What's Happening Here

Is classical music dying? That's a big topic, and a blog seems like a perfect way to attack it ...

Is classical music dying? That's a big topic, and a blog seems like a perfect way to attack it. Nobody knows any answers, and in my experience -- teaching a course about the future of classical music, writing and speaking about it, and discussing it with many people in the field -- anything we say spins off in 12 directions at once. So why not approach it all in little pieces, following thoughts wherever they lead?

I do have to say that as time goes on, I've gotten more pessimistic. I wouldn't say that classical music is going to die. Among much else, that would be a tragedy. We'd lose a large and deep part of our western heritage, along with the notion, almost forgotten among people who don't know classical music, that a piece of music can change and grow over long spans of time, the way a movie does, or a novel, or a play.

But I think classical music will change, maybe drastically. The economics of the way we do things now won't work in the future. The audience is shrinking. There's something rigid, stuffy, artificial in the old presumptions that classical music is the only serious music, that it has to be treated with reverence (and scholarship), and that old masterworks are more important than new compositions (which isn't what many people say out loud, but is clearly how the business works).

What will the changes be? I'll explore that here.

October 24, 2005 3:22 PM | Permalink

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Khrushchev's Cold War
A book by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali. Tells the story of the cold war during Khrushchev's reign, mostly from the Soviet point of view, as revealed by Soviet archives. Expertly told, and paced; it moves, at times, almost like a thriller. And it teaches some lessons. First, the blunders on all sides -- the lack of information, the misunderstandings, the paranoia, the prejudice, the dumb decisions -- are just staggering. And second, many top people in the US government and military (Nixon, for instance) were more warlike than anyone on the Soviet side. Khrushchev was insecure and belligerent, and he loved extending Soviet influence (often haplessly) into the third world. But he wanted peace. The American fear -- which I remember so well from those years -- that the Soviets might launch a nuclear attack on us from bombers flying over the North Pole, or that they'd attack western Europe with their land forces, turns out to be absolutely groundless. Nothing of the sort was ever discussed in the Kremlin. And they didn't even have the bombers.

Antonioni

Anne Carson

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