Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

> Classical music has been institutionalized, sent to the conservatory as a relic. A small segment of society has decided the ability to perform it is worth preserving, and devotes a sliver of capital to that end: training young people, and paying a few of the best players in the biggest cities to do it professionally.

I had a whole discussion with a German friend whose husband works in opera (this was after Chalomet's "opera as a dead art" comments) and their view was mostly that this view of the world does not hold for at least chunks of Europe. To their mind, there is still both active input into this space, support in this space, and there's societal support to some degree or another.

I don't know the realities on the ground, but that annecdote did make me wonder if I simply assumed that the world of classical music wasn't as dire if you leave the States, at least in terms of job stability.

The comparison to popular music is kinda funy too... plenty of pop musicians that don't live off of their music, right? Maybe we're not generating "Taylor Swifts of Oboe"s but I feel like the measure is more about the median (or even the 90th/95th percentile?) when it comes to art, rather than the top of the top.

I think he agrees it is popular, but in comparison to contemporary styles of music it’s tiny (in skilled performers, listeners, funding and revenue). Right? Even in Europe.

Europe is actually worse, or at least Germany, because the government pays for opera, so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.

There is a certain amount of government support for classical music in the US as well. Not enough to fully fund it.

> so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.

That's great. A lot is lost when art has to cater to audiences.

Except it runs into an excess problem. As an example, Berlin - just one city - has 7 professional orchestras. They are supported by the government financially to the tune of 200 million EUR per year. There is a very real opportunity cost here and quite a bit of a wealth transfer to old people at the same time (since the audiences for classical music tend to be on the older side).

You could pump a large part of those resources into supporting other kinds of music and arguably the outcome would be more interesting.

It's a wealth transfer to the middle class. Poor people by and large don't go to the orchestra or opera.

Of course, some poor people do enjoy these kinds of things! But if you gave them a choice between the subsidised ticket or the embedded subsidy as cash in hand, I'm sure most poor people would take the cash.

> You could pump a large part of those resources into supporting other kinds of music and arguably the outcome would be more interesting.

Or give the money to poor people, or leave the money with tax payers, etc.

The job stability in classical music is great. It's getting a job in the first place that's a problem. My partner, in an earlier life, was one of the best young flautists in Canada. There were about eight jobs in the entire country for orchestral flautists, and about a year before graduating, a few of them turned over, meaning it would probably be another five years before any more jobs opened up. Good time for a career change...

Old joke: What's the difference between a flautist and a flutist? About $50 an hour. :-)

I think a lot of people just don't get how much of classical music was foundational for pop music. McCartney said blackbird was a twist on some Bach intro. Billy Joel said similar things. A lot of of good music was cooked in classical knowledge.

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