Learning to Love It: A Few Thoughts on Classical Music

GRYNCH in "My Volvo," standing on the street where I worked for three years.

Last week I read an article on Crosscut called "Can classical radio draw listeners without 'dumbing down' the music?" about the retirement of KING-FM's music director Tom Olsen.

Olsen has been in radio longer than I've been alive; I've heard his voice on the station for years, and will continue to, as KING-FM reuses his recorded banter. In April of this year, Tim Appelo reported for City Arts the financial hard times of the station, leading to its turn from for-profit to listener-supported radio.

Understandably, Olsen had a few thoughts on the state of classical music: “The whole world of classical music is diminishing," he tells Crosscut, "because fewer and fewer people are learning to love it."

Maybe it's because classical music isn't showing us much love either.

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Olsen went on: “My experience as a young person, it was considered bettering yourself to learn about classical music, great literature, great poetry, drama and art. It was a way to expand your mental horizons. Now it doesn’t seem to be that way. It’s just scratching an itch now.”

Seattle, I think, would beg to differ. Different musical genres and sounds are constantly being explored by young people.

In a city known for its rock, there's a massive hip-hop community, a dedicated rockabilly crowd and lively folk and country scenes, to name a few. There's plenty of niche radio, including KEXP, KUOW and KBCS, to indicate that this city has an ear for non-mainstream music. Maybe not enough to support those stations and KING-FM commercially, but the quality of listeners — and the youth — isn't the problem. 

Classical music may not be able to sustain the dynamic community conversation that keeps those other smaller genres alive. Of course, there are people who support classical music, discuss it and write new music using its sound, but ultimately the classical genre as a whole is something that happens to us — it enriches us, we don't enrich it. Classical music has seemingly been canonized to death.

Consider if rappers could only talk about Brooklyn — Seattle wouldn't have the hip-hop scene it does.

Instead, we have music like Macklemore's "The Town":

This is our scene, our movement
the history lives through us.

So while young people in Seattle are listening to music from decades before they were alive, playing the old songs, going to square dances and making old genres their own, music of the classical eras being transformed by the modern generation isn't being played. And I think that's why young people aren't listening.  

The classical genre will always be a musical artifact, rather than a "scene," which is what KING-FM and symphony halls need to stay alive. If we make that scene happen, the classical music (as a collection from a time period rather than a static genre) that we want young people to listen to will be heard, not solely because they are enriching, but because they are integrated into our modern musical culture — our scene. 

And with that I'll leave you with one of my favorite pieces by Bach.