This question makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up! It’s a horrifying thought to someone like me having spent my entire life listening, learning and playing classical music. So is it possible that Classical music is dead?
You could ask, is Shakespeare dead? Technically yes. Really though, the work of Shakespeare is something that has permeated throughout Western Civilization for centuries and still holds relevance in our modern society. While he might not be front and center, Shakespeare is still an icon and will be remembered and revered for centuries to come. So what does this have to do with classical music?
Like Shakespeare, most of the great classical composers lived hundreds of years ago. In recent years there have been less and less classical composers in the public eye. So what does this mean for the genre of classical music?
Technology has always dictated the advancements in culture – not just technical innovations, but structural ones as well. For example, the Sonata Allegro form is an invention that came about and was adopted by Mozart and Haydn and countless others. In their time it was a great innovation in musical form. So what would happen if Mozart was alive today? What would his form of expression be? He probably wouldn’t be writing sonatas anymore. Music and art has always been about expression and expression changes over time. So what period are we in now?
If you look at classical music and how it evolved over time throughout the nineteenth century, many of the advancements in music were enabled by the advancements in the instruments. The piano became a robust instrument capable of playing to audiences of thousands instead of the intimate settings of the previous century. Flutes were made of metal instead of wood offering a louder sound as well. In fact, all the instruments of the orchestra became more refined and bigger in volume. The orchestra itself grew substantially in numbers and variety of instruments As a result, the music got more complex and was composed on a grand scale.
Where we are today is interesting. The idea of the concert hall and the symphony orchestra is something that is still prevalent in our society which pays homage to the great composers of years past mostly. This type of performance is not going away anytime soon but there are new means of expression at their infancy. While 19th century music ushered in the modern piano (almost), the symphony orchestra and the concert hall, 20th century technology offered electrified and amplified instruments and recording technologies. The seminal album by the Beatles, Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an example of music co-written and produced not for performance, but as a recorded musical expression. With the integration of people through the internet, could we be that far from collaborative music on a global scale? Already, popular forms of music have utilized snippets of recordings of others in re-mixes. So, instead of trying to compose yet another great symphony, it is possibly more likely that the next great outpouring of creative energy will be in new forms of music we can only begin to imagine.
There will always be traditionalists – Brahms and Rachmaninoff were conservative in their times. In short, classical music is alive and well! It’s not the same as it was in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries but classical music will be here for generations to come. However, music will continue evolving by revolutionaries expanding the genre with both mixing elements of styles from around the world as well as utilizing emerging technologies in innovative ways.
4 thoughts on “Is Classical Music Dead?”
Greetings! Very helpful advice within this article! It’s the little changes that make the most important changes. Thanks for sharing!
I am not your stereotypical grey haired, ol’ bitty who listens to classical music but a guy who grew up listening to hard rock in the time of heavy metal. Yet, I have never been moved to tears listening to music from my youth. Rarely have I heard a score of top fourty music that pulled at my heart strings. Classical music has humbled me, moved me, and grabs my spirit. No, I dont think classical music is dead. The craftiness of many great peices of classical music never ceases to amaze me. Often I have heard modern music steal small runs from classical peices. Classical is and always will be in the here and now and it is so relevant.
Likewise, there’s only a tiny amount of the popular music of my youth that I think is any good. But perhaps it’s just that 99% of everything is garbage. There probably was a lot of bland boring classical music in the 18th and 19th centuries, but what happens with everything — not just music — is that people only keep the good stuff. So, from a couple centuries out, everything looks good, because the rest of it — the vast bulk of it — has been discarded and forgotten. Looking back less than a century, Cole Porter and James P. Johnson live on, and many of their contemporaries are in the process of being forgotten…..
I think a good thing to keep in mind is that classical music as we understand the meaning was a period of less than a hundred years. We started with pre-historic and now are in the modern or contemporary period. Art changes with the times and music is no exception. To think that classical music could ever die is like saying the Mona Lisa or Rodin’s The Thinker could ever die. Forgotten maybe. Think about the lucky person who finds a long forgotten wax recording or 78 of the early blues legends.
Even if i never get to see the painting hung at the Louvre, I will always get to enjoy it in many other ways the artists of the time could never have imagined. I’d love to see Lizt and Phillip Glass together, and I’m sure Lizt would love it as well.
Art doesn’t die, it just changes over time.