Beethoven transformed music, but has veneration of him stifled his successors?

A counterpoint. You're describing the American situation. Most (central?) European orchestras are at least partially publicly funded and therefore relatively stable. As they do not rely solely on donation (by old farts as you imply), they are able to experiment far more and also provide a stage for new composers, new works. Same for opera houses. As they are modernizing the interpretations of symphonies and especially the screenplay in operas, they become politically and socially relevant again. There is little worse than enduring a ballet in the style of the 19th century, but watching a modern piece can be a really great experience.

So government endowments enable orchestras to experiment and hence stay relevant. Without those your analysis is spot on.

Well, death spiral is harsh. Sure orchestras are closing up shop. But as described, they were being propped up unnaturally. They could play something else! If nobody goes to the classical music shows, then they're putting on the wrong kind of shows.

I'm glad to see musicians continue to be employed because it makes the world a better place. But the 'classical music' cult was weird. It's like the State Fair tap-dancing talent competition. Why is it there? Because they've always done it. Not really a spectator sport, but folks spend 10000 hour getting good at it anyway. I'm not going to cry over the 'death spiral' of tap-dancing either.

I've been attending orchestral concerts in the US for three decades now, and the entire time people have said that Beethoven et al were going to die out with the new generation.

All that will happen is people will no longer be able to make a living being a musician in a big name orchestra. Classical music will go on, musicians who love playing will keep playing, and audiences will keep listening. The only thing missing will be the money.

Completely wrong. Streaming music services have added a convenience factor to pop music enjoyment, but they've made exploring the complete repertoire orders of magnitude easier and more rewarding. I've listened to music in the last few years that would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars to listen to even a half decade ago (music pirating outlets were miles away from what Spotify/Rdio can do).

I believe that in a world where the 3 minute radio-friendly song is an artifact of a bygone era and the constraints of physical media are gone, there will be a major resurgence of interest in epic, complex works of music. Just as Netflix has made psychologically complex, extremely long TV series much more central to our culture, I think people will start to gravitate to headier music that was constrained by yesterday's media.

People do seem to still enjoy listening to Hans Zimmer style BWAAAAAAAAH stuff so maybe its not totally in decline.

People have been saying that for hundreds of years. But it hasn't happened yet. Repeating the same trope isn't helpful or informative.

See, for example, http://properdiscord.com/2014/07/22/scott-timberg-ive-got-a-...

There are many other similar posts, all full of facts, on this blog. Alex Ross himself has written on the subject.

Especially since the influence of Beethoven probably dominates classical music much less now, after the enthronement of Bach, the rediscovery of Vivaldi and the whole Baroque and early-music revival, than it did in the nineteenth century when classical music was still (and maybe increasingly?) a popular and commercial hit.

Nobody writes in that style of music anymore. It's "already been done". Even if someone wrote something as good as Beethoven's 5th, nobody would care. The classical music world has been there, done that. Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler aren't remembered just for their music on its own, but the fact that their music pushed the envelope, invented new forms of expression. They didn't just do it, they came up with it.

Classical composition moved in a kind of academic, atonal direction in the 20th century which was completely inaccessible to most of the public, and essentially died, in terms of a popular artistic movement. After Stravinsky, there just wasn't really much left to do. (Composers still write movie scores, but these basically just rehash what was already done in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

Instead, the world moved towards rock, pop, hip-hop... and there's a lot of exciting stuff there. Unfortunately, it's mostly based around 5-min songs, which limits its complexity. No matter how genius something like Brian Burton's "The Gray Album" might be, or certain Led Zeppelin songs, the format doesn't allow for even 5% of the kind of complexity that a symphony can embody.

So the Bach's, Mozart's and Beethoven's are surely out there -- but they're not doing the same kind of music, and they're harder to recognize as equivalents because we've abandoned musical structural complexity for sonic complexity instead (it's more about the sound or flavor or texture of a track, its hooks, and so on).

But there are. That is to say, if you mean exceptionally talented composers of classical music.

See Gyorgy Ligeti, Arvo Part, John Adams, George Crumb. Phillip Glass, and Nico Muhly. Everyone except Ligeti (RIP homie) is still living last time I checked.

It's too soon to tell. You would need 200-300 years to go by to know. And among the countless contemporary artists today, a tiny handful will be recognized for their enduring contribution to music.

They're not writing classical music. But I'm sure they exist. David Bowie was amazingly inventive. Other examples?

They are important even with limited public success.

There is a lot of interesting contemporary classical music, but much of it requires a formed ear to appreciate. More accessible classical music usually comes from composers dead 100+ years ago in the Classical and Romantic periods. All styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern and Contemporary bring something to the table, but some of them are too elevated for the general public, just like not the finer points of functional programming not being every developer's cup of tea. I wouldn't want advanced programming paradigms or exotic new math stop being produced just because the general public doesn't have a taste for them.

I like his well known Pruit Igoe/Koyaanisqatsi music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE). But his recent work for a local small opera house named "Kepler" is off-putting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Fh2TmHZyk).