The Serious Music Files: Find Us "New" Music, Give It the Support It Merits, and We'll Listen

t's always fun when somebody comes up to you and says he or she enjoys your blog. That happened on Saturday at a concert the Arion Baroque Orchestra gave of Henry Purcell's "Incidental Musicke." Apparently one young couple--she, a violinist, he, a harpsichordist--follow what I write. I'm not sure how they came across it--probably through Elin--but as I thought about them and the difficult career they have chosen, I found myself thinking of Alex Ross's column last week in The New Yorker.

In it, he talks about the declining audiences for classical music documented in a report done recently by the Audience Demographic Research Review. Audiences for classical music are going to shrink, he says. "You can see clearly how various generations experienced a bump in participation as they got older. The so-called Generation X, however, has yet to exhibit an upward spike as it moves into middle age."

What is the solution? He mentions Le Poisson rouge, a club in New York which now features classical music, the way jazz clubs feature jazz, as a way to broaden the audience. What he doesn't mention is that jazz also is running into listenership problems or that what a musician takes home from club performances is nothing like the income he or she would get regular gigs with orchestras. But when you're paying down student loans undertaken for your musical education and/or trying to finance an instrument of the calibre that serious music requires, you need serious income or you're going to have to change occupation pretty quickly.

The "growth" areas in serious music over the last 20 years have been ones where musicians have led listeners into new areas. Early music is one of them. What is needed to expand audiences now is the same kind of support which encouraged Arion (CBC-recorded concerts, grants, teaching gigs to supplement income from performances) as well as a spirit of adventure on the part of musicians themselves. Find us "new" music to listen to, from the past, the present or the future, or give us "old" music, re-imagined the way Arion treated Purcell's greatest hits on the weekend, or Les Voix humaines did in their recent CD.