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Why do so many young persons hate classical music
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I do not understand the obsession with "Why do so many young persons hate classical music."
Most old people hate classical music.
I play with three volunteer music groups. Most of my friends hate classical music (with the exception of the musicians that I play with). Trying to get my non-musician friends to attend concerts, even when they are free, is like trying to take candy from a baby.
At work there used to be employees trying to sell raffle tickets for their church or whatever. I would purchase the tickets. When one of groups I play with would try to raise money by selling raffle tickets, I would go to these same employees to try to sell my tickets. Even though they would not purchase the tickets the good part is that they stop harassing me about buying their tickets. They decided that they should stop trying to sell me tickets so I would not try to sell them my tickets for my dumb orchestra.
Most old people hate classical music.
I play with three volunteer music groups. Most of my friends hate classical music (with the exception of the musicians that I play with). Trying to get my non-musician friends to attend concerts, even when they are free, is like trying to take candy from a baby.
At work there used to be employees trying to sell raffle tickets for their church or whatever. I would purchase the tickets. When one of groups I play with would try to raise money by selling raffle tickets, I would go to these same employees to try to sell my tickets. Even though they would not purchase the tickets the good part is that they stop harassing me about buying their tickets. They decided that they should stop trying to sell me tickets so I would not try to sell them my tickets for my dumb orchestra.
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That sounds like what I see. The good news from it may be that some young people are more open to CM than young people used to be.
The title of the thread is a bit like tabloid.
"Why do so many young persons hate classical music"
Then proceeds to ask " Is it true young people hate classical music??? ". So the original question is not based on an actual premise.
Very poor quality.
Betteridge's Law is only half-joking, hah.
The OP started this thread to promote his vanity-published book, A Young Person's Guide to Classical Music.
Click bait, eh?
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I think I’m qualified to answer this. I’m young myself and I have friends that know that I love classical music and I introduced them to some works. I can already say that young people don’t hate classical music. They often just haven’t been exposed to it so they don’t know what they’re missing. And for some they like it but it’s so different that they don’t really know what to do with it.
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Early exposure to all music is key. Aged 7, 70 years ago, I was given a gramophone, Mozart 40, Debussy Images and some thirties British dance bands. Dad built a big majestic sounding wireless and the family shared Henry Wood Proms, Edmundo Ross, the BBC Concert Orchestra... I loved it all, including the later arrival of Bill Haley, Presley, Buddy Holly and his wonderful backing strings. Next of course The Beatles - superb musicians. None of it hinged on image or celebrity, just great music.
But school? Oh dear. The Planets, only, played on a dreadful portable. Aversion therapy, but at least we had an actual music teacher. Now, in UK, many schools have no such a person, no instruments and unfortunately a philistine government that cannot see the huge importance of encouraging arts of any kind. I agree with others in this thread: big music has an unfortunate image of snobbery, inaccessibilty and a further barrier in poor sound reproduction.
I'm willling to bet that a full sized orchestra playing some carefully chosen classics in an informal venue would seize quite a lot of the young by the ears. And I mean young. Around ten?
But school? Oh dear. The Planets, only, played on a dreadful portable. Aversion therapy, but at least we had an actual music teacher. Now, in UK, many schools have no such a person, no instruments and unfortunately a philistine government that cannot see the huge importance of encouraging arts of any kind. I agree with others in this thread: big music has an unfortunate image of snobbery, inaccessibilty and a further barrier in poor sound reproduction.
I'm willling to bet that a full sized orchestra playing some carefully chosen classics in an informal venue would seize quite a lot of the young by the ears. And I mean young. Around ten?
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61 Posts
'I hate classical music' is perhaps a not very subtle way of saying 'I don't know much - or anything - about classical music and don't feel qualified to discuss it'.
Poor parenting, with the middle-classes no longer being aspirational.
Men and women in their forties and fifties are too busy dressing up as teenagers and trying to out-woke their own kids, to ever think of taking them to a ballet or the opera.
People should only be allowed to have children once they can prove that they are both intellectually and financially capable of providing for and developing that child.
There are currently 6 billion more people than there should be on planet earth. We need a gardener… ✂
Men and women in their forties and fifties are too busy dressing up as teenagers and trying to out-woke their own kids, to ever think of taking them to a ballet or the opera.
People should only be allowed to have children once they can prove that they are both intellectually and financially capable of providing for and developing that child.
There are currently 6 billion more people than there should be on planet earth. We need a gardener… ✂
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169 Posts
Bold of you to say that, but I agree, somewhat.
Just been reading a short book by (Scotland's best known composer) James Macmillan. It's interesting that he says that when he was growing up in a poor Ayrshire mining village, serious music was everywhere -- miners played in bands and orchestras and the idea these days that bourgeois classical music should not be inflicted on the working class would have been scoffed at then. I can still just about remember the days when an orchestral concert audience was pretty mixed in terms of age and background-- not any more. The lack of live music in public life and draconian cutbacks in music funding in general,, particularly in schools and particularly with reference to the UK, must be part of the reason. Another is the soundbyte culture where no-one ever has time for anything any more.
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Virtually all the "worker's movements" in the first half of the 20th century were very much in favor of expanding bourgeois culture to the underprivileged classes. This was the case both in the West and later in the Eastern socialist countries. My hypothesis is that a combination of factors changed this in the last 50 years. Cutting back general musical education, a huge expansion of mass media powered popular culture, arrogance of a subset of highbrow culture producers who reduced or cut "middlebrow" stuff like operetta and alienated a part of the audience with provocative stagings of classics (because if you do a naive cozy/spooky Freischütz or an "affirmative" Meistersinger, you are Riefenstahl or worse...). And, probably not least a considerable part of both academia and broadly speaking leftists enthusiastically embracing counterculture (regardless of its instant commercialization) and denigrating traditional high culture.
Until the middle of the 20th century the feedback looped worked to bring more people, especially the economically upwardly mobile into contact and appreciation of high culture which in turn strengthened its status. As soon as high culture becomes mostly irrelevant and no longer accompanies socio-economic high status as it used to, the feedback works in the opposite direction. High culture becomes a niche for nerds and freaks and some staid remnants of the bourgeois culture of decades ago.
Until the middle of the 20th century the feedback looped worked to bring more people, especially the economically upwardly mobile into contact and appreciation of high culture which in turn strengthened its status. As soon as high culture becomes mostly irrelevant and no longer accompanies socio-economic high status as it used to, the feedback works in the opposite direction. High culture becomes a niche for nerds and freaks and some staid remnants of the bourgeois culture of decades ago.
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Or another way of putting it would be don't confuse indifference with hate. The former is passive, while the latter is an active emotion requiring familiarity.
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