the classical audience
Feb. 4th, 2010 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacHere'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.
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.
