Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

From Marie Finnegan, a classical music fan "in snowy Maine" (as she says): HI Greg, I found your blog this morning and wanted to share a few thoughts. I am a 39 beginning flute player. I played tenor sax back in high school so music isn't completely new to me. Classical music as an interest is, however. My band instructor wasn't a great motivator or teacher of classical music. (Actually he lacked many talents and the band sadly shrunk because of it.) Our "band" also lacked a string section. (we were 12 to 20 strong on a good day) I came … [Read more...]

In the old days -- which I used to think meant the 18th and 19th centuries -- pianists used to improvise introductions to pieces they played. This was called "preluding," and gave rise to the short, freeform pieces we call "preludes" (like Chopin's), which were written-out versions of the kind of music pianists might improvise. But now I've learned that pianists preluded well into the 20th century. And that there are recorded examples, from old-time like Josef Hoffman and Wilhelm Backhaus! I guess I'm late in learning this, because many people … [Read more...]

Something wonderful in Andrew Druckenbrod's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece on applause...and no, not simply what he and various Pittsburgh Symphony musicians say about how people in the audience should feel free to clap between movements. And maybe even during the music. No, what struck me even more was Andy's many links to musical examples, which bring to life so many things he talks about. He even includes both live and studio recordings of "Un beldi," from Madama Butterfly, to show what happens when people applaud over the orchestral … [Read more...]

My 80 gig video iPod, and my Shure E5-C headphones. I've had Etymotic headphones, which I'd swear were the best in-ear earbuds I could possibly hear, but the Shures (a Christmas gift) outdo them, both in how well they isolate outside noise, and in their sound. It's so rich and detailed that at first it sounded almost phony -- too real, too rich. But then I got used to them. Perfect for planes. Two downsides, though. To get them to stay in place, you have to loop the cord over your ears, which takes a long moment, and can be a little cumbersome. … [Read more...]

I should apologize for my silence on this blog for the past -- can it be? -- two weeks. Or maybe not. I'd have preferred to post, but (to bring up an issue more important than music, both for myself and others) I realized this fall that I'd been very stressed. My paying work, traveling, my teaching, this blog, meetings on future projects, composing, my online book...I've had a lot of balls in the air at once  and I noticed a lot of classic symptoms of stress. My mind racing at night, back pain, irritable bowels; and throughout it all, a … [Read more...]

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. … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 l 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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

I'm about to go off for the holidays, which means no blog for a while. Or more specifically, no blog till the second week in January. I'm going to be visiting family, and then taking a long, leisurely drive home. Maybe I won't even pick up e-mail during the drive. The very thought is liberating. So this also means I won't approve comments until I'm back. It sounds so geeky, so controlling -- I have to approve every comment everybody posts, before they show up on the site. And why? So we won't have to look at the spam comments that arrive in … [Read more...]

Reviews and other accounts of classical music events from the past -- I mean written in the past -- don't talk much about the audience. And why should they? Everybody reading them would know what the audience was like, so there wouldn't be much need to comment on it. That's why a famous Virgil Thomson piece from 1950 is so interesting to read now. He's describing one part of the classical music audience back then, and -- at least if you ask me -- he might as well be talking about 19th century Shanghai. Now I don't see anything like what he … [Read more...]

As regular readers of this blog know, I've been posting a lot about the age of the classical music audience. The current myth is that this audience has always been as old as it is now, but all the data I've found says the opposite -- the classical audience has been getting older at least since 1937, when the earliest data I've found was collected. See my post on audience age for more details. And now -- thanks to a tip from a marketing director I know -- I've found more data, giving even more support from my view. It's in a very good book on … [Read more...]

We all know (or we ought to know) that classical music used to be more popular in the United States than it is now. But how can we measure that? Well, in the 1950s the big TV networks showed spectacular classical telecast. That's one piece of evidence. Clearly, classical music must have been more popular then, or else the networks wouldn't have bothered with it. But this isn't statistical data. It doesn't measure the popularity of classical music, and give us a number that we can compare with anything now. With this in mind, I was fascinated … [Read more...]