphonic-length classical music has to offer - that it is the only artform that takes place in time in which the real-world content is not specified, and therefore the audience member gets to create his own associations between life and the work of art. Whatever one might think of his tangential assertions, the lecture was a masterful refutation, point by point and couched in more accurate social history than most musicians have at their disposal, of the fears that something terrible is happening to the classical music world. A tape of the lecture doesn't, as of this writing, seem to be available via internet yet, but if I can find a URL for it I'll post it here.

Photo credit: Steve J. Sherman