Richard Bratby

Musical conservatives ought to love identity politics

The only effect of the Great Awokening has been to put engaging melodies, warm harmonies and sprawling Romantic symphonies back at the cutting edge

Robert Nathaniel Dett's Parry-like cantata The Ordering of Moses is being performed in Birmingham and would be considered positively old-fashioned in any other context. Image: History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo 
issue 08 January 2022

It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published a timeline by the industry analyst Andy Doe showing the precise chronology of the decline and fall. Ageing audiences in the 21st century, the gramophone in the 20th, the dangerous new technology of the pianoforte in the 1840s: all, in their time, were considered proof that the rot was terminal.

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