By Jens Ibsen
Let’s face it: these days, classical music is underground; it is no longer part of mainstream culture. By “underground,” I don’t mean that the San Francisco Symphony is punk, but that classical music has become something you will only hear if you seek it out. People at every level of the industry lament this — recall the outrage over the comments Timothée Chalamet made about opera and ballet earlier this year. To remedy this, many symphonies and opera houses attempt to market their work in a way that frames classical music as contemporary and relatable. Locally, San Francisco Opera has tried everything from tweet seats to immersive theater experiences to garner a younger audience, with varying levels of success. The idea is, if organizations present the music in just the right way, the uninitiated will gravitate to it the way they do to, say, a Taylor Swift concert.
In reality, different genres of music exercise different functions. A Taylor Swift concert is as much about the music as it is about the artist’s relationship to her audience. For a hypothetical young millennial Swiftie, the music’s manifest content — adolescent awkwardness, first heartbreak, being underestimated in society as a young girl or woman — is just as important as the memory of first encountering that music as a kid. Her audience grew up with her, and in a sense, through her. For her fans, attending a Taylor Swift concert is as much about enjoying their favorite songs as it is about traveling back to the version of themselves that first heard those songs.
In contrast, you cannot have a parasocial, historically contingent relationship with a composer in classical music like one might have with Taylor Swift or her epigones. Shostakovich is dead. Mozart is super dead. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the average symphony program because the overwhelming majority of programming centers on dead white guys, with their share of orchestral programming hovering close to 70 percent in the United States. What little contemporary music gets programmed is so varied that it can scarcely be bundled under the same umbrella — beyond the fact that nearly all the musicians involved have conservatory backgrounds and are largely working with notated music. Additionally, many contemporary composers devote energy to projects that travel far beyond the music’s sound itself: you cannot fully appreciate Gabriella Smith without understanding her goal of spreading ecological awareness, nor can you properly understand Jasmine Barnes without having a basic knowledge of Black history and Black vernacular genres.
These complexities present significant barriers to entry, as does the much-discussed ticket price sticker-shock. It is true that anyone who wants to hear classical music can find chamber concerts, indie opera, or something else at an affordable price — nobody is limited to the big symphonies and opera houses. But most people are wholly unaware these options exist, and that lack of awareness, combined with everything above, builds a much bigger barrier than economics alone.
However, I think this obscurity is both a weakness and a strength. Classical music being underground is a good thing, because it positions this music to do several things other genres are generally less capable of:
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Classical music can experiment along a virtually infinite number of axes — not just sonically but conceptually. Contemporary classical music seeks to ask, at its core, what can music be? In practice, the answer is clear: anything.
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Classical music is more free to depict emotions and experiences underrepresented in commercial music.
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With virtually no stylistic constraints and significantly less pressure from moneyed interests, classical music — contemporary work especially — can meaningfully comment on the zeitgeist and critique the powerful. While it is true that conflicts between musicians, donors, and administrators arise — especially with larger organizations — generally, there is a wider berth for social critique than in other music scenes. This is also because classical audiences are uniquely ready to engage with music that goes beyond mere titillation.
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Classical music engages with a rich, centuries-old tradition spanning Europe, and well beyond. In the US in particular, that hegemony is being actively critiqued by racialized and marginalized musicians who have been raised under that hegemony and trained in this tradition; the future of this music is in the hands of those who in past centuries would have been its mere imperial subjects. This is remarkable and praiseworthy.
Most importantly, I want to argue that classical music has a rare quality that I will call “wonderment.” I define this as the sensation of being changed by an encounter with musical depth that can cause the listener to reorient their idea of what music can be or say. This is not a quality exclusive to classical music, but a quality of all music that seeks to be art, not mere commodity. Abstract music can do this especially well.
One of my most memorable experiences of wonderment was hearing Patricia Kopatchinskaja perform György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto in 2018. Though the concerto has a written-out cadenza, Kopatchinskaja opted to write her own. It involved having the entire orchestra sing along with her as she improvised incredible, strange, alien figurations on the violin. I thought, “So music can be like this.” This feeling is at the heart of wonderment; it is a permanent widening of an individual’s possibility scope, musically and beyond.
So, how can classical music’s put its unique qualities to fullest use? I propose that we learn from another underground genre I know well: metal. In my piece about streaming, I talk about how I was in the right place at the right time to encounter metal music while getting my master’s in music composition: I was already a fan of the avant-garde, and of the metal songs I’d heard in Japanese anime. So when I first encountered progressive metal, I enjoyed that it combined the lyricism and groove of vernacular music with experimental technique. It became my musical home. Over the years, I’ve been to dozens of metal shows, and there are some key lessons I’ve learned from the metal scene:
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Bands live and die on fan investment, not donor money. Purists and gatekeepers exist, but their critiques are laughably irrelevant to the bands selling out stadiums. The biggest metal bands do well because they capture a diverse audience, which these days generally means a more female one.
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Opening acts supporting bigger bands expose listeners to music they have never heard. At a metal show, it is perfectly normal to hear several hours of music by bands you don’t know before hearing whichever band prompted you to attend (provided you don’t skip the openers). Orchestras try something similar — a large masterwork by a canonical composer, with a token new-music work early on the program — but the proportion of new music to old stays woefully small.
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Metalheads have a look. We all know it: a black band tee, distressed jeans, maybe even a spiky denim battle jacket. Metal’s aesthetics, the music and the fashion, are led by its youth. In contrast, if you ask anyone to imagine a classical music fan, they will picture someone generically older.
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Metal is self-policing, not led from the top. Whether it’s teaching newbie metalheads how to safely enjoy a mosh pit, or decrying fake guitarists on Instagram, the strictures of the genre are dictated by its fans.
What do all these observations have in common?
They all involve giving the reins of the art form to young people, onstage and off. Young people largely decide what music gets heard. They decide the look of the fandom. They decide the genre’s ethical codes and concert etiquette. There is a decentralized organizing principle whereby you can become a metalhead simply by choosing to be one and learning the ropes from the fans around you. What if classical music were similar? What if you went to the symphony and mostly heard new music? On every program? Cosplay is a global phenomenon now — so what if operagoers were asked to come dressed like Werther (the original goth boy), just as fans of Goethe’s novel did? What if we had more classical festivals that were less prestige experiences and more DIY, youth-led efforts? While I do not have all the answers, I think we should continue to learn from other genres outside the mainstream that nonetheless thrive and apply those lessons to classical music. We know the music is worth it. If we let those who will inherit the art form shape its future, classical music might become something more vital — and far more fun.
