Classical Revival Music Trends Seem To Be Headed Toward Traditional Sounds

Sensing a huge untapped market in baby boomers looking beyond rock, publishers and producers are scrambling to bring classical music to the masses.

They are pumping out classical CDs that come with primers, new magazines for amateur classical fans, books and videos that make learning about “serious” music fun, pre-concert lectures to educate people on what they’re about to hear.

Even Hollywood might be banking on a classical boom: This month, “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” a Richard Dreyfuss movie about a passionately dedicated music teacher, will open. This follows 1995’s “Immortal Beloved,” about Beethoven, and the successful 1990 TV special “The Three Tenors,” whose spinoff videos and CDs have chalked up more than $12 million in worldwide sales.

“We’re after the 35- to 55-year-olds who are bored with their Michael Bolton records and want something meatier,” says Bob Cannon, editor of TuTTi, a hip new classical-music magazine out of Coconut Grove, Fla.

The Catch-22 is: The boomers comprise a generation raised without knowing much about classical music. So the marketing is geared to educating them. It’s a trend many people hope will trickle down into the schools, preventing yet another generation’s passing through life without benefit of the Three B’s - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

“Neglect of the arts in our schools has lost two generations for classical music and we’re on the way to losing a third,” says Martin Bookspan, PBS’ “Live From Lincoln Center” host and a classical-music commentator for four decades.

The engine powering the appreciation trend is clearly the small but mighty CD.

“We’re witnessing the influence of interactive CD-ROM technology on editors looking for new ways to move books and magazines out of their traditional parameters,” says Mary Anne Lynch, a senior editor at Macmillan.

Some classical magazines, in fact, are so obsessed with luring the thirtysomethings weaned on pop that not only do they stress snappy writing and lavish color layouts, they enclose a CD with every issue.

One big appreciation push in the past three months has come from publishing giants Simon & Schuster and Harper/Collins, who have issued competing CD-and-book primers called “CD-Bs.” These are CD-sized booklets, complete with CDs that can be programmed to replay the musical examples you’re reading about in the texts. You are guided, movement-by-movement, through the music.

Explaining the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Harper/Collins’ “Play by Play” notes: ” … the development (section) is quite short, less than two minutes out of a total of 13.5. It begins (Track 4, 5:14) with a variation on (theme) “A” with the lowest brass sounding a series of oddly dissonant sustained notes, like foghorns through the mist (Track 4, 5:23) …”

There’s undeniably a lot of parsing detail, but after first listening to the work in one or two sweeps, you can go back and dig into it, focusing intently on details and sections that interest you, guided by the CD player’s digital clock.

“CD-Bs are low-tech - they don’t even involve interactive CD-ROM, so we think they’re ideal crossover products for chain bookstores like Borders that sell both music and books,” says Harper/Collins’ Clayton Carlson, publisher of “Play by Play.”

Despite the accent on tutoring adults, children are not being neglected. “We do intend to market these products also to educational institutions and hope they catch on in the schools,” Carlson says.

Theatrix, a California CD-ROM software producer, has created a sophisticated new program with New York’s famed Juilliard School. Children 9 and older learn basic composing skills while exploring a cartoon castle complete with evil gnome and fire-breathing dragon.

This boost for the classics from publishers comes at a critical moment when music education in most U.S. schools is at a low.

“Music programs, like all arts programs in our schools, have been decimated,” says John Mahlmann, executive director of the National Music Educators Conference, an organization with 65,000 members headquartered in Washington. “In Los Angeles, two decades ago there was one music teacher for 750 students; today there’s just one for 4,500.”

This despite a new study by The College Board, which administers university entrance exams, that shows students who take music and arts courses over a two-year period score more than 20 points higher on the SAT.

“The lack of education about just great American folk music and songs in schools today amounts to a kind of cultural disenfranchisement,” says Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of Miami’s New World Symphony. “If kids grow up and only know music with a lot of back beat, a Beatles tune or two, and maybe a jazz tune - if it’s being used in a television show - they won’t know much about their cultural heritage.”

The decline in U.S. music education has become so acute it has attracted Hollywood’s attention. Screenwriter Patrick Sheane Duncan, who created “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” the new movie about a music teacher, says he got the idea when he heard on his car radio that California Gov. Pete Wilson was about to slash school arts programs.

“Political leaders,” says Duncan, “need to realize that the ‘Three B’s‘ are just as important as the Three R’s.”

Until this renaissance, the commercial sector’s interest in classical music has been tepid and dispiriting, says PBS’ Bookspan. “Viewers today forget there once were variety shows on all the major TV channels that exposed people to classical music. Itzhak Perlman made his U.S. debut on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ NBC staged, even commissioned, TV operas, and there were ‘The Voice of Firestone’ and ‘The Bell Telephone Hour.’ Now there’s only PBS, unless you buy cable.”

New York conductor Walter Damrosch pioneered the airwaves with his “Music Appreciation Hour” on NBC radio from 1928 to 1942. He reached 7 million students in 70,000 schools and 3 to 4 million adults weekly. The same network created the NBC Symphony Orchestra for Arturo Toscanini, an American musical icon.

Leonard Bernstein brought a new dimension to mass teaching of the classics with his imaginative “Omnibus” TV shows and “Young People’s Concerts” for CBS in the 1950s and ‘60s. But though the shows were released on VHS videos two years ago by Sony and are often telecast in Europe, oddly, they have not been shown yet in the States.

With all the classical music scene had going for it then, what happened? To a certain extent, personal idealism, which led to big network interest in the first place, seems to have dwindled. NBC got into the music appreciation business in the ‘30s largely because its powerful head, David Sarnoff, liked good music and actively supported putting Toscanini on the air, which created a ripple effect for music appreciation in the broadcasting industry.

But a “bottom-line” mentality has taken hold widely during recent decades; classical music in the recording industry and book markets brings in a financial return of about 10 percent, whereas pop brings 70 to 100 percent.

Conductor Thomas looks at it this way: “It’s clear that being musically literate causes you to be a more civilized person. It sensitizes you to different centuries and societies, and that goes into the mix of developing your own level of compassion and understanding. If we lose that, where are we?”