The American classical recording industry in is big trouble. The crisis has been building quietly for nearly a decade. Peter Andry of Britain's EMI predicts that "there will be a total collapse of the American classical-recording system within five years unless someone figures out a more economic one." Falling sales percentages reflect the story of youth turned off by the concert hall's irrelevance, a shrinking number of serious-record stores, a union that has almost priced orchestras out of the market, a record-buying public that responds only to a few glittering names, a repertory glutted by old war-horses. The future, according to RCA's Laginestra, "is a question of getting across to the kids." RCA is packaging records on slickly appealing jackets: its "Carmina Burana" design features a woman with an exposed breast. None of these market ploys looks like a real solution to the accelerating plunge in sales of classical records. There exists a primal apathy toward classical music in America. More than a setback for the classical-record business, it is a tragedy for young music and musicians. Says EMI's Andry: "I can see that very soon these orchestras may not be as efficient as they have been. When musicians lose the extra recording money, they may just go off and become shoemakers instead....
All the preceding is an abridged version of an article that appeared in Newsweek in 1970. The great difference between the situation now and then is that Newsweek in its current incarnation would never publish such a thing. Otherwise, the sky seems to be falling at the same rate. How many more articles bewailing the collapse or corruption of the art do we have to read before the novelty expires? They are generally symptoms of an exhausted critic, not of an exhausted culture. (I wrote one poor example for the New York Times back in the early nineties.) Which is not to say that we don't face serious problems demanding serious coverage. But the Cassandra act is dinner-theater.
See ArtsJournal's delightful Death of Classical Music Archive.
