Alex Ross, the classical music critic for New Yorker (and blogger par excellence), wrote a column (which I spotted in the online version today) about the effects of the web/internet on classical music. It sounds as though there is a clear new golden age of classical music emerging these days – if only managers and musicians are smart enough to set aside old profit/loss paradigms and just jump on in – led largely by music bloggers.
Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines, and other mainstream media, its products deemed too élitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student’s ruminations on György Ligeti’s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question—Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler —was himself twenty-seven.
News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko; sales of classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise, first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, follow performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar tundra of the classical experience.
Ross has consistently beat the drum of “the sky is NOT falling, thank you very much!” for as long as I have read him, in clear opposition to such writers as Greg Sandow and Norman Lebrecht.
You can see a clear comparison to the extinction of species in the way the music world is changing. The small, agile, warm-blooded organizations which can adapt to changes quickly and absorb greater risks are taking on the challenge with gusto, and succeeding to a remarkable degree. The larger organizations which give their bodies warmth through sheer dollar amounts are doing ok for the moment, with their eider down of massive endowment funds. Those in the middle echelon, however, are not able to take the risks required and they don’t always have a clear vision of how to move ahead.
I hope that we musicians have enough clarity of vision to let go of outmoded models of income and revenue, and move quickly to embrace models which might not initially gain us any addition pocket money, but might serve as new and innovative methods of marketing our workplace to the world.