BULLETIN: SKY NOT FALLING

posted by James Reel

    Allan Kozinn of the New York Times is fed up with premature reports of the death of classical music:

    Moaning about the state of classical music has itself become an industry. But as pervasive as the conventional wisdom is, much of it is based on sketchy data incorrectly interpreted. Were things better in the old days? Has American culture given up on classical music?
    The numbers tell a very different story: for all the hand-wringing, there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of classics in America.

    Aside from the missing comma in that last sentence (what's wrong with the NYT's fabled copy editors?), Kozinn marshals some heartining evidence. A bit of it, though, probably won't withstand close scrutiny.
    "On Apple's iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three years, classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales, four times its share of the CD market," he writes. Well, iTunes' idea of "classical" includes a lot of crossover crud, and its "top classical downloads" are usually dominated by Andrea Boccelli. If the crossover material were dumped into its own category, where it belongs, I suspect the iTunes classical sales figures would be far less encouraging.
    Later: "The American Symphony Orchestra League puts the number of orchestras in the United States at 1,800 (350 of them professional). The 1,800 ensembles give about 36,000 concerts a year, 30 percent more than in 1994. And in the most recent season for which the league has published figures, 2003-4, orchestras reported an 8 percent increase in operating revenues against a 7 percent increase in expenses, with deficits dropping to 1.1 percent from 2.7 percent of their annual budgets from the previous season."
    Well, I'd like to see the numbers of concerts adjusted to exclude the growth of pops programs, which have almost nothing to do with classical music anymore, and I'd also like to be sure the numbers don't include little hour-long string-quartet concerts for children sponsored by your local orchestra; these are important, but they inflate the figures if what we're really talking about are traditional full-length concerts of classical music.
    Also, using a nationwide budget figure is very misleading. When you look at orchestras community by community, some are doing very well, others are tanking, and a lot are struggling with issues peculiar to their own markets. Furthermore, any deficit is bad for an arts organization. A deficit compromises an organization's programming, employee security and standing in the community. So deficits are down from 2.7 percent to 1.1 percent? Well, that's like being told you have cancer in only one lung, not both. You still have cancer.
    Otherwise, Kozinn makes several interesting points, although his essay is, of course, New York-centric and does not fully reflect the realities in the rest of the country.