Why we are shutting children out of classical music

[Florestan]

Great thread. The only future for classical music in the long term is in getting more children involved, listening and playing, from an early age. This is the key to getting rid of snobbishness and elitism, not dumbing down the music and dishonestly tampering with it in recording studios. Kids of all classes need to feel that the music belongs to them.

[micrologus]

I don't know how things are in the UK, but here a lot of kids are going to the music academy and not all of them have 'musical' parents.
Although that might be a advantage

[Philidor]

I've a friend who whenever there's a birth in the family they gather to listen to the Mozart bassoon concerto... simultaneously joyful, optimistic and ludicrous.

[ame]http://www.classicalmusicforum.net/music/mozart-bassoon.mp3[/ame]




I wonder what the official thinking was in the 1980s when Music Services was demolished? I suspect a combination of three things: class hatred - why on earth expose these proletarian children to high culture? Let them watch rubbish on TV. If their parents weren't such failures their children would be in private school where music is available; economics/social Darwinism - state schools are places where children are prepared for wage slavery in the new flexible labour market. They shouldn't be taught ideas above their station. Indeed, they'll be happier if they don't know about such things; and simple barbarism: government ministers who themselves knew little about classical music and cared even less.

Most of these people are still alive and might be persuaded to talk to a researcher. It would make an interesting book: why it was deemed necessary to alienate a generation of British children from high art music, how the high ideals of the 1945 government - high art for everyone - were infected with class hatred.

What's absurd is it doesn't cost much money - half a day's subsidy for a nationalised bank?

[micrologus]

[Philidor]

[micrologus]

Originally Posted by Dame Hilda Tablet

Did play. Bassoon. You can't play a bassoon with false teeth!

Oh yes, you can!

[Dame Hilda Tablet]

I like the concept but that's a bass recorder not a basson!

[micrologus]

Well, you can do the same with a bassoon

[waynemcevilly]

I agree with Mischa that "the problem starts with narrowing down the issue to classical music exclusively..."
The entire "war against classical music" (believe me, I became aware of its existence in the working class neighborhood of my youth when I began to play Mozart around about 1942 and the neighbors took some "attitude" about it, big deal and all that-)
So let's stop making "classical music" a special case. It is music, for cryin' out loud. Music.
Music. Music. Music.
( don't ya just love this little guy? )

[Despina41]

I was having a conversation with a friend in Chicago about this issue more broadly. We noticed that the Chicago Lyric Opera was attempting to promote a new production of Handel's Hercules by Peter Sellars. (Sellars is the closest thing Amuhrca gets to "avant-garde" productions.) Here's some info on the production.

A week or so ago, they had a video interview with Peter Sellars to help promote the "live webcast" they were doing. I thought "Great! a webcast!" then I realized it was only for ONE HOUR on Wednesday at 6pm. SAY WHAT???

Cue angry tirade as neither my friend nor I could watch this. "Why the middle of rush hour on a Wednesday!" She suggested it "was for the veterans," since the production is about Hercules as an Iraq vet. (God knows no retirees know how to watch Lyric Opera online.)
"No, it's probably market forces." If you start broadcasting things free on the internet, no one will go to the productions anymore, right?

Or more like, if you start making opera available on the internet, heaven forbid young people who use the internet might stumble upon it...