The Conversation Continues — By The Numbers

I simply cannot believe that the conversation is continuing along the lines set forth in Allan Kozinn's New York Times article of last Sunday proclaiming that, despite rumors to the contrary, classical music lives. As noted here, that article reaches its rosy conclusion primarily by way of statistical argument and reasoning* — by the numbers as the piece's headline puts it — and that's doing things according to the mentality of marketing types, which mentality is useful for determining the state of health in our culture of the domains of, say, beer and soap, but not so useful for determining the state of health of the domains of art; in this case, the specific domain of classical music.

The most useful way of determining the state of health of the domains of art in our culture is to determine how vital a part each plays in our mainstream cultural life, and the best way of determining that is via a perusal of the mass media where even a cursory examination will reveal that in our mainstream culture the domain of classical music is pretty much stone-cold dead. It's not, of course, as an examination a bit less cursory will reveal, for what that less cursory examination reveals is that classical music in our mainstream culture is not so much stone-cold dead as become largely ghettoized; ghettoized to an extent not seen in this country since the turn of the last century or thereabouts.

Better ghettoized than stone-cold dead, certainly, but hardly cause for celebration — or for Pollyanna articles proclaiming that classical music lives.

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* Even those parts of Mr. Kozinn's argument not quoting specific statistics or statistical sets are statistical in their reasoning in the form of more-than or less-than. Remove all those statistics, and all one is left with is New York City-centric anecdotal evidence, which by itself is worthless as a general measure of anything outside the unique arts environment and circumstances existing in NYC.