Future Classical

Thoughts & news about the future of classical music.

Author: Matthew Hodge (Page 1 of 9)

Artists of the Future (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 9)

August 7, 2024 / / 0 Comments
Víkingur Ólafsson (L) and Christopher Tin (R)

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8)

In this second-last part of the Classical Music 2.0 series, I wanted to share a couple of examples from the current classical music world which I think indicate that we are heading into a new world of how audiences are attracted to music. There are elements of some of these changes that are happening in various classical music companies (for instance, I was contacted by New Bedford Symphony Orchestra who pointed out their Musical Connections program which uses themed Spotify playlists and special events to introduce new audiences to classical music).

But where I am really starting to see traction is in the recording industry. Artists and record producers seem to be getting the idea of the new landscape quite dramatically. So in this post I want to talk about two artists who have broken fairly recently into the classical world, but without necessarily coming up the regular pathways. I think what they have done speaks to how an understanding of the new landscape of music can lead to increased cut-through and audience growth.

Víkingur Ólafsson

Víkingur Ólafsson is an Icelandic pianist, signed up with the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon (DG) label. I first discovered his music back in 2021 or 2022, when Limelight, the Australian fine arts magazine, named his recording of Debussy & Rameau, the album of the month. A few months later, it became Limelight’s best classical album of the year.

I had a listen to the album, and was almost instantly hooked. For background, I grew up learning the piano, but I’ll be honest, I have never fully enjoyed listening to hours of piano music. I don’t know what it is, but after half an hour, an album of piano music just becomes a bit too heavy going for me. But this Debussy / Rameau album was utterly compelling but I couldn’t quite work out way.

I started going down the Víkingur Ólafsson rabbit hole and became equally enamoured of his other albums (which at that time included a Philip Glass album and a J.S. Bach album). It took me a little while to realise why I liked his music so much, but I finally worked it out. It’s because his albums actually function in two ways at once: at a classical level, they are exquisitely performed, so the playing is phenomenal and the programming of fast and slow, dark and light is beautiful. So to the classical music world, he is a pianist with some interesting thematic programs and variety. Going from Philip Glass to Bach to Rameau is quite a feat.

However, at the same time, his albums are doing something else. With their spotless acoustics (they sound phenomenal on a good pair of headphones), they also double as Piano Music for Studying / Piano Chill playlists. In fact, whether it’s a canny choice on Víkingur’s part or his producers – or his musical taste just shakes out this way – but his repertoire largely consists (at least in the three albums I’ve mentioned) of short tracks, where the tempo and volume remain relatively consistent throughout a track. If he was cranking out Liszt or Beethoven albums – the path trod by many other up-and-coming pianists to “prove themselves” – his playing might be musically fantastic, but wouldn’t achieve this extra purpose of being great to chuck on in the background while you’re doing something else.

This means that when it comes to Spotify or any streaming service, Víkingur’s tracks aren’t just found in the classical section – his music features throughout all the relaxation /study / reading playlists.

This is key because it’s been well documented in a few places that the rise of classical music in the streaming world has been massive – particularly among younger audiences. However any time I have read reports on this, the results have always indicated that this is more people listening via mood and genre playlists, rather than, say, thousands of new people getting particularly knowledgeable about different classical composers. In other words, they are not like the old Brahms fans were that we were talking about in Part 6.

So in this environment, Ólafsson has spectacularly managed to play both sides of the market: he is tapping into the new up-and-coming market while also getting rave reviews from the traditional classical crowd as well.

Crossing Genres

Another feature of Ólafsson is how his various projects cross genres – further helping work the streaming algorithm in his favour. Joe Wright, the film director, has used him in a couple of film soundtracks: Winston Churchill bio-pic Darkest Hour and the semi-musical film Cyrano with Peter Dinklage. Ólafsson features in nearly every track of those soundtracks, thus cementing him in the film music playlist world – another common gateway into classical music.

Finally, he appeared on the track “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” on Moby’s recent Reprise album, also released by DG. (The fact that DG, one of the most prestigious classical record labels of all time, worked with Moby to create a crossover album at all already seems to indicate that the label at least sees the future of the industry.) So Ólafsson is now seeded across Spotify in three different genres, a myriad different line-up of mood playlists, while not at all hurting his standing in the classical music world.

The result? Measured by the number of streams per month (around 2.7 million when I checked), it makes him the second-most popular classical pianist on Spotify (second only to Lang Lang, with about 3.5 million). By comparison, every other great classical pianist of note, living or dead, is mostly below the 1 million mark. Having so spectacularly worked the streaming system, it is little wonder that Ólafsson can now pull a packed crowd wherever he goes, and has a following that is now keen to see what type of project he tries out next.

If I ever get to meet him, I’d love to ask him whether he has consciously chosen this path, or whether it is his producers, but either way it is a spectacular achievement!

Christopher Tin

An equally spectacular achievement that is perhaps less well known is the rise of American composer Christopher Tin. I first encountered Tin when his song cycle The Lost Birds was performed with vocal group VOCES8 and Queensland Symphony Orchestra, at which time I discovered that he has been well known in video game circles for many years. In fact, his composition model is quite clever. His most popular song of all time is “Baba Yetu”, an arrangement of the Lord’s Prayer sung in Swahili for choir and orchestra. It was designed as menu music for the video game Civilization IV.

The music became so popular that Tin later added multiple movements for choir and orchestra and turned it into an-hour long choral song cycle called Calling All Dawns. Each movement in Calling All Dawns is in a different language, sung by different ethnic choirs and vocalists, and the end result is something akin to a video game soundtrack combined with world music combined with a classical cantata.

He’s since repeated this song-cycle composition style four times, often taking something that started as video game music, and turning it into a full-length composition.

Thirty years ago, Tin would probably have been dismissed simply as a “crossover” artist – because the unspoken rule used to be that only music for the concert hall or opera or ballet counts as “classical music” and composers who spent most of their time outside those genres (e.g. John Williams) were rarely counted in the same breath as the classical composers.

So in a spectacular reversal of that trend, this year Washington National Opera commissioned Christopher Tin to write the finale for Puccini’s Turandot. And apparently, according to most reviewers, it was amazing. I cannot tell you how much of a reversal this is that someone who could have been pigeonholed as a “video game composer” was allowed to complete the most famous unfinished opera of all time.

Feelgood Countdown

Finally, at the time of writing this, I can’t help but mention ABC Classic’s latest Classic 100 countdown from a couple of months ago, which featured a “Feelgood” theme, which absolutely mixed up the genre’s even more. Go check out the final list for yourself. Classical purists might be sighing at the dumbing down of music, but it is clear ABC Classic sees the future.

These are just a few examples. I could list more. (e.g. violinist Daniel Hope, who has smashed even Lang Lang out of the water with monthly listens on Spotify). But these stories are enough to indicate that in terms of recordings, radio and individual artists, a sophisticated audience-building approach is being utilised.

Which obviously leads to the question: what seems to be holding up the major classical music companies from also adopting such an approach? (And I don’t count just putting on populist concerts as “commercial” shows for money as building an audience of the future.) The answer is a complex and subtle set of barriers, and I’ll talk about them in my final post in this series next time.



The two-pronged approach that is needed (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 8)

July 26, 2024 / / 2 Comments

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6 | Part 7)

Forgive me if the detour on the topic of familiarity seemed like a long one, but outside of academic circles, it is talked about far less frequently than I think it should be. But if we accept that familiarity is one of the strongest drivers of attendance – at least for the majority of audience members – then we can now understand the importance of the pyramid of the classical music ecosystem.

In the past, the lower-down parts of the pyramid – light music, classical music in popular culture, being taught classical music at school – all these things, far from being separate and unrelated, actually created an interconnected web whereby many people were hearing the same classical tunes over and over again. It made the sound of classical instruments and the music written for those instruments ring in the ears of a large proportion of the population. Furthermore, there was a good chance – and this is important – that a lot of people knew both the names of the composers and pieces that they liked. In the same way that it’s no good deciding you like a certain song if you can’t remember the name of it or who sings it, then the same holds doubly true for classical music. A certain knowledge of the canon is a prerequisite, so that when you see, for instance, your local orchestra offer to perform Brahms Symphony No.3, you have a good idea who Brahms is and what his third symphony sounds like.

From there, the success of classical music companies was more or less a numbers game. If there are so many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people exposed to classical music, then there is a good chance that you can get 100,000 people in a large city who were happy to go hear at least their favourite pieces from time to time. And if you could get 100,000 to do that, then there was probably a good chance that you could persuade 5,000 of them to come several times a year (assuming they had the time and money to do so).

So, to me, in this new age where classical music seems fragile, the way forward seems obvious: the industry needs to start rebuilding the pyramid that used to be the engine that generated new classical music fans.

To do that, work needs to be done in two directions, both of which are quite different, but both necessary for a full ecosystem to survive. In short:

  1. To deepen current audiences’ familiarity levels, the industry needs to invest in adult educational initiatives that are designed with the sole aim of increasing that audience’s knowledge and enjoyment of classical repertoire. This is not simply about facts for their own sake – all the knowledge needs to be targeted towards creating increased enjoyment of the repertoire.
  2. To increase new audience numbers, the industry needs to invest in creating programs that will be familiar to them (and I would go even further and argue that there is a need to start commissioning / creating repertoire for that purpose).

Strategy 1: Adult Education

With regards to educational initiatives, I think we need to start with some basic questions: If someone wanted to get into classical music, where would they start nowadays? Is there a book they could read? Is there an online course? Is there a person or two out there known as a guru who can get people into classical music?

These initiatives can’t just introduce audiences to a few favourite pieces – though they should at least do that. But do they give audiences the listening tools to be able to tackle trying new works on their own and have a good chance of enjoying them?

Now, it is true that nearly every large classical music organisation has an educational department that puts on educational concerts for school children. And a lot of organisations have pre-concert speakers at concerts (of which I am grateful to be one).

But to invest most of our educational efforts into concerts for young people on the hope that they will come back in 30-40 years as ticket buyers, seems a very long shot to me. (Especially since I suspect these educational concerts have been running for that long, and I’m not sure how many of those young people have turned into ticket buyers.)

I’m not saying that organisations shouldn’t do these – they should – but what do classical music organisations have to offer to the brand new person on their database who actually stumped up money to see their first concert? Or that the ticket buyer can suggest to their friend or partner who knew nothing about the music, but came along for the night out?

What if classical organisations had an e-course they could offer (perhaps as an extra revenue stream) to every new ticket buyer? What if they had a book they could sell at interval? It would take money and time to set all this up, but once it is in place, it would be a useful resource for several years.

Strategy 2: New Concerts and Repertoire

On the other side of the two-pronged approach, there is still much that could be done in the area of programming and repertoire that might bring in new audiences. Some ideas include:

New Pop Music. The classical music industry could start to work more closely with the pop industry to bring the sound of classical instruments back into pop music (and ideally into pop culture). And I think the impetus for that needs to come from the classical side. There are many talented musicians in the pop sphere, but unless they have a small fortune, they would never consider writing songs for orchestra or classical ensemble, because where would they find a classical group to play with? (Gone are the days when a pop producer might have lined up an orchestra as part of a recording session.)

So is it any wonder that modern pop is going to learn towards using guitars, drums, keys and electronics (including completely digitised orchestras), because how many other instrument combos are affordable? So what if every classical group set aside a week a year to work with a pop group and an arranger to create an EP?

New Lighter Classical Music. I was also going to suggest creating “lighter” classical music, but to be honest the growing mainstream interest in neo-classical composers such as Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi is showing that there is already an interest in this. But how much of this music is being integrated into concerts put on by the established classical groups?

Mixed Genre Concerts. I owe this idea to Aubrey Bergauer, who many years ago posed the question: who wouldn’t want to go to a concert that features John Williams and Beethoven? In my own years in the industry, I was able to see a few concerts come to light that mixed genres like this and the results were always tremendously popular with audiences, but it still seems a rare thing to see in an orchestra season.

Imagine the Future

The reality is that some of these things are starting to move. But these things are still mostly happening to the side and disconnected from the core classical business and in the case of the Education layer, missing in a lot of cases. However, imagine what it might look like if this was all interconnected.

Imagine, if you will, some time in the future, where popular bands on Spotify regularly team up with classical artists or ensembles to create cracking new covers of their favourite tunes. And where the classical groups, in turn, regularly put out recordings of orchestral fantasias on the most popular pop music, written with classical instruments in mind and showing off the range and technique of these instruments. (Lest you think this is totally blasphemous, maybe think of it a bit like Liszt with his phenomenal piano arrangements of popular songs and arias, or Beethoven doing a theme and variations on things like God Save the King.)

To facilitate this, orchestras and ensembles regularly put aside a week or two to record with local bands. A small army of dedicated arrangers and composers who might otherwise have been considered too crossover are starting to write seriously high-level music for this space.

People start to listen more to these classical covers of their favourite songs and start getting served ads – within whatever social medial platforms are still standing in the future – that their local orchestra puts on a concert of this type of stuff 2 or 3 times a year.

They go to the concert to hear, I don’t know, the Billie Eilish variations or the Taylor Swift Fantasia (or maybe even Brahms vs Radiohead or the Resurrection Mixtape, just to name some that actually exist) and they find that the clever orchestra – doubling as its own warm-up act – in the same concert, is playing other cool stuff – bits of video game music, film music, new compositions and traditional classical music that the new audience now realises sounds awesome when it is played live.

They go home raving to their friends that they’re going to try this again. A day or two later, they get an email and the orchestra wants to know:

  • Would you like to learn more about classical music? Because – if you would – they have a book and an online course called How To Get Into Classical Music that you can buy. Plus an online group that swaps favourite tunes.
  • Oh yeah, and here’s a $50 ticket to come and try a “regular” classical concert if you haven’t already.
  • Or if you’re super-keen, for $X a week (about the cost of joining a gym and pretty much guaranteed to improve your mental health), you can sign up for unlimited concerts. We’ll throw in the book for free if you do.

Now, does it require a lot of work to get to this kind of future? For sure. To create entry-level gateway music, we’d have to dig up the composers and arrangers who have been “languishing” writing music for video games and TV and let them know that we’d be interested in what they could do for the concert hall. For the Education piece, we would need to track down musicologists who don’t mind talking to complete newbies that might not be super-familiar with classical music. And there would need to be organisations prepared to have strategies to tie all this together, so that audiences really can make a journey step-by-step from the music they are currently familiar with to the music that classical musicians would love them to be familiar with one day. In fact, it might require multiple organisations to join together to achieve change on this scale.

Which is why – as I said right back at the beginning – we need to start thinking of classical music as an ecosystem.

And maybe this sounds like no form of the classical music business that you’ve ever known or been familiar with, but to me it sounds very much like the words of Robert Newman who started the Proms concerts in London (that I wrote about in my last post). “I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”

The future may not look exactly like this, but if we can envision a future that looks different, it gives us something to move towards.

I have two more parts to wrap up this series. In Part 9, I will share a couple of examples of artists who have benefited very well from understanding the new cross-genre age that we find ourselves in.

Finally, in Part 10, I’ll talk about some of the internal barriers that are still preventing this sort of change at a large scale.

Embracing Familiarity to Broaden Audiences (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 7)

July 18, 2024 / / 0 Comments
Photo by Haithem Ferdi on Unsplash

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6)

So if you’ve been with me on this blog journey so far and kept up with my train of thought, you will see that I’ve argued that there used to be a whole pyramid supporting the classical music industry, which has slowly crumbled, as we’ve only focused on the bit at the top – high-level professional music-making. I also spoke about the tyranny of familiarity, where we are predominantly seeing audiences buying tickets to music that they are familiar with, meaning less familiar music gets harder and harder to sell. Finally, I used the example of Brahms’ music to dive into where this “tyranny of familiarity” is coming from – as our audiences (potential or actual) know less traditional classical music theory, they have less of a framework for listening to complex music. Left to the devices of “tune and mood” to determine their musical taste, modern listeners are shaking up the traditional classical canon in ways that we probably haven’t seen in over a century, if at all, in the classical music ecosystem.

The Current Solution

Is there a way out of this? For most orchestras (who have to wrestle with the familiarity problem the most because they have the most concerts to sell in a year) the current method is usually for an orchestra (who have the most concerts to try to sell) to try programming a series of “blockbuster” classical concerts (i.e. concerts with at least one super-famous piece of music in it) alongside more obscure concerts, with a healthy dose of “commercial” concerts (i.e. movie concerts, bands with orchestra, etc) to make the money. The hope is that the commercials and the blockbusters will make enough money to balance out the smaller audiences for the niche works and that the company will come out ahead financially at the end of the year.

This is in the sophisticated companies. Amongst others, there can sometimes seem to be an approach that as long as the music is great and well-played, the programming shouldn’t be tinkered with and that the Marketing team should be able to generate audiences to anything that the Artistic team wants to put on.

Or sometimes companies go through swings and roundabouts – trying the balanced strategy for a couple of years until a new Chief Conductor or Artistic Director comes along, and then they go adventurous for a couple of years until the revenue starts to suffer, and there is a return to balance.

But on the whole, the industry does know, if there is enough familiarity, people will try some unfamiliarity. Put a warhorse on in one half of a concert, you can usually get away with programming something less well known in the other half. Classical music radio will always have a solid amount of famous pieces but they play them side by side with little known gems.

But this “balanced programming” approach seems too risky to me in this new environment. If this problem is being caused by less people being familiar with the music, I’m getting concerned that a day might come where people simply don’t know more than a handful of great classics – which jeopardises the breadth of repertoire that an orchestra can perform.

Populist + Serious

To me, the constraint that rarely gets questions is the persistence in only pairing famous serious classical music with slightly less famous or new serious classical music. Perhaps it’s not obvious (or perhaps it’s too controversial), but I think an obvious solution that is rarely tried is that the industry could push the pairing concept a lot further by deliberately blurring the lines between populist music and so-called serious/art/classical music.

Surely there is almost no more powerful way to introduce people to new music. In fact, I believe this is how it used to be done in concerts a century ago, but we’d lost sight of it by the end of the 20th century.

So I wanted to share a couple of stories where familiarity was leaned into to expand listener’s musical horizons. One is a story from the late 1800s that still has resonance today. The other is a relatively new phenomenon from the last 15 years. But both illustrate a similar point.

1) The story of the BBC Proms

Regular readers of this blog might know that I love reading about the rise of classical music in the 1800s in London because we can learn a lot about how they reached new audiences and grew a following. One of my favourite stories is on the origin of the London Proms concerts (or BBC Proms as they are known now).

According to Wikipedia:

They were inaugurated on 10 August 1895 in the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place by the impresario Robert Newman, who was fully experienced in running similar concerts at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Newman wished to generate a wider audience for concert hall music by offering low ticket prices and an informal atmosphere, where eating, drinking and smoking were permitted to the promenaders. He stated his aim to Henry Wood in 1894 as follows:

“I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Proms

There’s only a brief Wikipedia entry left to tell us about Newman, but what a genius of audience engagement! He recognised in a way that rarely is nowadays – that the programming of concerts itself could, with some work, become a training ground for creating new fans for classical music. But it needed to have a) regularity, b) easy stages and c) start popular. In other words, he was deliberately using familiar populism as the hook to be able to lead people in stages to the serious.

Now, what’ I’m not sure about is the timeframe for this sort of “training” of the public. The original Proms festival lasted for about 10 weeks, so was his goal to get people from popular to serious in 10 weeks? Or was it more the case to have this running over multiple years, and as people came back year on year, their tastes would get more adventurous? I suspect it would have been the latter, but if anyone knows more, I’d love to hear.

2) Spotify Discovery Playlists

This next story I remember hearing, but I can’t find confirmed on the internet at the moment – so I hope this isn’t apocryphal – is that music streaming service Spotify had an issue when they first released their famous Discovery Playlists. (For those unfamiliar with this concept, Spotify gives its listeners a fresh Discovery every week which serves them up about two hours of music that it thinks they will like, based on what they have been listening to before.)

The story goes that when Discovery Playlist was first made, the idea was to show people a list of music that was in genres or styles similar to music they already liked. The idea was to help you broaden your taste and discover new music that you were likely to enjoy. The important thing to note is that at this stage, the music in the Discovery Playlist was designed to be 100% new to the listener.

But the problem was that there was little take-up. Then, apparently, one day – by mistake, in the story I heard – a version of the Discovery Playlist was released where half the music were things that the listener already liked or had listened to before.

All of a sudden, the Discovery Playlist took off. In other words, it was by showing enough familiarity to the listener – which would reassure them that the playlist really did understand their musical taste – that the listener would be encouraged to listen to the newer music in the playlist.

Of course, the dilemma with this kind of playlist is that it is so driven by an algorithm, that it creates musical echo chambers where we only encounter a narrow range of music. But the principle is still there.

So, in conclusion, what might it look like if we used music from one familiar genre to try to draw listeners towards another one (in this case, classical music). In other words, could we push the concept of familiarity a lot further than it is currently used?

I’ll give more thoughts on that next week.

Whatever happened to Brahms? (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 6)

July 11, 2024 / / 2 Comments
Johannes Brahms

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series putting forward a possible vision for the future of the classical music industry – imagining a time where we might have larger audiences, more revenue, and play a bigger role in society. (Previously: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5)

So we’ve been building the case that the audience and their familiarity (or otherwise) with classical repertoire is the primary driver of concert attendance (and thus revenue). I’ve suggested that what we have been seeing as an ageing audience crisis could also be seen as a crisis of familiarity. In short, that audiences have less of a knowledge of what used to be known as “the canon” – the great masterpieces that (at least supposedly) everybody knew.

The barometer of this (at least in Australia) is the ABC Classic Top 100 countdowns, and I mentioned in the last blog post that when ABC last polled people on their favourite piece (“the music you can’t live without“) Brahms didn’t make the top 100. This is one of those strange discrepancies between audience and musicians / conductors. Among the latter, Brahms is considered one of the greatest composers of all time. So why are audiences not on the same page? How did Brahms fall so far out of fashion?

Education as an aid to Processing Music

The mostly likely main culprit in Brahms’ decline in popularity is a lack of musical education. However, this lack is perhaps not for the reason most of the classical music industry thinks of. Often when the classical music world thinks of musical education (especially with classical music) the goal in the past has been to keep the “great works” of the past alive, or perhaps to generate an enthusiasm for classical music – music appreciation.

But one of the most important aspects of learning about classical music, particularly musical theory, is that it provides a guide for our brains in how to process the music. In Part 4 of this series, I mentioned the work of Professor David Huron and his work Sweet Anticipation, which details how we tend to experience music as pleasurable when our brains can anticipate where the music is going.

One of the things that I don’t think we’ve appreciated fully in the classical music world – even perhaps when we have been the beneficiaries of such knowledge ourselves – is that some of the basic points of music theory work to guide our listening. And not only that, but not having that knowledge makes it much harder for a listener to process the music.

Brahms Symphony No.3 – the Pre-Requisite Knowledge
Let’s take Brahms Symphony No. 3 for instance. I want you to consider the level of knowledge that the typical die-hard classical music fans would bring to bear to listen to a piece like this. For instance, if a person with some classical training found themselves at a concert with Brahms’ Third Symphony, even if they weren’t immediately familiar with the music and hadn’t listened to it before (or not for a long while), they would know to flick open the program booklet. In that booklet, they would find a program listing that contained something like this:

Johannes BRAHMS – Symphony No.3 in F major, op. 90 (1883)

I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante
III. Poco allegretto
IV. Allegro — Un poco sostenuto

35 minutes

I’m not sure what a newcomer would make of this listing, what with its Roman numerals and Italian language (for music written by a German?). But the classically trained person, almost without thinking about it, would pick up the following:

Level 1 Knowledge

  • That Brahms was a famous composer from the Romantic era. (They would pick that from the 1883 date.)
  • That this is a symphony, meaning a large-scale work for orchestra.
  • That Brahms wrote multiple of these symphonies and that this is his third one.
  • Despite this being only his third symphony, this is his opus 90, meaning the 90th work he had published. So we can already presume he wrote a ton of music before this, making this something he wrote later in this career when he had his style fairly styled.
  • The key is in F major, indicating that – at least for the opening – the mood will be in a more “happy” major key rather than a darker minor key. (Though a classically trained person will expect a lot of variance in mood for a Romantic piece.)
  • This symphony, like most symphonies, is broken into sections called “movements”, rather like courses in a meal.
  • There are four movements, indicated by the four subsections with Roman numerals.
  • The Italian wording refers to the speed of the movement. Allegro con brio means fast and lively, for instance. Andante means a more moderate speed.
  • That all four movements together will take about 35 minutes to get through.

Level 2 Knowledge

If they’re even more advanced with their musical theory, and have listened to a few symphonies, they might also know:

  • That symphonies from Haydn onwards (i.e. for most of the 18th century) usually had four movements – though this isn’t a hard and fast rule.
  • That the first and fourth movements of these traditional symphonies would usually be fast.
  • That the two middle movements would consist of a slow movement (to contrast with the opening and closing movements) and a lighter movement usually with a one-two-three beat known as a minuet or a scherzo.
  • From which the advanced listener could look at the Italian speeds above and deduce that Brahms’ symphony, even though written towards the end of the 19th century is, at least in form, following the basic pattern of many, many symphonies written before it.

Level 3 Knowledge

If they are really, really advanced in their musical knowledge (and I think most classical fans were up until the 21st century), they might also know that often the opening movement in a symphony (and some of the later ones) is written in a form called sonata form, which is a form where several themes are stated (in different keys) in an opening section called the “Exposition”, then the themes are mixed up and played around with in a section called the “Development” before the themes return in a section called the “Recapitulation”.

Now, you’re either reading this and thinking “Yeah, isn’t that obvious?” in which case, chances are you’re a part of the classical music business or a long-time audience member. If you had no idea that die-hard classical music fans bring this much knowledge to the listening experience, then congratulations, you’re probably an ordinary person who stumbled across some classical music and decided you loved it, even if you didn’t know all the stuff I’ve mentioned.

The Importance of a Listening Framework

Here’s the important thing – the points I’ve mentioned above aren’t necessarily terribly interesting, or of themselves necessarily going to make you like Brahms Symphony No.3 better than any other symphony. But they do give you a guide as to how to listen to the music. This knowledge, which as far as I know was well-known to most classical music audiences up until the mid-20th century, was the framework which guided people to be able to know how to listen to different pieces of classical music and how to anticipate what was likely to happen.

This does not make classical music a cold clinical thing, just because it utilised these sorts of frameworks. It was simply a way to create length. In the same way that the typical structure of a song (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, etc) allows a songwriter to create a song that is 3-5 minutes long, the above structures of movements, sonata form, etc allowed composers to create works that run anywhere from 15 minutes to 100 minutes (!) without the audience getting lost. (Mostly. There are some long symphonies that do get a lot of people lost.)

Another analogy might be to say that the rules of a sport allow spectators to follow the action – they know roughly how long the game is, whether their team is winning or losing, whether a particular shot or goal was successful or not. Or consider film, where we have an instinctive knowledge that most films have a three-act structure with all the problems being worked out in the finale. These frameworks exist all the time in arts and sports (and many other areas of life) so that we can make sense of what we are processing.

Brahms to the Untrained Ear

So now I want you to consider a hypothetical situation: Let’s say a listener knows no classical music theory at all. They don’t even know what a “symphony” is. They encounter Brahms’ Third Symphony. How are their brains likely to process the work?

There may be better research out there that can shed more light on this, but I would say – based on Huron’s work and my own personal experience when I was younger and know a lot less musical theory – that the listener is likely to only be able to grasp onto simpler things:

  • How the music makes them feel
  • The melodies
  • The rhythms

Most music listeners with no knowledge can pick up on these elements. But the harmonies, the symmetrical structures, the journey that Brahms created, the cleverness of the way he creates something that sounds similar to the symphonies that have gone before and yet different, the difficulty and challenge for the musicians and the conductor – many of these will not be perceived. Now you might say, “But does this matter? What’s wrong with listening to Brahms for the tunes or the feel?” And this is a fair point, except that sometimes, for some composers, creating a catchy tune wasn’t the top priority for the piece. In many cases, symphonies can be far more about how themes are changed or developed over time and combined in different ways, than whether the themes themselves have a good hook.

Tune and Mood

In my years in the business, I have spoken to many, many audience members that I ended up sitting next to at concerts or met in the foyers or attended some of my pre-concert talks. And it has become apparent that the depth of knowledge that used to guide extensive and deep listening of classical music has started to dry up. As the music education part of the pyramid has dried up, people have started listening to classical music in simpler ways.

This, I believe, is the driving force behind the shape of the ABC Classic 100 and the connection between familiarity and sales in orchestras around the world. Left to their simpler listening devices of tune and mood, the pieces that are staying firm on the favourites lists are those pieces with either clear “hook” tunes that everyone knows (e.g. Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Bolero, Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony) or pieces with a clearly defined mood / theme that is easy to grasp (e.g. The Four Seasons, The Planets). Pieces that require more knowledge of structure and form, with less easily memorable themes – like most things by our friend Brahms – are disappearing from the mental canon of our potential audiences.

And that mental canon is crucial for the financial future of our organisation. For the average ticket-buyer, if they see an ad for “Beethoven Symphony No. 5”, your success at selling the ticket will almost certainly depend on whether that person has a good idea in their head of what Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 sounds like already. (I would add that even for the so-called “commercial” concerts, this is important. It’s not just enough for an orchestra to create a concert of movie music or video game music. It must be movie music or video game music that, on the whole, is already familiar to the audiences.)

This type of idea does get raised in the halls of classical music organisations from time to time, but it’s not one that the industry likes to dwell on too much, because it seems to only lead to one conclusion: playing the same old Top 20 pieces that everyone likes to hear.

But I want to put forward a new framework: what if, by embracing this limitation of audience familiarity, we could chart the pathway back to larger, smarter, more diverse audiences? What if, simply by acknowledging that audiences today are not the same now as they were 50 years ago, we could see a way forward? This, to me, is what Classical Music 2.0 could look like.

More on this, in the next post.

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