I've written here previously about genre fatigue, that's to say the idea that an art form - in this case the Piano Quartet - can outlive its usefulness. Let's apply the same idea for a moment to classical music generally.
The heyday of our art might be said to have come in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people flocked to concert halls to hear famous virtuosi and burgeoning orchestras. Both were symptoms of growing prosperity and an increasingly organised society. Individuals could devote their young lives to mastering an instrument, and as adults could make a reasonable living writing music, playing it and teaching it. The economic model worked because enough people were willing to pay to hear them play or to play themselves as amateurs.
We take the continuation of this infrastructure for granted. I think that's a mistake. Young people are willing to devote hours of their time (10,000, the theory goes) and pursue classical music as a career because they think that there is a reasonable prospect of success. In fact most of them don't make a career as performers, and you could argue that the conservatoires are in fact exploiting their students' naivety, peddling the dream of a stellar career which in most cases won't happen.
My contemporaries at College struggled to get into the profession in the UK, and the best oboist and horn player in my year now play professionally in Spain. Others are in non music-related jobs. More recently another friend who is a brilliant all-round musician finally got an orchestral job here when on the verge of packing it in. Two flautists I know worked busily for years as freelances in the North West; one is now retraining as an IFA, another persists in the hope of getting a seat. My heart goes out to both. A violinist friend, trying to set up a chamber orchestra, tells me that he is going to work in a call centre, "until the music thing takes off". I wonder whether he really believes that it will.
Despite these difficulties there is actually no shortage of young people wanting to become musicians. Even if that changes in the UK, and it might, our conservatoires are full of talented players from Europe and the Far East who could do the job instead.
What there definitely is a shortage of however is people willing to come and hear them play. And this is where things get serious. The income of professional classical ensembles comes partly from bums on seats, partly from sponsorships and partly from subsidy administered by the Arts Council but funded by taxpayers. In very difficult economic times (and times likely to get harder still) the argument for taxpayer subsidy of any art is more difficult to sustain. An art like classical music, with a dwindling and ageing audience, is likely to be viewed as less rather than more of a priority and less attractive to sponsors. How long before we see some professional orchestras close down? I think it will happen in the next twenty years.
Part of the problem with the symphony orchestra is that it is essentially a nineteenth century invention. A hundred years ago, it represented the flowering not just of prosperous industrial society, but also the apogee, or close to it, of technological possibility. If you doubt this, just look at the key mechanism on any woodwind instrument. But the electronic age quickly burst in, the developments in communication (the telephone, radio, TV) between the wars still dwarfing the achievements of the post-internet world, and the symphony orchestra became what it still is, a glorious antique. Attempts to change it have been modest and largely unsuccessful. Perhaps a modern orchestra will have a bit more percussion, but that's all.
The orchestra can still produce art of the greatest refinement and depth, but what it lacks is the sense of belonging to now, and while this is not the only cause of its peril it is a significant one. Whilst it may be true that its range and variety are infinite, we now know that, paradoxically, it is infinite only within certain constrained parameters. The average teenager can spend a couple of hundred quid on a PC and soundcard then download programs for free which will enable him or her to produce sounds you could never get out of a symphony orchestra in a million years. Moreover whilst it takes years to learn how to play an instrument really well, years to learn how to write for orchestra, and a long time to write sustained pieces of music which you will be lucky to get put on, an intelligent person can get started on a computer in an afternoon, burn a CD before teatime and have his music played in a club before midnight.
The banishment of tonality and regular rhythm in the latter half of the 20th century led classical composers to concentrate increasingly on timbre as a constructive device; I have often thought this inherently superficial, but the dazzling sophistication of computer Digital Signal Processing has made their efforts lame. There is more sonic invention in the average hip-hop track than in most modern scores. There's a limited amount an orchestra can do.
Many composers don't think it matters if most people don't like their music, and in a way they're right. It only matters if they expect the professional institutions which perform it to carry on existing. Then it matters very much indeed. The failure of modern composers as a group to write music which can enthuse an audience is another key element of classical music's decline.
So is classical music suffering from genre fatigue? The history of art is littered with examples of genres that have withered and died. The magic lantern. The Victorian ballad. Melodrama. It took me fifteen seconds to think of these. There must be dozens more. Why shouldn't classical music be one of them? When I was young I assumed it would go on forever, but there is no reason why it should.
I want to raise the possibility that, like other genres, classical music, for all its longevity and flexibility, has certain limits beyond which it cannot function. That is to say, it has developed in the last hundred years in a way which is possible within the technical constraints of the instruments which play it, but which may not be able to command the attention of a paying audience big enough to sustain it.
There would be no shame in this. I think it is only because classical music has over the centuries attracted such extraordinary prestige and cultural impact that adherents like me expect it to continue all-powerful. But it ain't necessarily so. Perhaps it is a genre with limitations. Bluegrass music, for example, tends to feature the banjo. Symphonic bluegrass played on synthesisers and theremins (I just made that up) might be interesting, but it might not attract an audience and it wouldn't be bluegrass any more.
Perhaps we have to accept that, like bluegrass, classical music also has limitations, and that once we go beyond them it may not be classical music any more, or at least not in a way which has mass appeal and is sustainable. The pursuit of originality has taken us a long way, but it hasn't taken a mass audience along with it.
The composer Nicholas Maw once gave an interview in which he was taxed on his lack of radicalism. I paraphrase, but Maw's reply was to this effect: "I see myself as the inheritor of a tradition and I don't want to depart too far from it". I would add that in my own work, such as it is, I feel a responsibility to pass that tradition on so that it survives the present century. At this stage that seems like quite an ambition.
There's a story to the effect that Rabbis in Auschwitz held a debate about the existence of God. Unsurprisingly, given their plight, they voted against. After the vote, the most senior Rabbi said, "Thank you, gentlemen, for an interesting evening. We will end as usual with prayers".
And so back to work.
