The Classical Underground
(written 2010, revised 2021)
I’m having a ball reading my old blog posts. This one below is from around 2010. It basically says that Twitter is cool and has lots of classical music fans on it. I think that is still true but now, 11 years later, no one is embarrassed to say they love classical music, or country music, or Iberian, Estonian, Gospel, jazz, musical theatre. The world has opened up so much in this time of the selfie and Covid lockdown. I believe Covid has made us more courageous. If the world is ending, we want to go out being honest, kind, loving one another – or adversely doing the opposite, I guess too. Now, everyone can find like-minded fans on the social media platform of their choice.
I was heartened the other day when I did a search on Twitter for Classical Music and started reading the feeds. The first couple of tweets were what I imagined I’d find, “I’m sick of classical music” and “How do people like it?” My heart sank at first and I almost stopped reading but the next one was by a young kid putting on classical music to do her homework. The next one was saying something like: Don’t tell anyone but I’m loving Madame Butterfly! Another lady said, Is it too late to start learning classical singing? It went on and on. There were literally hundreds of tweets in favor of classical music; most of them were embarrassed to admit it! In secret people are listening to and/or wishing to perform classical music! Hardly any of them were by classical musicians themselves. One of the posts sent me to the blog of Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, called “The Rest is Noise.” At the end of that blog he wrote, “As I said at a Chamber Music America conference a few years ago, classical music is, in a strange way, the new underground.” I’m starting to agree.
Thank god I started to tweet! I tweeted happily to those underground classical music lovers. Classical musicians can feel so isolated, so unloved. But there, in secret, in an underground community of technical geek tweeters, classical musicians are loved! Alex Ross said that no one is forcing us to listen to classical music like they are forcing us to listen to pop. They, the advertising establishment, have told us what to listen to and we have obliged. Still, when a person needs connection to his or her own higher self, he or she may turn to classical music. All alone, in the privacy of his own little corner in his own little room, he turns to Clara Schumann or Lucy Simon for solace, for calm, for sanity.
There are so many implications in this amazing discovery. Number one: Classical Music is not dead as so many pundits keep postulating! Number two: Classical musicians need to tweet. I couldn’t find many people, real classical artists on Twitter and almost no opera singers. It would be a great way to find underground fans and to talk with the real music lovers! Number three: It is a brave new world out there for all of us. The online world has been strange and scary for me too but that is where our fans are so we’d all better take the red pill (Matrix) and dive right in.
