Future Classical

Thoughts & news about the future of classical music.

Tag: audiences (Page 1 of 4)

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.

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.

« Older posts

© 2026 Future Classical

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑