Sometimes there's a harmonic convergence of media coverage of a particular meme and the dots have to be connected. My article on Daniel Barenboim last week mentioned his lack of optimism for the future of classical music in the US, which occasioned a fair amount of feather-ruffling here in Chicago. Barenboim doesn't like the way the music is marketed in the US-not how the Chicago Symphony markets it, mind you-but the general way of hyping the music as if it has something to be ashamed of in comparison with pop music. It's not pop music, it communicates differently than pop music, and that should be enough.
Drew McManus took issue with this approach in the way orchestras raise funds and argues that classical music is seen in the larger culture as the music of choice when a society needs consoling. No argument here. Tim Smith in the Baltimore Sun wrote on Sunday of how orchestras are using extra-musical enticements to get more people into the concert hall. He rightly points out that having these extras may very well limit an orchestra's goal of getting people to attend a concert without the video projections and light shows. Smith pulls in Leonard Slatkin to beef up his argument, and Slatkin's pretty darn eloquent on the need for orchestras to solidify their base, i.e., the people who will attend no matter what, and then move on to younger people and other new listeners.
Smith's money line is this: "Theoretically, classical music can appeal to anyone. In actuality, it doesn't." This music matters to some people and it doesn't to others. I like classical music but have little patience for what's called country today. (Though anyone who speaks ill of Hank Williams risks an old-fashioned bar brawl and will have more than just a tear in his beer.) That's the point that should be driven home in marketing materials, not trying to turn classical music into pop lite.
The latest article I've seen on this comes courtesy of The Scotsman, which reports that the crossover king label Sony is holding a contest to form a singing group of kids aged 10-14 for "the next classical crossover band." This stuff sells like almost nothing else in the classical genre, which is the cold, hard reality. But it's not the entire genre, and it's not the most satisfying part of the genre, either. And distorting the art form to something the composers of it would not recognize is not the answer for the larger problems facing the industry. Barenboim called these efforts treating the symptoms and not the illness, which is a better way of putting it than I or anyone else has yet to come up with.