Joseph Horowitz had an interesting question: what would an American performance style be of classical music?
American Classical Music at 250 — Take Three: The Orchestra Gap: Europe vs. the US | Unanswered Question
Obviously, we don't have one. We never did. Our American performance style is a musical style the way a corporate board room is art. It is a signifier of status: anonymous luxury, plush cliche, pointless muscle flexed to show power that overwhelms but never inspires. The ideal American musicians? James Levine. Murray Perahia. Hilary Hahn, Robert Merrill; the Emerson Quartet, The Chicago Symphony: Robots. Automatons. Long before this uninspiring period, American classical music was synonymous with anonymous perfection and polish designed for the specific purpose of eliminating personality.
Classical music in America is so boring that no wonder the interesting souls gravitate to virtually every other form of music there is. God knows there are plenty of boring jazz and rock musicians out there, but "interesting" was never discouraged in rock, and it's only recent that it was in jazz.
Horowitz mentions a few stars who got past the individuality threshold: Bernstein, Vickers, Stokowski, Gould... each of them had a different way of playing, but each was interested in something deeper than 'excellence.' Each of these stars was a unique spirit--we've had a few more stars, at least quasi-stars: MTT, Jessye Norman, Eileen Farrell, Rosa Ponselle, Rosalyn Tureck, Lawrence Tibbett, Paul Robeson, Norman Treigle, Anthony Newman, Teresa Stratas, Virgil Fox, now Cameron Carpenter. There's a few more if you make allowances for some restraint: Leontyne Price, Beverly Sills, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Samuel Ramey, William Warfield, Gerald Finley, Maureen Forrester, Igor Kipnis, George Shirley, Richard Purvis, Thomas Hampson. but this is still a pathetic list. How many is this? Twenty-five? Compare that to the hundreds of any European tradition. How many did I miss? Are there even another dozen?
Horowitz's basic point is that since there is no American 'canon' of classical music in the manner possessed by Germany, Italy and Russia, we can't be surprised that there is no American performance style either.
Who can doubt that that's true? But classical music has a very basic problem: we're competing here with its own homegrown genres of music which guard their traditions jealously. What is a young adult music lover going to gravitate to who's lived an original, authentic life full of struggle? Will they gravitate to the music that's synonymous in America with class privilege and anodyne technical excess, or will they gravitate to music that is known for articulating the inner lives of Americans for generations? Which will make them feel expressed? Which will make them feel heard?
There's nothing we can do to compete with that. Some of us may find popular music more trite, but it is 'our' music. There probably was never going to be an American classical canon. By the fifties, Gershwin might have grown so frustrated by concert hall strictures that he'd have fully decamped to Broadway or Hollywood for the generally agreed upon golden age of the musical. Leonard Bernstein fell into conducting because from the beginning of his career, classical music found him too free in his expression to be a proper composer: even Copland and Koussevitzky said so. Composers were supposed to make due with the idioms of Europe, preferably in a modernist dross. A composer who allowed the world in with all its vulgar jazz was a non-starter to them. If I'm right about Gershwin, maybe we'd have lost Bernstein to Broadway too. And even had he become director of the Boston Symphony after Koussevitzky, it's difficult to imagine him lasting past the McCarthy hearings.
And thus, American classical music has always attracted the timid: the good students and their teachers, the children of immigrants, doctors and scientists and academics who grew up playing instruments. Since the 1950s, classical music has almost always denoted a certain amount of relaxation inherent in class privilege.
In 1880, if you wanted to hear the music of masters, you had to make it yourself, and the very act of recreating it for yourself put this music into your body and soul Today, if you want to hear the music of the masters, you flip a switch, click a remote, or click on a mousepad. Even the people who play classical music have their own music which they click the mousepad for, and it's the music everybody else listens to: pop, rock, hip-hop, country, R&B. Classical music is almost completely divorced from the souls of even its musicians. As Joseph Horowitz said in an excellent podcast discussion with Kenneth Woods, only reason so many grew attracted to it was the challenge of technical mastery, and thus the classical profession's generally pursued these days by the diffident souls who express themselves by coloring within the nine dots.
Our Top 12 Unknown Canonical Works?
The Tides of Manaunaun/Harp of Life/Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance/The Banshee/Fairy Answer/Voice of Lir/Dynamic Motion (Piano Music by Henry Cowell)
Lukas Foss, The Song of Songs (1/2)
Adolphus Hailstork (Symphony No. 2)
WS_William_V2_16x9.mp4 (William Grant Still Symphony no. 2 "Song of a New Race", assuming the crowd who reads this knows the Symphony #1: 'Afro-American Symphony')
https://youtu.be/rdXNajPlO-8?si=knH7kWIvOQb4t5VK&t=462 (Morton Gould: Fall River Legend)
Wuthering Heights, Bernard Herrmann, 1965, Part 1/8
George Crumb "Ancient Voice of Children"
Lou Harrison: La Koro Sutro (1973)
Blackwood, 16-note Microtonal Etude (opus 28) Andantino © (Easley Blackwood Microtonal Etudes)
HOVHANESS: Symphony No. 2 op. 132 "Mysterious Mountain" / Reiner · Chicago Symphony Orchestra (could easily be a dozen other pieces)
Conlon Nancarrow - 45 studies for player piano [w/score]
HARRY PARTCH - King Oedipus 1952 (Audio)
The truth is, even in our small world of American classical music, we have our heroes, our original spirits, the real artists who warp the fabric of reality when you hear them. We have the makings of a canon, we just don't play it. Gershwin and Ives are great, Copland's populist music is great, so is Barber's, Reich's minimal music is great, even Adams is great, but what about Henry Cowell? I will stay on my hill calling Cowell one of the greatest composers of the 20th or any century until the entire world comes around to my view; but what about the mystical music of Alan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison? What about the polystylism of Morton Gould and Lukas Foss? What about the music brined in African-American musical traditions by William Grant Still, Adolphus Hailstork and Florence Price (we still don't hear much of her chamber music)? What about the player piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow and invented instruments of Harry Partch? What about east coast academics like David Diamond, Walter Piston and Vincent Persichetti? What about the high modernism of Ruth Crawford Seeger? What about the exoticisms of Arthur Farwell? Not to mention all the legendary immigrant composers, not to mention all the movie composers like Korngold and Rosza and Goldsmith and all the others; even John f***ing Williams. There are living ones still active too whom I think should be considered for the canon: Paul Moravec, Aaron Jay Kernis, Michael Daugherty, Richard Danielpour, William Bolcom, Joseph Schwantner, Jake Heggie, Kevin Puts, Jennifer Higdon and relatively young ones like Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snyder, Andrew Norman, Matthew Aucoin, Timo Andres, Lera Auerbach, John Mackey, Kevin Day and Carlos Simon.
This swarm of names and more comprises a real canon: it is not a canon as large as those of rock, country, R&B, even hip-hop by now, but it is enough to say we can be proud of what we've done in America if only we paid attention to it and tried to get some funding to play it...
It's not likely, but perhaps this new generation is the generation we've been waiting for, because my generation and younger is truly the first generation for whom there is no compunction about any source: I wish we'd be more forgiving about what's commonly termed cultural appropriation, but otherwise, consider the freedom of the modern composer: high source, low source, it doesn't matter. The idea that our art is something holy and untouchable is over. No source is too vulgar to appropriate for our music, and the best composers will be fearless about the critics who wag their fingers at how they fashion other styles.
And there are great, original spirits among American performers if only we'd pay attention to the right ones.
Just think of American violinists:
Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto 1st movement - Rachel Barton Pine
Stravinsky - Violin Concerto in D major (Leila Josefowicz)
I don't know why Hilary Hahn is known as the world's greatest violinist when Rachel Barton Pine tours every city to empty houses with a repertoire three times the size, youtube tutorials on every major violin concerto and a series of pop song encores she arranged herself. To anybody paying attention, she isn't just a better artist, she's got more charisma too. She could be regarded as the world's greatest violinist, with the most inspiring story of any violinist short of Augustin Hadelich, and not a single major orchestra books her.
Everybody seems to forget about Leila Josefowicz who plays with the passion you'll never find in Hahn too, or Jennifer Koh who champions all the obscure and raw repertoire you'll never hear from the exquisitely pretty playing of Joshua Bell--and exquisitely pretty is something you will never hear Stefan Jackiw's playing described as.
[NYCP] Beethoven - Violin Sonata in A, Op. 47, 'Kreutzer' (Stefan Jackiw, violin) (arranged for string orchestra accompaniment)
Sibelius, Camilla Wicks, Sixten Ehrling – Concerto In D Minor For Violin (1952) Capitol P 8175
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM6TBHR8-Ac&list=RDtM6TBHR8-Ac&start_radio=1 (Oscar Shumsky in recital)
And it didn't start there. In the recently deceased generation we had the Ivry Gitlis-like devil may careness of Camilla Wicks, the Grumiaux like musicality of Oscar Shumsky where every bar has a subtle detail to make it come to life, the Szigeti-like intellect of Berl Sonofsky where you hear how every phrase fits in the context of a longer term plan, the relaxed perfection of Aaron Rosand, and Fredell Lack.... whom I still know nothing about. Perhaps they should have all been superstars. What happened to all of them? Well... it would seem that Isaac Stern blackballed them: that's pretty well documented. He was clearly determined to be the #1 violinist of his generation, and did what he had to to knock any rival out of the way. During Stern's heyday they were all relegated in America to regional orchestras and university positions. Was Stern actually better than they were? Well, he certainly had an explosive personality that came through in his playing, but find a recording by Wicks or Sonofsky and tell me with a straight face that Stern was obviously the best of them.
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61: I. Allegro ma non troppo (Live) (Beethoven VC done by Sonofsky with Munch/Boston. He was a creep but man he could play.)
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36, TH 27: I. Andante sostenuto - Moderato con anima - Moderato... (Serebrier doing Tchaikovsky)
Our big five could have been lead by Kenneth Schermerhorn, George Cleve, Jose Serebrier, Jorge Mester, Maurice Peress: each of them at least as good in their way as Maazel or Levine if only some promoter or manager gave them a chance. This isn't even getting into somewhat better known names like Conlon or de Priest, or champions of unknown American music like Gerard Schwarz and Dennis Russell Davies, or the fact that Zinman and especially John Nelson should be remembered as among the greatest conductors of the age.
G. F. Händel: Messiah - John Nelson - Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (for my money the greatest Messiah recording set down in the history of the mic)
Of the 'big five' names I just suggested, the three Americans among them were known for being difficult, but were they any more difficult than Lorin Maazel? And did any of them have Levine's baggage? Serebrier at least has some recordings where we can commemorate what an interpretive giant he is, but we have barely any of Kenneth Schermerhorn in his core repertoire. The little I've heard, like a broadcast of a Milwaukee Symphonie Fantastique, was explosive like Bernstein or Mitropoulos. Mester was a bit fleeter and balletic, more self-consciously 'virtuoso' like Kleiber, though looking at concerts in old age with undistinguished Latin American orchestras he's becoming rather Giulini-like. Both Schermerhorn and Mester made plenty of records, but nearly all were in the unselfish pursuit of getting music recorded that nobody else would do.
Mahler: Symphony No 2, "Resurrection" - Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductor
Kenneth Schermerhorn conducts Beethoven's Symphony No.7 (LIVE at Hong Kong)
The problem of all five was that they were too 'interesting.' Maazel and Schippers chose to have celebrity careers where you make top dollar and spend your lives aboard first-class flights, these guys chose to make music. Mester was a veritable tornado of new music, Schermerhorn scarcely less, while Maurice Peress is best known now for his jazz crossover arrangements: something Gunther Schuller is better known at than he, but Peress may have been even better at it.
Black, Brown And Beige Suite: Work Song/Come Sunday/Light (orchestrated by Maurice Peress)
Brahms, Symphony no. 3 - George Cleve, RPO
But then there was George Cleve. When I heard Schermerhorn in Milwaukee or Mester in Sydney, my reaction was 'wow!' When I heard George Cleve, over and over again, my reaction was 'oh my god!' That we had a conductor that musical and that intense in America for the better part of fifty years and never recognized him strikes me as perfectly extraordinary. The reason why is obvious: he was a tyrant of the old school. A musician who regularly played under him seemed to groan through the keyboard when he talked me about him. One longstanding acquaintance of mine who knew him in SoCal referred to him as 'a scary dude.' And yet, scarier than Dutoit? Scarier than Maazel? Scarier than Muti? I doubt it. America kept dismissing the chance for great true greats like Klemperer and Erich Kleiber and Ivan Fischer (he was interested back in the day) as too difficult to work with, then hired tyrants like Szell and Rodzinski and Maazel whose only difference was how much colder their musicmaking was and the possibility of slightly less new music.
Vaughan Williams - Symphony no. 2 ("A London Symphony"), George Cleve, cond.
But do these examples add up to an American performing tradition?
Absolutely not. Of course not. If there's anything that sounds American about them, it's different facets of their musicmaking in each case. And even if there were something that sounds American, how would we know?
We'd know because we know what American music sounds like. America is the home of improvisatory freedom, America is the place that embraced music by oral tradition when no one else would. The presence of a recording device meant oral traditions could be passed on by anyone who cared to hear it, and in the case of every other genre of music, people cared to hear their predecessors.
But they cared to hear it because they were not educated in the old ways of music, and what they were hearing was entirely new to them. But when traditions become old, the texts which codify them become sacred: and what becomes sacred becomes banal. Art by reverence becomes art by bureaucracy, music by paperwork. We so revered tradition that we abandoned it.
The evidence of what music always was was right around us, and we willfully ignored it.
But the truth is a little more nuanced than that. The presence of the microphone changed the playing even of the players who carried the tradition. If you listen even to romantics like Furtwangler and Rubinstein steeped in 19th century traditions as though living them, something in their style changed utterly after the end of World War II.
We'd like to think that it was the final devastating triumph of the Toscanini aesthetic, mid-century modern in the dross of classical interpretation where form became function and any ornaments which smacked of loving care were deemed unnecessary. But the truth is probably simpler: they heard themselves played back and didn't like what they heard. They may have grown more risk averse after hearing themselves, but they also realized that certain mannerisms were... well... distracting. Not everything in the gold old days was good, and not all of the old effects were as thrilling as others.
Taking massive liberty with the score is one thing in a messy romantic masterwork like the ones written by Wagner and Liszt, it's another in work by Mozart or Beethoven which are already just about perfect. When the work is as ideal as Beethoven 5 or The Marriage of Figaro, nearly anything an interpreter could do gets in the way. I love opera singing the way anybody does: at least I love it when it's done well, which it too rarely is these days. But I failed to hear what was as great in Verdi as in his Viennese predecessors until I heard Toscanini do Otello and realized that every detail means something, and if you distort the details you distort a tragedy so perfectly constructed it could be Greek. I love the Panizza Otello, but I love it as opera, not art. At the end of it you could probably imagine Martinelli's guts spilling out all over the stage after a ritual seppuku gone awry.
And yet... the amount of classical music we can call 'perfect' or 'ideal' is so miniscule: is it even 5% of the repertoire? Even most of the greatest music has flaws, and if performers don't find ways to negotiate the sequential repetition, the awkward harmonic modulations, the formal wandering, the thinness of texture that you find even amid passages of the most titanic masterworks, it's going to be a more boring night than it should be.
To understand interpretation, it's always good to turn to the place interpretation matters most: the law. We all became originalists in the 20th century, turning from the Earl Warren-ness of Mahler's textural freedom to the Antonin Scalia-ness of Toscanini almost overnight before anybody realized what happened.
But even Mahler's textural freedom was commented upon at the time as being excessive. It was a revision of a previous tradition, an upending done in the name of greater vividness, greater intensity, greater quality, and most importantly, greater clarity.
Was it excessive? Well, no, because Mahler is Mahler, and he's one of the great musical minds of all time. If Mahler thought it worked, it probably worked. Is it reproducible for us? Probably not. We only know Mahler's interpretive spirit through the recordings of his assistants and associates like Bodanzky, Mengelberg, Fried and the pre-dotage Bruno Walter. But when you have Riccardo Chailly record Mahler's re-orchestrations of the Schumann symphonies but with a strict adherence to the score in spite of its changes, what's the point? You've literally turned Mahler into Toscanini.
If we had Mahler recordings of anything at all besides a few piano rolls, they would be essential to consult in whatever repertoire. But there is no more way to capture the spirit of Mahler than there is to capture the spirit of Furtwangler. You can try, but every copy will be a faded facsimile. First we had Furtwangler, then there was Jochum, then Keilberth, then Barenboim. Every successive impersonation of Furtwangler's interpretive style was a little less vivid than the one before.
Why? Because those are interpretations not meant to be imitated. They were created in the moment of performance from instincts the performer himself may not have understood, and consequently over time what was done instinctually becomes didactic.
But just as there is the originalism of Scalia and the living documents of Furtwangler, there is 'stare decisis', meaning 'to stand by things decided.' In other words, maintenance of tradition, and the realization that interpretation is ultimately a continuum which allows for a greater freedom within a binding framework.
When a judge rules by 'stare decisis' he is drawing on the wisdom of previous judges who over hundreds of years have accumulated practical wisdom by seeking out precedents for new cases. As over time there have been precedents for nearly every case, there is much practical wisdom out there in judicial rulings, much of which contradicts other wise judicial rulings.
Musicians can draw on the wisdom of previous musicians, and should. It is dangerous to try and draw lessons in tradition from Furtwangler or Cortot or Gitlis, because they were as much revolutionaries as the Toscaninis and Heifetzes with whom their aesthetic was at war.
But we can draw lessons personalities a rung or two down in strength: the Moiseiwitsches, the Francescattis, the Monteux's, the artists who were steeped in the tradition their whole lives and found an individual way forward within it. About matters of interpretation these Kubeliks and Grumiaux's and Firkusnys were neither revolutionaries nor reactionaries, they lived in the practical wisdom of precedent. Some interpreted more conservatively (Rubinstein, Oistrakh, E. Kleiber), some more liberally (Fricsay, Huberman, Hofmann), but they all were within the same continuum of tradition.
There were obvious differences in each national school, French, Russian, Italian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, maybe even Ukrainian, but each of them were responding to the same need to live the music on a level deeper than its outward manifestations, and they each lived the music of foreigners through the precedents they knew of the music they had at hand: their national composers, their folk and worship music, the most treasured artforms and humanities of their countries, even the country's speech pattens. Through all that, these musical giants diagnosed what they took to be the challenges of this music: where are the architectural destinations of the piece, where are the harmonic pressure points that allow for freedom of tempo, does every modulation demand a new color palette? When does the music become rhetorical and demand agogics? Are the inner voices independent counterpoint or mere atmosphere? How do we create momentum through sequential repetition? How do we clarify dense counterpoint? How do we maximize harmonic tension? How do we make sure phrases rise and fall regardless of the indicated dynamic? And they all had their solutions to these problems. What was shared was not their solutions, but that they understood what the interpretive questions were.
If we're not aware of the problems anymore, it's because we're not really listening on any level deeper than our ears. We're not just checking whether or not the audience is paying attention, we're not checking if we're paying attention. By putting such premium on 'the score', we have neglected 'the music.'
'The music' cannot be taught through practical solutions, it can only be elicited, inspired, drawn out through inspiration. It has to be lived on a level deeper than ear and fingers before one can even talk about any sort of practical solution to the score, and that can only happen if we feel it in what science would call the 'limbic system', and the rest of us might call our guts, our souls, our bodies.
All that lives must die, and once traditions die out, you never get them back in the sense that they once were. They come back reconstituted through the filters of a new age. One day, no longer will waltzes be played with a properly placed upbeat, just as Brahms is rarely ever played anymore with a properly un-self-conscious rubato.
Every soul has an address and we can't be old Viennese in our souls any more than we could naturally speak English as the Elizabethans did. These are things that cannot be acquired, because they would inevitably feel false.
Perhaps that falsity isn't a bad thing. Look at modern bluegrass music, or 'newgrass' as people call it. The old banjo and fiddle traditions are dying out, and bluegrass has increasingly become the purview of nice musicians with classical training: who hold the bow properly, who play properly in tune, who learned bluegrass as a foreign language that came with a culture which intoxicated them. But Bela Fleck and Mark O'Connor will never be able to play it without sounding 'too good,' The raw sound from too much bow pressure, the out of tune fingering, the slight rhythmic insecurity on banjos, that's as much part of bluegrass and old time as the tune itself. The 'proper training' always comes out, and it brings its own advantages. Many people love the 'newgrass' of Fleck and O'Connor and Edgar Meyer and the Punch Brothers and so many others, but it is a very different thing from the original and an ancillary growth from the original tradition.
But we can be as American as Johann Strauss was Viennese, and we can find an American style perfectly easily if we just played from the gut rather than the brain.
We even know exactly what the American style would sound like. It would sound like the style of every other American musical genre: impassioned, explosive, improvisatory, charismatic, even flamboyant, utterly unafraid to use the score as a departure point, more interested in adapting the music to the individuality of the performer than making the performer the servant of the music.
Will every performance be great? Of course not. Was every performance great by the great artists of other countries' schools? Would it be the deepest musicianship around? Well... are we the deepest country? Of course not. But they would be 'our' musicians, recognizably ours. They would have the same spirit within them as John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia. I'm not sure these musicians would be my favorites, but they would recognizably be our musicians because the performer becomes an equal partner in a collaborative process that never ends with the score.
Everybody around the world would accuse Americans of vulgarity. Well... look around, we ARE vulgar and everybody already accuses us of it. We showed the world how to be vulgar. We're the country whose raw energy ruined the classical tradition for ourselves, then ruined it for the rest of the world, now we can bring it back to the rest of the world with the very ignorant vulgarity that created American music in the first place.
Part of what killed the grand tradition here is good old American ignorance. Even the educated among us seem far more proud to wear our ignorance on our sleeves than our erudition. So what then would an American school do with that naivete? If I know my country, then my sense is that we would take the improvisatory freedom of the 19th century and turn it up by an exponent. Not just rubato and textual modifications, but rearranging pieces for completely different instrumental combinations, rewriting melodic lines and accompanying figures, inserting cadenzas, bowdlerizing the thing in itself which generations of 20th century musicians devoted their lives to preserving exactly as they found it into something just barely recognizable: utterly vulgar by the standards of the last 100 years, but energetic as only this country has been, and fostering creativity in the re-creative realm that will hopefully rub off in the creative realm itself.
If history teaches us anything, it's that overcorrection comes for every historical movement that loses touch with reality. Few places are less in touch with reality than classical music, therefore I can't be convinced out of the idea that overcorrection is bound to happen. Whether it happens now or in the 22nd century it's only a matter of time.
What does that mean? Well, eventually a new wind of classical performance will blow from America, and it will be so shockingly different from everything we ever knew as classical music that we will barely recognize it.
It may not even be live music. We all see how close so many orchestras are to insolvency, we see how few people are in the audience, we see how old the leftover audience is. Classical music used to be a museum, now it's a mausoleum.
America is now packed brim to brim with a hundred years of its own classical music, which comprises rock, jazz, R&B, country, hip-hop, bluegrass, and all its related subgenres. More people every year, even the young, prefer old hits to the new. It's the ultimate revenge of our classical music on the people who ignored us, but our revenge is procured with our graves.
I don't know about anyone else, but I would find the end of great American orchestras unbearably sad. The Big Five is a joke: well-endowed zombie nests who still need your money wheb even the playing sounds like the walking dead (playing dead?). The place where there is life is in the second-tier American ensembles: you know the ones. Nobody's confusing these orchestras with Mengelberg's Concertgebouw, but they play with commitment and intensity and nuance precisely because they are endangered--because they know that the day may come without warning that they can never play together again. I am grateful to live in a second-tier town like Baltimore where I can hear what miracles a threatened orchestra can conjure with the sword dangling over their heads.
But however good they are, the clock ticks for them and no amount of musical quality can forestall something as inevitable as death itself. The day is coming when the orchestras close their doors in all but the most well-moneyed cities. Any American city where decline is a regular state will eventually lose their orchestras: no matter how good they are, no matter how much they try, no matter how much good marketing staves off the inevitable for another few years, the day is coming, and the few of us left who love this music will find it harrowing.
But perhaps it's only after this music finally passes its long delayed crossing that our music can be resurrected as something completely unfamiliar to us.
Who knows? It may be entirely generated through AI manipulation of recordings of previous ensembles who knew the secrets of playing this music. Since the entire rest of the world of music went electronic, why wouldn't we? But more likely, it will be something so beyond our comprehension at this point that we would have no idea how to conceive of it yet.
It won't necessarily be AI. Classical music missed 120 years of fashionable revolutions, why not this one? But history teaches that one day, classical music will get swept up in the currents of some new development just as everything else does. Nothing can evolve at snail's pace forever without the guarantee that evolution won't come to mutate everything about it overnight.
With the new, the old sense of possibility comes back: it may come back in entirely different forms, but it may generate some of the old flame of inspiration we love but with the spirit of an entirely new era and zeitgeist.
Think of the last switch in eras.
Today's Bach and Handel would be fundamentally unrecognizable to the meisters, even the historically informed performers. Some HIP performers are wonderfully impressive, but all the techniques that made the original performers so inspiring are likely gone: techniques for coloring, for maximizing harmonic tensions over appogiaturas, for ornamenting in sequential repetitions, for emphasizing syncopation in passages with metric complexity, for rewriting entire melodic and accompanying lines to better feature the performer's strengths, and for simply improvising whenever the player felt like it...
One would think that without the temporal context, the music itself would disappear, but even if it dipped for a while, Bach and Handel never disappeared. They just went into a bit of hibernation, and even at their sleepiest they slept with one eye open. There was always a Messiah, there was always a Well-Tempered Clavier, there was always a Goldberg Variations and Art of the Fugue, there was always an Israel in Egypt and op. 6 concerti grossi, and when the public was ready, the more forbidding masterworks were revived. The revivals sounded completely different: the traditions were utterly lost, and they were inevitably played in the style of their own era: but the impact came through. That is literally what classical music is! It transcends the bounds of its own era, and when reconstituted in new forms the impact still comes through. When Haydn heard Messiah at the end of his life, he wept. When Beethoven studied it he exclaimed that Handel was the greatest of us all [composers]. When Mendelssohn first performed the St. Matthew Passion in his own arrangement, the public wept too.
Perhaps one day the St. Matthew Passion would come back to us in a completely altered form of which we can't even guess, but just as the 19th century developed orchestras of a size the Baroque couldn't possibly know what to do with, so the 21st century has possibilities electronic and digital that Beethoven and Mendelssohn wouldn't understand the first thing about (maybe Mendelssohn...).
This is the natural future of music. The longer we go repressing this natural adaptation to new technologies, the greater this revolution will probably explode when it happens. It's not the kind of historical inevitability that Boulez evoked when talking about serialism, it's an inevitability that things change and things die. AI is no more a possibility than rearrangements for rock bands or DJ samples, and with far more potential for destruction, but for the moment, it's just the nearest tool at hand, and if you were to conceive of classical music attaining a new context, what would you think people would use to get it? Who knows? But one day, probably quite soon, an entirely different tool can come about, perhaps one that does not so easily steal human accomplishment for itself, but whether it's AI, or whatever comes next, or whatever comes next after that, or the next, or that next, some technology is coming for classical music, and after classical music dies as we understand it, that technology will resurrect what we would think un-resurrectable.
