The Three Fronts

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 9:32 PM Eastern on 3 Jun. See below.]

Over the eight years we've been blogging (six years here on S&F, and two years prior to that on a now-defunct predecessor blog), we've fought against all attempts to pander to populist sensibilities and the populist mentality in trying to build a new audience for classical music (or "concert music", or "art music", or any other term by which one chooses to designate it). We've fought against such attempts not because we're elitist in our thinking (we're not), but because classical music, by its very nature and from its beginnings to the present and in perpetuum, is an elite enterprise that can't be made to be, or made to appear to be, otherwise without in some way vitiating or even destroying classical music itself.

So, if that's the case (and it irrefutably is), how, then, ought we to go about building new audiences for classical music which since the mid-Sixties has been relegated to the cultural margins of mainstream society (and we speak here about American culture and society as we can't speak at firsthand about any other)?

It's our considered opinion that this is a war (and today, there's nothing to be gained by pretending it's anything else) that must be organized and fought simultaneously along three fronts: the governmental, the educational, and the commercial.

The first thing that must be understood and accepted unquestioningly is that there are NO quick fixes possible. This war will be a long one as, beginning in the mid-Sixties, the cultural damage that has been done (to all the so-called "high-culture" arts, not just classical music) is both deep and widespread, and therefore all battleground strategies and tactics will, ipso facto, be long-term ones. If that's not in-the-bones understood and accepted, the war is lost before it's begun.

And of just what should these battleground strategies along the three fronts consist? We can speak only in the most broad-stroke, general terms here as any detailed treatment would require a book or ten, written by one(s) more qualified and competent than we. But let us begin.

The Governmental Front

On the Governmental Front (and by governmental we mean government at all levels from local to federal), there must be mounted a well-organized, effective lobbying campaign for government support via taxpayer money of all the high-culture arts, and of classical music most particularly. The marketplace model simply will not work here for reasons due the very nature of classical music (and of all the high-culture arts, for that matter). We must convince legislators and legislatures that Art (uppercase A) matters, and that, in a free society, it works always to enrich and make more meaningful the lives of all, even if most of the all are largely ignorant or unaware of its beneficial influence on their own day-to-day lives.

This is the most difficult battleground of all, but a battleground victory that must be won as that victory is key to securing a victory on...

The Educational Front

On the Educational Front, we must see to it that music is made a required subject in all public schools, and taught beginning not with junior or senior high school (that's way too late, for as we've a number of times written, if you don't get 'em very young, you mostly don't get 'em at all), but with pre-kindergarten classes. And when we say taught, we do not mean via so-called "music appreciation" courses which are almost always a joke and a quite bad one at that. We mean teaching music the way language, math, biology, or history is taught; viz., as a discipline and as an important and necessary field of knowledge in a well-rounded education, which teaching must always include the learning of a musical instrument no matter which, and no matter the gift or lack of it of each individual student. We cannot possibly overemphasize the importance of that last as absent that context the rest is more likely than not to fall on deaf ears because too abstract.

This battleground is the one battleground that can be fought on most effectively by ordinary people; viz., by the parents of school-age kids. It's those parents to whom the message must first be sold, and those who must be the first to enlist or be enlisted in the battle.

The Commercial Front

This front is the one front that can be established immediately as it can be established independent of public approval and public funding. It's also the front that can most powerfully influence the successful establishment of the other two fronts. On this front, classical music must be sold the same way any other product or entity is sold today: advertising in commercial, mass-market media. But we must always be careful how it's sold. To quote ourself from this 2004 S&F post:

If [classical music is] sold as merely another "stream" flowing into the "river" of music the campaign will fail — abjectly. It must be sold as the elite enterprise it in truth and in fact is; something the appreciation and understanding of which is something to which one ought to aspire. And that means the purveyors and performers of classical music must never succumb to the temptation to ape the techniques or the outward trappings of the world of mass entertainment, or dumb down classical music's content or presentation in the false and doomed hope of thereby attracting a greater following. There must never be permitted a disconnect between projected image and the true reality of the thing itself (i.e., classical music's fundamentally elite nature). In marketing terms, classical music must be sold honestly as a vintage Château Latour, not a sexily packaged, reasonably priced Napa Valley Merlot or, worse, some concocted hybrid as is today attempted in classical music presentations featuring so-called "crossover" music.

And just what form might that commercial advertising take? On commercial television, for instance, something very much along the lines of this brilliant TV ad for the computer chip maker Intel, one in a series of such ads all concluding with the same graphically displayed but silent tagline, modified, mutatis mutandis, for each:

In the case of classical music, nothing can convey what needs to be conveyed as an overarching concept more perfectly or more forcefully than the sense of that graphically displayed but silent tagline.

To sum up, all the above constitute the battle plan written in large. What's first needed is the will to implement it, and then the involvement of those with the competence, qualifications, and skill necessary to spell out the details and carry it off successfully.

If ever the phrase "easier said than done" were more apt, we can't imagine when or where, but done it must be.

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Update (9:32 PM Eastern on 3 Jun): We received an eMail that, apropos our above piece, said simply, "This must have really set your teeth on edge."

The "this" our correspondent was referring to is this Los Angeles Times news item headlined, "California Assembly votes to further dilute arts as a high school requirement," which news item reported on California assemblyman Warren Furutani's successful attempt in getting passed, 76-0, a bill in the California Assembly that would allow more students to skip arts instruction entirely during their high school years.

To earn a diploma now, students have to take at least one yearlong course in arts or a foreign language. If the bill, AB 2446, passes the state Senate and is signed into law by the governor, students, starting in the 2011-12 school year, will be able to substitute a “career technical education” course for arts or a language.

[...]

By allowing students to take a technical course rather than arts or a language, backers say, teens aiming for immediate full-time jobs rather than college will be better prepared for them. Meanwhile, they say, being able to use a technical course to graduate, rather than arts or a language, could prompt some potential dropouts to stay and earn a diploma.

As a matter of fact, not only do the reported provisions of this bill not "set [our] teeth on edge," they make eminent good sense to us. As we've above pointed out, junior and senior high school are way too late to start teaching students music, and we would extend that caveat to all the arts. If students haven't been taught what's needed to be taught in those areas by the time they enter high school, there's absolutely no point trying to cram it down their throats at that stage of the game. Much better to help prepare them for entry into the hard-knocks worlds of business, industry, and commerce.