I want to thank many people for their responses — both by e-mail and in person — to my January 20 post on the classical music crisis. Perhaps the most striking came from two highly placed people deep within the biz, who both thought things were worse than I’d said.
And very informative comments came from people who either corrected me, or added crisis points I hadn’t thought of. I knew, of course, that I was only taking a preliminary measure of the crisis, subject to modification and elaboration later on.
So thanks to Lisa Hirsch, an acute critic and blogger, who told me I should add the decline of music education to my list of classical-music difficulties. I tend to avoid music education, because I’m tired of seeing the lack of it treated as the main cause of our difficulties, and its restoration treated as the cure. (Even if music education was restored immediately to its former glory, how long would it take to educate our future audience? How many of our institutions would have died by then?)
Still, the decline of music education is a dimension of the crisis, and I should have included it.
Lisa also corrected me about Nonesuch, which I’d said once was exclusively a classical music label. But even back in the ’60s, as Lisa said, they had their Explorer Series of world music releases. I had some of them on LP then, and have some on CD; of course I should have remembered that.
But as Bob Hurwitz, the president of Nonesuch, pointed out (he also e-mailed after my post), the Explorer Series recorded the traditional music of various countries, while the current Nonesuch world music releases are of individual artists. These — this is me speaking now, not Bob — could just as well be considered a refined form of pop.
Bob also said that the proportion of classical and non-classical Nonesuch recordings hasn’t changed since 1986. But there, too, there’s been a change. The current classical releases are almost all new music, which wasn’t true in 1986. So if we take current Nonesuch releases as a measure of what art music is now, it’s Emmylou Harris and Steve Reich, with standard classical masterworks strikingly absent.
And then there’s another crisis point, which I learned about this week in conversation with an artists’ manager. She says there are fewer bookings than there used to be. So A-list soloists take some B-list gigs, making work for B-list people harder to find. The business in every way has gotten more difficult, this manager thinks, and even her stars might have to work hard to keep their heads above water.