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
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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.