Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

This is definitely not the argument that I am making. He pointed out that, as an adjudicator, mentor, and facilitator at various high school music competitions and workshops throughout the region, he (and here I paraphrase) “has never seen such strong growth in interest among young students in the study of the traditional instruments of the orchestra. Anyone who could think that classical music is dead in the face of such vitality and interest is mistaken.”

While this activity and excitement is encouraging to all of us who love the music of the Western classical tradition, it is also precisely the problem. The overwhelming beauty, power, and inertia of the music of that tradition calls us ever more insistently to the womb of the past. We do not have to face the question of “what next” because we have a glorious refuge offering endless opportunity for (literally) burying ourselves in its riches. We are drawn—by the attraction of aesthetic experiences unparalleled in the history of humankind—to the past. The desire for these experiences distracts us from the care (in all of the complex meanings this word evokes) for and of the present. We are failing our living present—a truly fatal mistake. Worse, we are failing our students by ingraining in them skills appropriate to a tradition that is no longer of our time. Again, what does it mean when we say that the classical music of our present is the classical music of the past? How can we even ask this question without raising one of three other questions?

The first of them is this: What is the music of our living present?

It might be argued that the love of listening to and performing the great music of the past grows precisely out of care for the present. This argument is true to the extent that the great music of the past, just as all the great art of the past, will always be an important part of the present. It is (again) the past that in some way produces the present, and it is the present that, to some degree or another, rearticulates the past in its own image. The problem in our culture is that the past has essentially obliterated the present in a way that can only be called a step toward cultural senility. We cannot be naïve about this problem: the very attraction of the past—certainly and undeniably based on a well-placed recognition of its value as an essential resource—is also its own contradiction: our greatest danger.