"I would love to see the classical-music industry crumble, just absolutely fall to bits. Because I think then we'd have to start over. We'd have to say, well, what is it? What is classical music? Is it the concert hall, is it these tuxedos? No, it's the music. And then we could start over from the beginning, build it up, find people who like the music. Like rock and roll started, like the punk movement started."
I'm not sure about his rock and punk analogy, but I've a great deal of sympathy with this view of classical music, as voiced by Joshua Roman, the 23-year-old lead cellist of the Seattle Symphony, via Alex Ross's blog. It's so often the dreadful paraphernalia surrounding classical music that conspires to undermine it. It's the record companies who puff up their artists and encourage them to behave like prima donnas (then wonder why they have monsters on their hands). It's the arcane ritual of the concert hall, which, unless you happen to be an initiate, must seem as abstruse as the Eleusinian mysteries.
Much as I love Radio 3, it's even the way that people "in the know" talk about music, the way they dissect and deconstruct this recording or that performance.
But, as cellist Joshua Roman says, the response from people who hear classical music completely unmediated is almost always incredibly positive. He talks about the reaction when he has played Mozart in Uganda. I've also witnessed projects in the refugee camps of Palestine and the barrios of Caracas where people get to hear classical music without having to deal with all that snobbery and exclusiveness we're so used to - and connect with it with enormous intensity.
Even just watching people's delighted response to musicians busking in the piazza in Covent Garden in London, where live music has just happened to creep up on shoppers and passers-by without them having to grapple with the usual parphernalia, is convincing proof that people are almost always completely mesmerised by the miraculous event of someone picking up a musical instrument and playing it beautifully.
I'm not necessarily proposing that we tear down the concert halls and opera houses and destroy the record companies... or actually, maybe I am. Maybe we really would be better off without all that stuff, in the end.
