Post-Pandemic Anxieties: Contemplating the Prospect that Classical Music Culture Might Disappear

Extract

Readers of this issue of the Musical Quarterly will encounter a striking and perhaps prescient statement by the late Reinhold Brinkmann, the eminent historian and musicologist, taken from an interview conducted some twenty years ago, in 2001: “Now, I must say as a historian that we know that the classical music culture is approximately 250 years old … and it is not a frightening thought for me as a historian that it may disappear. This could be something completely normal. It could very well be that this kind of musical culture will no longer exist in a hundred years, that a new generation will develop entirely new things about which we cannot know anything right now. Perhaps at the moment we stand at the beginning of this process and later it will look as if only a small elitist group were fretting about the old canon, while the mass of those interested in culture have moved into other areas.”