will Classical music ever return to mainstream?

Crossover like The Three Tenors and Andrea Bocelli (not to lump them together in ability, but they play to similar crowds) has always played to large audiences. It's the same thing Lanza and Caruso did.

It's a few years old and the marketplace has changed somewhat, but this piece is informative: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/arts/music/28kozi.html

 

Don't forget mothers or grandmothers obsessed with Il Devo. Well, I guess they crossed over.

EDIT: ubertrout beat me.

 

Quite the wonder of marketing, that one. I'm sure the sales of "Three Tenors" is reflected in the bi-annual PBS pledge drives where "at the premium rate" a copy of the Three Tenors CD or VHS or DVD would be sent to your home. In the wake of "Three Tenors" there were many other attempts to increase the market for "Classical Music" by riding on the coattails of Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras. Much like the "Easy Listening" classics of Andre Kostelanetz, a new sub-genre of semi classical vocal with nods to the Great American Songbook has been marketed in the same CD bins as "Pop Vocals". I'm sure the "Three Tenors" effect can be heard in Rock with operatic pretensions. And then there's Charlotte Church:



The eternally cynical Norman Lebrecht usefully points out that the earliest Classical performers in the United States were produced and marketed by the same people responsible for the touring circuses of the late 19th century.

When Classical music was really "Classical" the job description shifted from personal servant to royalty and/or church musician, to marketable personalities. One might say that the first steps to Rock and Roll stardom were made by Beethoven. One can see the link from Beethoven to Lizst and so on, creating a cult of personality around performers of music. The cult of "Classical Music" and "Classical Music Education" came later. But the thread that connects Franz Liszt to Roger Daltrey has more impact on the direction of music and music making than SFEMs seminars in Marin County or "Music Appreciation" classes at Junior Colleges.

 

Allow me a near-digression.

In the late 70s, when rock mucician-composer Frank Zappa was launching his new record label, Zappa Records, he told in some interviews of having proposed to Mercury-Phonogram (which he was hoping would distribute his new label) the project of reissuing-repackaging the Mercury LP catalogue of XXth century composers' works, to make it more appealing to the younger generations. I don't remember his exact words and rationale but that was basically it.

I ignore whether this endeavour would have worked out or not. But it would have been nice to see Zappa doing some of the presentation liner notes of those albums, with his idiosyncratic, matter-of-fact yet knowledgeable and fun style...

 

Might want to point out that Allan Kozinn is no longer an employee of the Grey Lady.

 

Don't forget that several of the best loved bands on this forum, like Genesis, Yes, Rush, ELP & quite a few others have classical as a crucial part of their formula. Queen, Zeppelin & Deep Purple have key signature tunes based a lot on it like "Stairway" & "Bohemian". And don't forget McCartney's gotten his feet wet with "Liverpool Oratorio". I'm betting there's several here that have posted about recordings in Classical Corner that initially started with all this.

 

Honestly the only of these that I see as having any real classical content are ELP and McCartney.
Zappa is the rocker who has done the most serious classical work.
Yes/Genesis have delved into classical only in some solo segments by Wakeman, Howe and Hackett

 

I think it's just the opposite...incredibly dated-sounding, a largely failed experiment to find new frontiers in music. But that's just me.

 

I think you have to define the word "mainsteam" before you can really answer the question. If you mean in the modern day sense of chart success, then the answer is no. But to say classical music was never mainstream isn't quite correct - it was just that the musical landscape was hugely different. You can't knock it because it relied on money from the rich when plainly there were no alternatives. Also, arias from operas did find their way into common usage by ye olde working man, and did some plain chant. However, you have to take historical factors into account, how music was passed around (early days it was done by ear, kind of like chinese whispers), and noted music itself went through many different stylings.

So I wouldn't say it was never the mainstream - because context is everything.

Moving to modern times it IS mainstream. People don't bat an eyelid when they hear classical music. It's used in commercials, movies, backing tracks for pop songs, and so on. It's everywhere. However, the demographic for the hardcore listeners is older, and generally more sensible with their money - so record campanies are more interested in acts that appeal to younger generations.

The problem I see with fans of Classical music is that while I consider myself a fan, a lot of people wouldn't. That's because I'm not really interested in your classics, your Satie, Beethoven's, Bach's, Mozarts, etc. I'm more into John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Keeril Makan, Danail Lentz, Ingram Marshall among others. I call it "contemporary", but when I look through contemporary classical lists they still seem to be full of dead people.

The modern classical - for want of a better word - is actually quite vibrant. But it won't ever be as big as Madonna because it has value beyond five minutes.

 

In my opinion, coming at the state of classical music from the point of view of "mainstream" mass marketing and audience demographics, with a heavy emphasis on negative comparisons to golden-age popularity and boffo box office success in the past, is getting it backwards, and it guarantees a certain hand-wringing defeatism. (I.e. the whole funereal school of "Death of X" genre analysis.) Unless your job is audience development and backstage management and sales, you're a fan, a listener, and a consumer, and from that vantage point classical music offers a fantastic landscape of beauty, inspiration, and endless exploration.

The blockbuster economy of hit-making and pop hordes and freak crossover sensations is a big fat red herring in the classical-music context.

 

Great point. It's almost over-used in movies.

SHOTS FIRED

 

No doubt Classical (likely the biggest all-encompassing genre we know) will change, as it has for centuries. Composers' interpretations of works, newly composed pieces, crossover artists of varying popularity degrees coming into our international attention (Chris Botti, Katherine Jenkins, Andrea Bocelli, Rene' Fleming,...).

If the popularity is fading, why are there so many new releases annually? Let's also not forget the recording sessions' costs. I'd imagine an 80-piece orchestra (each artist earning $60,000+, playing a $50,000-$250,000+ instrument) could be significantly higher than a 4-piece band renting a studio.

Classical Music delivers a permanence like nothing else. Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, to a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto, through a Wagner opera.... NOTHING tops the experience of these, plus thousands more, treasures when done well-live or recorded.

Just Gramps' take this AM...

GT

 

Ah likes me some of that "Dead Guy music".

More to the point, the bulk of it has duration beyond five minutes. That "limited market" for classical music includes the set of people willing to listen to a continuous hour of most anything. The even more select set of those fond of music by living composers/performers—those who can take on an hour of aleatoric atonality, or even scarier, an hour's worth of stochastic sounds—has more than a little crossover with fans of "Free" or "Outside" Jazz.

 

With the caveat that free jazz is improvisation and spontaneously created.

 

There has been a small but persistent campaign to produce deluxe audiophile issues of classical audiophile favorites. I remember when Classic Records first announced their Living Stereo remasterings it was a big event in audiophile circles. These were deluxe, mastered by Bernie Grundman and pressed by RTI. They started the whole 45rpm trend when they released much of the catalog in that format. These are highly desirable issues and now command many times their original cost. Now Chad at Acoustic Sounds is re-doing the titles in purportedly better remasterings. You also have the Decca and Mercury classical reissue campaign, and ORG had been doing incredible work with the Decca London recordings in very deluxe 45rpm issues. So there has been and continues to be some activity for reissuing highly sought after titles, though it is admittedly a niche market. I attribute most of the interest in these recordings to Harry Pearson and The Absolute Sound, during his control of that journal. It was from reading that that I started listening to more and more classical, as it is (or was) true stereo and the best material to evaluate if your system was reproducing the illusion of real performers in a real space. Since those years, classical occupies half of my record collection. And this is from a listener who was into rock exclusively. This month I am attending 5 concerts at the New World Symphony, right here in Miami Beach. For me classical never died.

 

Remember Pete's hi-fi in "Madmen" where he showed it off playing Beethoven? To a certain extent, classical music was successfully marketed in the 60s to middlebrow suburban folks with new hi-fis who wanted to appear highbrow. That was as mainstream as it got.

 

Nope.

 

We call them film scores. Star Wars, Superman, LOTRs and I'm sure others have all become part of the general repertoire. Heck, while marches aren't "classical", we regularly program the march from that Belushi dud 1941, because it had far better scoring than it had writing.

 

European classical has had the advantage of having at least a decent number of deep pocketed donors to help fund it and keep it alive. Jazz a lot less so.

 

There have been very active reissue campaigns, but they all seem focused on audophilia "golden age" recordings. The late 50s and early 60s were a time where technology, both in recordings and playback intersected with a growing, aspirational upper middle class to vault classical into it's heyday as a commercial format.

 

I wonder what the mass attraction was to the Three Tenors. Marketing I'm sure has a factor, but I'd be curious to see the ordinary Joe who went to a stadium show, being asked what he liked about an opera performance such as this. I want to feel in my heart that there's just no way not to appreciate this level of talent, but I'm sure that's not really the case.

 

Us old folks that are retired are the only ones with the time to sit thru a Mahler symphony.
So no it will always be geared towards oldsters.

 

Except there's an extraordinarily active reissue market. Sony has just put out a box of Bernstein's Sibelius recordings in brand-new masterings, after having done the same for his Mahler recordings, and there are many other examples. And although there aren't as many SACD reissues in the west, there are many coming from Japan, and they tend to find their way here.

Plus...there are tons of new recordings coming out, with SACD and Blu-Ray Audio being far more popular than they are for new issues in other genres. Look what BIS, Challenge, Chandos, Channel, Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, Pentatone and others are doing. And then other labels like Hyperion are doing releases on regular CD and high-res download, and the majors seem to be following suit. There's been a flood of new releases, and a market exists for them.

 

Crucial?? I don't think so

 

You haven't heard Deep Purple's "Concerto for Group and Orchestra" (1969)?!! If you want classical content, then do check it out, especially the DVD release.