New young audience?

From Harper's magazine, in a provocative article by Thomas de Zengotita, which suggests how a proposed new liberal TV talk show ought to work:

Whatever his style, the Host must embody [a] fusion of high and popular culture. That is the key to our enterprise.

Why? Because the base of a renewed progressivism in this country is made up of young people for whom that fusion is a way of life. People in this base have read Foucault and spent time in chat rooms discussing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. From interns to associates, these people drive the culture industry -- media, arts, nonprofits, the academy.

But they don't drive classical music, and in fact are barely represented in our field. Nor is their aesthetic reflected in the concerts we give. Except in new music, of course. The current generation of new music groups -- Bang on a Can is the obvious example -- come completely from this culture, which is why they have a chance to capture the new young audience that mainstream classical music might never attract.

Mainstream classical music, in fact, doesn't even seem like high art to younger people; it can all too often seem middlebrow and sentimental. That's because irony is a big part of the culture that de Zengotita describes. To see how older classical music -- at least as we present it now -- can strike younger people, see the new issue of Chamber Music, the publication of Chamber Music America. In it, there's a very good piece by Stephen Rodgers and Kevin Gosa, reporting an informal survey of people from 24 and 34, who were asked what classical music meant to them. And in that piece we read, quite wonderfully, the following:

Many…associated the classics with clichéd expressions of triumph or raging love. Jarod, 30, offered a mock voiceover for each: "Uplifting! Triumphant! The soldiers and the Spanish noblemen have just arrived, Sire! We will feast tonight!!!…Two long-lost lovers, married many years ago, suffer amnesia and forget they are married, only to have their memories completely restored to them! At last! They are back together! Love!! YES!!"

What's our answer to that?