Old debates Seems like a couple of points often -- always? -- come up when I talk about changes -- aging, shrinkage -- in the classical music audience.
Any stats about aging (and there are plenty, proving the aging of the audience, over many years, beyond much doubt) elicit a familiar response, that the population as a whole has aged, and so the aging of the classical music audience is simply something one would expect.
(Some of what follows might be a little dry, for those who don't move easily in the world of numbers. Apologies for that, though of course there really isn't any other way to delve into these issues.)
But there's more to the aging of the audience than that. If the classical music audience had aged simply because the population had, then the relationship of ages -- the relationship of the classical music audience's age to the age of the population as a whole -- would remain the same. If the classical audience was, let's say, 10% older than the population at large in 1950, it'd be 10% older today.
But that's not the case. In the 1950s, when the Minnesota Orchestra found that its audience had a median age of around 35, the median age of the population was just a hair over 30. In our present decade, when one major orchestra told me privately that the median age of their single-ticket buyers was late '50s, and for subscribers over 60 -- typical figures for an orchestra that size -- the median age was only around 36. Clearly, if these figures are representative, in the 1950s orchestras had an audience about 16% older than the population as a whole, while in our time, the audience (figuring a median age of about 60) would be 67% older.
These are rough figures; many approximations went into my calculations. (For instance, I don't have age data for 1955. The earliest figures I can find were for 1958, so I compared the audience age in 1955 to the population's age in 1958.) But I don't think the approximations make my calculations suspect. The trends are too large to be thrown off by small approximations/
For another look at the same phenomenon, consider NEA data that shows the median age of the classical music audience increasing from 40 in 1982 to 49 in 2008. That's a 22% rise. The median age of the population, meanwhile, went up from 31 to 36, a 16% rise. So the classical audience is aging faster than the general population, a point, by the way, that the NEA has been making in various public statements for many yeras.
(The NEA's age figures are lower than those reported by orchestras, for reasons I've discussed before. The NEA doesn't focus on any part of the classical audience, and in fact defines "classical audience" as people 18 and over who say they've been to classical concerts. They aren't asked which concerts they went to. The orchestra audience is a subset of that, clearly with its own characteristics, one of which is that it's older.)
Not that my saying this will put the argument to rest. I'm sure I'll get the same response next time I raise these issues. Not everyone reads all of my posts, and it's hard to think about these issues -- hard to separate speculation from fact, especially when the facts aren't terribly well known, and can be hard to find.
One more argument I've run into. When I talk about the classical music audience being much younger very far in the past -- for instance, when I cite the famous passage about teens and young adults hearing Beethoven's Fifth at a concert, in E.M. Forster's 1904 novel
Howard's End -- I'll be told that life expectancy was so much lower in those distant years that the youth of the classical music audience doesn't mean what it would mean today. One person posting a comment here even said that in 1904 people 25 years old were middleaged!
This, with all respect, is just zany. Life expectancy was lower in those past years for many reasons. People died in childbirth more often than they do now, and also died more often in infancy, childhood, and young adulthood. Nor of course did people so readily live into their 80s and 90s as they currently do.
But that didn't mean that the population you'd encounter as you went about your life in the 19th century, let's say, skewed notably younger than what we see today, and certainly not that 25 was the middle of life for those who made it that far. Average life expectancy is a misleading statistic here, since it includes so many people who died very young. If you read literature from the past, you see an age distribution among the characters that doesn't seem all that far off from what we see now. I'm reading Dickens'
Bleak House right now, for instance. There are young characters, middleaged characters, and old characters. Similarly with Balzac, whom I read over the past year, and for that matter Shakespeare.
And the young characters act young, while the old characters act older. If, in Balzac, you find Parisian aristocrats in their 20s going to the opera every night, that's not because they're behaving the way 55 year-olds behave today. They clearly don't, and the contrast -- in things other than opera attendance -- between them and the older people they encounter is very much the contrast we'd see today, between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.
So if the people in their 20s went to the opera constantly, that shows a different relationship to opera and classical music than people in their 20s have today. It hardly matters -- for my purposes here -- that the people in their 20s might get married earlier than they would now, or that possibly they'd encounter fewer people in their 50s and 60s than people in their 20s encounter today. The relationships between people of all these ages remained very much the same, and so the presence of many 25 year-olds at the opera really does mean something.
Back in the day Once upon a time, a generation ago or so, classical music was far closer to everyday life than it is now. We all know this, I'm sure. But it's good to be reminded. So here are four quick appearances of classical music in the popular culture of the past.
The Birds (the classic Hitchcock film, released in 1963): Tippi Hedren, the star, playing a woman in her 20s, visits a normal middle-class family, husband, wife, 11 year-old daughter. The family has a piano. Hedren sits down and plays Debussy's First Arabesque, which isn't identified, any more than her playing is remarked on in any way. Nobody says, "Oh, you play classical music." It's just taken or granted that she might.
Laura (the classic noir -- or, more accurately, semi-noir -- thriller, released in 1944): Vincent Price, playing a high-society type who appears to be in his early thirties (Price himself was 33 when the film was released), is a suspect in a murder case. Where was he, the detective asks, on the night of the murder? At a concert, he says. What music was played? Brahms's First and Beethoven's Ninth, he replies. And whether a concert program like that makes sense, or would have been heard back then, the fact that he's at a classical concert is simply taken for granted. There's nothing special about it. Of course he might have been there.
House Dick (a hard-boiled mystery thriller by E. Howard Hunt -- yes, the Watergate burglar, though that doesn't matter for my purposes here, and he turns out to be quite a sharp writer): The world-weary hotel detective, banged around by life, attracted to the wrong kind of women, has had a hard day. He goes home, and listens to Brahms on the radio. This is just a throwaway reference, nothing special about it, no need to explain why a tough ex-cop would listen to classical music. He just did it. The book was published in 1961.
And now my favorite, an extravagant interlude from
Skylark Three, the second (despite the "three") in a trilogy of science fiction novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith, the greatest name in the great old tradition of "space opera," stories in which evil aliens plot destruction, planets explode, and the laws of physics are pretty much ignored. This book was serialized in
Amazing Stories magazine in 1930.
For our purposes here, it doesn't matter why two married couples in their twenties are traveling through space, many times faster than the speed of light, saving the galaxy from a ghastly threat. Or why one of them plays a Strad. But here they are, entertaining themselves in a rare quiet moment:
"What say [says the hero, Richard Seaton] you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we'll sing us a little song? I feel good...it's the first time I've felt like singing since we cut that warship up."
Dorothy brought out her "fiddle" -- the magnificent Stradivarius, formerly Crane's, which he had given her, and they sang one rollicking number after another. Though by no means a Metropolitan Opera quartette, their voices were all better than mediocre, and they had sung together so much that they harmonized readily.
"Why don't you play us some real music, Dottie?" asked Margaret, after a time. "You haven't practiced for ages."
"Right. This quartette of ours ain't so hot," agreed Seaton. "If we had any audience except Shiro [their Japanese servant, an ethnic stereotype from a thankfully bygone age], they'd probably be throwing eggs by this time."
"I haven't felt like playing lately, but I do now," and Dorothy stood up and swept the bow over the strings. Doctor of Music in violin, an accomplished musician, playing upon one of the finest instruments the world has ever known, she was lifted out of herself by relief from the dread of the Fenachrone invasion and the splendid violin expressed every subtle nuance of her thought.
She played rhapsodies and paeans, and solos by the great masters. She played vivacious dances, then "Traumerei" and "Liebestraum." At last she swept into the immortal "Meditation" [this would be by Massenet, the "Meditation" from Thais], and as the last note died away Seaton held out his arms.
"You're a blinding flash and a deafening report, Dottie Dimple, and I love you," he declared -- and his eyes and his arms spoke volumes that his light utterance had left unsaid."
It's sweet that she plays light classics, which Doc Smith reveres as if they were the greatest masterworks. But note that these aren't culturally fancy people. Great scientists the men might be, and galaxy-spanning warriors, but as the dialogue shows, these are colloquial people (well, three of them are -- Seaton's buddy Crane is adorably stiff), in their behavior perfectly normal twentysomethings from their time. But classical music (which, if my memory is accurate, shows up just twice in the
Skylark trilogy, is an easy part of their lives.
Dion on YouTube He's
singing his first big hit in the balcony of a theater, with his group (aka two backup guys) the Belmonts. The song is gentle, and if you listen to the words, it's supposed to be sad. "Why must I be a teenager in love?" But Dion is cocky and confident, enjoying his easy triumph. So this -- in Milan Kundera's famous definition -- can't be kitsch. There's no subtext telling us that he knows he's being sad, because he's not being sad. But the song is honest. It's about something he might have felt before he was famous. And surely it catches the helpless longing all the girls listening to him felt, all the girls clapping dutifully, right on the beat (because we white people hadn't yet learned what a backbeat is).
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Smart, searing TV series. For instance: Cameron looks like a teenage girl, but really she's a killer robot from the future, reprogrammed to help people, rather than kill them. But she's still a killer. And though she tries to understand human beings, she can't grasp empathy. Someone finds a turtle on its back, and turns it over, so it can walk again. Why do that? Cameron asks. Later she attacks -- with unrelenting violence -- a friend of the people she's helping, because she thinks he's a liar. "Stop," she's told. She looks down at the man -- battered, groaning -- and with no expression turns him over.
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