The Health of the Classical Music Ecosystem
Let's take a quick look back at classical music for the last 120 years. What has been added to the standard repertoire ? I don't mean some token five-minute works that orchestras toss on a program to have something modern.
From 1900-1960 we have added to the standard repertoire Strauss, Mahler, Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel, Faure, Holst, Honegger, Berg, Rachmaninov, Janacek, Webern, Sibelius, Saint-Saens, Elgar, Vaughn Williams, Schoenberg, Debussy, Gershwin, Prokofiev, Ives, Shostakovich, and all the DiaghilevBallet Russes works, and I am sure we can find a lot more. Now what has been added to the standard repertoire from 1960 until 2020 ?
If you look at this like an investor would look at a business, you will see a very unhealthy ecosystem that would be destined to collapses as all business and art need innovation to be relevant. Do we have less talented composers these days or did the first half of the 20th Century by luck produced all these ? Or did they have leaders in the classical industry with a vision that was the catalyst to create these masterpieces. It seems like today concert halls now sell history as their business models.
Walter S. Hartley, I think, still producing works this century, but who's playing his material? Yeah. There are composers, but they're not getting the exposure. If investment in classical composition is needed, who's paying? Better question is, who's buying?
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