What, short of impending Armageddon, could possibly have filled a church at such an unlikely time? Readers from Canada’s national capital region may recognize what I am describing: this was the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival – the phenomenally successful extravaganza that in nine years has grown to become the largest chamber music festival in the world.

The concert was one in a series of five festival performances by Montreal pianist Louis-Philippe Pelletier featuring the complete piano repertoire of Claude Debussy. And although much of the program contained lesser-known works by the French composer, enthusiasts stood in line for as long as two hours to get in.

Acting as master of ceremonies for the concert, Ottawa Citizen music critic Richard Todd announced that he would be attending 30 of the 112 concerts in the two-week festival. Remarkably, when he asked if anyone in the audience planned to attend more than that, some people raise their hands.

That something as rarified as a chamber music festival could be so popular in the year 2002 confounds all common sense, not to mention those who are quick to declare classical music "dead" at every inauspicious turn of events. Proclaiming the demise of classical music – usually in tones of woe, but occasionally with glee – has grown into a small industry over the last few years, and those who hold this opinion can point to a sizeable body of evidence to support their position.

The symptoms of decay appear all around us. Last year, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that worldwide sales of classical recordings, which accounted for 20 percent of record sales four decades ago, now clings to a three-percent share of the recorded-music market.

Here in North America, the San Jose Symphony went bankrupt last year, and the orchestras of Toronto and St. Louis almost did. While CBC Radio 2 soldiers on, many American classical music radio broadcasters – including NPR stations – are being converted to non-classical formats at an alarming rate. Detroit, with a metropolitan population of 4.7 million, currently has no classical music station, and the city’s last classical record shop closed its doors earlier this year.

Even from the heartland of Europe comes news that German Culture Minister Julian Nida-Ruemelin recently suggested that popular music should be taught in his country’s schools. "You cannot get most adolescents interested in the culture of music with classical music," he remarked.

And everywhere there is talk of an aging audience. Said Alexander Coleman, music critic for The New Criterion (as quoted in The National Post): "The audience is increasingly grey-haired. Classical music has become the province of geezers, and moneyed geezers at that."

Some reports are perhaps little more than press sensationalism. However, it’s harder to dismiss the views on classical music’s troubles found in numerous thought-provoking books on music and culture. Here are just three examples from the last two decades (although worries about classical music can be traced back farther than that):

American music critic Samuel Lipman, in his 1984 collection of essays, The House of Music, prophesized the finalization of the classical repertoire in Fukuyama-esque terms. "Today’s musical public has come to a fundamental decision: it has the music it wants, and is satisfied with that," he stated.

Three years later, Allan Bloom’s famous book of doom, The Closing of the American Mind, announced that "classical music is dead among the young." Bloom went on to explain that for the few university students who were still interested in this music, it was a "special taste, like Greek language or Pre-Columbian archeology."

And in a 1996 volume, Who Killed Classical Music? (also published as When the Music Stops), English music critic Norman Lebrecht assumed collapse as his starting point, and laid the blame at the feet of maestros, managers and corporate politics. In his writings, Lebrecht has variously argued that publishers, record companies, music competitions – indeed, most classical music institutions – have become decrepit and irrelevant.

Aligned against these gloom-merchants is a phalanx of optimists. Armed with accounts of success and accomplishment, they often predict a bright (or at least stable) future for classical music, and accuse the nay-sayers of alarmism. For instance, David Patrick Stearns, critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, questioned the notion that North American orchestras are facing a crisis en masse. "The industry’s utter decentralization assures that trouble in St. Louis or Toronto doesn’t necessarily spell problems elsewhere," he has argued, "any more than a hurricane in Florida causes devastation in Oregon or Quebec."

There are even signs of renaissance: the once-moribund San Diego Symphony was recently thrust into solvency with a massive $120 million donation from a wealthy citizen. And in Detroit – the same city that served as a bleak example eight paragraphs back – a derelict 1922 vaudeville house in the centre of town was beautifully restored seven years ago, and now serves as the home of the thriving Michigan Opera Theatre.

If traditional record labels are floundering – issuing few new releases and packaging such unlikely pairings as Luciano Pavarotti with the rock singer Sting – the upstart Naxos company, which offers discs at a budget prices, has grown to be one of the largest classical music labels in the world. As well, both the London and San Francisco symphony orchestras have launched their own record labels.

As for radio, Britain’s Classic FM went on the air in 1992 and has grown to become that country’s largest commercial radio station, drawing away listeners from the BBC’s classical broadcasts. While critics fulminate against the station’s populist, "dumbed-down" approach to the classics, millions of people tune in daily.

Paris has five opera houses and London has five major orchestras. Philadelphia just built a new concert hall, a new auditorium is under construction in Los Angeles, and another is planned for Montreal. In Ottawa, hundreds of people sat in a hot church on a summer weekday night at 11 pm to hear a piano recital.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the controversy about classical music’s health is the sheer volume of evidence that can be cited on either side of the debate. If it is dying, then why are there so many orchestras, opera companies, choirs and chamber ensembles? Why are new concert halls and opera theatres being built, at great expense? But if classical music is doing just fine, what are we to make of reports that young people – even in Europe – are simply ignoring it? And why has so little of the classical music composed in the last half-century found a permanent place the repertoire?

Perhaps it is time to stand back and ask ourselves if there is something wrong with the question, and the assumption that underlies it: the idea that an art form is a kind of organism, and that "dead" and "alive" are the only two things it can be. I would like to suggest that classical music is neither dead nor alive: rather, it has "crystallized." (This is not a new concept: I have seen this word used in literature about music as far back as the 1920s and 1930s.) With its well-defined boundaries, standardized repertoire, ritualized performance-practices and skewed finances, it is increasingly esteemed for historical rather than aesthetic reasons – and for those who care about its survival, that is both good and bad news.

Since World War I, what I like to call the "popular culture of classical music" has resisted innovation and non-European influence – despite the championing of these very things by many 20th-century composers. Such interest as there has been in artistic novelty has led mostly to a backward development of the repertoire, as early-music specialists perform once-forgotten compositions from the Baroque, Renaissance and Medieval periods. And so strictly is classical music confined within its own traditions that even the dress-code resists change. One hundred years ago, an orchestral conductor went to work in the formal attire of his era: white tie and tails. Today a conductor may wear the same clothes, but they have become a costume.

As for economics, the situation was bleakly summarized by music writer Christopher Small in his 1987 tome Music of the Common Tongue. "Without governments subsidizing classical music," he observed, "most of the structure would collapse, for it has little genuine base in human lives."

Yet this is crystallization – not death, in any "dust-to-dust-and-ashes-to-ashes" sense. As bright and durable as a diamond, classical music can still gleam with the light of a night at the Metropolitan Opera. While it’s true that it cannot survive without government support, in every developed nation, respect for classical music has elicited a single response: to subsidize it.

I believe that our society desires custom, ritual and history more than some (such as Mr. Small) care to admit – and classical music satisfies this desire. This is why we subsidize it, and various other tradition-bearing arts; and this is a good thing. Even in Canada, the need to connect with the cradle of Western culture is strongly felt: consider the millions of dollars spent by Canadians every year to visit European cathedrals, castles, art-galleries and concert halls. Classical music is woven into the fabric of our culture, and is supported not merely by thousands of concert-goers, but also by many who have no personal interest in music yet who value it as a pillar of Western Civilization.

But what can the future hold for an art form suspended in amber? Won’t listeners and musicians both tire of repeating the same masterpieces over and over? On the contrary, there is precedent to suggest such a music could survive for a long time.

In Japan there is a kind of music called gagaku. Its name translates as "elegant" or "refined" music, and it is thought by musicologists to be the oldest orchestral music in the world. Originally imported from other Asian countries, gagaku flourished in Japanese courts from the eighth to the twelfth centuries AD. This static, pungent music is still performed by court and temple musicians devoted to its traditions – although the grand boast that it has undergone no stylistic changes in 1,000 years is probably an exaggeration.

In the 19th century, in order to protect and preserve gagaku, its repertoire was catalogued by Imperial musicians, and found to consist of just 144 works. While the 20th century has seen various efforts by Japanese and Western composers to write new compositions for gagaku ensembles, it almost goes without saying that new works are not considered part of the true repertoire.

I claim no expertise in Japanese music – I cite it only for its cultural similarities to the current status of Western classical music. Thankfully, classical music has not yet become so codified that its works could be precisely numbered by an official academy – and even the most severely critical catalogue would yield a much higher number than 144. (Last year, Juilliard professor David Dubal published The Essential Canon of Classical Music, which included about 240 composers.) But our collective, informal decisions about the classical canon can certainly be harsh, with winner-take-all consequences: Mozart and Liszt are in; Salieri and Thalberg are out. And contemporary composers have been cast into the outer darkness: nothing that they write sticks to the wall. Our culture has concluded that their efforts – by definition, and regardless of style – are not "real" classical music at all.

There may be some readers who find my portrayal of classical music as a crystallized art form disappointing, possibly even distressing. That a once dynamic, fluid music in which innovation was welcome should be relegated to the museum is not perhaps an appealing thought. But museums are valuable and useful institutions for preserving what a society values. Classical music’s enshrined position in our culture assures its continued survival for many years to come. There is no reason to fear for imminent demise of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms.

And one more thing: those young kids who aren’t interested in classical music will come around – or at least some of them will.

© Copyright Colin Eatock 2002

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