oboeinsight

For too long, classical music has been regarded as the domain of instrumentalists, composers, academic musicologists and, typically, anyone over 40 years old. But while the majority of today’s youth would rather listen to Britney Spears’ greatest hits or watch My Chemical Romance on MTV, the view that young people are completely uninterested in classical music is not just erroneous – it’s simply not grounded in historical reality.

Mozart, widely regarded as one of the greatest classical composers of all time, wrote his first symphony at age eight and was dead by the age of 35. Schubert also died when he was 31, while Chopin famously didn’t live past the age of 39. Moreover, the phenomenon of the castrato in classical music in the 1700s shows that young people haven’t just been interested in classical music throughout the years – they’ve practically been canonised as part of a classical music tradition that, although lost, is not forgotten.

Today’s orchestras, choirs and opera houses are packed with young singers and musicians, many of whom are still in their twenties. Moreover, almost all modern, successful classical musicians will have undergone training from a very young age. Charlotte Church may have made headlines when she released her debut album “Voice of an Angel” in 1998 aged just thirteen, but while her phenomenal mainstream success was not typical, the fact that she was such a young musician in the classical industry was. (RTWT)

Does anyone else see problems in these paragraphs, or am I just a total goof? I’m willing to admit that the many things in this first part of the article that bug me might be my problem. But I do wonder. So do tell ….