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That got nothing to do with teenagers.
The classical music world is apethetic and closed minded and is making people of all kind shy away from it. Read the article I posted. The classical music scene has been in major trouble for at leat fitty year and it's nothing but its fault.

Anyway classical music is just music.
I love fantasy and fantasy novels but I don't get alarmed by realizing that lot of people don't like that kind of literature and it's their right not to. The topic is way more complex than exploiting lame stereotypes about young people, when I know more young people who love classical music than people in their 40's or 50's.

Classical music doesn't strike a chord in everyone.
I have known eleven year old kids that after listening to a classical piece on the radio, wanted immediately to know more about that music and started to buy cds and to read specialized magazines. Likewise I have known lot of adults that couldn't give a care.

I still think that it's pretty natural for a society to be more knowledgeable about the music of its present than the music of its past, because it's the music of the present that expresses social dynamics according to the sensitivity and circumstance of the present. If the music of the past wants to be more known and appreciated, those promoting it must find ways to make it more appealing, accessible, affordable ... first of all by getting rid of that ridicolous patronizing snoot attitude.

Anyway the best evidence that among teens, like in whatever other group, there are several classical music lover, is the fact that millions of teens are studying music and playing an instrument.

During the classical era no one would listen to baroque music.

I remember when I'd look around at an opera, or a symphony concert, and think "there's only gray hairs here, whose going to be in the audience 40 years from now?"

40 years later - I'm one of the gray-haired ones. And 40 years from now, it'll probably be someone else. Something happened in those 40 years

Cathy

"who's", dum-dum.



"dumb-dumb", dumb-dumb.

The reason why people in their 70's listen, probably, more classical music, is that when they were young most of the LPs available were classical music. Classical music has been the first one to be recorded for the phonograph, so there was more classical music around than pop music. It's a sort of old age traditionalism that lead people to get back to what they used to listen when they were young.

When the 5 year olds of nowadays will be 70, they will probably listen to "old music" which will be the music we consider now modern and not classical music.

But my hope is that concert halls will be desert soon, that's the only way to seriously hope for a reform in the classical environment ... to get rid of the snoot vibes, of the old dead weights, of all the pseudointellectual ilk and give classical music back the life sparkle it deserves.

Hey...you go GreenRain. I'm with you on the music thing. I reckon there's heaps of crap out there and do not subscribe to the doctrine that there is "no good or bad music". I'm only a beginner piano player but know decent music from crap and there's a lot of crap out there. Half of it is females gyrating, half-naked in front of the camera and about 30% is rap or R&B and then there is death metal, thrash metal and punk (usually guys screaming into a mic with or without hair).

My dad love light opera, jazz and blues and mum loved Dusty Sprigfield, Elvis, Gene Pitney. I couldn't abide it as a kid but funny though, that as the years have rolled on, I've gone back a little to the stuff my parents listened to - particularly jazz and blues and have found myself trying to get the kids into Steely Dan, the Doobies, Supertramp and mostly 70's stuff. If they moan, they get disco or Frank Sinatra. I just love disco and Frank. My kids don't always get it but I think they appreciate it a little more as the days roll by - not that the world evolves around my music tastes, but I think there's more to music than Britney and Rihanna. You wouldn't go to a concert to hear an arrangement of "oops I did it again" or "umbrella" or something by Lady gaga.

I don't think classical concerts will become deserts ... but they will change, if only because the latest generation of classical musicians are coming from an age cohort that took rock and pop for granted as good music.

Classical music will never quite catch up to today's pop, but it shouldn't really. "Classical" means immortal, and you can't tell what's immortal and what isn't until enough years go by for the corpses to start piling up. You can't tell what's timeless and what isn't right then and there.

So it'll always be a generation or two out of sync, but contemporary music of some form will find itself a place there. And like jotur said, there's always greyhairs around. :-)

Also -- one additional little bit -- classical music concerts can't be called entirely snooty because they're just so damned much CHEAPER than pop concerts. I paid $50 to hear Andreas Scholl sing, and as much as I like his voice, if Perry ever went back on tour, I'd probably have to fork over two grand for SROs. For $150, I can hear Placido Domingo this November. That wouldn't get you within 50 miles of a Prince or Madonna concert. *grumble grumble* Tell ME what the true "music of the people" is ... *steps off personal soapbox*

Comparing classical music to pop music is like comparing apples to orange. They're completely different. The circumstance in which they were created, their role in society, the social dynamics they cover, the means by which they're promoted.

No one can tell what crap music is, because there's no objective way to define good or bad music. Tchaikovsky is still considered crap by a lot of educated listeners as he was 100 year ago.

Seated tickets category 2 for Madonna concert was 95$

I think your sense of history is a bit off. The first phonograph was patented by Edison in 1878, and by the 1920's there were plenty of recordings of the pop music of the day, which are now treasured as examples of early jazz. And if you do the math, people now in their 70's would have grown up listening to the pop music if the war years, which was big band and swing, while people a little younger were the first rock and roll generation.

While there are indeed plenty of people who remain fixated on the music of their adolescence or early adulthood, there are also many of us who find that our tastes in music continue to grow and develop as we age and mature, and I have to admit that I feel a bit sorry for those age peers of mine who still listen to only arena rock of the 70's, or (god help them) the music of the early MTV years.

I've discovered and enjoyed so many different styles of music since then, such as classic jazz, world music, or later classical composers like Bartok and Stravinsky (I was a big Bach fan as a teen, but didn't like anything post-baroque).

While I think it's normal for teens to relate best to the music that defines their generation, I believe that those who continue to grow and develop musically will learn to enjoy both new music and music of the past.

If you can demonstrate to me the difference between a Baroque opera and a Styx concept album, including the way in which it was received by the audience, I'll eat my hat, your hat, and any other hat you toss at me.

"Classical" music is not one type of music, you know. We're talking half a millennium of stuff, here. Pop and rock are much the same -- you can't find me one metalhead who will cop to listening to a boyband.

But growing and developing doesn't mean following the classical or complex musical path. Actually, for someone listening to a lot of operas and classical in their youth, having their taste growing and developing might mean discovering pop music and electronic music. Can you see how relative the whole concept is? The pattern might often be from complexity to semplificty and minimal, rather than the other way around.



It's normal for every human of whatever age to relate best to the music that defines their living era (in fact I have a book of a sociologists who blame it on old people for becoming old, meaning mentally old, focused on the past rather than the present, which is their present too) and yes it's perfectly normal to enjoy music of the past too. What I think is not normal is to enjoy and know only the past and enojy nothing and know nothing of the present. That's humanly flawed imo.

As long as you're always interested in something unfamiliar and curious, I think that's all that matters. Sometimes, old people find pleasure in what's old because that's how they grow. They were fascinated by newness when young, and now the past is the great unknown frontier to them. They may not simply be "stuck" in the past, they may be exploring it themselves with interest and curiosity now that they themselves are old.

The older I get, the more interested I'm becoming in VERY old music, like early Renaissance and medieval stuff. The sort of stuff they wrote before they entirely knew how to get different instruments to manage not to sound like crap together.

I'm sure this will be interpreted by some as a middle-aged woman becoming stuffy in her old age, but to me, this stuff's totally new. There's a LOT of "the past" to play with. And the kicker is that the whole damn thing was occasioned by my listening to a bunch of 80s arena rock and realizing that most of those guys were chest-voice countertenors.

The difference can't be summarized in few words because it's a complex environment difference. It's like the difference between a Charlie Chaplin movie and a modern movie. You might claim that the portrayal of humans and society is still faithful in his movies as it is in modern movies, but no one will ever be able to make that kind of movies again, because the social circumstances that influenced them are not there anymore. The same for a Beethoven sonata, the reason why he composed that kind of music it's because of social influences and circumstances that belong to the past are not coming back.

Okay, so there's just as much difference between all forms of music.

Metal, pop, boyband, melodic rock, disco. All totally different.

Beethoven, Haendel, Mozart, Schumann, Strozzi, Berlioz, Prokofiev ... all totally different.

At that point, you can't distinguish between ANY form of music, and so categorizing anything as "classical" versus "contemporary" is meaningless.

And besides -- I'm not asking that question casually. Convince me you know why I'm comparing those two. It's not THAT complex. If people can write concisely about the start of World War Two, they can write concisely about this.

Classical music is a pretty meaningless term I agree as it doesn't define any genre. On the other hand there are well defined genres in the classical music group like romantic, classical, baroque, neoromantic, impressionistic, minimalist. And they are the equivalent of modern and pop music genres (disco, new age, melodic rock, techno and so on)

Still what contemporary or modern music means is pretty straight forward. No Doubt, being a rock punk band from 90's is neither modern nor contemporary. This of course is a chronological definition and says nothing about the quality (subjective concept) and the genre of the music I'm talking about.

I don't know anything about Styx.

Maybe if you actually defined what you think these terms DO mean instead of what they don't, and not reactively, there might be hope of an actual conversation here. clearly, you think the word "classical" means something or else you wouldn't be expecting/hoping so fervently for it to die out.

I love classical music which to me defines the accademic instrumental music in its classical forms (sonata, symphony, concert ...) created by composers with a scholar knowledge of music theory and harmony and representing the only true structured and written down music before the advent of more sophisticated forms of popular music (including nowadays modern music) since popular music used to be folk music, mostly improvized. I play classical music on piano and I have a big collection of CDs from Scarlatti to Grieg, from Vivaldi to Sibelius. So I don't want classical music to die.

What I mean by "classical enviroment" is better explained, as I said, in the article I posted. Classical music became the establihsment of a certain elite, it became a status quo rather than an expression with people showing their belonging to an higher social class by attending concerts they didn't even enjoy. In the middle of the 20th century the avantgarde built a thicker wall between the real world and the "classical music" ivory tower. In a way the emotional and expressive dimension was ignored, boycotted by the supremacy of the structure in itself. Pleasure in listening was considered suspect, edonism was a flaw. Everything became ideologically puritanical and snoot. That's why what is a powerful music lost, in the teathers, all its essence, with an audience of unemotional zombies. That's also when composers began to believe that if at least half the audience didn't walk out during the performance of their works, they had failed and their music was worth nothing. And I could mention the ridicolous composition schools environment, with teacher giving bad grades if there wasn't a dynamic mark in every bar (there are funny jokes about what a contemporary sheet music is supposed to look like) Lot of modern soundtrack composers have heap of anecdotes about the closed mindedness and dogmatic behavior of teachers, composers, performers in the "classical environment" and Keith Edwards has a good article about it: Detergent School of Composition

As much as classical music is powefully actracctive, the classical music environment and the concert hall is powerfully repulsive, even for a music lover like me, and I can't blame any person (young or old) if they're not attracted to that world. Competitions like Masterprize are the evidence that people, young or old, are still attracted to classicla/contemporary instrumental music when the environment is friendly and human.

huh?!?

Cathy

We are not talking about proofs, but about classical music. I do not attend concerts. Does that mean i'm not a fan of music?

We're also forgetting the impact of commercials and promotions. The reason why people know about Maddona concerts it's because it's publicized in the television, radio and magazines. How did they publicized the premiere of Rite of Spring? How would they publicize the same event nowadays?
How would you publicize classical music cds? I learned about a great rock group called Carpark North from the net. But before finding it out I didn't even know its existence.
Would you think it was my fault not knowing about this group?
So how are people supposed to know and to find out about classical music? (still we must accept that most people might not like it, simple because of subjective taste)

I introduced my father to Steely Dan and he introduced me to Brubeck.

Yes, maybe that's the only hope for Classical live performances, that somehow people are magically turned into Classical music lovers as they age and mellow. Better late than never I suppose. Still, then they've basically missed out on something great their whole lives, and it will be too late for them to teach their offspring. So you see them dragging their grandchildren to concerts.



The whole concept of a generation being defined by the pop culture of its day is pure marketing BS anyway. Somehow people have become so eager to define themselves by what they like and reject. So we have the Classical music snobs in one corner, who consider everyone retarded who listens to the Top 40, and in the other corner the afficionados of everything new, who wouldn't even give Chopin a chance in the Liberace version. It's absolutely silly!