January 2007 Archives

I'm sorry that I haven't posted all the recent comments yet. There were so many that I haven't been able to keep up with them. Many asked the questions I answered in my last post.

And here's another question that people ask. Isn't the classical music audience larger than the concert audience? Don't many people buy recordings, and hasn't there been a surge lately of younger people downloading classical music?

Yes to all of that. But none of it generates much revenue for classical music. Or, very crucially, much pay for classical musicians. It's still concerts -- and, let's note, large mainstream classical concerts -- that float the classical music business financially. They're what's threatened in the current climate, and if there are many fewer of them in the future, classical musicians will have trouble making a living. I've yet to see a financial model that would show how classical musicians can make a living playing chamber music or new music for small audiences.

It's going to take me a few days to go on with my "Where We Stand" series. I've had to deal with the start of the courses I teach on the future of classical music at both Juilliard and Eastman, which includes a lot of work preparing materials for each course. Every year I teach this course it changes, in part because I keep on learning more. The Juilliard course outline, for anyone curious, is here. (The Eastman course is shorter version of the Juilliard course, so it makes more sense to look at Juilliard.)

Now's a good time, though, to talk about some questions that came up in comments on my recent posts. And which, I have to say, have come up elsewhere, too. Probably I should have talked about these things in my posts. The questions I have in mind are two objections to the data I've offered on the aging of the audience, or maybe more precisely to my interpretation of that data. Some people wonder if the rising median age of the audience, over many years, isn't due to increasing life expectancy. People live longer; they go to concerts for more years than people did in the past; thus the audience, if you take its median age, seems older.

But even if you leave the oldest people out, the rest of the audience is aging. See the graph I included in my first post in this series. Take out the oldest age group, and you see that everybody else is older than they used to be. Of course, this is only for the 10 years between 1992 and 2002, but why shouldn't the process also have been going on in earlier years? We can guess that it has been, even without detailed age breakdowns for earlier decades, because of the comments made in the 1937 and early '60s studies that the audience then was young. The 1937 study notes this in a very factual way, without surprise. The 1960s study stresses the youth of the audience more strongly, saying that one of the most decisive characteristics of the performing arts audience, across all disciplines, was its youth.

Thus, in past decades, the audience seemed young even to people living then. It's not just my perspective, looking back; it's what people thought at the time. The classical music audience, in long-past decades, was young not just in comparison with the audience now, but in absolute terms.

Which brings me to the second objection that people often raise. The entire population, they say, is getting older. So that's why the classical music audience used to be younger than it is. The audience for everything was younger in the past, because the population was.

But in fact the rising age of the population doesn't make much difference, and certainly not enough to account for the age increase in the classical audiece. And I should note that when I made my graph I adjusted for the change in age distribution in the population at large. The result of doing so was fascinating. Rather than smooth out the aging of the audience, an adjustment for the changing age distribution of the overall population actually makes some details of that aging stand out in stronger relief.

But that's a digression from the point of the question that I'm discussing. So, getting back to it, I can answer the question -- whether the increase in the overall age of people in this country makes a difference -- in two ways. First, I can say that I looked into the aging of the population, and did some calculations to adjust for it. And the first thing I found is that the age increase, in the population as a whole, isn't as great as many people seem to think. Certainly it's smaller than I thought it was. The median age of the population in 1958 was 30.2 years old. In 2002, it was 35.7. (My source is U.S. census data.)

Even so, the audience, adjusting for this, would be aging a little less than it seems to be otherwise. (In effect, we have to subtract a few years from its median age now, to make a proper comparison with the 1950s, because some part of that increase is just due to everybody getting older.) But still the audience is aging, as we can plainly see if we compare the median age of population at large with the median age of the orchestra audience (since it's for orchestras that I have the most statistics).

Let's assume that, in 1958 (the earliest year I could get this census data for), the median age of the orchestra audience was 33, the same age it was when the Minnesota Orchestra (then the Minneapolis Symphony) did its audience study. (Or, in reverse, we could assume that the median age of the population was also 30.2 in 1955.) We then find that the orchestra audience wasn't much older than the general population, just 9% older

But in 2002? Let's assume that in that year, the median age of the orchestra audience was 55, a figure that's often cited, and which is in the ballpark for the major orchestra whose 1980s and current age data I cited in my post. How does this compare with the rest of the population? It's 54% older, or in other words far older, relative to the rest of the country, than the orchestra audience was in the 1950s. The orchestra audience is aging quite a bit faster than the population at large.

But of course there's also a second answer to this question. It's the same answer I gave to the earlier question about life expectancy -- the audience in past decades seemed young to people who talked about it back then. So what difference does it make that the population as a whole has aged? People in the past looked at the classical music audience, and said it was young, relative to what they saw in the world of their time. Would anybody say that today?

Which brings me to a question. Why do some people have so much trouble accepting this data? I think, quite honestly, that these facts I've unearthed come as a real shock. None of us, including me, were prepared for them. Like so many other people in classical music, I believed the conventional wisdom that the audience had always been the age it is now. Why shouldn't it have been? And then I discovered two things. First I discovered that there isn't any data to support this belief. Or if there is, nobody has been able to show it to me, no matter whom I asked.

Second, I discovered the data I've been promenading here, which clearly shows the aging of the audience. I was absolutely amazed, and I'm not surprised that others are. I am a bit surprised, though, that some people want to reject what I've found. To question it is one thing; I've questioned it myself (largely because of methodological questions), and have vetted my conclusions with a sociologist who knows at lot more about these things than I do. (I passed.) But to simply deny what I'm finding, and raise to objections as if they surely were decisive -- that, I think, is due at least in part to the emotions all these questions raise. What's at stake, after all, is the future of the classical music world as we know it. And the data makes that future look thin.

Here's comparable data in another field. According to an AP article printed in the Albuquerque newspaper while I was visiting my in-laws over Christmas, the average age of model railroaders has been going up. It was 30 in the 1970s, 40 in the '80s, 50 in the '90s, and presumably is even higher now. Model railroaders today, the story says, are largely retirees.

And so everybody connected with this hobby takes for granted that model railroading is toast, that in another 20 years, hardly anyone will care about it. No complications, no denial. Just a clear perception that if things go on the way they're headed, we won't see model railroads any more.

I know very well that classical music is more complicated, that there really are younger people avidly involved in it (I taught a classroom full of them at Juilliard this very morning). And I also know that clearly more is at stake, that it would matter in a far more vital way if classical music disappeared, compared with model railroading.

But still the numbers tell the same story. The average age of the classical music audience has been rising, almost precisely in the way the model railroad age has been (though over a longer stretch of time). Why shouldn't that just as clearly spell trouble for the concerts that our audience attends?

Here I'll give the second of my reasons why I think the classical music era may be ending. The first was that the audience is disappearing. And the next reason is...

2. Classical music institutions may not be able to sustain themselves

Prelude

In my last post, I showed that the classical music audience may well be disappearing. If that was really happening (or at least starting to happen), we'd expect to see a fall in ticket sales to classical events, and that in fact is going on. As I've said before, orchestra attendance has been falling since the 1996-97 season, according to the American Symphony Orchestra League. Private figures from the largest orchestras show ticket sales declining since 1990 (when the data I've seen begins).

I don't have comparable statistics for opera. But look at the Chicago Lyric Opera, which used to be a ferocious operation, selling more than 100% of its tickets (because subscribers would return tickets they didn't use, and these would then be sold again). It's nowhere near that level now. The Metropolitan Opera, too, has sold many fewer tickets in recent years.

There also aren't figures (or at least none that I've ever heard of) for chamber music. But I've talked to many people who run chamber music series in various parts of the country, and almost all of them report than ticket sales have badly fallen.

Recently there's been some good news. The Metropolitan Opera, under Peter Gelb's impressive leadership, has sold more tickets. For orchestras, too, last season saw an uptick in sales and attendance (which are two different quantities, let's note, since attendance figures count people at free concerts in parks, schools, and elsewhere; ticket sales are a more sensitive measure of what orchestras are facing, because they reflect a more serious interest in classical music than going to a parks concert does, and also because orchestras need the income that they generate).

But nobody knows what these increases mean. Look at the Met. They had a problem; Peter started to address it; they sold more tickets. The increase last year in orchestral ticket sales may have the same cause. If you address the problem -- if you do smarter, better, more intensive marketing -- you'll make some gains. But how far can these increases go? Can they reverse the losses of the past 10 years, or maybe even the past generation? Or will they sooner or later hit a wall they can't go through, as interest in classical music declines even further?

The financial crisis

Let's start with some very simple, but very telling numbers.

In 1937 (when, as I've said, a major study of American orchestras was done), orchestras got 70 to 90 percent of their income from earned income, which mostly meant ticket sales.

In 1962 (according to a report made to the Big Five orchestras by McKinsey, the management consulting firm), orchestras earned 58% of their income.

In 1972, the figure (again from McKinsey) was 47%. And now it's somewhere between 25 and 33 percent, depending on the orchestra. (Note by the way that ticket prices in the past few decades have increased far more than the inflation rate. And even then the percentage of income that they represent has fallen!)

What does this show? Clearly, it shows that for the past 70 years, orchestras have consistently needed to find new funding sources. Seventy years ago, they funded themselves largely from ticket sales. Now they mostly fund themselves from other sources. They had to find these other sources.

And let's stress how long this has been going on. Seventy years! This isn't any trivial, short-term development. There have to be deep, persistent reasons for it. The growing need for money, moreover, over all this time, has been sharp and serious, and has fundamentally changed the way that orchestras operate.

Look, for instance, at the financial picture at the Big Five orchestras in the 1960s. (I've gotten this information from the McKinsey report I mentioned, and also from some orchestra budgets of the time.) Back then, the Big Five orchestras sold 100% of their tickets. They did this with very little marketing; marketing and advertising costs are a trivial entry in their budgets. (That's because all they had to do was tell people what music they were playing, and who the soloists and conductors would be. There's something about this in the 1937 study; the most effective forms of advertising back then, the study said, were simple concert announcements, sent to mailing lists and distributed at retail stores. Most orchestras only hired (in the now-quaint language of the study) "part-time publicity men."

These orchestras also did very little fundraising in the 1960s. People gave them money, of course. How else could the orchestras survive, since they met only 50 to 60 percent of their costs from ticket sales and other earned income? (The other earned income, if anybody's curious, came largely from broadcasts and recording. Classical radio and recording, in those days, were profitable enterprises.)

But they didn't have to work hard at fundraising. There are hardly any fundraising costs in their budgets. Whatever patrons the orchestras needed were (or so it seems) easily reachable. Compare the situation now. Orchestras spend large amounts on marketing. They spend even more on raising money. Typically, the largest department in any large orchestra -- the largest part of its staff -- is the development department, which spends all its time raising funds.

Nor are orchestras the only institutions affected by whatever's going on here. I'm stressing orchestra statistics, because I happen to have them. But the history of the Metropolitan Opera shows the same trend (as recounted in Irving Kolodin's marvelous book, The Metropolitan Opera, 1883-1966: A candid history). In the 1920s, the Met got most of its income from ticket sales -- and it made a profit! In the '30s, the depression hurt the Met's finances. So for the first time the company started raising money in an organized way, by forming the Metropolitan Opera Guild, a membership organization whose members' dues helped the company survive.

Note, though, that this was an amateur effort, compared to fundraising today. The founder of the guild was a patron, not a professional fundraiser. And, desperate as the need for money seemed back then, it didn't consume the institution as fundraising does now. The Met didn't even have an endowment until 1966, when it sold its old building at Broadway and 39th Street, and moved to Lincoln Center. The funds from the building sale were the seed of the endowment. The endowment then grew, tremendously. But all that happened after 1966, which is also, roughly speaking, when orchestras (as we'll see) began their serious fundraising.

Why there's a crisis

So why do orchestras (and opera companies, and in fact all large performing arts institutions) need to keep finding new sources of money? Many people point to changes in the way orchestras operate -- the expansions of their seasons during the 1960s, and the move, starting at around the same time, to pay musicians more. But developments like these were pushed by larger economic forces, and the most crucial one was first noticed in the early 1960s by William Baumol, now one of the world's leading economists, working with a colleague named William Bowen. This economic principle -- now a standard part of economic theory -- is sometimes called "Baumol's Dilemma," or even "Baumol's Curse."

What it says is that service industries -- industries that offer services (including art or entertainment), and don't produce anything tangible ---- over time will have financial difficulties, especially when they're compared to the rest of the economy, and above all with profit-making companies that manufacture things. The reason for this is simple. Thanks above all to improvements in technology, manufacturing concerns show gains in productivity. Over time, they'll produce more and more goods, at lower and lower cost.

But service industries don't have productivity gains. The classic examples are orchestras and hospitals. It takes as many people now to play a symphony or to staff a hospital as it did 20, 40, or even 60 years ago. So these organizations constantly grow more expensive to run, compared (again) to the rest of the economy. To see why this is, look at labor costs. A manufacturing company can afford to raise its workers' raises, because as time goes on, the workers keep producing more and more goods with the same amount of work. This doesn't mean, by the way, that corporations were thrilled to raise wages, or that they did it willingly. That's why unions were formed, and their struggle for recognition and for higher pay was really bitter at first. But even so, manufacturing concerns can afford the higher wages.

And so look what happens as the economy expands. More and more things are produced. We start taking these things more and more for granted. They become a normal part of life -- things like central heating, running water, radios, TVs, cars, fresh vegetables in winter, and now iPods, computers, Internet access, college educations, and cable or satellite TV. Workers' pay goes up, generally speaking, so that people can afford these things. And employers, once again, can afford the higher pay, because their productivity is rising.

But now look at an orchestra. It has no gains in productivity. But it, too, has to pay employees more, because higher pay is now a given in every other industry. Why should orchestra musicians live without cars or TV, when everybody else has them? Orchestras had -- in the larger economic scheme of things -- no choice but to raise musicians' salaries, and in fact (in the case of the largest orchestras) to give musicians fulltime employment. How else would musicians have been able to hold their heads up in the expanding economy?

And that's why orchestras (and other performing arts institutions -- Baumol and Bowen stressed that their principle applied to all the performing arts) are always needing new sources of money. The old sources are never enough; as time goes on, orchestras and other classical music organizations fall more and more behind the rest of the economy. So they're always -- potentially, at least -- in economic crisis.

Naturally, in the real world, this crisis ebbs and flows. Sometimes (as in the late 1990s) orchestras feel flush. Sometimes (as in the early '90s), orchestras feel strapped. (Again, please remember that I'm using orchestras only as an example here, because I have their data. Other large classical music institutions will show approximately the same profile.) They recover from their crises, usually by doing something new.

And that makes it very instructive -- crucially instructive, in fact -- to see how they got out of the most serious crisis they had in the post-World War II era, a crisis that hit them in the late 1960s. This crisis was the reason for the McKinsey report I've mentioned. Orchestras got into trouble. They didn't know how they'd survive, and so the Big Five (led, if I'm not mistaken, by the New York Philharmonic) hired McKinsey to help them figure out what to do.

The crisis, as McKinsey pointed out, had a very specific cause. This is important to understand, because people often say, these days -- in response to the current classical music crisis -- that things can't be as serious as I or others might say they are, because, after all, classical music is always having trouble. But this, I think, is unfortunately a rather superficial view. Classical music (or, rather, classical music institutions) are sometimes having trouble, and sometimes aren't, but when they are, there's always some specific reason. In the early '90s, it was an economic slowdown. And in the late 1960s, it was -- for large orchestras -- the expansion to a 52-week season, and a rise in musicians' pay. These things, as I hope I've shown, were more or less inevitable. Orchestras had to pay competitive wages to musicians (a concept that includes full employment all year long), or else musicians would drop through the floor of the growing economy. Orchestras had to pay their staffs competitively, too.

But they couldn't afford to do this. They were running at a loss already; not a great loss, compared to where they'd be now, if they didn't have much income beyond ticket sales, but still a loss. When they expanded their operations, the loss of course grew, and it turned out, McKinsey found, not to grow proportionately to the expansion. For all sorts of reasons, orchestras' expenses were growing faster than their income, and so the loss seemed to mount gigantically. In 1969, McKinsey estimated that orchestras would have to double their "nonperating" income -- income not derived from ticket sales, or for payments for broadcasts and recording -- in order to survive.

So how could they do this? McKinsey thought it had an answer. The federal government should step in, and contribute 25% of every orchestra's budget. Somehow this seemed plausible, though the reasons McKinsey gave now seem naïve. European governments, McKinsey said, supported 90% of their orchestras' expenses, so why couldn't the American government offer a mere 25%?

It never happened, obviously. Instead, orchestras developed the funding apparatus they have now, in which money comes from many sources -- donations, both large and small, from individuals; donations from corporations and foundations; some money (though often not very much) from government agencies; and income earned by endowment funds. Orchestras work overtime, 52 weeks a year, to raise this money. And note that they have to raise two kinds of money at once -- money for operating expenses, and money for their endowments, which always need to be bigger. (Some orchestras, in fact, have very small endowments, and as time goes on have realized that they need to make them larger. Which means they have to fundraise even more vigorously.) Sometimes they have to raise yet another kind of money, funding for one-time projects like new concert halls. The fundraising never stops.

The crisis now

And now there are signs that the current funding model isn't working any more. It's striking, to say the least, to hear a major orchestra say (as I've heard one say in private) that its funding sources in its home city are tapped out. I've noticed, as I've worked inside the orchestra world, five orchestras that, pressed for funds, are trying things that never have been done before:

The Philadelphia Orchestra --I can name it, because its new president spoke of this idea in public -- hopes to raise 10% of its budget from sales at its store, including online sales. Nobody has ever done that.

Another orchestra hopes to fund its entire budget from endowment income. Nobody has ever done that before, and the money that would have to be raised is staggering. Suppose an orchestra had a budget of $30 million each year. To generate that much money at 5% interest, the endowment would have to be $600 million, which is vastly larger than the endowments of even the very largest orchestras. And the orchestra in question here isn't one of the very largest.

One orchestra wants to perform as much as possible outside its home city.

Another one wants to raise more money from its subscribers than any orchestra has ever done. More specifically, they want more of their subscribers to donate money, and they want the donation rate -- the percentage of subscribers who donate funds -- to rise far above anything seen among orchestras before.

And finally there's an orchestra that wants to raise subscription rates above the industry average. The number of subscribers has been falling, over time, and many orchestras think the era of subscriptions is ending. This orchestra thinks it can reverse that trend.

The end of subscriptions, by the way, would be a serious thing. Subscriptions have been useful, even essential to orchestras. They're cheaper to sell than single tickets, because a single effort yields many sales at once. And subscribers turn into donors; without subscribers, orchestra managers say, the pool of donors will be much smaller. And yet subscriptions really do seem to be vanishing. The proportion of tickets sold in subscriptions gets lower every year, and subscriptions themselves are shorter. Decades ago, people would subscribe to entire seasons, or half-seasons. Now they might buy three or four concerts at a time. The subscribers, of course, are the dependable, core audience for any orchestra. If they disappear, orchestras might wonder where their future core audience will come from. And in fact one orchestra I know of -- as it looks toward its future -- has officially (if privately) projected fewer sales to its core audience. Bravely, it hopes these will be replaced by single-ticket sales to people who've never come to the orchestra before. Though how these new people can be attracted isn't quite known.

But back to the new things orchestras are trying, to find more money. If five orchestras are trying to push at their financial barriers, that suggests there really is a problem. If each of them is trying something different, that suggests the problem isn't yet quite understood, and that solutions for it are in a preliminary stage. To me, this looks like the most serious financial crisis orchestras (along, I think, with the entire classical music business) have faced since the late 1960s. That 1960s crisis forced orchestras to break their mold, and find new ways of getting money. The new one may well do the same.

But note a crucial difference. In the 1960s, as I've said, the biggest orchestras were selling all their tickets. Now they're suffering (as I've said) from a long-term decline in ticket sales. On top of that, classical music is far less central in our society than it was in the '60s, which makes it harder to attract both audience and funding. The existing audience, moreover (as I showed in my last post), may well be disappearing. There's never a good time for a financial crisis, but this looks like a spectacularly bad time to have one.

How can classical music institutions find a new financial paradigm -- a way to raise more money than they ever raised before -- when the odds are stacked that much against them? It's hard to believe that they won't have to cut back their operations, if they can survive at all.

(Coming next. My third reason for thinking we're at the end of the classical music era -- our culture has changed.)

My first post in this series got more comments, the first day it was online, than anything I've ever posted here. So now I'll give my argument in more detail. My thesis, as I've said, is that the classical music era -- which began around 1800, when the classical music world as we know it now began to take shape -- is ending.

Why do I think that? Here are my reasons, starting here, and continuing in later posts.

1. The classical music audience is disappearing.

The classical music audience is now, on the average, more than 50 years old. There's a common belief that it's always been this old, but I've uncovered data that shows this isn't true. Some of it goes all the way back to 1937, when, as part of a large-scale study of American orchestras, audience surveys were taken at the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. How old were these audiences? Much younger than the audience now. In Grand Rapids, the median age was 27. In Los Angeles it was 33.

Or we can look at 1955, when the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) studied its audience, and -- just like the Los Angeles Philharmonic two decades earlier -- found a median age of 33.

In the early 1960s, a study by the Twentieth Century Fund, a major foundation, found that the median age of the performing arts audience was 38. This, the authors of the study said, was the same for all the performing arts disciplines, classical music included.

From the 1980s on, there are several sources of data. The National Endowment for the Arts has published periodic studies of the classical music audience. According to these studies, the classical music audience was (on the average) 40 years old in 1982, and 49 years old in 2002 -- a steady process of aging. And at major classical music institutions, the audience seems to be older still. In Minnesota, the median age of the orchestra's audience had gone up to 48 in 1985, and 51 in 1989. At one of America's largest orchestras (which I can't name, because I was given the data privately), the average age of the audience was around 50 in the late '80s, and now is 58. And subscribers (an important part of the audience, because they're the ones who go repeatedly, and tend to give money) are even older -- their average age is 64.

So clearly the audience is aging. And -- most crucially! -- this isn't a recent development. It's been going on (if we trust the Minnesota and Twentieth Century Fund data) for more than 50 years. A trend that's been established for that long has to reflect some kind of deep-rooted cultural change -- and the change it represents, I'd guess, is that our culture, over a long span of time, has lost interest in classical music. Certainly there's other evidence that this is so. Just look at classical music on television. In the 1950s, it was broadcast on network TV. In the '80s, it was common on PBS; now we hardly see it at all.

And this is where the age data starts to look devastating. If the audience has been getting older for 50 years, then clearly younger people aren't coming into it. And in fact NEA figures show that the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience dropped in half between 1982 and 1997. But that's not all -- the percentage of people from 30 to 45 has been dropping, too. Here's a chart I've made from NEA data, showing the age distribution of the classical music audience (the percentage of the audience in various age groups) in 2002, plotted against the age distribution 10 years earlier. (The figures are adjusted to reflect the changing distribution of these age groups in the population at large.)

 

 

What does this chart show? Look at the peaks of both curves. In 1992, the largest part of the classical music audience was 35 to 44 years old. In 2002, the largest part of the audience was 45 to 54 -- which means it was the very same people who were the largest part of the audience in 1992, now grown 10 years older. This gives us a vivid picture of an aging audience, an audience whose core is growing older, and isn't being replaced.

Will this be the last generation of classical music listeners we'll ever see? (Or at least the last generation attracted to classical music as it's currently performed?)

I might put it this way. Some people, of all ages, will continue to join the classical music audience. But there won't be as many of them as there used to be. Remember that the percentage of people under 30 in the audience collapsed between 1982 and 1997. If fewer of this new generation went to classical concerts when they were young, fewer will go when they're older. Especially in our current age, when-- far from turning to classical music -- people over 45 now buy more pop records than younger people do, and the AARP, responding to this trend, now promotes pop music tours, as a way of attracting new members.

All of which ought to mean that the audience of the future will surely be smaller -- and maybe a lot smaller -- than the audience we have now. (Unless, fo course, there's some giant change in the way classical music relates to our culture.)

(I apologize for repeating things I've said before. But I've worked out this thesis in greater detail than I ever have before, and I need to get it all down in one place. For more detailed age data, including citations for some of my sources, see one of my previous posts.)

In future posts, I'll give two more reasons why the classical music era looks like it's ending:

Classical music institutions may not be able to sustain themselves (already some of them are acting as if the current funding model doesn't work any more)

Our culture has decisively changed.

I've been doing historical research, as readers of this blog know. And finally I think I know enough to make some predictions. Or at least to speculate about the them.

What I think I've found is that the present crisis is worse than most of us would think, and also that it's been brewing for a longer time than most of us have realized. This makes me think that the era of classical music is going to end. Not this year, not next year, maybe not in 10 years (though surely by then we'll see decisive signs of where we're going). But sometime reasonably soon, the era of classical music will be over.

What does that mean? It doesn't mean that classical music will die, or that Beethoven (or Schoenberg, or Guillaume de Machaut) will never be performed. It doesn't mean that people won't go on writing classical music (defined, maybe, as music that uses classical instruments, or that's written down, and then performed from the written score -- not that there can't be other definitions, or that other music that's clearly in the classical tradition might not take some other forms).

But I do think that organized classical concerts, as we know them now, won't be very numerous, or at least won't be as numerous as they are now. Though they may well be replaced by other kinds of concerts -- more informal, or also offering other kinds of music -- in which classical music might be played. To be as precise as I can, I might say that the apparatus of classical music, as we know it now, will very likely fade away. We won't see many concerts (or at least not nearly as many as we see now) featuring only music from the past. We won't explain classical music primarily in historical or structural terms. We won't tell classical musicians that their main job is to serve the great composers. We might not ask our audience to sit in silence, clapping only when it's told to.

What will take the place of all of this? Concerts in which classical musicians emerge from their hiding place behind the repertoire, and present themselves as human beings, playing whatever music means the most to them. This doesn't mean that nobody will study Beethoven sonatas, prizing out their meaning with every tool available. (Very much including structural analysis.) But those same musicians might also play country songs, or jazz, or techno; they might compose. And when they play Beethoven (or Bach or Berg or John Corigliano) what will matter most is what they think about the music -- what it means to them, what they're saying with it, what they think it might just mean to everybody else.

But how -- people will surely ask -- can this happen? How can things change so drastically? And if these changes really do occur, what will happen to our classical music institutions, the Cleveland Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera? The institutions, I'm afraid, will very likely shrink, unless they can adapt, and completely reinvent themselves. (Which doesn't mean that I'd be happy to see them shrink or disappear, or that I won't gladly work to help them to adapt.) And as for how the changes can take place, remember first that the classical music world as we know it now is hardly very old. It emerged no earlier than 1800, which means that many of our honored classical composers -- Bach, Haydn, Handel, Mozart, Monteverdi -- worked in an atmosphere that wasn't (in our present terms) exactly classical. The audience talked; musicians improvised; music from the past was almost never played. Only in the 19th century did people start to venerate the great composers, to play (and play, and play) their music, to expect musicians to solemnly respect the composers' intentions (or what can be guessed of them). Only in the 19th century did people start to say that the audience should sit in silence, and as documents from that time -- and even from the 20th century -- clearly show, the battle over silence took a long time to be won. Only in the 1950s did audiences (at least in the United States) stop clapping after every movement of a symphony, saving their applause for the end of the entire piece. And even in the '50s, Italian opera audiences would sometimes shout at singers, or applaud while they were singing. (In one Callas performance of Norma that I've heard on records, there's a ripple of applause while she sustains a calm high C).

If a new paradigm of classical music could emerge in 1800, another one could start to show itself right now, or in 2010. And we also should remember that other things have changed in history. For centuries, educated people learned Latin. But now they don't. For millennia, men ruled women; now they don't (or at least their rule has been contested). In the 1950s (when I was young), you'd go to the movies or turn on TV and see a western; try to find one now. Also in the '50s, no corporate executive would dare to wear a shirt to work that wasn't white. Nor did executives drop out, as they do now, to open restaurants or run organic farms. Hardly anybody jogged, ran marathons, or lifted weights in gyms. Women mostly stayed home. Gays were in the closet. African-Americans sat in the back of the bus. Only teens (and blacks) listened to pop music that had a heavy beat. Non-western cultures were routinely stereotyped (African cannibals, Arab hootchie-kootchie dancers, "Chinamen" with buck teeth). So a whole new culture has emerged in recent decades. And if everything else has changed so forcefully, why shouldn't classical music also show some drastic change?

Besides, as I'll show in my next installment, the classical music world as we know it very likely can't sustain itself. Its audience is vanishing; its institutions are up against financial walls that very well could crush them. (The numbers that suggest this have all been in this blog before.)