the classical audience

[calimac]

Here's the graph and commentary on declining classical music concert audiences. Notice that the X axis is not calendar years, but age. If the classical audience is greying, I'm not sure why participation rates even for the earlier generations goes down in the 50s and 60s, but it does show a point I noticed anecdotally in the "boomer" (I hate that word) generations, that adults previously uninterested begin to show an interest in classical music in their thirties or forties.

As someone who developed my interest early on, and began attending symphony concerts regularly at the age of 13, I am of course an outlier. But this didn't happen because I was involved in performing - I wasn't, and have never had a vocation for it - nor because of early education. My exposure to classical music at school consisted of annual programs with visiting quartets (string, wind, brass) of San Francisco Symphony players demonstrating and talking about their instruments. (I wonder if they still do this?) I found these intriguing, but I had no aesthetic or emotional response to the music at that time. Same with Leonard Bernstein's young people's concerts. But I think I was just too young to appreciate the music.

What, if anything, these primed me for was not an understanding of the music itself, but an entirely self-directed project that I undertook in my second decade (I never told anybody about this, it wasn't my teachers' idea, and I only indirectly consulted adults for advice), to expose myself to various aspects of great Western Culture and see what I thought.

The results were mixed. In literature, I took to Shakespeare immediately; my road to him was an interest in the period of English history he wrote about. That's also what inspired me to attend my first live Shakespeare play, a production at my high school of Henry IV Part 2. But while I read more contemporary fiction of various kinds, my exposures to the "great novels" of the 19th and early 20th century were almost entirely disastrous, leaving me with profound loathing of the whole bag. (The only exceptions were Mark Twain, whose Tom Sawyer I already knew, and Steinbeck. I didn't read Jane Austen until much later.) It took even longer to find poets I enjoyed.

I've never had a strong response to visual art. I look at it, it's good or bad, but I don't react. Possibly the first time I was dumbstruck by a painting was a reproduction of Magritte's Castle in the Pyrenees on the cover of my college roommate's edition of Kafka's The Castle. It was only gradually in adulthood that I realized I had a stronger appreciation of architecture, which is spatial art, not visual. A work project cataloging some architecture books when I was about 30 turned me to studying that.

Music was different. I always loved music but had a hard time finding music that I loved, if you follow me. I did hear a few classical pieces that struck me - a first exposure to the Blue Danube Waltz in 2001: A Space Odyssey was a milestone - but the breakthrough came when my project led me to explore my parents' small classical record collection. After that I learned further from radio stations and public libraries. Had the record collection not been there, or had the classical radio around here been as bad then as it is today, I could have been stymied. Yet the local public libraries have better classical CD collections now than their LP collections were then, and all the stuff on the Web is a goldmine for the curious that would have fed me well.

I think what's diminishing classical audiences is the same thing as what's affecting live drama, and movie theatres, and even literature: younger, and now even middle-aged people wired by computers for continual interaction who find it difficult to sit still for long periods and absorb art in silence. There's a definite loss there.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Any idea why the interest bumps for the 'Late greats', 'Late silents', and 'Early boomers' are so much later in life than the 'Late boomers'? Affluence maybe? Accessibility or perception of? (By perception of accessibility, I mean the kind of limitations people put on themselves, like thinking they're not the kind of people who go to concerts, art museums, etc.)

Also, I find the peak then precipitous drop off for all of the groups surprising. Why isn't there more of a plateau of interest? Especially with boomers that show interest at an earlier age, why don't they continue into their 50s and 60s? I can understand the greats tapering off, with age and illness making attendance more difficult. I get that people can try it and decide it's not for them, but I'm still surprised that there aren't more boomers continuing to check it out into their 60s like the earlier generations.

Very interesting, but raises many questions.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I expect there are accessibility issues that have varied across generations, yes.

But the dropoffs mystified me too, as I noted. Even if it was absolute numbers, it wouldn't make sense, as people don't die off in quantity at that age. I don't think it's percentage of the audience. If it's percentage of the cohort, which is what I think it is, I'm more baffled still.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

My guess for the bumps and drop-offs has to do with school concerts. Parents go to concerts given by junior high and high school bands and orchestras, and then later for the concerts their grandchildren are in.

But with more and more schools eliminating music programs generally, there are fewer concerts.

And for those only generally acquainted with classical music, it is the school concert that opens the door to other possibilities. Losing that immediate option leads to less seeking out of the live professional performances.

I grew up in a household where the standard background music was classical music. My father had a pretty solid record collection, plus we listened to the University of Michigan radio station, which played classical music. Dad also love opera, and so Saturdays were filled with the Live from the Met broadcasts. We attended the local symphony, and the concert series of touring artists (opera, ballet, piano soloists, string quartets).

The range was fairly catholic, and my "education" about classical music was more by osmosis than study (hence, my admiration of your thorough approach to reviewing music). Gradually, my personal tastes sorted out -- I preferred ballet music over opera, loved Bach, loved the Russians, love Debussy. I liked some Beethoven, but for the longest time, listening to piano concertos put me to sleep. As time has gone on, my range of interest has expanded, but I'm not a diligent study.

Anyway... my point is that I suspect that a lot of the matter is simple exposure, or lack thereof. Where is the ordinary person to find classical music on a regular daily basis? It's not that people "can't hear" it anymore - in the sense that they get no pleasure from hearing it. Consider the way someone playing a classical piece in a subway station can get lots of attention (when Mythcon was in D.C., I recall coming back from the Mall to the station near the site, and riding a very long escalator up to the surface -- at the top of the tunnel was a musician making use of the wonderful accoustics, playing ... I think it was a saxophone -- very beautiful). It's just not "in the air". I wish it were.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

School concerts are a good guess, but the survey controlled for that, specifically excluding school concerts from its definition. (See the PDF report that the graph comes from.)

Your reference to listening to the busker in the Washington Metro is particularly ironic, considering this.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think you hit the nail with your earlier post, on why people do not linger with the street musicians.

But what makes me sad is that the "not lingering" gets equated with "not liking" or "not caring", and I don't think that's the truth. The Washington Metro stop had the advantage of the really long escalator -- it took a bit of time to reach the top, enough to really absorb the beauty of the music. But I didn't linger, because I was trying to get back to the campus before meal time, I believe.

As for the graph... I didn't check the whole report. But I still think the proximity of school concerts in one's life increases the probability of going to other concerts, for all sorts of reasons (musicians the student wants to hear, pieces the student has studied and played, musicians the instructors have recommended).

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

Greg Sandow, who I think you introduced me to, had a recent blogpost on his visceral reaction upon attending one of the Metropolitan Opera movie-casts in the suburbs of NTC.

Sandow has done a lot of work on the aging of the classical audience, but when he saw it in person, outside of the cocoon of Manhattan, he was shocked. The opera moviecast audience is old. Really old. At 50-something, I'm one of the youngsters in the crowd. Many in the audience have mobility issues; some are bussed in from assisted living facilities, and there is a parade of old people with walkers when the busses unload.

I always had a faint interest in classical music. Dating and marrying a classical singer perked interest up a bit, but the big leap forward came in 2002 when I started listening to BBC Radio 3 for the folk/world content, and then stayed with the channel for the classical music programming.

Anecdotally, I hear about younger people -- teenagers -- who have discovered an interest in classical music as they trawl through gigabytes of freely-traded MP3 files. If this music has a future beyond our lifetimes, that's where the next American audience will come from.