Quel Dommage!

The sounds of a dying tradition are painful, particularly if the tradition’s value is still so apparent, at least to the mourners, and still so vibrant to a wide number of sympathizers. Those melancholic strains can sometimes be sensed only on the edge of awareness, sounding like faint drones, heard only in moments of silence. But they are all the more distressing if the imminent demise seems a result of previous carelessness or willful neglect.
That is how I often think of the Western art-music tradition — the classical tradition — these days, and though I once tended to whine about its problems with cranky optimism, now even a stunning performance seems like a spray of flowers at a funeral.
O.K., this is a bit too melodramatic. There is no need after all to act like an extra in “A Song to Remember,” or any other cinematic biopic from an era when names like Chopin or Beethoven could still command box-office attention, an era when émigré film-score composers imported the symphonic tradition into Hollywood.
I also don’t idealize the idolatry that once enshrined the long 19th century of music (roughly 1785-1915) that forms the heart of the Western art-music tradition. But it is astonishing how little is now sensed about what might well be lost with it. And traditions do come to an end. The reading of ancient Greek and Latin — once the center of an educated person’s life — now seems as rarefied as the cultivation of exotic orchids.
The title of Lawrence Kramer’s new book, in fact, is exactly right: “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California). It is the kind of title that would not have been used a generation ago, when debates about the musical scene might have involved titles more like “Why Contemporary Composers Don’t Matter” or “Why Audiences Are Stuck in the Past.”