Letters to the Editor
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missing the point
All this mass of analysis on classical music and the point of why classical is losing popularity is completely missed. All art has to change and grow or it dies, and when it dies and becomes stagnant, it slowly loses audience. You want to look at broadway musicals, it's not that tastes have changed, it's that the musical form was stagnant, and because of that it died as an art form. You want to look at modern rock and roll, it has become an art form with exact boundaries and as such is constantly losing ground to hip-hop which is fluid and able to change and grow.
Audiences need this stimulation, they need the new. Classical music is wedded to the violin the piano, you can't use a James Brown sample in classical music, you can't use a heavy metal riff in classical and that is the real reason that classical continually lost relevance. Not Schoenberg!
The same problem is true for all art, it's true for movies, for music for everything. It doesn't matter how good the television series "The Simpsons" is, after a while it gets old because of the limitations and boundaries imposed on itself by how that particular show has been defined.
Nothing else matters really. Art needs to be constantly redefined. If an art form like classical music allows itself to have set boundaries, it inevitably will fossilize, which is what has happened. No composer can save classical music. The only thing that can save classical is for classical to give up the old forms, hire some hip hop rappers, some metal guitarist, play at raves with Armand Van Helden. Give up on Beethovan, Bach, Wagner, Schoenberg and embrace the new. Now this will never happen, because those that support classical music like it the way it is. They don't want hip hop music contaminating their pristine classical music, that's why they listen to it in the first place, they don't want samples and scratches invading their Beethovan. So there's really no hope for classical music as a popular form of music with any kind of meaning in our time. It still has some value though. It's still good musical training for musicians who later decide to make relevant music in the studio for the real music stars of our age.