Thoughtful Musings

Blogger Alex of Wellsung has some interesting and thoughtful musings concerning the seemingly ubiquitous Death Of Classical Music question.

I often think that maybe classical music hasn't gotten smaller, the world's just gotten bigger. And classical music, i.e., a sort of music and a practice of experiencing it figured out when the world didn't have so many people in it, therefore has some natural limits on its ability to maintain the market share it did in 1860....

It gets me thinking, though, about that mid-century golden age of modern classical music appreciation that serves as the benchmark for the classical music debate. We seem to spend a lot of time thinking back to that period, when the country waited with bated breath for the next Saturday Met Broadcast, when opera stars made the cover of Time Magazine, when NBC devoted more energy to a symphony orchestra than it did to Fear Factor and its imitators, and wondering: what's wrong with us today that seemed to work back then? We're not talking about hundreds of years ago...in Bavaria...when people had no electricity. The country looked more or less the same, yet it actually seemed to give a damn about art music and serious culture. Pretty soon otherwise rational people are feeling warm and fuzzy towards the Eisenhower era, while the Sandows of the world are using it as a cudgel to justify just about anything in the name of putting butts back in the seats and slowing classical music's long cruel slide from the relevance it used to enjoy. It's not a pretty state of affairs.

RTWT here.