(And maybe never mentioning how that first sonata, which Brahms wrote when he was 19, ends with a burst of pure teenage exuberance.) Not, of course, that the classical music world hasn’t already begun to change, since (to mention just a couple of relatively new developments) musicians sometimes dress less formally, and often break the silence of the concert hall to say things to the audience. But the changes will continue, growing larger and more startling, and classical music institutions that don’t change fast enough —orchestras, opera companies, concert halls, chamber groups, including even some brand-name enterprises—might well collapse.

How startling will these changes be? Very startling, at least to some people. A decade ago, the Columbus (Ohio) Symphony ran some mildly lively advertising (they compared the sound of their orchestra to a Harley roaring down the highway), and one long-time member of their audience called the marketing director to complain. “One would think,” she said, “that you wished to address those who do not go to the symphony.” Exactly! That’s precisely the key to the necessary change, which with any luck will break classical music out of its ghetto, and allow it to speak…well, for a start, how about to the artists and intellectuals who gave up on it many years ago, let alone to any wider audience? By positioning the change that way, I hope that I’m preempting any notion that it might dumb classical music down. Just the opposite; for me, these changes ought to make classical music smarter, and also give it much more depth, until (again with any luck) it becomes a truly contemporary art.

But more on that later in the book. I sympathize, I have to say, with everyone who’ll mourn the passing of the classical music world we know, since I grew up in it myself, and as a composer, I often feel I’m writing music that belongs in it. These emotions, too, will find a place in what I’m writing here. And they lead me to ask, with maybe more force than I expected, why all these changes should be necessary. The answer, of course, is very simple —the old ways aren’t working. Why else would we have a crisis?

And the old ways aren’t working, first of all, financially. The classical music world, as we’ve known it now for generations, is moving toward a sea of red ink, in which it won’t be able to support itself. The audience — getting back to the first of the questions that I asked at the beginning — really is growing older. Data from the National Endowment for the Arts pretty much proves that, at least for the United States. (As we’ll later see, there are questions about the NEA’s methodology, but even the people raising those questions think the numbers must be accurate.)

And if the audience is growing older, then it’s very likely growing smaller. Older people, in their last years of concertgoing, aren’t being joined by younger people starting to attend. So as time goes on, the audience will shrink. As it happens, there’s another theory, which says the older audience is good news, not bad, because it means that people now live longer, and will go to classical concerts for many more years. But that’s not likely. If this were the only reason that the age of the audience is going up — because there are more older people in it — then the age distribution of the younger portion of the audience wouldn’t change. If, let’s say, we went back 10 years, and found that twice as many people in their forties went to concerts than people in their twenties, we’d expect to see the same thing when we look at the audience today. But we don’t. Instead, almost the entire curve has shifted to the right:

 

 

Yes, there’s a small increase in the percentage of the audience that’s 75 or older, but it’s more than offset by the marked increase in people 45 to 64, and corresponding decrease in people 18 to 45.

And in fact there’s also data that suggests — rather strongly — that the audience is getting smaller. This comes from many places, for instance from anecdotal and newspaper reports of shrinking sales for classical concerts at performing arts centers (these come almost unanimously from everyone involved in these events); from anecdotal and newspaper reports of declining ticket sales at major opera companies; and from figures gathered both privately and by the American Symphony Orchestra League that show declining ticket sales for orchestras.

Though here’s a notable discrepancy. The League’s figures show a peak in the 1996-97 season, with a drop thereafter; the private figures show a steady drop since 1990. Which is right? Well, why not both? Because the numbers measure different things. The League’s data speaks for 1200 orchestras, and the private figures only for the largest ones; more importantly, the League’s numbers are for attendance at all orchestral events (including Christmas music, and free concerts in the park on the Fourth of July), while the private numbers zero in on tickets sold for serious classical performances. And the serious classical performances have been losing more of their audience. So then aren’t orchestras having trouble with their core mission — performing the masterworks of the orchestral repertoire — and making up the slack (whether or not they consciously planned to do this) by expanding into other areas, like holiday concerts, pops events, and sold-out performances of the music from Lord of the Rings? And wouldn’t this support my contention here, that the old ways aren’t working, and that things will have to change? (Whether Lord of the Rings — and, more generally, other populist events —would be the only change I’d want to see would be another story.)

And then along with the aging audience and the falling ticket sales inevitably comes a financial crunch. That’s not just because falling ticket sales bring in less money; there’s also a snowball effect. No classical music organization can support itself on ticket sales alone; they all have to raise money, first of all from private donors. And where do those donors come from? Most of them are ticket-buyers. So if ticket sales are falling, donations will fall, too. But now pull back for a larger view. Classical music organizations also raise money from the community at large, and above all from corporations, foundations, and all three levels of government, local, state, and federal. So if fewer people are buying tickets to classical concerts, then fewer people care about them. And if fewer people care, then of course money from any source is going to be harder to find.

Which, once more, is exactly what’s happening, while the expense of putting on classical performances keeps rising. Orchestras therefore report (at least in private) that they’re facing structural deficits, or in other words that they see a long-term pattern of expenses rising faster than income. Their private projections can be very dire. I’ve heard a prominent person in the orchestra world say, safely out of the public eye, that a representative large orchestra (which he didn’t name) might have so large a deficit by 2010 that it would have to go out of business. And I’ve heard another respected orchestral say that, if present trends continue, all orchestras will be playing to halls only 20% full 10 years from now. And while it’s true that these prophecies come with disclaimers attached (the conclusions are only tentative; more studies need to be done), most orchestras act, at least in private, as if the danger was real.

The first part of this book will ponder these financial horrors, along with related crises, like the declines of classical radio, classical recording, and media coverage of classical music. [I should add that my analysis is still preliminary. I need more data, especially about opera companies and chamber music concerts.] And I should say that catastrophe hasn’t hit yet. There are still bright spots in the picture — kids still are learning to play classical music, and so both youth orchestras and music schools are thriving. Classical downloads sell better than classical CDs. Classical concerts can still be exciting; some of them still have sold out houses. But the collapse (if that’s what it’s going to be) has begun. The trend is downward, and so empty seats are sometimes very noticeable. Some concerts, even in healthy times, sell more tickets than others; but if ticket sales are generally falling, the events that sell the least soon start looking very empty. And projections for the future, as I’ve said, look even worse.

In the next episode, which goes online March 20: the introduction to the book continues, with an outline of some other problems the classical music world will have to face — its growing distance from contemporary culture, and an uneasy blankness at its core. (Readers of Book 1.0 already know my thoughts about that last point.)

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Here's the text of episode 1:

(This is the first episode of my second version of this book on the future of classical music. It's the beginning of the introduction to the book. Like the older episodes, it's an improvised first draft, and will very likely be revised, maybe extensively revised. But I trust it's a draft of something tighter and more focused than the last version -- a draft of a book that starts by asking (much more directly than the first version ever did) what's wrong with classical music, and then goes on to say how I think the problems might be fixed. See the outline at the left for more details.)

This is a book about the future of classical music. It's a necessary book. Not, maybe, necessary for me to write, though I've made a specialty of this subject, and find myself getting hired to write, speak, teach, and advise about it; certainly I've got a lot to get off my chest. But someone, surely, has to write a book like this. Classical music is in crisis; nobody knows whether it can survive. And there are burning questions to be answered. Is the classical music audience getting older? Will it die off, and not be replaced? Can we find a younger audience? And why, exactly, should we be having a classical music crisis? Has our culture degenerated? Is it now too shallow -- too noisy and dumb, too frenetic, too careless -- to support cultivated musical art? Or has classical music just fallen behind the rest of the world, and gotten out of date?

These are big questions, and I can imagine that four kinds of people might get caught up in them. First, of course, would be people who work in the classical music business, who have to care, because their careers depend on it. Though it’s not just their careers. Anyone who knows them knows that they love classical music — many of them, especially the ones with high-level jobs in classical music institutions, could make more money doing something else — and if the classical music world really does collapse, they’ll very likely be heartbroken. (The musicians, I’d think, would keep on playing, but now with any chance of ever making a living.)

And then next on the list come the warm and often gentle people who go to classical concerts, and of course to the opera. They’re mostly in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, and in everybody’s worst-case scenario they’ll soon enough vanish, leaving concert halls empty. Many of them, I suspect, love classical music even more than the professionals do; certainly their love can be achingly pure. Not all of them see very deeply into the quality of each performance they hear, and they might not care all that much what happens behind the scenes; but they do love the music. They’re also, at least in my experience, the people in the classical music world who worry most about the lack of any younger audience, maybe because they’re the ones who most clearly see, at all the concerts they go to, that they’re getting older, and that younger people just aren’t showing up.

And third come people who like classical music well enough — they might listen to it on the radio, and maybe they’ll buy classical CDs or downloads — but don’t go to classical concerts. (Though they might bring a picnic basket when the New York Philharmonic plays free concerts in Central Park.) They’re one big part of that elusive new and mostly younger audience that the classical music world is looking for. There’s even a fancy term for them: “Culturally aware nonattenders.” But why aren’t they attending? If they like classical music, why don’t they buy tickets to hear it live? There are many answers to that (studies have been done), but what’s most stimulating is simply to ask these people why they don’t go to concerts, something that’s easy to do because everybody in the classical music world — or certainly everyone 50 and under — has friends like this. I’ve talked, just for instance, to one of my downstairs neighbors, an old friend of my wife’s, a woman in her 40s, who loves to listen to classical music at home. And while her reasons for not going to concerts are revealing, and even more so her thoughts about what might get her to attend (concerts should be shorter, start later in the evening, and be more informal), I was especially struck by how much these questions intrigued her. She herself thinks that something not quite right is going on, if New York is full of classical concerts and she’s not drawn to any of them.

And so this book would be for her, just as much as for my colleagues in the classical music business and the good and loyal people in the classical music audience. There’s also one more constituency I’d aim at, and that’s anyone interested in the current state of our culture, meaning especially (but not at all exclusively) scholars and cultural theorists, along with civilians who like to read about culture and cultural theory, everyone, in short, who might care about the long-term meaning of everything I’m talking about. No matter why classical music might be threatened — whether it’s because culture is rotting away, or because classical music has stagnated — what’s going on is an ongoing, large-scale, long-term cultural shift.

Part of that shift, of course is the rise of popular culture. There's a lot written about popular culture, about its meaning, worth, and ascendancy (including, recently, Stephen Johnson's wry and important book Everything Bad is Good for You, which insists — right in the face of everything many people in the classical world believe — that popular culture, far from being dumb, is smart, and getting smarter). But there's much less written about where classical music fits in this ongoing shift, and too much of what does exist is more or less worthless, because the writers don’t know much about popular culture, assume that it’s junk, and then have a laughably easy time proving classical music’s crucial cultural worth by showing that, guess what, classical music isn’t junk. (There have, though, been some terrific critiques of the classical music world’s exaggerated sense of its own importance, and, most important, its idea that classical music has timeless value purely on abstract musical terms, and stands aloof and alone, unaffected by the shifting winds of cultural change.)

So I’m writing this book for all of these people, all the four groups I’ve mentioned, plus anyone else who wants to come along for the ride, even if they don’t know anything about classical music. That, I know, is going to be a tricky balancing act — to address both the concerns of people inside the classical music world and the curiosity of people outside it, to speak equally to heartbroken (and sometimes angry) fans and to skeptical nonattenders, to cultural theorists and to people who passionately love classical music but might not care about cultural theory. But I think I can manage that, and, best of all, I think that simply by trying I’ll give the book some extra verve.

I hope, too, that I can establish the value of classical music, in terms that both insiders and outsiders can accept, and without needing to take down popular culture in order to do it. To do this, I'll have to talk about the position of all the traditional high arts in our current culture, another contentious topic that needs to be better understood. And I'll also have to talk about music itself, which will be a relief, after all the theoretical talk about culture, not to mention everything I’m going to have to write about classical music’s financial distress. What, in any case, would a book on music be worth, if it didn’t have any music in it? (Maybe I should even write a piece of music — I’m a composer, after all — and distribute it along with the book, to demonstrate exactly what I think music should be.) I trust, by the way, that I can write about classical music non-technically, so I won’t lose uninitiated readers, and maybe in doing this break down the unfortunate notion that classical music is by nature complex, and can’t be understood without special study. Maybe, by the time the book is done, I’ll have given people who don’t know classical music a better idea of what it’s about — and maybe I’ll also give old-line classical music people a better idea of what pop music is. Even if I just manage those two things, I’ll be happy.

But now, I think, I’d better state my own beliefs (which in any case keep sticking their heads out as this introduction unfolds). I’d better give my own answers to the big questions I posed at the start. So here goes. Essentially, I think the game is over. The classical music business won’t be able to exist much longer in its present form. That doesn’t mean that classical music will disappear (though some of our classical music institutions — orchestras, opera companies, and the rest, including some name-brand groups — might well collapse). But I think classical music will have to learn to understand itself in a new way. It’ll have to transform itself both externally, in the way it presents itself to the world, and internally, in the way that it’s taught, played, analyzed, and composed.…

Episode 2 is, of course, the continuation.