Classical music, dead or alive: A debate

After 40 years of representing classical musicians, my agent, an American based in Germany, is giving up. He's tired of the way things are going, he told me, and he gave me his reasons:

1) Arts education was always first to be cut during a recession and, when the recession was over, last to be restored.

2) This pattern has led to a critical lack of mentors qualified to exert positive influence on potential performers and music audiences. In their place, amateurs started to take over, with the result that musicians and artists are now paid amateur fees.

3) The consequent dumbing-down of culture at the local level leads to the general dumbing-down promoted by radio and TV and the media in general. When my agent was young, NBC in New York was commissioning operas (like Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors), and NBC and CBS were broadcasting classical concerts. Ed Sullivan was inviting famous opera singers like Mario Lanza, Victoria De Los Angeles, Maureen Forrester, Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Jan Peerce and Robert Merrill to sing on his program.

Amateurs in charge

4) Recordings were relatively cheap until the late '80s, when the CD was introduced at an inflated price that invited pirating.

5) The Internet and NAPSTER made intellectual property theft easier.

6) Meanwhile, live performances and the control of arts institutions were increasingly handled by musical amateurs, which had an effect on programming.

7) Arts institutions became more social than artistic vehicles. Music per se seems to have no importance, and musicians are increasingly seen as mere commodities.

Blaming music schools

8) Organizations claim they are "international" or "extra-regional" but only hire local talent, because that's all they can afford (or all they're willing to pay for).

9) The numbers of really fine performers are waning; few full-time concert musicians are left. In certain specialties, the problem is acute: My agent says he knows of excellent early-music performers who've taken jobs as cleaning ladies in Europe.

10) My agent believes that fully 90 percent of the present and past music students should have gone on to other fields, after studying music mainly to become part of a critical and supportive audience. He blames music educators for encouraging students with adequate or less than adequate technique and musicianship to pursue a path leading to poverty and lifelong frustration, rather than simply telling them the truth.

Bankrupt orchestras

11) The result is a market glut that's being filled by many incompetent or uninteresting musicians whose only advantage is their skills at promoting themselves to the artistic amateurs who now often lead arts organizations.

His conclusion: "We have reached that critical mass where art has no meaning any more, except to the few remaining connoisseurs who are growing older and soon will die out. More than 100 orchestras in the U.S. went bankrupt in the past two years."

Things are no better elsewhere: My agent lists Portugal, Italy, Greece, England, Germany, Mexico and Canada as countries where arts funding is either problematic or non-existent, while "neo-Nazi" political parties in Holland and Hungary are combining with the recession to strangle the arts there. And so he's getting out.

And I'm staying in, for several reasons.

Lady Gaga's sidekick

First, I didn't study piano expecting to get rich. That would be nice, of course. But the performing arts have never been a path for those who seek guaranteed financial rewards.

Second, a wide variety of musical genres have been declared dead over the years— jazz, rap, rock and roll and disco (which has resurfaced, with minor alterations and a new name). They're still flourishing. I don't think it's time to bury Classical music yet.

A recent survey conducted by my friend David Cohen, a classical guitar/pipa/oud player (ironically, while he worked on a degree in tourism at Temple) found that the group that listened most to classical music were 18-to-24-year-olds (49.6 percent of the total audience). To be sure, many of these respondents didn't know what they were listening to, and few of them attend live performances, preferring to get their music on the Internet. Still, they are listening.

If artists like the pianist Jade Simmons and the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (who accompanied Lady Gaga on the violin on "American Idol") can get TV exposure for their crossover Classical performances, more of those young people might be lured into the concert hall to hear Bach, Chopin, Debussy and the like in addition to classical/hip-hop hybrids.

Dudamel's revolution

Yes, people with limited musical education are now making decisions that affect the opportunities available to performers. On the other hand, Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is helping to create a new generation of educated musicians with his orchestra of urban young people, modeled after the program in Venezuela that fostered his own musical development.

What about the problem of sub-par musicians flooding the market? I'm well aware of the pressure felt by small college music departments to enroll enough students to justify their funding. But most music students who aren't strong performers end up in music education— a very demanding major that generates precisely the sort of trained mentors that my agent insists are vanishing.

Even when I studied at Juilliard in the late '80s and early '90s, I noticed a trend toward reducing the number of pianists (my history professor opined that the world simply didn't need that many of us).

Internet sensation

Still, for those who are creative and enterprising, the Internet holds new opportunities for marketing. (See, for example, Dan Coren's BSR article on the Internet sensation Valentina Lisitsa).

In the end, if what you do doesn't speak to the public, you won't be able to sell it. Familiarity with a variety of styles isn't selling out, it's opening up. That's very important if we Classical musicians want to survive.

One of my friends said that whenever he writes a check to the local orchestra, he feels like the people in white tie and tails who listened to the orchestra play on the Titanic. I disagree. This ship isn't sinking; it just needs to be turned around. Ultimately that's what creativity is all about.♦


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