On our way to a concert last night, we found ourselves distracted by a question.
Why is it almost impossible to imagine classical music becoming popular again?
Now, to be clear, we aren’t suggesting we want classical music to be popular again. We have no horse in that race. Whether performed or recorded classical music persists, gains new and widespread appreciation, makes lots of money, and reaches the top of everyone’s end of the year “Best Of” lists isn’t terribly important to us. We do not spend out idle hours raging against the ever-waning cultural significance of classical music. We aren’t worried about whether classical music will become popular again, but rather why we can’t at all imagine that being the case. It’s inconceivable to us and we have no idea why.
Plenty of unexpected cultural things fade into relative insignificance for a long while before suddenly, for no clear reason, enjoying resurgent fame. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” - to quickly cite an over-discussed example - lingered in the annals of pop music history for thirty something years before gaining wild attention last year. Talk radio and radio plays (in the form of podcasts) gained traction with new audiences in the mid-2010s after half a century of cultural obscurity. Vinyl records, of all damn things, started selling widely and well circa 2008 after being relegated to figurative and literal landfills for decades. Even Shakespeare became a hot commodity in the ‘90s with a slew of film adaptations (Romeo+Juliet forever btw).
The cultural landscape is always seemingly willing to give formerly dominant songs, formats, authors, or really more or less anything a second, third, or fourth shot.
But there’s no telling what returning cultural objects will regain popularity nor is there ever a clear answer to why certain things manage to succeed anew.
Why “Running Up That Hill”? It’s a good song, sure, but there are lots of good songs. Because it was featured on that popular show with the upside down kids? Plenty of old songs are featured on popular shows (e.g. The Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” is a great old song that showed up on Euphoria, but this (sadly) didn’t give rise to Delfo-mania or anything). Did the Kate Bush industry just capitalize on a peculiar form of nostalgia? This probably comes closest to the mark, but even then it’s unclear how nostalgia for 1985 was satisfied by that song. Were people wistful for the apparent glory days of running up an hill? Deals with god? Minimal synth melodies?
The precise causes behind widespread interest in radio type things, vinyl records, and Shakespeare are similarly hard to identify. Some intangible quality? Associative clout? Nostalgia? All or none of that? And why, anyways, those particular things? Why not a resurgence in the art of mime, wax cylinders, or Aristophanes? Who knows? Maybe mime’s time to shine (anew) is right around the corner.
The baffling thing isn’t that certain things become popular again for untold reasons nor is it especially troubling that some old things gain new attention while others molder in the cultural attic, but rather that it’s usually conceivable that literally anything might get popular. We can easily, for example, imagine a world in which feather boas are wrapped around every neck and people get around by way of pennyfarthings.
There are plenty of specific objects, activities, and media (silly, serious, good, bad, etc.) that we can imagine piquing interest after no matter how long, but we can’t imagine a possible world in which classical music reaches the top of the charts, sells out stadiums across the continent, inspires tremulous fans to become aggressive stans, or motivates ceaseless media coverage.
We aren’t alone here.
Frustrated with our dull imagination for the entire evening (which, we promise, we’ll actually discuss eventually), we tried to search out instances in books or films or literally anywhere else that might help us envision classical music’s future resurgence. We found folks suggesting that opera might make a sort of comeback (e.g. The Fifth Element). We found evidence that maybe light jazz could be au courant again in a place far, far away (e.g. Star Wars which, OK, is technically set in the past but that doesn’t make any sense, so we’re counting it anyways). We saw a suggestion that maybe advertising jingles from the old days might return to dominate the pop music market (e.g. Demolition Man). We ran across abundant speculative evidence that dance music of various sorts (e.g. The Matrices) and theremin-based grooves (e.g. The Jetsons) would be rediscovered in the future and inspire mass attention.
But we couldn’t find anyone who fantasized that future audiences would show up en masse to hear strings, brass, woodwind, and those great big drums doing symphonies or anything even remotely resembling classical music. We found no nuclear wasteland, waterworld, or spaceship society in which classical music was the it thing.
So, this isn’t just failure of our imagination - but a more general and longstanding cultural unwillingness or inability to see classical music as something that cannot and will not recover from its current marginal status. If Lydia Tar and Mozart in the Jungle couldn’t reignite passionate interest in orchestras, sheet music, and whatever a concerto is then maybe nothing will.
What, then, about classical music makes it seem as though it has hit an insurmountable cultural brick wall? Is it because it’s associated with bourgeois ideals and values? Can’t be. Opera is arguably even more marginalized as a genre than instrumental classical music and folks have successfully revived it sporadically (here’s looking at you Carmen: A Hip Hopera starring Beyoncé and Mekhi Phifer). Is it because it’s challenging in a certain sort of way? No, that doesn’t work. People were widely up for the unspeakable things going on in Twin Peaks a quarter century after the original series concluded. Is it because instrumental music is hard to discuss? Maybe, but Basquiat’s art is also hard to discuss and he’s enjoyed multiple, lucrative swells of attention since he died. Is it simply because the cost of attending a classical music concert is already very high and likely to climb ever higher? Definitely not. One could get the best seats (the place nearest the cellos?) in the most esteemed concert hall (Vienna Musikverein according to radioelvin.com) for a fraction of the cost of Taylor Swift Eras tickets. We just checked and nosebleed seats literally behind the stage to “see” T-Swift in Glendale, AZ are over a thousand dollars. Category I tickets (fancy!) for a performance of the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein go for a little over two hundred euros.
Where does that leave us? The future popularity of classical music is difficult if not impossible to imagine because…?
We sure hope we have a satisfying answer because the lead up has been pretty long.
Here it goes:
Our imagination of the future is predicated, obviously, on the present and, in terms of North American popular culture, the present has been more or less the same since the 1960s. The cultural objects that achieve popularity must serve as either:
1) A means for a broad demographic to think, talk about, or otherwise address broad social issues.
Or
2) A means for a broad demographic to escape from the reality that social issues of any kind exist.
In very rare cases, a popular thing will achieve both (Avatar and Black Panther are recent examples that come to mind). These two categories are - you might be yelling at the screen - VERY BROAD. We know. Settle down. It’s probably going to be OK.
The thing is that while almost everything can be sorted into either (or both) of these VERY BROAD CATEGORIES, classical music no longer seems to fulfill either function. It was once a means of talking about broader social issues (see Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Adorno) and also escape from them (see Lisztomania), but due to a variety of factors it has lost its ability to perform either of these functions.
Narrative arts are easier to force into conversation with whatever fuckery is actually happening in the world. Video games, music with lyrics and an actual y’know beat, as well as the abyssal depths of TikTok are more efficient means of escaping our only-slightly-pre-apocalyptic reality. Classical music, under our current model of popular culture, can’t hope to compete. Few people are able or willing to make the effort of suggesting that some movement in some symphony really speaks to how we need to abolish the police. Fewer still are going to settle down in the evening overwhelmed by whatever the day has hucked in their direction and zone out to a kickin’ Bach motet or two. We are not saying that no one does these things, but rather that it is difficult to imagine lots of people doing these things given the existence of alternatives.
Compounding the problem of competing with newer media custom designed to fulfill these two functions, we have collectively treated (or been subject to) classical music as something that gets played in the background of toilet paper commercials, while on hold with the phone company, or the kind of thing that only European movie villains care about for such a long time that we have been quietly trained to consider violins etc. as immanently ignorable, aggravating, and/or ethically dubious.
Is it possible that the vibes shift and the paradigm for popularity follows? Totally. Is it possible that a novel orientation towards the function (or functionlessness) of cultural objects allows classical music to enjoy a popular resurgence in the future? Absolutely! Are either of these things imaginable in any concrete or straightforward way? No! Not even a little! Or at least not to us. We cannot imagine a cultural landscape where broad demographics refuse to treat cultural objects as mere tools with which to prod and pry at some recalcitrant social problem or as quick narcotics to insulate themselves from the ongoing harm that comes with life in the twenty-first century. What would that even look like? What would those people be like? How would they spend their days? What kind of world could they build? Would they let us live in it?
The whole thing is unimaginable - but hell if it isn’t an exciting possibility.
And anways even if the future popularity of classical music is unimaginable and turns out to be unactualizable - well, what’s popularity in its current form worth anyways? Mullets, pop punk, and harem pants got popular multiple times and it was a bad time for everyone. Popularity might, in fact, be overrated. As Samuel Johnson - OG blogger and due for a resurgence any day now - once wrote, “The great and popular are very freely applauded; but all soon grow weary of echoing to each other a name which has no other claim to notice, but that many mouths are pronouncing it at once.”
Sure, it would be a shame if, by dint of diminishing audiences and hopeless future popularity, classical music suffered cultural extinction. But it’s also a real shame that entire species of animal go fully extinct on the regular. We live on shameful planet, folks. There’s more than enough shame to go around. Take heart, though, because there’s no present sign that classical music is dying. It seems that it’s even gaining relative popularity compared to previous decades. Things are looking up for ol’ Brahms! Maybe it won’t be long until the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are headlining Coachella! Imagine they play some deep cuts from Fanny Mendelssohn?
Can you imagine?
Yeah, no, we still can’t either - but imaginations are limited by all sorts of things and the future doesn’t at all care about us or what we can imagine. Here’s, then, to the unimaginable possibilities of whatever cultural future may or may not be headed our way.
Oh, right, yeah, we went to see a classical music concert! It was called Golem and performed as part of the Montreal/New Musics Festival (no idea what that slash is doing for them). The music (composed by Yuliya Zakharavawas and performed by the Orchestre Nouvelle Génération) was beautiful and troubling and playful. The accompanying dancers (members of choreographer Lena Cruz’s Fila 13 Productions) were odd and angular and funny. There were also curious paintings by Natasha Turovsky incorporated into the whole thing at different junctures. The performance demanded we pay attention and continually reassert our focus in unusual and sometimes strenuous ways which, as far as Friday nights go, was pretty fun. We’d rate it six out of seven viola bows if we lived in that unimaginable possible world where classical music is popular.
Here’s a publicity still they used to advertise the event:
Maybe you can imagine the rest? If not, maybe that’s even better.
Whatever happens next with classical music, we hope they keep the unhinged aesthetics of the pamphlet we picked up on our way out forever and ever.