Blaming The Audience

If classical music is really dying, or at least becoming a culturally irrelevant fringe entertainment, we have no one to blame but ourselves, writes Bernard Holland. “An implicit contract has been signed but is not necessarily being honored. It states that if I understand a piece of music, I’m likely to like it, too. This is not true. No amount of experience and analysis can by itself induce the stab of communication between art and its beholder… The consumer, it would seem, bears the fault. The product is rarely held accountable.”