So… It would seem that clas­si­cal music is dead. That might seem like a bold claim. After all, peo­ple still lis­ten to clas­si­cal music all the time. It has it’s own sta­tions on the radio. There are whole orches­tras devoted to it. It’s the first thing peo­ple learn in most music class­es. Many peo­ple ded­i­cate their lives to play­ing and improv­ing at clas­si­cal music. All this is much more than is ded­i­cated to say, jazz. I’m not say­ing jazz is dead am I? No, (well, may­be) but I am say that clas­si­cal music is dead, or largely so.

Think about it: when was the last time a new piece of clas­si­cal music gained noto­ri­ety? 1925? Before liv­ing mem­o­ry? At least Bob Mar­ley was still mak­ing music in the 70s. Folks may still play clas­si­cal music, but for the most part, they’re play­ing music that is a cen­tury or two old. The new pieces which do get lis­tened to are usu­ally not “se­ri­ous” music but rather movie scores and nov­elty pieces. What’s more, despite the fact that orches­tras still exist and clas­si­cal radio sta­tions still get fund­ing from the gov­ern­ment, peo­ple no longer flood con­cert halls like they did in the 19th cen­tu­ry. There’s no deny­ing that while at one point in time clas­si­cal music was embraced by the mass­es, with few excep­tions, it’s largely regarded as a cul­tural relic today.

But enough of ham­mer­ing in this point. Most peo­ple would con­cede that clas­si­cal music has declined since the 19th cen­tu­ry. What I am inter­ested in is “why?” Why is clas­si­cal music so niche today and why do so many peo­ple lis­ten to pop­u­lar music instead?¹ Well, I have a the­o­ry.

Con­sider the time frame of clas­si­cal music’s demise: It was going strong right up until the 1910s. At around that time, pop­u­lar music began to take over. First you had jazz, the blues, but other forms would move in as well. It was around the 1910s that the last great com­posers started to die, and that their replace­ments failed to mate­ri­al­ize. What we might ask is what hap­pened in the 1910s that trig­gered the end of music as they knew it at the time?

The obvi­ous cul­prit is World War One. Now, the war did sig­nal the end of Roman­ti­cism and the rise of Mod­ernism, which con­sti­tuted a sub­stan­tial styl­is­tic break from older forms of music, but this isn’t the same thing as the destruc­tion of clas­si­cal music as a gen­re. In fact, there is a such thing as mod­ernist clas­si­cal music; it’s just hor­ri­ble for the most part, and while that may be a cause for clas­si­cal music’s decline it can’t be the only cause. After all, mar­ket forces being what they are, why did­n’t com­posers react by mak­ing new clas­si­cal music which was­n’t mod­ernist or which was but has suf­fi­cient con­ces­sions to acces­si­bil­ity that nor­mal peo­ple could lis­ten to it?

So, I think there is another con­tribut­ing cause here, and I think that it’s pretty obvi­ous. What was the other big trend around the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry? It was the rise of tech­nol­ogy and house­hold appli­ances. More specif­i­cal­ly, recorded sound and the radio were invented and gained wide­spread adop­tion around this time frame.

Now this might seem a lit­tle sil­ly. How could radio and recorded sound pos­si­bly pose a threat to clas­si­cal music? All they can do is make it more avail­able, right? Well, I don’t think so. You see, clas­si­cal music is largely a writ­ten medi­um. The cen­tral com­po­nent of a piece of clas­si­cal music is not the per­for­mance or the per­former, but the composition. That is, unlike pop­u­lar music, where there is very lit­tle if any­thing writ­ten down and per­for­mances are unique to each artist, or even unto them­selves, clas­si­cal music tran­scended per­for­mance and existed pri­mar­ily on paper. When recorded sound hap­pened, the per­for­mance was given a new per­ma­nence and pop­u­lar music was freed of its lim­i­ta­tions and paper ceased to be the advan­tage it once was.

Let me explain: before the advent of recorded sound, there was no way to pre­serve an indi­vid­ual musi­cal per­for­mance. Orig­i­nal­ly, all music was essen­tially folk music. A sin­gle musi­cian or group of musi­cians would com­pose a song and other musi­cians would hear the song and copy it, chang­ing it slightly in the process. As such, musi­cal tra­di­tion was mal­leable and songs would change over time. There was also no easy way of shar­ing per­for­mances between musi­cians save through more and more lossy per­for­mances and the influ­ence of indi­vid­ual musi­cians was lim­it­ed.

To alle­vi­ate these dif­fi­cul­ties, writ­ten music was invent­ed. Even­tu­al­ly, the con­cept of com­po­si­tion as dis­tinct from per­for­mance also devel­oped, so that one musi­cian could com­pose a piece for an entire cho­rus of singers and not have to sing him­self for them to per­form cor­rectly and for that piece to be shared between choirs and cho­ruses all over the coun­try. With that, stan­dard­iza­tion and stricter forms of music also devel­oped, so that writ­ten music could get more mileage. The orches­tra, which con­sisted of oh-­so-­many vio­lins, and oh-­so-­many clar­inets was formed so that any com­poser could write a sym­phony and know exactly what musi­cal instru­ments would be avail­able to play his piece. Solos, duets, quar­tets, all took stan­dard forms which could per­form any piece of music com­posed for a group of their com­po­si­tion. In addi­tion, musi­cal com­po­si­tions took on on pre­dictable struc­tures so that they could be tai­lored to spe­cific per­for­mances and eas­ily learned by musi­cians. 19th cen­tury music was almost defined by an intense amount of struc­ture for­mal­ism.

All this stan­dard­iza­tion in musi­cal form, orches­tral com­po­si­tion, and musi­cal nota­tion was built around one thing: The need for com­posers to write music inde­pen­dently from the actual per­form­ers of that very same music. This need in turn, arose from the imper­ma­nence of indi­vid­ual per­for­mances. How­ev­er, with the inven­tion of recorded sound and the radio, each per­for­mance was no longer imper­ma­nent nor was it local­ized. Indi­vid­ual per­for­mances them­selves could be spread and all the stan­dard­iza­tion of clas­si­cal music became obso­lete. Thus, pop­u­lar music which had pre­vi­ously been rel­a­tively dis­pos­able, could now be pre­served and an indi­vid­ual per­for­mance could have all the reach of sonata my Mozart.²

And this is why peo­ple don’t write clas­si­cal music any­more. There’s no need. The defin­ing aspect of clas­si­cal music was the stan­dard­iza­tion. This existed so that one could write the music and have it be per­formed the world over, just as one imag­ined it so that every­one could appre­ci­ate the author’s orig­i­nal work. Mozart as played by the Boston Phil­har­monic is not so dif­fer­ent from Mozart played by the Prague Phil­har­mon­ic. How­ev­er, with recorded sound, one need never write music down for it to be expe­ri­enced all over the world. One unique per­for­mance is enough.³ Clas­si­cal music is tech­no­log­i­cally obso­lete.

1. We are ignoring, of course, that people have always listened to popular music. It just hasn’t had the prominence that it does now. ↩
2. More so, in fact, because an individual orchestral performance is much more expensive than a performance by a popular music group. ↩
3. This also leaves room for changes between performances taking on artistic significance. Hence why Mozart sounds the same no matter who play him but Eric Clapton’s I Shot the Sheriff and Bob Marley’s I Shot the Sheriff are very different. Personalization in music, which classical music avoided on principle, is now standard. ↩