Joseph Horowitz has been mulling over the state of US classical music across 250 years and it's predominantly musings on the state of orchestral repertoire

I am not going to attempt to summarize or describe Joseph Horowitz’ eight takes on the question of whether or not the United States has delivered on its classical music promise.  If you have read them you have read them, too, and if not, here are links.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/06/at-250-has-america-delivered-on-its-classical-music-promise.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/jonas-kaufmann-vs-the-orchestra-of-st-lukes-take-two-mahler-steinbach-festival.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-two-the-bam-experiment.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-three-the-orchestra-gap-europe-vs-the-us.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-four-the-orchestra-gap-contd.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/feeling-it-giuini-and-arrau-vs-george-szells-new-world-perfectionism.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-five-the-disconnect-between-scholars-and-orchestras.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-six-the-ford-foundations-misguided-philanthropy.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-seven-another-boston-symphony-perspective-on-the-malaise-afflicting-orchestras.html

 

The thing that jumps out for me is that even the one time Future Symphony Institute is now the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music.  They don’t even call themselves the Future Symphony Institute anymore.  They still want a future for orchestral and symphonic music, of course, because while Roger Scruton has died many of the people at the core of the institution have remained.  I kind of started tuning them out after Scruton died but also after Douglas Murray got added on to the senior fellows roster.  I had my issues with Scruton but I do still own half a dozen of his books.  Writers like the late Roger Scruton and Theodor Adorno can benefit you when you don’t agree with them. 

 

Being a guitarist I find that I am more drawn to hearing what is going on now than in revisiting past glories.  Matanya Ophee is no longer with us but he dispelled the idea that the classical guitar ever had an actual golden age.  Do sonatas by Sor or Giuliani compare to the works of Schubert or Mendelssohn?  Most would say not favorably.  On the other hand, when Stephanie Jones gave a recital in Seattle a few seasons ago I enjoyed her program of contemporary Australian and Austrian composers writing for the guitar.  I am looking forward to the second half of Nikita Koshkin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues finally getting recorded.  I just noted recently the death of Frank Campo as reported at Slipped Disc. 

 

Jens Ibsen has floated some ideas that self-policing within genres can stifle innovation.  Ibsen has contended that within the United States classical music is functionally underground music now.

https://sfclassicalvoice.substack.com/p/classical-music-is-underground-let

 

I wonder if that’s a bit of an overstatement but for contemporary composers I think I can take the point as given.  Anyone who is attempting to build bridges between classical and metal is already interested in inter-canonical experimentation that I can be sympathetic to.  The concept of inter-canonical translation and exchange comes up inIbsen’s profile on Jon Batiste. I’m okay with a slow-drag reworking of a Mozart warhorse. Ragging the classics has been a thread of improvisational and compositional activity for centuries.  Batiste is also correct to say that improvisation was previously inextricably bound up in musical life and practice in the days of Mozart and got steadily purged out of classical music theory and practice. 

 

If arts non-profits are having a banner bad year then the future of classical music in the United States probably isn’t “entirely” bound up in the states of institutions.

 

I haven’t been to orchestral concerts in decades and I have nothing against orchestral music.  I went and heard the symphonic suite Mathis der Maler when it was programmed.  Yes, I am a bit of a Hindemith fan.  I went and heard Samuel Jones’ Tuba Concerto twice and even bought the score.  I liked Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto, which I feel is several steps above what he was doing with All Rise (which I really wanted to like but couldn’t get into).  I even recently listened to a violin concerto by Kip Winger.  Don’t know who that is?  Well, I still hate the band Winger but Kip Winger’s violin concerto is solidly made.

 

But to me the present and future of classical music is in small-scale works.  It’s not going to surprise anyone if a guitarist feels the present and future of classical music is more likely to be found in guitar music than in orchestral literature.  I have made this point a few times over the last ten years but I think the symphony has gone the way of the votive mass for the dead; the prestige of the genre and form hasn’t gone away but the niche nature of the musical form means it has lost its place of prestige.  Richard Taruskin pointed out that the social role of opera was displaced by cinema and television and that’s basically not going to come back.

 

I have not written as much about Regaining Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World as I, at one point, planned to.  I have had concerns about how easily John Borstlap decided to valorize Schleiermacher and scapegoat Herder.  Both philosophers were not “just” philosophers but Christian pastors and theologians both of them advocated aesthetic pluralism as well as encouraged nascent nationalist projects.  It’s possible to admire Schleiermacher’s ardor for aesthetic pluralism and music while agree with Emil Brunner that the trajectory of Schleiermacher’s thought and theology was ultimately a dead end. 

 

It is possible to regard Herder as more complex than Borstlap has allowed for.  American fundamentalist preachers who think Song of Songs is chiefly about the joys of marriage and sex don’t give Herder any credit for having swept allegorical and typological readings of Song of Songs away for a newer interpretive approach.  I can think of Schleiermacher as having positive contributions to make in hermeneutics while also finding him an annoying panentheistic crypto-Marcionite. It has been hard to shake an impression that Borstlap is eager to valorize and scapegoat figures like Herder or Adorno than to wade into the complexities of their respective bodies of work to show how mixed their legacies are.

 

So, obviously, I’ve made it clear I differ with Borstlap on a few things.  But I have realized that right there in the subtitle may be he simplest point of divergence.  Borstlap seemsto think the muse needs to be saved, the muse of classical music.  I think the muse has moved on from orchestral repertoire. She might come back now and then to check in on the state of her previously favored idiom but where ever the muse has headed off to, you will not find her by trying to “save” her so that there can be another Beethoven’s Ninth.  She may have moved on to intercultural exchange projects.

 

What if the failure of the promise of American music has happened because people sought that future in the symphony?  What if by the time Americans were looking for the creator of the great American symphony the muse had already moved on? 

 

for those who didn't already know, the Future Symphony Institute has become the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music

The Future Symphony Institute seemed to be on a hiatus in the wake of Roger Scruton's passing, which was understandable.  It has since retooled its site and name and is now the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music.

https://ffclassicalmusic.org/about/

Will Classical Music see a Renaissance? Bryan Townsend asks and it's a topic I've thought about for a while .... it depends on what we mean by classical music

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2021/01/will-classical-music-see-renaissance.html

Like many of you  I've been watching some of the streaming concerts from Europe and North America and I've started to wonder what the classical music world will look like after this pandemic crisis is over. And when will it be over? These are questions that are difficult if not impossible to answer at present, but we can do a little speculating.

I have read in a few places that perhaps 30% of professional musicians have simply left the business as there was no work for them. If the current crisis lasts another year or a good part of the year as it seems it might, then wouldn't it be likely that another 30% or more might leave the business?

We might also ask ourselves which musicians in particular are least likely to survive the crisis? It seems obvious that it would be the ones that are most vulnerable: the part-time musicians, the players in the smaller regional orchestras, the musicians that were already struggling to start or sustain a solo career, and most of all, the local musicians.

...

Reading, say, ArtsJournal or SlippedDisc on a weekly basis it could be easy to get a sense that classical music as we've known it has been in peril for some time.  Yet there was last year's debate about Philip Ewell's comments about the white racial frame of music theory in United States music theory, too. 

In comments at The Music Salon it got mentioned that album sales are dipping, even in the realm of digital download albums.  That got me thinking about how a musician friend of mine tried putting together a program for an album and discovered the licensing costs were more than he could tackle for the repertoire he wanted to record.  That, right there, might account for why there is a more robust indie rock scene than an indie classical scene in terms of recorded music.  At the risk of putting it too simply and briskly, what's the Bandcamp scene for new chamber music for string quartet compared to someone with a guitar and a band?  

One of the things that seems to be the default assumption in questions about the future of classical music is its future as a profession, the future of classical music as a form of cultural and participatory activity that people get paid to make.  The idea that classical music might continue in an avocational or amateur form doesn't seem to come up in "serious" conversations about "serious" music yet it seems as though, despite or in having to deal with the reality of arts funding and cultural policies in the United States, for instance, that's something we might want to keep in mind.  "a renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity" wouldn't require that renaissance to be one of jobs in classical music.

But as Ted Gioia put it in Music: A Subversive History, the powers that be (they, etc) have pivoted from classical music to pop music in the last sixty odd years. The elites may have favored classical music a century ago but since the Jazz Age and the emergence of rock `n roll the elites have favored American popular styles. There are, of course, some folks who have felt that classical music must be allowed to die at spots like NewMusicBox but there's an element of bad faith to that proclamation inasmuch as the call was to contemporary composers and musicians to create alternative communities who would not be bound by established conventions ... and that's just the Romantics and Wagner all over again and, as Charles Rosen has put it, breaking free of the real or perceived strictures of "tradition" is as much a part of how traditions get renewed as the ostensibly "rigid" aspects of traditions.  

To put this aphoristically, every new generation has a temptation to think that we have seen things clearly in a way that nobody before us has and there's always a seed of accuracy to it along with some significant delusions of grandeur.

But, as is also so often said, it's easy to imagine things have always been getting worse when they're staying the same. I am skeptical about that approach to things now, too, because I find much wrong with Gioia's parade of dualisms to the effect that music history has "always" been about cycles of dualisms that can never be reconciled since before there even was music history as anyone can functionally know it. Adorno was right to snipe that the more modern the sensibility the more ancient it insists on being--the Enlightenment built on the Renaissance; the Romantics looked back to medieval eras for cohesion and then the ancient Greeks and Romans; and via Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ancient or pre-historic humanity became the new reference point. Gioia distills that general trend by going all the way back to a "rupture" allegedly caused by Pythagoras (and Confucius, too, even if the latter is basically only useful as a reference point for the kind of top-down totalitarianism in cultural norms that was more indicative of "our" era than many an earlier era).  Things can get worse in real world terms because if they weren't nobody would be worried about whether orchestras can survive the era of covid-19 if concert life is gutted via medical restrictions over the next two or three years.

Maury's comment at The Music Salon about how music has been devolving to an individual rather than a social activity is a fair concern. I hope that doesn't mean that a whole bunch of musicians are going to be home studio types who turn into Jacob Colliers!  On the other hand, perhaps that's not something that should surprise us if that's something that does happen.  

Owing to the curious history in the United States of post Cold War arts policies (or lack thereof) and the persistence of our military adventures abroad I have floated a theory that in the United States the arts might have something like a Thirty Years War situation in which arts policy wasn't and isn't a concern where "highbrow" is concerned.  I mention the Thirty Years War as a Heinrich Schutz fan to suggest that like Schutz composers and musicians might want to take as given the reduced possibilities and resources and compose for the resources we have rather than the ones we wish we had.  

It's why, in a nutshell, this guitarist composer hobbyist composes primarily for guitar now.  I like the idea of a cycle of chamber sonata pairing the guitar up with woodwinds, strings and brass, for instance, but in the era of covid-19 finding chamber musicians able and willing to tackle chamber music is challenging and people may find you rather than you finding them.  Whereas in the era of lockdown you can find out what you can do just you and your guitar.  The irony of that being cosmetically similar to the lone Romantic solitary art-bro-genius is not lost on me and I find it loathesome!  But we may find this to be the situation we're stuck with in classical music or postclassic music in the second decade of the 21st century. These don't promise to be another Roaring Twenties like the Roaring Twenties that featured the creation of so much music I admire form the last century.

I was reading Composing Capital by Marianna Ritchie in the last few months and although reading about gentrification and theories about neoliberalism and fumbling attempts to imagine musical life apart from capitalism was, well, sort of interesting it was also sort of predictable and I have noticed that within the confines of classical music criticism and scholarship right alongside popular music criticism and scholarship there's a tendency to stay in one's lane.  The possibility that what could revitalize the ruts that both classical music and popular music have lapsed into since, let me just make this polemical point unavoidably clear, the rise of the commercial music industries is a synergistic interaction of the classical and pop traditions is not something that tends to come up among academics, perhaps for reasons so obvious they don't even need to be written out on the page.  

I agree with Richard Taruskin's observation that since Rachmaninoff's time there has been an increasing gap between the academic canon in classical music and the repertoire canon, a gap between what scholars say you have to study and what concertgoers pay money to hear because they want to hear X in a concert. Yet the gap between the repertoire canon and the academic canon is probably not as wide as the gap between the repertoire canon and the pop musical canon even though the repertoire canon of classical music can overlap with the pop musical canon in pops concerts.  I have heard, for instance, The Pink Panther theme at pops concerts and why not? It's a fun theme.  Just because I listen to choral music by Xenakis or Messiaen or Tallis or Byrd doesn't mean I can't turn around and enjoy what Shirley Walker did composing soundtracks for Batman: the animated series or notice the probable influence of Theolonious Monk on musical cues in Blue's Clues.

One of many reasons I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms last year was to show that we have available the theoretical and conceptual tools in music theory and formal analysis to melt down the boundaries that supposedly exist between American popular or vernacular styles and "classical" music. It is possible, and I would argue desirable, to find out how much classical and popular styles can synergistically revitalize each other as compositional and performance traditions. If people want a renaissance of their preferred musical style it's hard to see how that's going to happen during pandemic years but after twenty years of feeling like both the classical and popular sides of Western music have had some ruts I think dispensing with a bunch of counter-productive dualisms is more likely to help things than to stick to them. 

That is why the post-Idealist German art-religious impulse is something I regard as ridiculous and as something that needs to be dispensed with.  I don't view the arts as sacramental, however much I love the arts.  Taruskin has been right to point out that George Steiner was wrong to imagine that the humanities would humanize.  I am, alternatively, skeptical that a renaissance for classical music will mean a renaissance for humanity. I'm too Reformed to take that view seriously.  If sacralizing highbrow art and music keeps people from imagining that it is possible or desirable to compose ragtime sonatas or to write a fugue that could draw inspiration from Wilson Pickett or Thelonious Monk then sacralizing highbrow music has to go, alongside sacralizing musical canons.  I can appreciate what Ethan Hein wrote a few years ago when he said he's not against canons as such but against canonism and by "canonism" I venture a guess that the legacy of German Idealism in which the arts are the new true religion is as good a working definition as any.  

I've been revisiting the Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner's books The Mediator and Man in Conflict (Jim West says Man in Contradiction is a better translation). You don't have to be a neo-orthodox Swiss Reformer theologian to appreciate that Brunner's take-down of how the German Idealists re-engineered religious ideas from Christendom into a kind of panentheistic self-congratulatory cultural project could be a useful reference point for anyone who wants to take the Matthew Arnold style art-religion down a few pegs.  Brunner's work isn't going to be interesting for most, maybe, but I found his description of how liberal white Germans in the 18th and 19th century basically reverse engineered their idea of transcendence to kind of fit themselves to be an interesting polemic.  It might be germane to more recent American scholastic criticisms of the arts that were canonized in the proverbial long 19th century as a theological critique of the metaphysical confidence of European philosophers during the times when Beethoven was transformed into a god.  But that might have to be a post for some other time, maybe in tandem with a discussion of Mark Evan Bonds on The Beethoven Syndrome.

Somebody at The Future Symphony Institute got Taruskin's latest, which is totally worth reading

https://twitter.com/FutureSymphony/status/1268149771912589313

I finished it within weeks of getting it back in April.  Taruskin's always worth reading.I hope whoever at FSI that's about to read the book enjoys it as much as I did.  Be ready for Taruskin to heap lavish but deserved praise on Leonard B. Meyer. :)  Also, it's got one of the most passionate recent defenses of Haydn I've read in a while and since I adore the music of Haydn I'll never complain about that.

Norman Lebrecht relays concerns that UK orchestras are in critical condition which is yet another reason I doubt that the future of "classical music" is likely to take a symphonic form now that a pandemic is gutting concert life as we've known it in the classical scene

via Slipped Disc
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/british-orchestras-are-in-critical-position/

relaying the following:
https://www.musicweek.com/opinion/read/viewpoint-association-of-british-orchestras-director-mark-pemberton-on-why-classical-musicians-need-more-support/079416

With the global pandemic situation gutting concert life it's not a surprise that Bachtrack has closed shop
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/backtrack-shuts-up-shop/

Sympathetic as I am to the cause of continuing what's generally called "classical music" I have had my doubts, and posted them here at my blog, over the last year or so that whatever the future of classical music is that it will necessarily take the form of the symphony.

I.e. the name Future Symphony Institute might put too much stock in there being symphonies in the future.  I don't think for a second that "a renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity".  That seems like the kind of "fine art makes you a fine person" kind of manifesto that Richard Taruskin has spent his entire professional career, more or less, arguing emphatically against.

On the other hand, per some pieces by Jay Nordlinger at the Future Symphony Institute website, that were published in The New Criterion (back when I bothered to even read that magazine, come to think of it), mentioned way back circa 2004 some points raised more recently at On an Overgrown Path back in 2014 (there's too much classical music in terms of market saturation):
https://www.futuresymphony.org/tending-the-gardens-of-music-part-ii/
...
We have a glut problem, however. Horne recalls saying fully twenty-five years ago, “We should close all the conservatories for five years,” just to give the job market a break. And “now the situation is worse!” For woodwind and brass players, life has always been tricky: Zarin Mehta tells me that, for a recent tuba opening in the Philharmonic, over 120 people applied. [Editor’s note: A current tuba opening at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has over 180 applicants.] One result of all this redundant talent is that players tend to be quite good, everywhere. David Delta Gier, a conductor with wide experience both in America and abroad, says, “You should hear some of the players in Sioux Falls!” (The orchestra there is the South Dakota Symphony.) The sad part of our cornucopia is that many musicians wind up disappointed. Gier knows many fellow conductors – or would-be conductors – who have not had careers, or satisfying ones, simply because of the number of podiums available (versus all those who want to stand on them). “You get into a great school, you study with a great teacher, you work hard, you do everything right, and you think you ought to be rewarded. But a lot of people have been made to realize that that’s not necessarily the case.”

In a pandemic scenario even an orchestral conductor has pointed out the obvious, that symphonic music is not necessarily "what we need" these days.  Chamber music may be better able to withstand the current tide of policies that have curtailed concert life.  

Actually, that kind of gets me back to why I think Douglas Shadle is basically wrong about the idea of canceling the nineteenth century.  In a global pandemic we might want to actually revisit the Biedermeier era of in-house music-making.  I'm a classical guitarist interested in solo guitar music and particularly chamber music that includes the guitar so, of course, I don't see any reason we should "cancel the nineteenth century" when it was during the 1810 to 1845 period or thereabouts that guitarists were writing the kind of DIY music for amateurs playing solo and chamber music of the sort that we could learn from if the global covid-19 pandemic situation has led to policies that may 
permanently damage concert life at the orchestral and symphonic levels.  You can still play Chopin or even Beethoven (or Dussek or Hummel) in the privacy of your home, just like you can play blues, jazz standards or ragtime.  

When the Thirty Years War raged along Heinrich Schutz didn't make a point of staying at the production level of the grander larger-scale works he did in his earlier career.  He stripped everything down to little sacred concert music pieces.  His Passion settings shifted into voices-only for liturgical but also practical reasons.  

The guitar music of Mauro Giuliani is still fun to play even if snooty classical music critics at The Guardian have referred to it as silly trifling music.  Frankly, as a guitarist I find it easier to bridge the gap between American popular styles (i.e. ragtime from a century ago) and classical music by way of having studied Carulli, Giuliani or Legnani.  For that matter a Bohemian guitarist composer like Matiegka also wrote works that have given me inspiration to bridge the gap between American vernacular styles and sonata forms but Italian and Bohemian and Spanish guitarist composers are generally so far off the radar for mainstream musicology it's never been a surprise to me if in the turf wars of academic music studies pop vs orchestra or salon traditions have persisted.  If there's something we guitarists could potentially do the world over, it could be to develop ways of thinking and composing and writing about music that could potentially bridge this chasm, which musicology-as-usual in the last century and a half, even including New Musicology, has rarely seemed to be interested in remedying.   If a string quartet from Haydn might even seem hard to stage these days Haydn is public domain, try transcribing.  There are ways to learn from and to continue what we find beautiful in the old even if the received ways of playing that music can be kept from us due to the exigencies of dealing with a pandemic.  

Some ideas for consideration. 

Mere Orthodoxy has a review of John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution up

https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-classical-revolution-john-borstlap/

Mere Orthodoxy has a review up of Roger Scruton's book Music as an Art

https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-music-art-roger-scruton/

It's on the long side but not necessarily even as long as some of the pieces that occasionally go up on Mere Orthodoxy.