It's not dead or even ailing, Part 1

To hear some folks talk, you'd think that the entire adventure of Western art music was slouching towards an inglorious ending. Try a quick search for "classical music dying" or something similar, and just see what you get. Here's a particularly dire screed, but you can find any number of similar items that pound away at the same keyboard of gloom.

We hear that audiences are dwindling and lacking initiative. The orchestras stick stolidly to the old standbys. Performing arts organizations float belly-up at an increasingly alarming rate. The recording industry is making like the Worm of Ouroboros, consuming itself and threatening to vanish altogether. Nobody cares about contemporary music, least of all opera. There are no Mozarts, Beethovens, or even Bruchs around these days. Sheesh. Cassandras proliferate and the soothsayers augur dire portents.

But try changing your search to "classical music not dying" and a different story begins to emerge. This one is interesting in that it doesn't try to paint a relentlessly rosy picture but at the same time takes an overall positive view of the current situation.

There are abundant signs all around us that "classical music" (I'm not even going to try to define what that means) is in pretty vibrant health, not only here in the musical fertility of the Bay Area but all over. Let's begin with the conservatories and the music schools, which produce the musicians to come and are therefore extremely good indicators of the overall state of affairs. If classical music were indeed a dying art, then we should expect the conservatories to be suffering from shrinking enrollments, faculty attrition, poor funding, and the like.

It turns out that the opposite is true. The conservatories are not only thriving: they're expanding. Building projects flourish throughout the US, enrollments are high, and the overall level of student achievement is deeply impressive. New York's Juilliard School is in the midst of a significant enlargement (pictured to the left), badly needed for some years now. The Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore has transformed a gloomy, near-Gothic area of its 19th century building into a beautiful arcade with several new performing spaces. The Cleveland Institute of Music has expanded dramatically over the past few years, adding a new concert hall in addition to greatly-needed teaching space.

Here on the left coast, we find that LA's community-arts-oriented Colburn School has added a full-on conservatory and has constructed substantially to keep up with demand.

Saving our home town for last, my own San Francisco Conservatory of Music (to the right) has moved from a cramped, insufficient space in the Outer Sunset district to a fancy new building in Civic Center, at a cost of $80 million plus.

Now, I can't speak for all of these schools but I can say that the SF Conservatory is experiencing its highest ever enrollments even though selectivity is also at an all-time record. Young people, it would seem, don't think that classical music is dying, ailing, or even feeling a little queasy.

Coming up in future posts: concert halls, orchestras, opera companies, chamber music, recitals, recordings.

Joseph Haydn