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, and 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 and where 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 so wrenchingly sad.
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, with 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 inevitably played the music 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.
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