This column runs on Thursdays, so let's see...that means it's been one, two ... five days of recovery from our drunkenly debauched celebration of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 250th birthday. And how did you celebrate?
Having a few friends over to discuss Peter Shaffer's award-winning 'Amadeus'? Perhaps inviting complete strangers to your home and charging them five dollars per head to listen to Falco's 1985's international smash hit 'Rock Me Amadeus' ('Amadeus Amadeus / Amadeus Amadeus / Amadeus Amadeus / Ohhh Amadeus!') on repeat for three and a half hours? Maybe you honored Johann Chrysostom (as his friends knew him) indirectly through another wolf-related act, say Wolf Parade, Howlin' Wolf or Steppenwolf.
In the end, it wouldn't have mattered if everyone had spent their Friday night celebrating Anton Webern's birthday two months late (Can I get a show of hands? Thank you) because along with Beethoven, Bach and Vitamin C's 'Graduation Song,' Mozart's place as one of classical music's most prominent legacies is assured for at least another 250 years. What's come into question recently, as it has every few years since the invention of television, pop-culture and Elvis, is the legacy of classical music itself.
For the first 100 years or so after the rise of the European middle class at the turn of the 19th century, classical music was the West's commercially dominant form of music (in 1801, Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' led the TRL countdown for a record 42 weeks, a record broken only by Limp Bizkit's 'Nookie'). Yet, as the 20th century got its legs, its control of the market began to slip.
The reasons for classical music's declining share of the market are still contested, but in addition to facing competition from jazz, blues and 'Little Brown Jug' classical was also becoming increasingly atonal (read 'pretentious') and moved from the popular realm to serious academia. These early 20th century academic composers, being mostly weird, extremely intellectual and very, very German, did not enjoy the same level of popularity as more modern, non-mainstream forms of music such as indie rock, most likely because their music was not ironically titled and you couldn't really hit a bong to it.
The past three-quarters of a century have seen numerous crossover success stories, from George Gershwin to the Three Tenors but for the most part, classical music has remained the niche market the early 20th century damned it to be, having long ago lost the spotlight to pop. Sales of classical albums have hovered at around 5 percent of the total market and though steady album sales and concert attendance are enough to satisfy the industry in the short term, there is a slight concern over the average age of the classical music fan.
Currently, the average classical concertgoer is 53, and that number is rising. Particularly troublesome, as this number is increasing at a rate significantly higher than that of the average human lifespan, such that in approximately three decades the average classical music fan will be 83 and have a better than 50 percent chance of being deceased (or as the spokespeople for the New York Philharmonic would optimistically put it, 'This means that roughly half of our clientele will be 'not deceased'').
The obvious solution is to bring in younger fans, but this has so far proven easier said than done for classical concert promoters. The problem appears to stem largely from a cultural divide between the marketers for such concerts and their intended audiences, as evidenced by one such individual who complained in 1999 of the difficulty of capturing an audience more interested in Hootie and the Blowfish, which that group had demonstrated years earlier was not at all difficult.
In the interest of fostering a greater appreciation for classical music in young people (being a person myself, and fairly young) I humbly propose the following: 1) introducing the Three Tenors to crack cocaine, 2) always beginning Beethoven's 5th with the proclamation 'Oh my God that's the funky shit!' and 3) printing t-shirts baring the slogan 'Rock Out Amadeus with Your Cock Out Amadeus.'
If it's too loud, turn it down to mezzo-piano.
