K-Mozart goes to the potter's grave

[thedarkages]

I am thirty-seven years old. I like classical music almost exclusively.

Apparently, everyone else with my taste is over sixty. I see it at concerts, where I'm more often than not the only person without grey hair. A few days ago, I saw it at the Met's film-cast of I Puritani, where I was the youngest person by twenty years in a sparsely-populated theater.

As a result, broadcasters are dropping the classical music format like mad. The latest casualty of this is LA's commercial classical music radio station, KMZT. It's going country as of Monday. Major advertisers like Mercedes and BMW dropped KMZT at the beginning of this year, preferring to focus on their 25-50-year-old customers.

I wasn't all that keen on KMZT, because of all the ads. There were tons of ads, and you could tell that a fair number of them had been sold to individual advertisers, because they were for wart remover or off-brands of margarine. During election season, if there was a sleazy candidate or issue with an attack ad, it would air several times nightly. But KMZT did some things right; they had a vision of playing popular, unchallenging pieces, but they were different pieces than those played by its public-radio competitor, KUSC, which under current management has a playlist generated solely out of the top 750-1000 pieces of classical music. It was nice to have someplace where one would not be assaulted by Michael Torke or enveloped by sticky gushing adoration of Morten Lauridsen. And God knows that during the innumerable and intolerable KUSC pledge breaks, Audi ads next to my Mendelssohn were by far the lesser of two evils.

So, now, there's just KUSC. But God knows what there will be in twenty years time. Will I have to go to Europe to catch a concert? Will all my classical CDs be extortionately-priced imports? I pray that under a Democratic government, funding for the arts in the schools will be restored, and that there will be a new generation brought up to care about classical music. Right.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Satellite radio. Yes, an extra expense, but you should be able to get your fill of classical music that way. And if you happen to have cable or satellite TV, you very likely already have a classical music station or more on it (yes, it's dumb to turn on your TV to get music, i know).

[thedarkages]

I suppose that would work temporarily, but if classical music is being extinguished in the culture, it would not be long before the two classical music channels on satellite radio became one and then dropped off the airwaves altogether. With the pending XM-Sirius merger, it already seems entirely likely that one or more classical channels will be dropped.

In order for there to be any chance of classical music getting to a broader audience, it has to be available for free, and that means on the FM band.

It also appears that classical stations are falling in line behind some new gimcrack called "HD radio" -- free, but the tuners for it go for ridiculous sums.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, with the advent of Internet-based radio, the only barrier is a mobile device that has enough bandwidth to carry streaming music. Of course, then you have to pay for service anyway, unless it were 802.11-enabled and you were in a place with free wireless Internet, like Mountain View.

Right now, it's a stretch, but 20 years down the road, i think there will be more options than you think.

[mcohenmn.livejournal.com]

I think it would take more than arts funding to do more than slow the dwindling interest in classical music. I think children need to be introduced to the music early and often - by family - or it just won't take. It can't just be at concerts - it needs to be on the radio at home, in the car. Parents need to imbue the experience with excitement and knowledge. Now, we have older generations that prefer rock - and that's what is on the radio for their kids to hear. For those kids to say, "Hey mom, I want to play Mahler 2 in the car" - well, it would be a non-starter. Sure, some kids will still be attracted to classical music through chance exposure through school, but if you only hear it at orchestra practice and are otherwise left guideless, it just won't take.

[yesenixan.livejournal.com]

I thought I would find a reaction here when I saw the news in the paper yesterday. What it put me in mind of was this: <http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28773>, from what I now realise was six years ago. As many other things, it seems to have made the leap from parody to straight journalism in the intervening timespan, though the reason I remembered it was more the subtle air of ineffable sadness I felt accompanied it at the time.

Of course, this is hardly the only genre suffering from the die-off of its native age-cohort - you sound exactly like the OC Register jazz columnist did, before they sacked him a year or two ago for lack of interest...

Regarding the radio deficit, I think the classical channel won't be taken off the satellite services any time soon - Cox digital cable offered three or four of them as of a few years ago. Besides, one good thing about the balkanization of the media space is that there is room for all sorts of specialty tastes; so long as there is a constituency for things like Andean pan-pipes and death-thrash-metal, there will be one for classical, however smaller than presently.

[willendorf5761.livejournal.com]

WETA in DC just switched to an all-classical format. I went to hear Mozart's Requiem last fall and I was not the youngest person in the audience. I live near the Peabody Conservatory of Music and I see kids with instrument cases in the street all the time.

There is hope.

can you post a list

[vlforman.livejournal.com]

of your favorite pieces/composers/performers?