A way out of accessibility

The other day I saw another headline for an article bemoaning the collapse of the classical music audience.  I think of this "crisis" and I wonder why we're squandering our opportunities to generate a new audience that could appreciate (and I shudder to use this term) Western Art Music as music as it loves its Western Popular Music?  It should be obvious by now that changing the programming, the whole accessible concert thing, isn't working, so what to do?

What we really need to do is change the stigma around classical music.  If the association people have with classical music is the moneyed elite, dressed in their Sunday best, going to see dead European's music, than it will be progressively harder to recruit a new audience.  This seems obvious, right?  But then why is that classical music what the general public is fed as the only classical music? Why do high schools (those that haven't cut the arts) fail to mention Cage, Ligeti, Reich, Messiaen or Lang in any depth and favor teaching the history of Rock'N'Roll after touching a little on Bach and (likely pre-1950) Jazz?  Is it the assumption that kids want to learn about what they already know, or is it that the teachers are just as ignorant (or even hostile) towards contemporary music as the average symphony fan? Why do so many collegiate music departments give contemporary music the arms length treatment?  True, colleges are also the bastions of new music outside of the major cities, but walk into any large music department across the country and while there will undoubtly be a few students carrying the new music banner, but I'd bet the vast majority of the students have tastes that stop progressing with Mahler.

And what does giving new music equal footing to Mozart and Bach have to do with building an audience?  There is currently a generation of composers and performers, painters, writers, and dancers who are early in their professional lives and creating wonderful works of art, but of whom not a soul outside the insular art community knows.  But if you're an average kid in the 10th grade, listening to the newest things on the radio, what will strike your curiosity more?  A school project about Beethoven's 5th or a school project about a composer who grew up listening to hip hop, who may still listen to top 40 radio, who lets this popular culture inform his music.  I can just picture a group of kids sitting in their music class, scratching their heads at the notion that there are people out there who listened to Eminem, Blink 182 and or N'Sync in High School who write classical music!  What a shock this must come as!  Let alone that indie artists like Dan Deacon and Glenn Kotche compose classical music, or that Sufjan Stevens writes songs that borrow directly from the Downtowners, or, for the kids who already consider themselves artsy, that members of The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth worked with classical composers La Monte Young and Glenn Branca, respectively.

So, is the knowledge that classical music is still living, still breathing, still evolving and interesting, enough to get an un-interested populous interested?  Probably not, but then what?  People need to create, people need to meet artists, artists of all sorts. I was turned off the visual arts in general for years because of my drastic inability to draw, but I was never exposed to any abstract art, never told that using collage to create an abstract image was a legitimate use of art class, but maybe if I had been exposed the visual arts in the same way I talk about music I would have developed and enduring interest.  By bringing creative people into our schools (and beyond to community centers, retirement homes, adult education classes, etc.) to guide folks in their own artistic journeys with open minds, then we can begin to cultivate a sustaining audience.