William Weir has an article in the Chicago Tribune which addresses a very important point about getting people to listen to Classical Music. After describing the difficulty of getting new works performed in the usual places for the usual audiences, he suggests that this might be the wrong place to look. What about finding new audiences for new music?
This is not a new idea anymore (fortunately), and Weir offers a good entry point into that new world. He quotes Greg Sandow, who often says that we should try to cater to pop music audiences, as part of a larger argument that maybe the traditional audience shouldn't be expected to like new music as much as non-Classical Music fans might.
After all, Weir says, the genre of "Classical Music" is so wide-ranging that no one will automatically like it all just because it's "Classical". The example of Hoagy Carmichael and Radiohead both being "pop" is a reasonable analogy for the vast chasm between, say Corelli and Xenakis. Yet they're both in the same section in the record shops (online or not). No other genre encompasses so many centuries, so many countries, so many cultures, and so many permutations. Of course, in reality it's rather silly - almost arbitrary at this point in the industry - to put all this music into one capital-C "Category". The term "Classical Music" itself is essentially obsolete anyway, but until something better comes along, I'll use it, along with "New Music" for the contemporary languages, for the sake of argument. (There is certainly an academic case to be made for why all this music should be considered parts of a greater whole, but this is not the place for that discussion.)
In one sense, it's a marketing issue. The listener only cares about categorizing music in this way so he or she knows where to go to buy it. Call it something else, and they'll still like it. In fact, I would submit that some contemporary Classical Music would be received by the non-Classical audience much more readily if it was called something else.
But it's more than just a question of marketing and terminology. In order to figure out which audience is going to like which music, one has to address the issue of language. The genre of "Classical Music" these days has become almost as diverse as the human species, and it's important to understand that there are a wide variety of languages being spoken with which not everyone is going to be conversant. I've touched on how the language of New Music might be familiar to non-Classical audiences before. Now I'm going to take this idea further, and posit that in fact there are some contemporary languages which will be more appealing to them than to traditional Classical Music audiences.
The language of the Standard Repertoire (I don't intend that as a pejorative, I swear) tends to be that of the European harmonies and structures of the late 18th Century through to the middle of the 20th. Yes, this is a gross generalization, but bear with me. When I say "harmonies and structures", I mean the shapes and colors and emotions of the language. These affect different people in different ways, depending on many personal things. In the end it's a personal perspective, and so much of life experience contributes to that.
The personal music experiences of today's younger generations tend to include far more that is over-amplified and distorted or strange-sounding, violent or ugly, or harsh and dissonant than in previous generations. The sounds that some Classical audiences reject are much more readily accepted by people who listen to other kinds of music. There's probably something to Thomas Beecham's old adage that the public don't like music, they just like the noise it makes, but what it really means in this case is that the audiences who like other kinds of "noisy" (to more conservative audiences) music will have less difficulty getting into this kind of "noisy" music.
I'm definitely not saying that the younger, pop audience is more open-minded than the traditional Classical audience. In fact, I'm saying that they're at least as prejudiced and closed-minded - if not more so. How many times have we heard that "Classical Music" is boring? Or, "That's too pretty, it's putting me to sleep", or other casual dismissals of 1000 years of music? As often as not, it's because they are only exposed to one of the "prettier" languages, and their own personal experience simply hasn't prepared them to understand it. That should be a familiar argument to anyone who cares about New Music.
Someone who is very into the grungier, more experimental sounds in rock or electronica will find many appealing sounds in contemporary works. But the same person who enjoys the purely electronic sounds coming out of IRCAM can just as easily run screaming from the room at the sound of a harpsichord. The language of one is familiar and enjoyable, the other is Lurch from The Addams Family.
What this means is that there are many more people for whom the language(s) of New Music won't be so alien after all. It's time to reach out to that audience.
I will say, though, that this won't be accomplished by adding a piece by Radiohead or a film music suite to a concert of Brahms and Rachmaninov. And I also don't think the kind of blues and gospel stuff Weir mentions is the way to go either, even if it's fronted by Matt Haimowitz on cello. That's the wrong message to send also, as if none of the amazing languages of our genre cut it anymore.
Instead, I'd like to see a little suite from one of the new video games, plus something like Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead's "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" (not exactly to my taste, but it will bring that other audience in) along with works by living, breathing, interesting New Music composers who write in the more interesting contemporary languages. There are so many to choose from! One can come up with a nearly infinite list of combinations like this.
It's time to give up for good the idea that the old school composers will lead the way to new school audiences. That doesn't mean that music isn't great, or that it should die out because new audiences dont care for it. Instead, it means that the path to the enjoyment of the Standard Rep. starts with the enjoyment of the New Rep.
UPDATE: (Sept. 4) I see that AC Douglas over at Sounds & Fury disagress with me. I understand where he's coming from, and I have to say that there is room for both our positions. In fact, our two approaches can work side by side with little effort.
The audience whom Mr. Douglas describes as "young but already grown-up persons who presently have little or no understanding of and little or no interest in classical music" are buying tickets today, not in twenty years. So, while I will always approve of the outreach programs for the very young, and any and all efforts to cultivate the next generation of Classical Music lovers (who wouldn't?), I don't accept that as the only solution.
I've been through the argument that people don't understand how to listen to this kind of music, that they need to develop a longer attention span, etc. Having been in the trenches of various battles in this industry, I no longer buy that as the only way. "Get 'em while they're young" is great, but I've seen too many adults (or even late teens and young adults) get enthusiastic about something in the Classical Music genre, even if they've never heard any masterpieces or hallowed chestnuts of the repertoire.
The key is to stop worrying about getting this new audience to sit through a Beethoven String Quartet cycle or something once they have their ear in the door. There's a thousand plus years of music, in an infinite variety of colors and flavors, and it's illogical to expect all music lovers to follow one specific time-line or canon (as much as I would love to from an academic standpoint). I can't even begin to recount how many times I've seen someone whose first exposure to this world was through something with contemporary sounds and structures. They're into it, and they don't care if they're supposed to listen to Bach and Mozart first, or that this is more complex than the music they're used to listening to. That means nothing. The evidence is out there, and so is the audience, just waiting for someone to make the effort.
As for future generations, I hope we never stop encouraging them in exactly the way AC Douglas suggests. And there's no reason whatsoever that my other suggestions should interfere with or contradict this approach.
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