Huffington Magazine Issue 88 | Page 58

Exit EW YORK — It was business as usual at Weill Recital Hall on a January night — a typical pre-classical concert scene outside the small theater in the east wing of Carnegie Hall. Bald men stooped. Their wives hugged each other, ungainly in furs. No one patronized the cash bar in the center of the room. But as the clock ticked down, so did the audience’s average age. A gaggle of college-aged friends yelled hellos, so hyped up they stood in their row until the last minute. Whippet-thin fashionistas arrived, swimming in big sweaters and red lipstick. Girls in head scarves took their seats in pairs. Had these young people not read the obituaries? For the last decade, classical music has been proclaimed dead, most recently and divisively in Slate last month. Audiences, statistics show, are not only aging, they’re vanishing. In 1937, a study of classical music audiences in America yielded a median age of 30. By 2012, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, not only had audiences shrunk steadily for two decades, they CULTURE HUFFINGTON 02.16.14 ISIFA/TOMAS ZEZULKA/GETTY IMAGES N comprised mostly senior citizens, men and women ages 65 to 74. Steep yourself in debate on the issue and it’s clear the surrounding culture — to borrow Sandow’s language — is blocked from entry by institutional isms: racism, sexism, elitism. Even in the U.S., arguably the world’s most progressive classical seat, fewer than 3 percent of all orchestral musicians are black, according to a 2011 broadcast on New York classical music radio station WQXR. And recent data from the League of American Orchestras shows that 80 percent of all orchestral Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko said last year that a “cute girl at the podium” is distracting.