Classical Music’s Decline?

In the Wall Street Journal’s “Arts and Entertainment” section yesterday, Greg Sandow wrote that professional criticism of classical music in the press is in decline.

In this article, Mr. Sandow discusses the misconception that classical music itself is in decline in large part because the print media no longer care about art and culture. He says that classical music is in decline and it isn’t the print media , but rather the age of classical music audiences and the marketing of classical performances by the concert halls that is to blame. He cites three reasons for this belief:

First, any decline in the amount of classical-music criticism published is partly due to the rise of new cultural institutions … I asked publicists from opera companies around the country if their press coverage was growing or shrinking. Shrinking, they said. And why? In part, they said, because there were new museums, new dance companies and new theater groups in their cities, which newspapers had to cover.

Understandable. The paper would be compelled to cover the opening of a new museum, certainly, but what of the American debut of an up-and-coming lyric soprano? This is important cultural news, isn’t it? Surely, there’s at least one day during the entire year that a city doesn’t open a new museum! Sandow cites as his second observation:

…the decline in classical criticism has other causes, too, and has been going on for at least 20 years … The 1980s were the pivotal decade, the decade when classical-music criticism visibly started to disappear. In 1980, Time magazine had a full-time classical critic and … ran twice as many pieces on classical music as it did on pop. When Vanity Fair started publishing in 1983, it, too, had a classical critic…

Then, in 1984, … Vanity Fair canned classical music … As the ’80s rolled on, Time published fewer and fewer classical reviews, and by 1990 (again by my own informal count) the 1980 proportions were reversed, so that now the magazine published two pop articles for every piece on classical music.

These examples could be multiplied. In 1990, … Entertainment Weekly, bucking the trend … ran three classical-record reviews each month. But we didn’t buck the trend long. A few years later, … reader surveys showed that hardly anyone read our classical reviews [and EW dropped them].

Yep, it’s all about the $$$, right? Perhaps, the writer just wasn’t clever enough to capture and hold the reader’s attention. I would often (and still do) overlook the long-winded, technical and pompous writings and reviews of classical music critics simply because they were excruciatingly b-o-r-i-n-g. Classical music isn’t droll, Sandow could take some lessons from one of my favorite “critics,” OperaChic. She’s an American, classically-trained musician living in Milan and her writing is interesting, informative, stylish and extremely witty. Maybe Mr. Sandow should think about the audience he’s writing to. If you’re a critic for EW, how does one appeal to the younger audience? It’s no wonder, as Sandow cites as his third and final observation…

Who reads classical-music reviews? There’s been a decline of interest in classical music, especially among younger people. One sign of that is the aging of the classical-music audience, which (as measured by the National Endowment for the Arts and by private studies) has been going on ever since the 1950s. Do newspapers survey their readers? What if they found — just as we did at Entertainment Weekly — that not many people read their classical reviews? What if the editors themselves don’t listen to classical music?

So, we’re getting old. That’s the reason why classical music is in decline? Of course, one shouldn’t blame the press, as Sandow explains,

The last thing [we] should do, … is blame the press. “Newspapers don’t care about art or culture!” people cry. But I’d turn that around and ask if people in the classical-music business really understand the current state of our world [what?!?]. Because here’s something else I learned back in the ’90s when I talked to those opera-company publicists. One thing any publicist wants is advance coverage, preview articles about whatever’s being publicized. Once, the opera publicists said, they’d get these automatically. But that had stopped. “You’re doing ‘La Traviata’?” an editor might say. “You did it three years ago. What’s the story now?”

I guess, according to Sandow, when you’ve seen one production of la Traviata, you’ve seen them all.

Message to the Met: Save your $$$! La Traviata?? It’s been done!