The government wasn’t the only thing shutting down last week.
On Tuesday, the New York City Opera announced its intention to file for bankruptcy. And on the same day, the Minnesota Orchestra, already locked out for more than a year by management, lost both its conductor and the head of its Composer Institute. The day after, Carnegie Hall, in lieu of a stagehand strike, cancelled its opening night gala, forcing the Philadelphia Orchestra, newly emerged from its own bankruptcy, to find another venue for what should have been a milestone concert.
What The New Yorker is calling classical music’s “hell week,” sadly, is just one pit in the inferno: music education programs are being slashed from school budgets nationwide, concert halls and opera houses are forced to watch their audiences rapidly age and dwindle, and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” is breaking records, while the works of Bartok and Rachmaninoff rest in oblivion. Classical music appears fated for a thorough bath in the waters of Lethe.
And yet, people have bemoaned the end of classical music for centuries —in Beethoven’s time, in Berlioz’s, in the Beatles’. In fact, naysayers have been predicting the end of things since the beginning of things. Hailing the end of the traditional culture has almost become a tradition in itself.
But it is a tradition that, time and time again, has been proven wrong. In 1909, the Scientific American stated that “the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development.” In 1936, John Langdon-Davies declared that “democracy will be dead by 1950.” And Decca Records famously commented after auditioning the Beatles in 1962, “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” And yet, in the 21st century, Toby Keith still twangs on about trucks, beer, and the American Way through the speakers of our hydrogen-powered Honda FCX Clarity.
Yet somehow the doomsday attitude survives, and not just in the shape of old folks griping about how the world is going to pot. To the media, good news is no news. And bad news — particularly the decrying of yet another extinction of excellence in our culture — sells magazines. And we as consumers eat it up, and then regurgitate it to our friends as more-hipster-than-thou diatribes — “I knew them before they were cool, and I’ll be darned if I don’t keep yapping about them after they’ve been cool, too.” Blaming “society,” “the modern day,” or “the current generation” allows us to associate them with barbarism, and ourselves with sophistication. It inflates our ego, inflames our sense of self-righteousness, and, best of all, doesn’t require us to get out of our hipster armchairs to do anything about it.
Labeling the inevitable end of something makes our cause seem hopeless, conveniently sparing us the trouble of going out to save it.
But in the digital era, saving it has never been easier. In a world where all information, no matter how trivial, is retained somewhere in the dark recesses of the internet, no movement ever truly dies. Fans of incredibly obscure, specific niches can readily connect with one another, and spread their enthusiasm across the interwebs. If Whedon’s “Firefly” can do it, why not Stravinsky’s “Firebird”?
As egocentric, shortsighted beings, we all think that we live in a pivotal era. But will it be pivotal because we witnessed the end of a movement, or because we participated in its development?
The choice is ours.
