Greg Sandow has a series of posts on diversity in classical music where the principle idea is derived from Ramon Ricker’s quote:
Thinking about the well-documented changing demographic of the US towards greater numbers of citizens with other than European (read: white) ancestry, I can’t believe that this population, in 50 years or probably less, will want to sit in a concert hall and listen to Mahler. It’s not in their DNA or culture. And that’s not a put down. They also don’t get exposure to this music in schools. If I keep going along this line of thinking, I don’t see a bright future for “classical” music in general or US orchestras in particular. Sure this music will be with us, but will professional musicians be able to make a living playing it? That’s already difficult to do today in all but the largest US cities.
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When trying to envision the future, I am reminded of this quote that is attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. It’s a good one. When asked how he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and consequentially scored more goals than others, he replied, “I don’t go where the puck is. I go to where the puck will be.” Orchestras and musicians—maybe we should try to be like Gretzky.
When reading this, the first thing that comes to mind is that these ideas are already well on their way to being implemented. Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, the ascendancy of Osvoldo Golijov, and Philip Glass’ Orion are all examples of pressures on classical music to expand the cultural heritage of western classical music.
In one of the subsequent posts that Sandow made, he reiterated one of his own conclusions that:
- The classical music world doesn’t look outside itself enough, doesn’t understand what’s happening elsewhere in our culture.
To this point, I disagree. In the current new music scene, world music, which seeks to adopt other culture’s music into the classical heritage, is one of the most significant threads. Cross over acts between art/avant-pop and classical music are also becoming more frequent. Head over to New Amsterdam Records and you’ll find a plethora of different, interesting takes on where art music is heading. If I may offer a more specific conclusion to be drawn, it is that most classical music institutions are cloistered, failing to look outside.
This is understandable though, the major donors and patrons of these institutions are the gray haired audiences that attend the current concerts, programmed with music which is usually over a century old. Since these institutions are supported by people who want to hear 19th century music, they have every incentive to continue to put on a restricted program, even if it doesn’t make any long term economic sense.
This ascendancy of world music in the scene could be accounted for as some sort of market pressure to expand classical music’s horizons for a more diverse audience, but I’ve always seen it as something else. The world music thread provided an aesthetic “out” for western music. For quite a while, a work’s ability to delimit what music can be has judged it’s significance in the 20th century pantheon (open a music history text book and peruse the museum of addled ideas that, while philosophically correct, have done more than anything else to engender the idea that classical music is for sophists). World music’s “out” has provided institutions and composers a way to an accessible aesthetic while also allowing them to avoid charges of being sell outs, cheesy, or old fashioned.
That this movement in classical music has also begun to broaden audience demographics (see the example Sandow cited from another commenter) is fantastic. I hope that it continues to be a part of the classical tradition even as us musicians and composers go about fixing the “western side” of the music. Ramon Ricker should know, though, we’re is already heading for where the puck will be, but that doesn’t mean we’ll score.