> On Aug 27, 2020, at 8:58 AM, Is Milse Póg <ishdai...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I am a young amateur lute player (just 21), so I guess I am a part of > the next generation of players. I think the lute will continue to be > played for the foreseeable future, since there's always someone strange > enough to fall in love with the lute's music and sound, but it's sad to > see little to no young people in ancient music and classical music > concerts in general. Perhaps it has to do with the distance that has > grown between contemporary composers and the general population, the > former usually earning their bread through the academia.
It has to do with classical music being a taste that listeners tend to acquire as they get older. Old listeners are replaced with lots of middle-aged listeners, and not so many young ones. Alarms about the “graying of the classical audience” have been sounded for decades, and in the USA probably peaked in 1988. The general manager of the public classical music station in Los Angeles came back from the Audience 88 conference that year convinced that classical music was dying and he had to wean the station away from it. He was gone within a year or so. The station was was playing Satie, Rossini and Beethoven this morning. It reminds me of the line in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the galactic emperor is “nearly dead and has been for centuries." To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
