Doublestop Magazine

The Future of Classical Music?

The Seattle Times’ Melinda Bargreen reports on a recent forum on the future of classical music. From the sound of it, it seems like many participants rely on education and outreach as their main strategy:

At the forum, speaker after speaker described what their orchestra, their opera company, their educational institution was doing to reach into the community and (especially) its schools. If the school districts can’t muster the funding and manpower to teach youngsters about great music and how to play it, these groups aren’t going to sit idly by while their art form fails to renew itself.

The genre seems to have had it’s fair share of premature obituaries, but Bargreen finds signs of life on the internet:

Some of the optimism is generated by classical-music downloads, which have taken off like a rocket as symphony orchestras launch their own private music labels and offer both downloads and live streaming on the Internet. Never has so much classical music been so widely accessible: a trip to YouTube will let you see and hear great performers of the past and present singing arias, playing piano preludes and conducting orchestras.

Being a technologist, I’m inclined to look in that direction for potential strategies. I think I’d look at strategies like giving away concert recordings, and using the internet as a way to have musicians connect with fans. A couple of recent articles by Kevin Kelly (Better than Free and 1,000 True Fans) point out a couple of strategies that could be applied here. “Embodiment” — give the MP3 away for free, but make the concert experience something that can’t be reproduced on an iPod. “Patronage” — explore new ways to connect donors to the organization. (I once got a call asking for donations to help reduce a symphony’s debt — want to guess how exciting debt reduction is to most donors??) The good news is that plenty of organizations are figuring out new models and continuing to thrive.