New book episode

The new episode of my

href="http://www.artsjournal.com/greg">book (about the future of classical

music, of course), went online last night. As I said in my last post, I’m writing

now about the things that happened, in the 19th century and the 20th, to make

the classical music world what it’s like today. I realize that I’m going at

this a little backwards. The changes I’ll detail bear some responsibility, I

think, for the decline that classical music now has to fight its way out of.

But I haven’t yet stated the statistical measures of that decline — most

obviously the falling ticket sales over the last decade or so, picking up speed

in the last few years. Of course I’ve talked about these ever since this blog

began, but I need to put them all in one place again, for the book, of course,

but also for other reasons. They’re not as well known as they ought to be, and because

they’re not, people can (as we’ve seen) write all sorts of things about

classical music and its future, without quite knowing what the situation really

is.

In the book, I think, I’ll put that early, in the first

chapter. But for the moment, in my online book improvisation, I’m having lots

of fun suggesting how things got this way. In a couple of episodes (there’s a

new one every two weeks), I’ll finally put the stats together. And I think I

might just put that episode in this blog as well.