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Is classical music going to die?

© Louis Oniboni

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Here's an interesting read about classical music from Louis Oniboni. Share your thoughts on this or other music topics with our readers, too, by e-mailing them to me along with permission to share.

Is classical music going to die?

How many music lovers are we worldwide to ask this question ? Thousands ? Millions ? I couldn't say but surely a great lot of people so sorry to learn that the music we love is so far behind the « pop » music.

Sure the record industry is sick and, maybe, going to die in a few years but the discrepancy between those two kinds of music is so evident that we may wonder if the classical music lovers are not nowadays a separate race.

The most eloquent proof of this is the ranking of classical music in terms of record selling. Let's take the example of France which we know well. The percentage of classical music CDs sold last year was under 6% and even less for jazz. Amazing, isn't it ?

When you read that the best seller was Riccardo Muti's New Year concert of January 1st 2000( probably the worst concert of the kind of the last ten years ), that the second position was occupied by the never dying three tenors and that the third best seller was the violinist André Rieu who is to be compared with Menuhin or Vengerov as much as music by the Rondo Veneziano is to be compared with Vivaldi's , your opinion will be done.

Music has become a matter of money just as sport to quote an example of wide public interest. They keep selling quality but they mainly bet on rentability. Who can we pretend to be to reproach this kind of attitude in a world where the master word is MONEY?

I read a few weeks ago a phrase written or pronounced by Rick Jones, critic at the Evening Standard. Those were the exact words : « Michael Nyman is the greatest living composer in the sense that Richard Clayderman is the greatest living pianist ».

Apart from that hateful money-making spirit which, in my sense, is detrimental to classical music interests, what makes that so few people listen to it ? This subject would need the intervention of a specialist in the study of human brain since people love that music and at the same time refuse it as a companion.

Yet,everybody, your neighbour, your grocer, your butcher, your mecanic, is a potential classical music lover. You too, reading this article, who maybe have never spent a full hour in your life listening to Bach or Mozart or