Classical Music for Aficionados

Twoleftears, thank you for linking to the Spectator piece by Pace.  

While it's an overstatement to say that "the culture wars are killing Western classical music," as the Spectator article's heading proclaims, that's not really what this opinion piece says.  The thesis is that the culture wars are endangering academic musicology, and that will have harmful effects on Western music itself.

The Spectator piece is interesting and insightful.  But even the actual thesis of the piece is somewhat overstated.  Western classical music will likely survive even if academic musicology is further marginalized.  

Classical music survives because it's played, and listened to attentively, not because it is written about in journals.  

The greatest composers wrote music that expresses, more profoundly than any other art can, what it means to be a human being.  And now, though mass media and the Internet, the music is accessibly to vast numbers of people like never before in history.  They can find it, hear it, and have it change their lives.

First-rate composers still can flourish, and produce first-rate music in the Western classical tradition.  Think of Philip Glass, John Adams, and Thomas Ades.

There are reasons to not be so pessimistic about the future of Western classical music.  

gg107,

HEAR HEAR!

I think Western Classical music is falling in on itself and being dumbed down day by day. Every time I hear New Music I despair, Discordant, single lines with no harmony attached, written from a keyboard attached to a computer and then it goes through the Sibelius program to sort out themes and harmony then. The whole thing is bereft of any soul and then has to be played by orchestras who hate every note but who won't get funding if they don't play it.
I happen to go to RSNO concerts and some of the BBC Orchestras in Glasgow and they always have to play this garbage at the start of these concerts. When they are finished and the orchestra stands to accept the applause !!  there is a mass invasion of people coming to take their seats much to the amusement of the orchestra. I may upset some people now so if you are easily offended please don't read any further.
The BBC now have an unwritten law that new music gets played more frequently written by women and black people and all the better if it's both. I have never heard so much drivel in all my life , a lot of these people write computer games music. It shows how clever they are if they can get Sibelius to write it the more enharmonically the better.
After it gets an airing on the BBC then an ex BBC newsreader expounds it on air saying how virtuosic and clever it was, clowns wouldn't know good music if it jumped up and bit them on the backside.
I really am depressed about the state of classical music these days. I am glad I am the age I am as I won't have to see the eventual disintegration of it. Jim. 

I live in a large city with two world-class orchestras and thousands
of music students , well worth hearing .
And several superb halls .

With the concerts of the students , which I love, audience is other students, family and about ten old people like myself .

In the two world-class the audience is 90% over 70 .
Now with 4 million people you can pack the 1,500 hall and 2,500 hall
but 10 years from now , you guess .

I must say that the Saint Paul CO and the Minnesota Orchestra play
only the best . SPCO is a good a Mozart band as any .
The Minnesota IS the best Sibelius in the world .
Of course they have the best Finnish conductor in the world .

One thing will still be here , as this is the ground zero for Choral Music.
As it is also ground zero for the Lutheran brand of Christianity , count on it .

Len I am sorry to say it is a very different matter over in Scotland.We have very good conductors like Dausgard and Sondergard but they are held to task by rules from left wing gits with not one ounce of musical sense to them.
Jim.