Ask Me Anything: Let's Get Popular

Today, I conducted an informal Ask me Anything:

Post by Jordan Smith.

A reader asks:

What do you think is the best way to make "classical" music relevant to young/all audiences today? Is it important to popularize it in its most pure forms? Is it the musical principles and emotions that need to be employed and popularized in new forms or is it the literature or both? How? 

I responded:

Regarding the term "classical", you're right to note that the term is problematic, but that is mainly the case for musicians in classes and not for the people we supposedly serve, audiences. It's a genre. Like whisky. No one is worried about saying whisky because people may not grasp the historical nuances of the difference between Bourbon and Scotch, or what a difference 15+ years makes in the case of the latter. If you burrow down, then you can talk details, but at the surface, "Classical" is a large container with many possible subdivisions within. Same as "Rock", really. All of those other definitions for classical are more specialized ones that relate in interesting ways but are not so pertinent when it comes to how audiences relate. So I try not to flinch any more when I say it.

As far as the other term you use, "popularize": Matthew Duvall wisely and beautifully said in an interview once that, "Not everything we do is serious, or art music, and then that gets into a larger philosophical discussion, but... I kind of enjoy it when it is as loosely defined as it can be." (watch the feature below)

That's where I stand. Loose definitions are best. Big tents are best. Most critically: in just about every conceivable case, I think that at least part of the answer must be contemporary (or at least relatively recent!) music. People who get to make programming decisions must get their communities intoxicated with the music of the Jennifer Higdon's and the Christopher Rouse's of the world, to say nothing of the Roger Zare's and the Mark Fromm's and the Joshua Bornfield's coming up. And how do you get them hooked?

To me, the answer is following the lead of Gerard Schwarz, and James Levine, and of course my own mentor Marin Alsop, who all say and do some version of: 

1. find some composers that you are personally excited about, 

2. learn all you can about them and develop relationship,

3. perform their music, ALOT, and

4. repeat.

Levine did that in Boston for a time with Eliot Carter among others, Schwarz with Seatle by performing and recording so very many of the symphonies of Alan Hovhaness. Marin, with Cabrillo in her arsenal, would be unfair to peg down to the exclusion of all of the other composers she's so prolifically served, but certainly she and Rouse have had a particularly durable relationship extending back quite a long way, just to give one example.