On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> The "intelligentsia" just doesn't listen to canonical classical music
> anymore - Bach, Brahms, or Berg. It - they? - seem to listen to jazz
Considerably more classical CDs are sold than jazz. I believe I read recently the proportion was 2 to 1. Which is to say, 4% of the total CDs sold in the US last year were classical, and 2% were jazz. And of those totals, there's no doubt that a larger proportion of the classical CDs were canonical, i.e., by dead people who go by their last name. A major portion of what is grouped under jazz sales today are young vocalists.
The picture is equally clear from the radio. There are three classical stations for every jazz one, and the music on them is almost entirely by dead artists who have been sanctified, where half the jazz stations concentrate on currently popular performers. PRI, the educated American's radio network, has a large predominance of classical music slots in all parts of the country.
Perhaps what you are perceiving is that 45 year olds tend to go to jazz concerts more than classical concerts. But (a) that's a New York phenomena; and (b) live concerts play a diminishing small role in most middle-aged people's experience of music. And middle aged and old people are overwhelmingly the audience for highbrow music. It flatters their sitzfleisch. Young people prefer dance music. It flatters their lack of sitzfleisch. But people of all ages hear most of the music they hear on the radio.
I'm pretty sure there is currently more world music sold than both jazz and classical put together. I think that plus small and tiny niche pop music is probably the predominant CD rack fodder of the overeducated, especially up until middle age. But the real key is that their CD collection should contain examples of wildly different genres, and artists that nobody's heard of. That best shows off their independence of thought.
> The median age at a classical music event in NYC seems to
> be about 62 these days. They're doing a worse job of reproducing the
> audience than are radical economists!
This also isn't true. The median age of classical music audience has been going down over the last 10 years. The real crisis of classical music is that it's become a museum art where the popular program is entirely by dead people, and everyone prides themselves on sticking to the score, and home sound systems are wonderful, so you get diminishing returns from live concerts. But they are trying to get around that by playing up the virtuoso angle and by dressing them sexily -- both key aspects of classical music when it was more popular among the upper class. And they are trying to play up the cachet value of the new stuff, which can work with an American audience, almost none whom started listening to this stuff until they reached adulthood. Americans of all classes spend their childhoods immersed in popular culture. If they later become snobs, they've had to teach themselves how. And they are usually snobs first against their parents. Not like the old days, in the Old Country, where one was supposed to inherit attitudes like this as part of the furniture of class.
I think it might be that you think there's more jazz fans among the over-educated because they yak about it so much more. I think it's the autodidact angle. Plus the fact that jazz performances have a uniqueness aspect that makes them more bragworthy. Both make for lots of one-upsmanship.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com