![]() ![]() ![]() Suddenly it was only acceptable to write in one style. As the concert halls became more severe, so did the music itself. Similar aberrations were happening all over the West as grey concrete mausoleums – which were hardly conducive to an enjoyable evening out – became synonymous with classical music. British music is still paying for that mistake as by common agreement England’s capital city has no acoustically great concert hall for orchestral music. For example, instead of following through the plan to rebuild the beautiful, acoustically superb Queen’s Hall in London, the decision was taken to move out of the city centre and create an entirely new concrete structure south of the river. Yet for forty years of madness – from 1945 to the early eighties – classical music turned its back on its audience and shot itself in the foot with the result that, today, it remains seriously wounded.Īfter the war, everything had to be new. ![]() New music must be coming through, taking its listeners on fresh adventures, pushing at boundaries, exciting its audience. To survive, classical music must be a living, developing art. I refer, of course, to contemporary music. ![]() This particular ‘hornets nest’ is not even mentioned in his book – despite being arguably the primary cause of classical music’s alienation from its audience. But I believe we must look much further back to discover the beginnings of the current malaise and delve into an area which possibly even Mr Lebrecht found too sensitive. As The Times arts-editor Richard Morrison put it in a cry from the heart last November, “Why do the arts have so few friends in the TV companies, who neither report nor cover anything vaguely ‘highbrow’? Why are business leaders scuttling out of sponsorship deals? Why are teachers not evangelising for the arts in their classrooms?”īut how did all this come about? How, in Norman Lebrecht’s words, has classical music been “pushed to the periphery of public attention”? Why has gimmick-free classical music lost touch with its audience? Ironically, Lebrecht sets the date for the start of the decline at classical music’s zenith – the Three Tenors 1990 concert. Young people are force-fed their culture by the media, especially television, and that culture is pop, pop and more pop. In Britain there has already been a drastic and widely-reported decline in the number of young people taking up instruments – threatening our orchestras of the future – and the many fine classical composers writing today are simply not on their radar screens. And the truth is that the vast majority of young people in the West have no interest in classical music whatsoever. While I cannot subscribe to the doom-laden scenario of Norman Lebrecht’s book When the Music Stops, the truth has to be faced by everybody involved with Western classical music before it is too late. It is in stark contrast to music-making in the Far East where there are still huge numbers of children learning instruments, healthy classical CD sales, a media that takes real interest in classical music and – above all – concert halls that are packed with young people as a direct result of that media interest. This is the reality of classical music in the West today. (delivered to the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, Monday 3rd February 1998)ĭeclining audiences, government cuts, disastrous CD sales, sponsors pulling out of the arts, fewer children learning instruments, and a total lack of interest from the general media – unless semi-naked bimbo violinists or something like the David Helfgott circus are involved. ![]()
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