{"id":97308,"date":"2019-06-15T12:41:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-15T17:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa\/?post_type=bu-article&p=97308"},"modified":"2023-02-01T14:17:27","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T19:17:27","slug":"saving-the-classical-music-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa\/magazine\/articles\/2019\/saving-the-classical-music-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving the Classical Music Ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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By Lara Ehrlich, Illustrations by Edward Carvalho-Monaghan<\/p>\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSaving the Classical Music Ecosystem\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

How music criticism and classical music adapt with the times to remain relevant<\/h4>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n
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June 15, 2019<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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On November 14, 1943, Leonard Bernstein, then just 25, stepped in at the last minute to cover for the New York Philharmonic\u2019s ailing conductor at Carnegie Hall. The concert was broadcast live on radio to millions of listeners, and was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times<\/em><\/a>. \u201cMr. Bernstein [Hon.\u201983] advanced to the podium with the unfeigned eagerness and communicative emotion of his years,\u201d the Times<\/em> critic wrote. Bernstein\u2019s philharmonic debut was news<\/em>, and the review catapulted him to fame.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In Bernstein\u2019s day, classical music received almost as much coverage as professional sports. That was true into the late \u201970s and \u201980s, says Tony Beadle (\u201974), executive director of Rockport Music<\/a>, who was performing double bass with the Boston Symphony at the time. \u201cWhen you opened the Boston Globe<\/em> on a Monday morning, three critics covered a lot of music in long articles, and their reactions were important to musicians,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, readers would be hard-pressed to find those stories in the popular press. Papers are trimming costs to compensate for plummeting profits, a trend that began in the \u201980s. The arts section took the greatest hit, with classical music criticism as the first casualty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Opera producer Beth Morrison (BUTI\u201989, CFA\u201994); Anthony Tommasini (\u201982), the chief classical music critic for the New York Times<\/em>; and Tony Beadle (\u201974), executive director of Rockport Music. Michal Fattal (Morrison); Earl Wilson\/the New York Times<\/em> (Tommasini); Courtesy of Tony Beadle<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The decline of classical music\u2019s visibility in the mainstream media is a blow to an art that\u2019s struggling to draw audiences. Attendance, already lagging behind that of other performing arts, has been declining for decades. The National Endowment for the Arts reports 11.6 percent of adults in the United States attended a classical music performance in 2002. By 2017, that number had dropped to 8.6 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CFA<\/em> spoke to three experts\u2014Beadle, Anthony Tommasini<\/a> (\u201982), the chief classical music critic for the New York Times<\/em>, and Beth Morrison<\/a> (BUTI\u201989, CFA\u201994), an opera producer known for mounting innovative new work\u2014about how classical music criticism is changing, how those changes are transforming classical music, and the role, and responsibility, of the contemporary critic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SLIPPING OUT OF THE MAINSTREAM<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the three years following the Great Recession of 2008, half of the arts journalism jobs in the US disappeared. And they\u2019re not coming back. As newspapers have slimmed and folded, specialized art critics\u2014those who cover genres like dance, theater, and classical music\u2014have become arts generalists, been laid off, or moved to different beats. (In 2016, the San Jose Mercury News<\/em> scrapped its classical music coverage and consigned its critic to covering real estate.) Only a very few specialists remain, and of those, \u201cI can count the number of full-time classical music critics on both hands,\u201d Douglas McLennan, the editor of ArtsJournal<\/em>, told San Francisco Classical Voice<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tommasini is one of these rarities. A trained pianist, he performed and taught music until switching to journalism; he\u2019s been the chief classical music critic at the New York Times<\/em> since 2000 and has written four books on music. With so few experts in classical music criticism, Tommasini and his handful of peers have become the voices of authority on the genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But they can\u2019t possibly cover every concert or every new piece of music\u2014and the choice of what to cover is constrained by the need to attract readers in an industry obsessed with clickbait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cReviews of concerts are minimal,\u201d says Beadle. \u201cCritics just don\u2019t have the space and the time to write about a concert\u2019s complexities, as they might have at one time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I worry very much about the next generation of artists and how they will fare with the decline in number of critics, as well as the number of words devoted to our art form in the various publications.<\/div>