The Disease Afflicting The Realm Of Classical Music
“[Classical music lovers] are very exclusive… you get a community made up of artists and audience that is an ivory tower community, because both have lost a great part of that connection between music and everything else.”
Courtesy of the Director’s Guild of America.
When I tell people that I play piano, I often get responses such as: “I took lessons but they were so boring,” “You must be so talented!,” or “I used to play piano but my teacher told me I was bad so I quit!” I feel great sadness, since I see a fiery passion for classical music extinguished before it has an opportunity to develop. Maybe they would have been the next Mozart, or the next Yuja Wang, but we will never know.
By the time we reach adolescence, many of us have acquired a fervent love for music, just not “classical” (an inaccurate term, but useful for the purposes of this essay) music. We are forming high school rock bands, improvising on our guitars, and recording TikTok dances. We have been allowed to explore our artistic capabilities, thriving without drill sergeant teachers or pushy parents. While rock, R&B, and rap are accessible and enjoyable in today’s world, classical music has a stench of snobbery that seemingly drives our generation away from it. This alarming elitism stems from a few interconnected sources: today’s classical music experience is expensive and feels boring, the misguided belief that being talented or “cultured” is a requirement to enjoy classical music, and, worst of all, the unfortunate transformation of classical music from a means of personal expression into a medium that makes statements that do not move the common person.
Any classical music concert goer like myself understands the shame that sprouts when we have the audacity to cough just once. The brief interlude between the movements of a symphony is a relief for the audience as they release a chorus of throat clearing and seat shuffling. The sad truth is that classical music concerts have fallen to a new low, one where we must sit like schoolchildren and not make a single peep. In an opera, there may be screams of bravo! or thunderous applause after a memorable aria, but there is little more. No wonder classical music concerts have difficulties filling seats, especially among younger people. I love listening to classical music, but I’m not always having fun—in fact, I feel stifled in a sea of overly perfumed old people. A few hundred years ago, however, these kinds of concerts were great spectacles for the masses, where they could talk, eat, drink, move, and cheer. They were like what One Direction or Maroon Five concerts are in the modern era. Now, though, cultural elitism has taken over. Imagine a Jay-Z concert 100 years from now with crazy etiquette rules, where everyone must dress up, sit still and quietly, and only applaud at the conclusion of the program. This futuristic concert is also incredibly expensive, meaning you are surrounded by people who are either part of the wealthy elites or people who consider themselves too smart for your time.
Courtesy of Vermont Public Radio.
Before the Kardashians, legendary Baroque soprano Faustina gave her fans a source of drama akin to a reality show. Before Beatlemania, there was Lizstomania, where people swooned over celebrity pianists and composer Franz Lizst while fighting over his used hankerchiefs. Before Coachella, people attended the annual Wagner Bayreuth Festival (which still goes on) en masse. What do these things have in common? During their heydays, they were admired or attended by vast swathes of the population. Over 200 years ago, people enjoyed classical music events like they do dubstep or K-pop today, because such events were made accessible to everyone and not just the rich. Classical music lovers need to realize that we don’t need to be good at piano or music theory in order to appreciate Chopin, just how people who cannot sing to save their lives (such as myself) are able to greatly appreciate and belt out lyrics from Queen. If I were crushing on a Taylor Swift fan, going up to her and structurally analyzing “You Belong With Me” in my best Sheldon impersonation would make her scoff at me and walk away. So why do we analyze Beethoven to death rather than just enjoying his music, and why would we be considered unsophisticated for not understanding what a fugue is? By considering those who do not enjoy classical music to be “less intelligent,” we only end up turning people away.
Meanwhile, in their attempts to make grandiose statements about the meaning of art or to stretch the boundaries of what is music, some composers end up writing music akin to hearing car horns and fingernails on a chalkboard at the same time. If a thousand people were to listen to a Mozart aria, a Chopin nocturne, or a Wagnerian overture, it’s likely that many of these people would enjoy listening to them. They have catchy melodies, emotional depth, and are generally easy to follow. If those same people were sent to a torture chamber to listen to John Cage, Elliot Carter (or any 12 tone composer), and Phillip Glass, however, the majority would be turned off. Despite Cage’s reasoning and apparent depth behind 4’33”, 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence would leave most of us confused. Atonal music is, well, music, but it can be excruciating to listen to. Minimalism seems to drive musicians and listeners nuts with its never-ending repetition. This brings me back to classical music’s dwindling fanbase. As even legends like Stravinsky started embracing atonalism in the 1950s, people started turning away. Now we are left with repetitive minimalists like John Adams (not the president, the composer of the opera Nixon in China), atonal composers like Mason Bates, and talented student composers banging pots and pans together and calling it music.
So, what do all these genres I praise have in common? They have a legitimate purpose. Some write about love, longing, and desire; others tell morality tales. Some praise the glory of God; others depict nature through music. The difference between Shostakovich’s heavily dissonant 15th Symphony and any atonal Elliot Carter piece is that Shostakovich writes about the acceptance of death, while Carter writes to sound all clever with his uses of dissonance. What helps us identify with the repetitive Taylor Swift—and what turns us away from the repetitive Phillip Glass—is that the former muses about love, growing up, or Christmas while the latter primarily uses repetition to make a statement that repetition is a structural device for music, with the result of making listeners ask themselves when the piece will end. The German late Romantic composers and the writers of High School Musical, however, are both capable of making grandiose statements about music without seeming pretentious. Ultimately, we as artists need people to identify with our homes, our lost loves, or our spins on mythological stories. By the way, there is a currently living composer—John Williams—whose music would sell out auditoriums and theatres. This is because Williams writes music that not only uses compositional techniques long proven to create music that people enjoy, but also has a clear purpose, like depicting The Force or emphasizing how fascinating dinosaurs are. Classical music needs a hero, a genius from our generation, that can follow the examples of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Puccini and Williams and all the other greats, so that today's youth and young adults may once again feel connected to classical music.
I dream of being that hero, but I have a long way to go before I can even fathom such a status. As a composer, one of my biggest wake-up calls was when I wrote a piece that I thought was beautifully built, showed it to my piano teacher, and found that she greatly disliked the work. That piece was bad because I wrote it with the intention of showing off my compositional techniques and skills rather than expressing myself. I was subconsciously acting like I was smarter than everyone else, and showing it off, thus making the same mistakes as many contemporary composers do. I realized that I, like any aspiring composer, must write from my heart, not my brain.