For years there has been discussion ad-nauseam about the aging of classical audiences and what the best ways are to engage and connect with younger audiences. Don’t get me wrong or send poison letters quite yet. It is a serious issue. We who teach know this first hand. Not only are our students from the younger crowd, their parents are too. Boy, do we know.
Earlier this week I read a post entitled Classical Music And Dumbed Down Ears at On An Overgrown Path. As I read, several things I had been mulling over came to the surface. So, with your permission, I will assemble the rest of this post in a rather loose-knit fashion. Here goes.
The opening of the post was a quote from a comment by Josh McNeil to a series of posts which had dealt with ideas for connecting with younger audiences. He says, “…it’s at least a little ironic to me that the very people doing this tend to perpetuate some really bad PR. It all seems to add up to people asking, How can we get people to step up to our level? As opposed to asking, How can we make ourselves relevant to a world that doesn’t even know we’re here anymore?”
I feel his pain on this one—the pain of the eat your spinach because it is good for you, AKA the ‘You’ll Eat It Or You’ll Wear It’ school. I feel this pain because our local public radio affiliate stuffs the airwaves with this nonsense every pledge break.
You’re not like all the others. You’re a classical music lover. We classical listeners are special. We have high tastes and standards. How in the world are you going to grow listeners if you keep telling them they aren’t as good as you are? Each pledge break shames me to the point that I feel the need to hide my classical habit as one might a shady past or unshaven armpits.
Later in the post, there is a rather interesting link to another article, Turning up the bass in classical music. “There is a strong correlation between the popularity of works such as the 1812 Overture and Ravel’s Pictures at an Exhibition orchestration and their bass content.”
Holy Classical Music Batman! Should we be making sure that there is a strong bass present in at least some of the pieces in a program to appeal to a broader based group of listeners? When choosing pieces for picky students would pieces with strong bass lines have more appeal?  I don’t know—one of my students composes pieces nearly entirely in the treble register with, for me, entirely too few forays into the mid bass range, and an almost complete resistance to suggestions of low bass.
In the same article on bass, the argument is made that listeners have become conditioned to the lower resolution formats found in iPods, digital speakers, computers, earbuds, etc. I find this intriguing. Is this perhaps partially why my incoming students are seemingly less and less able to separate individual voices and hear details of phrasing and articulation in their own performances and those of others?
Back to the aging of the classical concert audience…. My husband and I attended a concert recently and were shocked to notice that we and the performers were the youngest people there, the average age being about 80. When I mentioned this to one of my neighbors, she quietly said, “I hope that when my children are grown they too will have the wisdom and leisure to enjoy and patronize such events.” Hmmm…
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