This is a cultural about-face worth marking. Once upon a time and long ago, bringing classical music to the airwaves was an image-enhancing operation, a programming decision, in the words of music historian Russell Sanjek, to "win over the custodians of public taste and appease the Federal Communications Commission." These days, it's bad taste even to mention public taste, and the FCC is appeased just by keeping a wardrobe functioning. But in the pre-television era, radio networks didn't just spin classical disks; they routinely featured live symphony orchestras -- "partly for the sake of prestige, partly to convince the people who wanted radio to be more educational that the radio companies themselves were hot for culture," as social historian Frederick Lewis Allen put it.
The effect, Allen wrote, was unprecedented gains in the public's appreciation of classical music, the high-water of which probably came in 1937 when NBC sent a representative to Milan, Italy, to invite Arturo Toscanini to lead a new radio orchestra. And not just any radio orchestra. As music historian Sanjek wrote, NBC "(raided) European and American orchestras to obtain the best first-chair players." Another airwave institution was The NBC Music Appreciation Hour, a show produced between 1928 and 1942 that was heard by as many as 7 million children in some 70,000 schools every week -- "children" who likely make up a sizable chunk of today's aging symphony-going audience.
With the advent of television, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein took up the educational baton, producing 53 installments of "Young People's Concerts." As one chronicler noted, however, "his 'young people' have not musically inculcated their young." Nor have they considered it important to do so. MTV culture aside, the fringe status of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms shouldn't surprise a society that always chooses to teach, say, recycling education over music appreciation. Sure, our kids will know how to dispose of old records and CDs, but they'll never know what's on them. After all, the less you hear, the less you hear. Call it decline, call it a trend -- but don't call it stewardship. Because what the classical fade-out tells us more than anything is that the "custodians of public taste" have left the building.
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