The Kennedy Center Goes Broke - No Surprise, Sitting Through Brahms Is Painful, The End Of Classical Music

Augusta Potter had season tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and was looking forward to the new year's offerings.  She, now well into her elder years, had been attending concerts at the Center since its opening in 1971 and long before that in New York. 

She had grown up with classical music as a girl in Boston.  Her well-to-do parents, descendants of both the Cabots and Lodges who themselves traced their ancestry back to the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Davenport and the Puritan colonies in Connecticut. 

Classical music was part of the patrician ethos, one of white, Anglo-Saxon legacy, patriotism, noblesse oblige, and investment high culture.  This sense of the entitlement of birth, breeding, and education was a good thing.  It was Hamiltonian in spirit and profoundly noble.  

Hamilton had argued with his populist colleague, Jefferson, that the country could not be entrusted to the masses, and that people like Augusta Potter's family should form an upper chamber of governance, one which prevented the lowbrow, selfish, and inestimably venal impulses of the majority to rule. 

This sense of anointment was bound to give way to excess, and the Potters were not immune to the kind of class snobbery that evolved from their entitled heritage.  The arts, and in particular classical music, were not only to be cherished, preserved, and promoted, they were the only expressions of human creativity that were to be so honored. Popular culture was base and uninspiring.  Its music was primitive and had never evolved from its origins in the African forest.  Its art was self-referential, hagiographic, and political.  It ethos was a mélange of racial and ethnic tribalism. 

So, it was natural for Augusta to exclude anything more popular than Leonard Bernstein in her listening repertoire.  She was an oldline, old guard, a defender of high culture and proud of it. 

What few people understood was that Augusta, despite her long, unbroken association with classical music, couldn't tell harmonics from an accented fifth, was lost in the layering of a Bach fugue, out to lunch when it came to Britten and Ives, and was bored stiff by Brahms and Schumann.  She was a patron of the arts, but her patronage stopped at the door.  Once inside, she wanted the throbbingly repetitive, featureless, routine to be over. 

She woke up to Stravinsky and Firebird and Tchaikovsky's cannonade at the end of his 1812 Overture and Copeland's Rodeo finally felt her Kennedy Center subscription and yearly check to the National Foundation for the Arts was worth it. But for all else, she was as good as tone deaf, and went to concerts because of inertia. 

She found herself switching stations in the car, listening to Country 1250 when she should have been listening to WETA Classical or WGMS, a bit of apostasy on the way to Whole Foods, and as much as she insisted that landing on salsa, country-and-western, and Emmy Lou Harris was incidental, errancy, she knew that that was where her heart lay. 

Richard Dare, former CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic put it this way in a recent article in the Huffington Post, The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained

There are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.

What to do about this? Dare had few answers.  No one wants to sit in the confines of a music hall. Organ music has been relegated to living room Wurlitzers and no longer can we listen to the great Gothic reverb of French cathedrals.  

We listen to plenty of classical music, Dare goes on, but it is in the form of occasional musical scores and video game soundtracks.  It is just we don’t like to still for hours, sitting on our hands.

He is acknowledging what most people have concluded.  Concert hall classical performances are dead, and many suspect that within a generation record sales will be down to nothing.  Older people who have grown up with classical music will no longer be around to buy tickets; and without concerts, recordings will become far less sought after.

Western classical music suffers from many ills. Most symphony orchestra rarely play any 20th century music, and even the sprightly Mozart cannot draw big audiences for whom an unbelievable array of modern, contemporary music and entertainment is available. Secondly, the venue – the concert hall – is as formal, deadening, and insufferably enclosed as can be.  

When ten thousand fans are jumping up and down for Romeo Santos or Taylor Swift, the handwriting is on the wall. The days of soporific, painfully wrought, interminable classical concerts are over. 

'Where will I go?', said Augusta, disconsolate, angry, and frustrated when news of the closure of the Kennedy Center went public.  There was still some chance of a bailout, so all hope was not lost; but in her heart of hearts she was happy that this penitential routine, this obligation, this family heritage, this corralling insistence on doing the right thing was over.  She no longer had to dress up and fall asleep in the loge, chatter at intermission, and go to bed way past her bedtime. 

One might think that you can't teach an old dog new tricks - that Augusta Potter was far too old to make the switch, but she had been catching snatches of popular music since her early days.  What young person could not have thrilled at Jimmy Hendrix, the Stones, or Crosby, Stills & Nash?  The Beatles? Even her privileged years at Miss Porter's and Wellesley could not have insulated her from the new zeitgeist, the social revolution of the Sixties.  Enough seeped in during those halcyon years to make a difference now. 

What did Brahms ever do for her? And wasn't that the reason for listening to him? Music like art and literature was supposed to be personal.  The collections at the National Gallery or the Met were not meant to be stared it, calculated for style, period, and historical influences. Country music was not meant to be parsed, disaggregated, and deconstructed. It was evocative of a time and place, of hardship, loss, expectations. Jimmy Hendrix touched something base, primitive, and electric. Romeo Santos and Les Tetes Brulées invited you...no, made you want to dance. 

his should happen to all of us old folks - the lifting of the veil, opening the blinds, pulling the curtains.  We all live within some obligation, some anticipation forced and enforced by someone else.  We all have our Kennedy Centers where we go routinely and dutifully, fall asleep before the end of the first movement, want to go home, to a bar, someplace, anyplace other than here.