Music students — another way the crisis hits?

Here’s something I might add to my list of ways that classical music is in crisis: Even music students now don’t seem to have the same interest in classical music that students used to have, years ago. (And as they did when I was a graduate student in composition at the Yale School of Music, from 1972 to 1974).

He says that a consortium of British commercial companies involved with classical music — Gramophone magazine and Classic FM were two of them; I don’t remember the others — surveyed young classical musicians, kids who play in youth orchestras. Almost none of these kids, the survey found, would even consider reading Gramophone. They think it’s a magazine for old people. And almost none wanted to go to classical concerts. My source was quite shaken by this news.

Britain — as has been reported several times, in news stories linked on ArtsJournal — is also seeing a decline in the number of students studying the less popular orchestral instruments, like the viola and the bassoon. This decline, the stories say, is reaching crisis proportions. I have to say, though, that I haven’t heard anything like this in the US (and I’ve asked about it).