Twilight Zone

We continue to debate whether or not our audiences are graying. The NEA says the median age for audiences was 40 years old in 1982, and 49 in 2002. The general median audience age for the top US orchestra is reported to be in the mid-fifties. As spin-able as the data is, it’s safe to say that most audiences for classical music are over 40 years old. And it seems apparent from all the controversy that the age of our audiences worries many people. Yet why is this issue so important?

Why must 20 -30 year-olds come to classical concerts anyway? The older crowd might just find classical music more appealing. If we look at why they attend we will see that classical music is not flawed or lacking in vitality, as is implied. Its lesser appeal to the younger crowd may have to do with people’s liaison with time.

Classical music requires time to exist and interact with the future, present and past. Each style of art music approaches time through its own rhetoric. With the exception of dance music, art music compels the future, or rather, it goes somewhere.

Classical music’s harmonic rhetoric calls for the listener to remember what was in order to realize how the now is different. Audio memory helps us recognize what might happen in the future due to past patterns, conventions, and stylized events.

Anticipation and metaphor are at work, for example, in the jokes of Haydn, the major-minor grief-stricken twist in a Mozart melody, and the suspenseful pedal points of Bruckner. Experiencing this music is enhanced by applying auditory memory.

Dance music, interestingly, is an exception. It is traditionally part of festival and ceremony music that celebrates the now or it is used in events that are ritualized, and therefore timeless. The enjoyment and celebration of the present is reflected in dance form’s construction, with frequent repetition and simple contrasts. It has no need for memory on the part of the listener. Dance music neither engages the future, the past, nor does it go somewhere. There is no climax, plot, or story; nothing needs to be worked out. Where classical music is reflective, dance music and popular music is not.

Audiences age, mature, and pass through phrases of life And each personal era has its priorities and individualized notion of time. For audience members over 40, is this not the time in life when people start to take stock in life and their time? And people desire to understand where they are in life and how they got there? How time was, is, and might be, are now serious and profound questions. What better art form than music, with its imaginative metaphors, to help us delve into these questions?

The concerns of 20-30 year-olds are less centered on reflection, memories and how the past creates expectations of the future. They move with energy filling the now, barely attached to the past and are undisturbed by the future. Time just is. Does this explain why many young people enjoy Vivaldi and his style of bouncing juxtaposed harmonies?

Although time is only one aspect of imagination and taste for music, it is a very personal concept and informs our lives on a very basic level. That older people enjoy classical music does not signify a lack of vigor in the art. It is a reflection of music’s potency as a temporal art.