Snippets? Apps? Visuals? Why classical music should stop trying to be pop

Classical music’s blessing is also its curse: you’ve simply got to pay it attention. Plus: No wonder Rossini was an Olympics hit – he invented disco

If you’re reading this, you too may know the essential power of the music we call classical to chart and change your life. That power of connection and empathy is among the miracles of human creativity, and it’s something that everyone has a right to. That is despite decades of underfunding of music education and the whole sector in this country; despite generations of the astounding innovation of its practitioners being ignored by government after government; despite the ravages of technology companies who would replace human-created music with rights-free AI given half a chance. With all of those pressures, and more, it’s no wonder that classical music is in a psychological state of defensiveness and a perennial struggle for relevance, and ends up trying to do things on terms that are set by the streaming companies and social media, not by the art form or the artists themselves.

Classical’s blessing and curse is that it demands our unmediated attention and our time, making it unfit for purpose in the second quarter of the 21st century. What to do with hour-long symphonies and evening-length operas in a cultural feedback loop of ever-shorter attention spans and a media landscape in thrall to the playlist, the reel, the image, the moment? Who has time for time?

So the question: how to square classical music’s demands for attention in today’s world of algorithmic excess? And no one really knows. Social media engagement is one thing, but it’s how the experience of the classical should respond to the demands of the moment that’s the cause of potential embarrassment and opportunity.

The embarrassment comes in what can all too easily happen when classical music tries to get down with the kids with new formats. Visuals! Apps! Short excerpts instead of whole symphonies! All of which can patronisingly say: we’re just like the pop cultures you love: we’re groovy too! With, er, our public subsidy and private sponsorship and expensive instruments. No. You’re not.

The opportunity is more interesting, and it’s there in such projects as Barokksolistene’s Alehouse Sessions, Britten Sinfonia’s Surround Sound Playlist events, the London Symphony Orchestra’s Half-Six Fix and my BBC Radio 3 colleague Georgia Mann’s Classical DJ events. Most recently, it’s there in the newly launched Classical Mondays at Ronnie Scott’s in London, whose programmes will include Vivaldi, Bach, Astor Piazzolla and Florence Price, acts on the tiny stage will include Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster, the Chineke! Orchestra and Laura van der Heijden.

And even if the repertoire on the opening night felt predictable (Gershwin and Bernstein), the listening culture at Ronnie’s could make it the ideal place for classical programmes that connect the improvisational roots of music by everyone from Bach to Brahms with the jazz traditions that the Soho venue is famous for.

And the listening’s the thing, at Ronnie Scott’s, in concert halls, or on your headphones: whatever else it’s about, that’s what classical music requires. To experience this music’s – and all music’s – transformation and transcendence, you’ve got to give it something that no playlist, critic, influencer, or social media platform can: your time and your attention.

But don’t listen to me: heed the wisdom of John Cage: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then 16. Then 32. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all”. Classical music? #notboringatall.

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Disco dancing with the opera GOATs

Further evidence of that essential non-boringness came on Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, when the gigantic heads of Rossini, Puccini, and Verdi danced to the strains of the Euro-disco classic, Vamos a la Playa, at the San Siro stadium. Given that Rossini invented disco, they should have just used his music: listen to the offbeat strings and drums that pound throughout the Cum Sancto Spiritu fugue from his Petite Messe Solonelle – one of the “sins of my old age”, as Rossini put it – and hear what I mean. And as for the chooons of Verdi and Puccini, which have never needed any apology in Italian culture for being part of everyone’s birthright, they’re popular music in every possible sense. Imagine the same thing happening in Britain: effigies of Britten, Elgar and Purcell rocking out at the opening ceremony of the next games we host? I can’t quite see it. Alas.

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This week Tom has been listening to: the final movement of Gustav Holst’s 1912 Beni Mora: In the Streets of the Ouled Nails, in which Holst creates a non-exoticised treatment of a tune he heard in Algeria. He repeats it 163 times in about seven minutes; before Ravel’s Boléro, before Terry Riley and Philip Glass, there was Beni Mora. Listen in wonder and astonishment.