The new episode of my 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.