Is Classical Music Still Dead?
It's a rather long piece divided into 24 pages (click on "print" to get it all at once), but you'll want to slow down and savor all 12,000 words of "The Musical Mystique," Richard Taruskin's defense of classical music against its advocates, in The New Republic. The University of Southern California-Berkeley professor and author of "The Oxford History of Western Music" feels that three recent books—such as Julian Johnson's "Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value," Joshua Fineberg's "Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears," and Lawrence Kramer's "Why Classical Music Still Matters"—overstate the alleged crisis in classical music; he writes:
As with rising gorge I consumed these books, the question that throbbed and pounded in my head was whether it was still possible to defend my beloved repertoire without recourse to pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery.
No, Taruskin doesn't feel as though classical music is in danger of disappearing, although he does believe that, like any vital art form, it is in a constant state of flux.
As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it—and why not?—as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. (My favorite example right now is Gabriel Prokofiev, the British-born grandson of the Russian composer, who studied electronic music in school, has headed a successful disco-punk band, and is now writing string quartets.) Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. All three of our authors seem reluctant to acknowledge this ineluctable fact. But change is not always loss, and realizing this should not threaten but console.
I feel better (as I listen to jazz pianist Uri Caine's terrific "Gustav Mahler: Dark Flame"), and I hope you do, too.