Having everything available is great, in my opinion. In the old days, I couldn't afford to be adventurous. If I wanted to try out something new, I'd either have to purchase it outright and hope it was good (usually after waiting a week or so for the order to come in) or drive to my local university and take up a listening space or call in to our once-weekly classical request show. Most times I wouldn't bother.

Now if I hear of someone or something (usually here), I can YouTube it or find it on Spotify and find out if I like it. I'm able to be more adventurous with my listening. And that has led to more purchases, because I'm more confident in what I'm getting.

 

Music availability certainly has provided unprecedented opportunities for the modern world to access and frequently listen to a wide variety of music. Nevertheless, we must remember that the great majority of people today listen to popular music, and the youngest generations are generally oblivious to the classical music that is "out there". Thus, future development of classical music depends not only on accessibility, but primarily on how many people are listening to it.

 

1) Listen to the Donaueschinger Musiktage recordings, from the earliest archival ones, to the 2014 box. Completely, and in chronological order.

2) Think about it.

I just finished doing that recently. That should give you a reasonable sense of where it's going in Europe, at least.

 

I'm afraid I can't accept your premise. "When all the world had were LP's", there really was a lot of music available. Because the world also had radio. If you lived within range of some good radio stations, as most in larger metropolitan areas did, you had a splendid assortment of music, including classical. Nowadays there is even more music available, I concede. But there is a whole lot of other stuff out there, too, good and bad. Overall, I think that's a good thing, as long as we don't forget that surfing the 'net is not a substitute for giving our children a real education, including one in music.

 

It is quite true that classical music choices were limited in the LP days (I was there). You could pick through the Schwann catalog so find LPs of the more popular works, but you could never tell which could actually be bought, or at least found at the record store, or were OOP, and so forth.

There is absolutely no comparison at all between the choices today and what we had then.

 

It is quite true that classical music choices were limited in the LP days (I was there). You could pick through the Schwann catalog so find LPs of the more popular works, but you could never tell which could actually be bought, or at least found at the record store, or were OOP, and so forth. There is absolutely no comparison at all between the choices today and what we had then.

But the real question is what does this large variety mean? Perhaps nothing? Perhaps we are all living in the shadow of that which has been eclipsed?

I fancy such a large variety may well mean the greater fracture of classical music. So far from contributing to its cultural success, perhaps it will contribute to its cultural failure? "After a while it all becomes the same noise."

 

The advent of the audio recording had the effect that fewer people learn to read music. The advent of digital music has the effect that techbros talk about what an awesome unspecified effect it's going to have.

 

A big impact to classical music is the medium. Not only are LPs gone (except for a tiny percentage of high-end audiophiles), CDs are also disappearing in favor of digital music you load on your iPod or home computer's hard drive. I don't think this bodes well for classical and instead encourages short popular pieces that have an obvious melody and deep bass that come across well over your earbuds. I might be overgeneralizing a bit, but that's one of the trends.

 

I wouldn't know, but I bet Music for 18 Musicians works fantastically well through ear buds while on the go.

Probably The Rite of Spring works pretty well too.

And any fast instrumental music from the High Baroque.

Basically anything that with a fairly consistently fairly intense degree of rhythmic activity.

 

I'm trying to imagine Rite of Spring on someone's earbuds while working out on a treadmill. You never know, I guess.

 

I think we value more what is somewhat more difficult to get. In the era of LPs, limited funds, and the nearest record store as source, which may not have had much of a selection, there was, on my part, an attachment formed to my slowly growing collection of records and pieces. There were a few classical music stations to supply new ideas, and friends lent each other records--that's how I first heard the newly-issued Shostakovich 2nd piano concerto; a friend lent his copy to me and said you gotta hear this! Now supply (of recordings) can meet any demand; there's YouTube, etc. But it seemed a little more special when one worked harder to get it. Purely subjective. But the music itself remains.

 

There will always be an awareness of classical music in general. My professor commented that there has been more, not less, performance and study of classical music (especially older music/periods) than ever over the last three decades. (She is over fifty years old).

 

Not to disagree, but I'm sure that's what a music professor would say. They live in an insulated world of their own profession. The question is what's the trend in the average, typical world.

 

Concert Band Music



I have no idea but for a band junkie it is great. During the LP era the only band music out on vinyl, other than Sousa marches, were the classic recordings of the Eastman Wind Ensemble. I checked my library and found I had over a two hundred recordings of concert band works including all of the band works of Percy Granger.

It can not be bad.

 

I don't mean to slam anyone, just giving my opinion. Music professors associate with people and places of their profession. The question isn't what music processors think or know, but what the real world likes. It may be very different than what your music professors think. They don't necessarily have a pulse on the rest of society that doesn't attend music school.

 

That may very well be true, but ArtMusic said, "My professor commented that there has been more, not less, performance and study of classical music...." Music professors would seem to know more about the the number of performances and especially the study of music than other groups. After all, that's what they do for a living.

 

I think the traditional models of production and distribution are going away unless governments around the world decide to allocate greater funding to the arts, which I can't see happening any time soon. Although the internet will continue to bring greater exposure to classical music, through free services like YouTube, no money goes to the performing artists through this means of consumption, so the music benefits but the industry does not. For this reason I can imagine that companies like Deutsche Grammophon are going to become too great a burden for their parent companies to sustain, and will be let go, their catalogues gradually entering the public domain, their platform of distribution then becoming one of the legal uses of BitTorrent and p2p services.

I think it is entirely possible that the funding situation both for composers and for ensembles will return to patronage of one form or another, most likely on a per project basis via crowdfunding, and that live performances, especially of large scale works, will become increasingly rare owing to the high costs involved. It follows that computers will become much more popular for the purposes of realising what was previously the domain of orchestra, and that this technological paradigm shift will influence the direction in which new music develops. However, for all the openness and therefore widening of appeal this, in addition to the suggested models of production and distribution, implies, I can't imagine a time when composers will be just composers, they will have to find alternative means of supplementing if not generating income, because it seems that idiosyncrasy will also increase, and this entails in fact the narrowing of appeal.

Maybe this sounds like hell to you, I don't know, it's just what springs to mind when I think of music 50-100 years from now.

 

Although the internet will continue to bring greater exposure to classical music, through free services like YouTube, no money goes to the performing artists through this means of consumption, so the music benefits but the industry does not.

I'm not sure about that. I read somewhere that Naxos, to mention one example, gets a significant amount of its revenue from Youtube. I assume that some of this trickles down to the artists, though I have no idea how much--though the percentage of money going to artists from a new cd purchase is also small.

I'd be interested if anyone has good facts and figures about how companies are profiting from free music streaming.

 

I suspect that eventually the cheapness ("availability") of recorded music will make live performance more valued, not only in classical music but in all other genres as well. We'll see.

I also believe that the music of "Davos people" will in the future be fusions of classical music, jazz, folk, and world musics. That may have happened already. Anyway, that is going to transform classical music.

 

If the Davos people's taste is useful for anything, it's for identifying which styles that may have been fertile ground in the recent past are now completely dead. (Which, hey, is exactly what "fusions of classical music, jazz, folk, and world musics" is.)

 

There must come a point, if we are not already there when we reach saturation for many of the most popular works.
Music is now available via media that don't wear out and is copyable, hence it gradually has decreasing retail value. How many more Beethoven cycles do we need, with so many in the catalogue and more importantly available instantly to be compared with the multitude of others.
I feal the future belongs to virtual reality where my investment in classical music will be into 3D or some form of virtual concert experience, that is radically different from the traditional hi fi approach. Otherwise we might simply be left with a handful of orchestras performing to live audiences supplementing this with recording yet another cycle of the old reliables. I can just imagine a future where I am listening to the latest interpretation of Beethohen's 9th, performed backwards on the penny whistle and spoons which has now been shown definitively to be how the composer intended, thus making all that came before obsolete.