Future Classical

Thoughts & news about the future of classical music.

Author: Matthew Hodge (Page 1 of 10)

Is classical music dying out? Depends how you define it.

May 19, 2026 / / 1 Comment

I recently re-subscribed to the ArtsJournal email newsletter, which is hands-down the greatest arts email newsletter in the world. The amazing Douglas McLennan curates a daily collection of arts articles from online publications around the world, beautifully broken into categories such as music, dance, film, etc. It’s so well done, I usually have to unsubscribe from time to time because it’s one of my brain’s favourite time-sucks, but there is almost no better way to get your finger on the pulse of the arts around the world.

I know I’d been speculating in my last post (at the end of my Classical Music 2.0 series) that I wasn’t 100% sure whether classical music was trending up or down around the world. Doug’s weekly round-up from the last few weeks have been great examples of how tricky this question is to answer.

Not because it’s hard to know what’s going on – but because depending on your view of the world / degree of denial – writers can either try to find doom and gloom with no answers or paint a picture that it’s all awesome, just a bit different.

The reality is a bit more nuanced, but let me give you an example of the polarity of the reports here, all taken from news reports from the last couple of weeks.

The Catatastrophpic

Photo by Mateusz Majewski on Unsplash

On the outright disastrous side, some of the biggest (organisational) names in classical music seem to be tanking: there is the news about the New York Met Opera digging into its endowments and generally going financially backwards.

The mighty Boston Symphony is facing financial challenges that have led to not renewing its artistic director’s contract. (It’s behind a paywall but Boston Globe referred to it as living on borrowed time.)

San Antonio Symphony barely being able to keep a season together with concert cancellations and other challenges.

Chicago Sinfonietta “pauses” all activity until 2027 due to financial difficulties.

And these are just classical music organisations. If we throw in theatre companies and the like, there are a regular bunch of stories like this under the theme “large arts company struggling to get money and audiences”.

The Positive ABC

So therefore, in the midst of these chronicles of artistic doom, it was somewhat surprising to see an article by our ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for those from overseas) joyously telling us how “classical music is thriving“.

To be fair, ABC also owns ABC Classic, our national classical music radio station, and their Classic 100 countdown is open for voting now, so it’s definitely in their interests to spruik classical music in the lead-up to the countdown. (And the Classic 100 is without doubt my favourite yearly event in the Australian classical music calendar. Nothing forces the industry to confront the truth between what they think is great classical music and what the general public thinks than several thousand enthusiastic listeners around Australia voting Hans Zimmer higher up the list than Igor Stravinsky.)

While the article admits that some of our big institutions, like Opera Australia and The Australian Ballet are having struggles, presenter Megan Burslem (who has done an amazing job over the last few years being the friendly face of classical music to the entire country) argues the case that maybe profitability isn’t the best measure of whether something is successful? And maybe the obsession with getting younger audiences is missing the difference this music makes in people’s lives already? (The rest of the article throws in a few references to the rise in interest in orchestra concerts that feature pop artists, movie music, etc.)

So Which Is it?

Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

So if classical music is thriving, what’s going on with the big orgs? And even if it’s just some of the big institutions that are struggling, is there a danger that we won’t be able to see this art form live in the future if they tank?

The reality is complicated – like almost everything else going on in the world today. Twenty years ago, when I entered the industry, there was a sharp divide between people over the age of 50 who seemed to like classical music and everyone under the age of 50, who thought it was their grandparent’s music and hated it. So the immediate conclusion was that classical music would die out because of the relentless aging of the audience and no new ones coming up.

Fast forward to today, and the reality has changed and we were sort of wrong. The next generation after the classical hating Baby Boomers and Gen X came along and apparently some of them don’t mind a bit of classical. (Which is markedly better and quite different than most of them hating it.)

But – and this is the key thing – this new audience is different in many respects. In the old days of my grandparents, classical music was considered the gold standard of all music and it was thrust upon the population in a way that we can’t imagine now. It was taught in schools, played on the radio, put in movies. You name it.


The person who said it best was John Rutter back in 2018:

When I was growing up there were two kinds of music: (1) music, and (2) pop music (plus jazz, folk and some lesser genres). If you gave ‘music’ as one of your interests when you filled in a university application form, that was assumed to mean what we now call classical music. If your passion was for Elvis, Tommy Steele or the dangerous young Cliff Richard, you would have had to put ‘pop music’ – if you didn’t mind being considered, frankly, a bit common.

We are in danger of forgetting this – that the classical music industry as we know it was birthed in an era when “music” equalled “classical music” and everything else was a “lesser genre”. While we would probably be gobsmacked by the breathtaking arrogance of deciding that one single genre could be the gold standard of music for the rest of us, it’s more important to realise what happened because of it: thousands of people learned the music theory in schools that explained this music, thousands more had a crack at performing at home and in school and amateur music. And hundreds of thousands heard it all the time, on the radio, in film, in TV – everywhere as ubiquitously as we are likely to hear Taylor Swift today.

A Massive Musical Immersion

What happens when you give entire generations (and it was multiple generations) that kind of massive musical immersion?

The result is they learn to hear and understand and enjoy a music that is known for complexity, length and sometimes challenge. And I’ll never know what fraction of those listeners migrated beyond the top classics with their big tunes to the more serious works but – as a sheer numbers game – the pool of people that was familiar with the stuff was so vast that the number that could turn into fully-fledged armchair connoisseurs was colossal by today’s standards.

In short, our modern classical institution was built by a society that provided massive educational and popularisation pillars that cemented the appeal of this music, and created an army of ticket buyers and donors (not to mention willing government support in our country) that could keep the business afloat.

Return to the Glory Days? Not so sure.

So is the the upsurge of interest in classical music heading back to these glory days that birthed the industry as we know it? I’m not convinced, for a number of reasons:

Who is writing for classical acoustic instruments? The vast majority of popular music nowadays is written for non-acoustic instruments. This is quite different from the 1800s and early 1900s where even much of the popular music was played on classical acoustic instruments. A big band was mostly the same kind of brass and woodwind instruments as could be found in a regular orchestra. A typical bass / synth / guitar combo – or EDM created completely on a computer – is not written for that configuration, effectively shutting classical musicians out from much of the pop world.

Yes, there are concerts of pop music with orchestras and movie concerts, but the former are usually retro-fitted onto an artist when they get popular enough – very few of those pop songs started out being written with orchestra in mind. And as for movie concerts, they are a great intro to orchestral music, except that over the last 20 years, Hollywood has systematically moved towards highly processed soundtracks that simply do not sound like a traditional orchestra and aren’t naturally designed to wok in the concert hall.

Who is teaching new classical fans to understand the theory behind classical music? While many classical organisations have education teams and educational concerts, one only has to look at classical program notes from 100 years ago, to realise that the typical audience member had four years of music theory under their belt. And not just general music theory, particular music theory that explained things like movements, sonata form, fugues, counterpoint, and countless other things. Who, besides professional musicians and conductors and the odd fan who goes down the rabbit hole on YouTube knows these things as a matter of course?

In short, I believe that the recipe for the success of the classical music industry in the 20th century was due to three things happening simultaneously:

  1. A massive popularisation of music that involved classical instruments, thus making it easy to slide into the classical genre. (I say “involved classical instruments” because I think we can forget about things such as pops orchestra, which deliberately played light and popular classical music as a gaeway.)
  2. A wide-spread education of the listening public, so that there was a clear staircase from being an enthusiastic amateur to being a connoisseur.
  3. The availability of excellent live performances of classical music.

There is a slight uptick in popularisation today, but it still seems more slight than the past.

It’s vague as to what kind of educational pathways exist to create connoisseurs in large numbers.

And, yes, there are still many live performances for the existing audience, but without popularisation and education creating the audiences of the future, we are back to the question of – is the audience dying out?

While it is also true that some things aren’t all about money – if enough money disappears from this space, I suspect the ability to fund full-time high quality classical ensembles would shrink. Worst case, we could see some groups disappear and training institutions consolidate. I actually feel like we could end up in a throwback to the 1800s where a few orchestras existed funded by wealthy people, and only a handful of people who were prepared to go to places like Europe learned to play the stuff.

So, yes, I’m excited that there are many new listeners to ABC Classic, wanting to vote on the Classic 100 – and I’m glad new people are coming to hear Star Wars in concert and Billy Joel tributes with orchestra and Ludovico Einaudi when he’s in town. But I’m not yet convinced this will organically get the major classical music organisations out of the woods.

Still, there is nothing like some glimmers of hope for the future – side by side with a platform that may be increasingly on fire – to drive innovation. So who knows what the future will hold?

Whose Job Is It To Change the Future? (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 11).

April 14, 2026 / / 1 Comment

Classical Music 2.0 is a (now)11-part blog series I started a couple of years ago 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 | Part 9 | Part 10)

Part 10 and 11 of this series are looking at the barriers to change. In Part 10, we looked at the issue of purpose: how the (explicit or unspoken) purpose of many classical music organisations is to pursue excellence, which can be at cross purposes with the things that need to be done to grow a new audience.

In today’s part, I’m answering the question: why can’t one person (e.g. the CEO or a conductor) just come in and change things? (I also – to be completely honest – sometimes used to think of myself as the “one person” back in my industry days, so this is a reflection on my own experience as well.)

Things in an established classical music company are actually quite complicated to change – particularly so in an orchestra, which has been mostly my experience. It is remarkably difficult to get the full mechanism of a classical performing company to head in the same direction, because there is well over a century of tradition that has gone into the art form. This has created a well-oiled machine that works very well for putting on concerts, but not so well if you want to introduce an element of change.

An orchestra (the ensemble and the organisation) are like well-oiled clockwork machines. Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash

A Well-Oiled Machine

Essentially, in an orchestra and many smaller classical music organisations, every group or department has a very specific job to do, with little control over how other areas do their job. So, for instance, the typical musician is required to show up and play the music that is on the repertoire for that week’s concerts. They may have some say on performance conditions and perhaps some veto rights on repertoire if they’re on the right committee, but ultimately, they are there to perform the music at a very high standard that somebody else has set for them.

There will be some form of operations team who make sure the logistics of seating, music stands, instrument transport (and much, much more) is taken care of, but they have even less say over what is performed and why.

The same holds true for other departments. The Marketing department exists to sell tickets to the existing shows planned by the Artistic department. The Sales team exists to run the box office (if the organisation is big enough to have its own box office) and deal with customers. The Development department exists to do extra fundraising on top of the ticket sales. The finance department exists to manage the money.

While there can be some good synergies if Artistic and Marketing work together – I certainly enjoyed some in my time – these ultimately need to be supported by the two most powerful people in the organisation: the Chief Conductor / Artistic Director and the CEO.

But is it explicitly the job of either of those two to re-orient the organisation for the future? The Chief Conductor might think their job is simply to shape the sound of the orchestra and champion certain music, and in their mind, audience growth is the job of the Marketing team. I do believe modern conductors are more aware that their choice of repertoire will impact sales and there is more discussion around this, but it wasn’t that long ago that the Artistic Director mostly led the artistic development of the ensemble, and most activity in the organisation was unquestioningly built around that facilitating that development work.

The CEO is likely to be more well-rounded in their approach to the direction of the organisation, because they are answerable to the Board for the financial performance of the company, but it can be completely variable from organisation to organisation how much say the CEO has over the artistic direction of the company. (This can be partly based on power, where sometimes the Artistic Director is given more clout than the CEO. Or it can also be based on perception, where the CEO might be perceived to be there because of their business acumen, but not their artistic background.)

The Board themselves are technically above all this, but they are there ultimately to provide governance, leaving strategy and artistic planning to be worked out further down amongst the executives.

Of all of these, the person who is most likely to be able to reorient an organisation towards growing new audiences alongside its existing activities would be the Artistic Director / Chief Conductor. But, again, the choice of an Artistic Director of nearly any classical music organisation is likely to be influenced to a great degree by the musicians, and their top priority is likely making sure they have a great fellow artist in the role who can develop the performance standard of the ensemble. Which means, the AD may or may not be a future-focused person.

I’ve been out of the loop for a year or so, so I would love to hear of any conductors or ADs overseas that are obsessed with growing new audiences while simultaneously being great artists in their own right. In the Australian context, it seems that Benjamin Northey is still the name cropping up time and again as the face of introducing orchestral music to new audiences, but I notice he still not a Chief Conductor or Artistic Director of any Australian ensemble yet. (He is Chief Conductor of the lucky Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in New Zealand.) Though, with Northey’s Principal Guest Conductor role with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, his Conductor in Residence role with Sydney Symphony Orchestra and now being Professor of Conducting at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he is well and truly placed to make an impact on the Australian scene – and hopefully create another generation of conductors like him.

Photo by J on Unsplash

Silos of Specialisation

But still, in general, at this stage, there is no one person in a typical classical music organisation who explicitly has it as part of their job role that they need to steward new generations of classical music audiences – except perhaps the Marketers, but with everything I have discussed in previous posts in this series, you can see the problem cannot be solved by marketing alone. So even if one or two people in the marketing department of an organisation wanted to pursue a strategy of reaching new audiences, they may not actually be able to do a lot to get the other departments to line up.

In short, the silos of specialisation that keep a modern classical music ensemble ticking along nicely are the very silos that prevent any major deviation from the current model of how a classical music organisation is run – a model that has been around for over a century. There have been some changes – typically in where funding comes from (e.g. less government money, bigger emphasis on marketing and philanthropy) and there is an increase in “commercial” classical concerts, but many organisations are fascinatingly (and perhaps dangerously) unchanged from what they were many decades ago, especially when it comes to the core artistic intent driving it all.

Photo by David Valentine on Unsplash

Black Swans

So where does that leave the future of classical music? I’ve been enjoying ABC journalist Matt Bevan’s podcast / video series If You’re Listening and his “Black Swans” episodes in particular where he eloquently makes the case that nobody has ever really predicted the future correctly. There are always “Black Swan” events that nobody foresees that come along and change the landscape.

So as someone in my late 40s, I look back on the absolute certainty I had in my 20s and 30s that classical music was going to die out, and now I’m no longer so certain. In the early 2000s, not many people (including me) saw the rise of streaming music coming, and that has opened the door to a lot of fans. Being able to access nearly all music in the world in a single subscription – despite the controversy of how little the artists actually get paid from this – has suddenly meant that everybody can try any genre they want. For most of the 20th century, you either had to listen to something on the radio or fork out for a physical version to try music. Now the world of music is yours for less than the cost of a CD a month (even 90s CD prices!)

And, as a result, people now listen to all sorts of genres. Young people may well mainly listen to pop music, but there are also thousands of them that will listen to classical as well.

The other thing we didn’t see coming was the rise of social media. I got to see Anna Lapwood play at the Sydney Opera House the other day and even that was a minor miracle. 20 years ago, even amongst classical music audiences, the only people I knew who were happy to go see organ music were a handful of purists who might go to the odd lunchtime concert (most of them seemed to be organists themselves!). And yet Anna has put this instrument on the map for a whole younger generation.

So, look, maybe it will all work itself out and a new cohort of concert-goers will come along just in the nick of time. Or maybe other ensembles more geared towards this audience will appear, while more traditional groups diminish in their influence. It’s hard to say.

Jan Jirásek

No Beautiful Things Should Be Forgotten

Personally, I’d still love to see the industry deliberately and purposefully trying to connect with the potential next generation and actively working to keep classical music alive – which is an important distinction from simply “trying to keep our classical music organisations running”.

And why it is important to me? Maybe I’m in denial about my own mortality, but I’ve always struggled with the idea of things disappearing from culture. Especially good things.

One of the things that haunts me is how many pieces of classical music get lost from generation to generation, as people get disconnected from the repertoire (or indeed how to listen to it). I know the idea of a “canon” is problematic – who decides which are the pieces that should be continually performed? I know that as new things become popular, inevitably they replace some of the more obscure old pieces. But I would love to know that out there somebody wants to keep most of them alive.

The person who summed it up best for me was Czech composer Jan Jirásek. He worked on a version of the St Luke Passion that might have been written by Bach (but mostly likely wasn’t), that was tinkered with by Carl Orff, before being turned into a performing version by Jirásek in 1999. In other words, it is an obscure recording of an even more obscure historical piece of music. (And now out of print on CD as well!) But in the liner notes, he explained why he wanted to work on it:

“We were very close to the ‘St Luke Passion’ having been lost or forgotten altogether. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems of our civilization. We learn a lot and we forget a lot. This is the reason why we are condemned to make the same mistakes and experience again and again. It is also a source of suffering. There were and there are many beautiful things in this world. None of them should be forgotten.”

Jan, I agree.

Barriers to Change: A Question of Purpose (Classical Music 2.0 – Part 10)

April 6, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Classical Music 2.0 is a 10-part blog series I started a couple of years ago 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 | Part 9)

I started this 10-part series a couple of years ago and only had this one part left to go and then life intervened and I never quite got around to hitting publish. I was almost on the point of letting it go unfinished, but no less than Christopher Tin (see Part 9) told me he was still wondering if I was going to finish it. So, look, given Christopher’s music has given me so much joy over the last couple of years (plus got me through the last half of many a Parkrun), the least I can do is finish a blog series for him.

But in looking at what I’d prepared, I’ve now decided this will be better done as two parts, both on the topic of Barriers to Change. Up till now in the series, I have been more interested in putting forward a positive vision of what the classical music industry could look like, rather than critiquing where it is at the moment. Chiefly, this is because I find it is often easier to complain about things we don’t like, rather than find new ways of doing things. Also, many commentators before me (and many to come after me) are already doing a great job of pointing out the faults of the current industry.

However, this being the tail end of this series on Classical Music 2.0, I felt it would be worth tackling about the difficulty in getting from where the business is now to where it could be. So if we imagine the future is one such as I described in Part 8, where classical music organisations are creating programming to scoop up the entry-level audience, while also providing adult education aimed at creating new generations of knowledgeable fans, why aren’t we seeing more of it?

To me, the biggest reason is that there are two questions that aren’t clearly answered by most classical music organisations:

  1. What is our purpose?
  2. Whose job is it to drive change?

Let’s take them one at a time. In this post, I’ll talk about purpose.

Photo by Arindam Mahanta on Unsplash


Big Question # 1: What is our purpose?
If you’ve been following along with my train of thought in this series, the upshot of what I’m saying is that it needs to become a major purpose of a classical music organisation both to create programming for new audiences and also actively to work on the education level of those audiences to get them across new works. Why, then, for so long have most organisations a) presented most of their concerts for the established sophisticated audience rather than the new audience and b) acted as if the audience is already fairly knowledgeable? (e.g. pre-concert talks and program notes that assume the audience has several years of music theory under their belt).

The short answer – and the most generous one – is that when most of our existing classical music organisations started, getting new audiences was not part of their core purpose or even perhaps necessary. Go back 50+ years and the audiences were there and desperately keen to hear more live classical music. There was not the need for the presenting ensembles to also be the educational institutions that taught people about classical music. They could pick that up from school, music lessons, playing an instrument themselves or the myriad of books written to nerd people up on classical music.

So from their earliest inception, most of our existing classical music companies could focus on what they do best: producing the highest quality performances possible for a connoisseur audience – an audience that recognised that quality when they heard it.

Not only that, this purpose of excellence became an even higher goal once the recording industry really took off from the 1940s onwards. With the rise of home hi-fi systems, an orchestra stood to make a lucrative extra income stream if it could land some good recording contracts and get their albums out into the world. (As Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic and many others did during this period, making them household names to this day.) With a highly discerning record-buying and radio-listening public, what was needed to cut through? It was going to come down to the calibre of the players in an ensemble and the skill of the conductors that led it. So in that kind of environment, it made perfect artistic and business sense to invest in employing the best musicians an orchestra could afford and hiring the best conductors.

[Side note: I originally started writing this post this a couple of years ago. Since then, academic Samuel Cairnduff has written an interesting series of eight articles about the history of orchestras in Australia, which unpack this idea of purpose even more specifically for the Australian context and show how we have landed where we are. This is Part 1 of his series to get you started. Sam and I have swapped notes many times in the past on this topic, but his research into the social and cultural forces that created our current orchestras adds a lot of depth to the discussion.]

Photo by Rob Simmons on Unsplash

The Problems of Excellence as an Orchestra
But while it is a key driver of what made our classical ensembles successful in the 20th century, it is this unquestioned purpose of excellence – and the correlating hyper-focus on playing quality and conductors – that has led to some of the problems we’re facing now.

It took me a few years and working for a couple of classical music companies to realise this, but often the core artistic decisions around what gets performed are not made necessarily with audiences in mind. While there will certainly be a subtle pressure to make sure that the entire season isn’t unsellable, on the whole, the goal is usually to create programs that showcase the skill of the ensemble and their regular and guest conductors.

So this means that if a classical music company wanted to suddenly switch over some of its programming to be more friendly for a newish audience, there are all sorts of artistic questions and hurdles that would be encountered, because this pre-commitment to excellence runs so deep.

For example, let’s say that an orchestra wanted to put together a series of concerts that might have, say, a full classical work mixed with a bunch of shorter pieces from film, television and video games. (Which I have argued elsewhere is not too dissimilar to the old 19th century English concerts which featured one or two full works side by side with shorter lollipops.)

As soon as the Artistic team try to put together a concert like this, there would be some questions. First up, who is going to conduct this? To be able to pull off the full classical work, you would need a very experienced conductor. But if such a conductor is primarily from a background where the purpose of an orchestra is to showcase quality, is that conductor likely to want to conduct the populist pieces, which are generally going to be simpler both to play and conduct? Much as modern audiences love a bit of Hans Zimmer, this is simply not considered a challenge to artists who have performed nearly all the Mahler symphonies.

You could go the other way, and find a conductor who is more known for the populist pieces and then let them step up to conducting the full classical works – but then you run a significant risk that the musicians will feel unsatisfied with the whole thing if the calibre of the conducting on the classical work is not what they are used to.

Strange as it might seem, the reality is that classical musicians will usually tolerate playing simple populist repertoire with a less experienced conductor much more than they will tolerate playing classical music with a less experienced conductor.

The only really viable solution is to find a conductor who is both experienced enough to handle full classical works but also has enough enthusiasm for an audience that they are willing to play more populist works as well. But people like this are actually quite hard to find. (At least in Australia.) The more experience a conductor has, the less likely it is that they want to perform concerts with “entry-level repertoire”. (Although most conductors I know would hope that they could put on a good performance for new audiences.)

All of this is almost never spoken aloud, but a quick browse through who is conducting what at various orchestras around Australia will very quickly demonstrate that there are two tiers of conductors operating – those who conduct all-classical serious concerts and those who conduct populist shows. (With perhaps the exception in Australia of Benjamin Northey, but I’ll talk more about him in the next post.)

Image: © 2022 Focus Features, LLC

Lydia Tár and the Worst Thing That Could Happen in the Classical Music World

[WARNING: Spoilers for the movie Tár to follow.] This tension is what made the finale of the 2022 Cate Blanchett movie Tár so blackly comedic. In the film, Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (the best orchestra in the world), renowned for playing the best repertoire in the world (we see her rehearsing Mahler with the orchestra, just to prove it). However, it emerges that she has been essentially using her power to access sexual favours from her protégés and using her influence to ruin their careers if she doesn’t get what she wants.

If the film was made by a director who didn’t understand the business, I would have mostly likely expected her to either end up in jail or maybe being killed mid-rehearsal by someone she had jilted or ruined along the way. Instead, in a movie that might have been mystifying to many, the movie ends with her losing her job with Berlin Phil and ending up somewhere in the Philippines conducting an orchestra in the performance of the music from video game Monster Hunter. Todd Field, the director, even makes the interesting choice of putting two thirds of the end credits up at the front part of the film, so that the actual end credits of Tar are short with Monster Hunter music all the way to the final words “The End”.

The reason?

Because the meanest thing that could happen to Lydia Tár in the classical music world is not for her to go to jail, lose her job, get cancelled or even get killed: it’s for her to end up conducting populist music. Even to leave the end credits with Lydia’s ethno-musical field recordings over the top would have been to give her too much credit for her greatness. For the judgment to be final, she has to go out to the sound of music that most of the industry would regard as banal and unimportant.

Conclusion
To conclude, the issue of purpose is a thorny one: it may well be sensible for classical music ensembles and organisations to alter their purpose to at least spend part of the time creating on-ramps for new audiences. But if those organisations are either explicitly or at least implicitly built around showcasing the excellence of the ensemble, it might mean that many classical music companies would feel that they have do take an artistic step backwards to do so.

And while it might seem obvious that an organisation whose audience dries up is not going to have the financial means to pursue excellence, this doesn’t seem to have stopped excellence being the main driver for the last few decades.

But, let’s say that in general, there was an agreement that things needed to change for classical music organisations. There is a secondary problem: who is actually responsible for and capable of driving that change? Whose job is it? I’ll tackle that in the next part.

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

August 7, 2024 / / 3 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.



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