Last night I went to a concert of golden classics – pieces like the Toreador song from Carmen that have the audience humming along. And I started wondering – why, when I go to a classical music concert, do I so rarely hear something written by a living composer? I can think of three explanations.
1. The dead composers are the great composers – the music of Bach or Mozart is simply better than that of living composers. I don't know enough about music to evaluate this argument.
2. The dead composers are the familiar composers, and audiences prefer familiar music. This argument has an element of truth – and if you don't believe this, turn on your radio and count the number of stations playing classic rock. But it begs the question, why are the dead composers the familiar composers in the first place? It could be because…
3. The dead composers are the cheap composers. Mozart and Bizet demand no copyright payments, something that cannot be said of Philip Glass or Andrew Lloyd Weber. And when you're trying to keep an arts organization afloat, every cent counts.
The economic argument would be easy enough, in principle, to test. In Canada, copyright protection ends 50 years after an author's death. So, for example, George Gershwin died in 1937, and so the copyright to his works expired in 1987. If copyright matters, then there should have been a significant increase in the number of Gershwin pieces appearing on concert programs around 1987, joining the works of Gustav Holst (1984). Stravinsky should start appearing around 2021, Aaron Copeland not until 2040. These projections are based on Canadian copyright law; international variations in copyright legislation would provide another useful source of variation.
Has anyone tested this hypothesis, or have any sense of the probability that it would, in fact, be supported by a more rigorous investigation?
I'll be meditating on this Sunday, at the national art centre orchestra's (free) Gershwin concert…
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
“And I started wondering – why, when I go to a classical music concert, do I so rarely hear something written by a living composer? I can think of three explanations.”
Another economic factor is the size of the orchestra. Today it is hard to get a gate that will support a big band like those in the Swing Era. Three or four performers is about the limit, without having a star or presenting a musical or making a movie sound track. John Williams, Andrew Lloyd Weber, and The Beatles are the heirs of Liszt and Wagner, Bach and Mozart. It isn’t just their popularity, their music is similar. For modern, post-Romantic orchestral music check out some of the scores to black and white movies. But that music never became popular. Who does not know the Indiana Jones theme, by Williams? OTOH, who hums Ernst Toch?
I think there’s another reason. It’s very expensive today to assemble a full orchestra to practice and play a piece of music. It was a lot cheaper in Bach’s day. (See Baumol’s law.) I’ve always hoped that technology would advance to the point where composers could easily have their music played through some sort of software that would fully reproduce a full orchestra. When that day comes, I think you will see a revival or classical composition.
Hmmm. It would be easy to make the Indiana Jones theme sound like Mozart. Just put in a little ornamentation, right? Instead of dah-du-dot-Dah, dah-du-Dah, make it dah-du-dot-dadadadadah, dad-du-dot-dadadadadah. 😉
Or, 1a: Survivorship bias means that we only listen to those dead composers who were really good. The music of mediocre dead composers has not survived.
(Being dead is also a good career move for many composers. Jim Morrison etc. Watched “Control” last night, and “Joy Division” documentary the night before. Wonder what Ian Curtis would be doing now, if he were still alive?)
On the other hand, there are probably just a lot more dead composers (classical or in total) than there are living composers. In fact, it’s sort of surprising that we listen to as many living composers as we do. Given that far more music has been produced (and is being produced) than any individual can ever listen to, why do we want any new stuff?
The biggest market for music is probably teenagers. I can’t help thinking that the main purpose of music (both on the supply and the demand side) is for social status. Or, to put it crudely, to help people get laid.
(For those like me who had to Google “Baumol’s Law”: it means that if there’s no productivity change for good A, but rising productivity in good B, then the price of good A will rise relative to good B over time.)
I don’t think Baumol’s Law is a good explanation here. After all, the reason good A is getting more expensive in terms of good B is because there’s more of good B around and thus it’s valued relatively less, the relative value of A must be going up with it’s price (MRS = ratio of marginal utilities). After all, it could equivalently be stated that the price of B falls relative to the price of A.
Furthermore, as we have a greater abundance of other stuff it should in fact be easier to free up the resources to have talented people spend their time composing (easier for society to feed, clothe and shelter them with all the surplus food, clothes and shelter we have, that’s how we manage to have lots of engineers).
I think the selection bias is a good point, you only hear the best ones from past generations. On the other hand, I’d imagine that one reason those with compsing talent today might not be as likely to actually be composing is the plethora of substitute pastimes and/or professions.
Yeah it is strange. Many Classical Rock artists from the 1960s and 1907s are still alive today. What’s less than half a century among friends?
I always thought live classical music was an expensive signalling device but what do I know?
Great comments.
Changing technology – instruments that didn’t exist 150 years ago, changing amplification technology, relative wages of musicians etc – would explain why a lot of the music that’s written today is written for a quartet of guitar, bass guitar, keyboards and drum. But it doesn’t explain why the music that is written for more traditional orchestral groups, e.g. John Williams’ work, doesn’t get played.
So a more refined way of stating the hypothesis in this post is: the reason Wagner is played more than Williams is that Williams’s work is more expensive to play.
Perhaps, as Nick suggests, it’s social status. Somehow saying “we took in Tchaikovsky’s 1812” sounds much classier than “we took in Williams’ March of Darth Vadar.” It signals erudition, as opposed Friday nights spent watching Star Wars on Space. Even if you’re one of the generation whose knowledge of classical music was gained watching the Bugs Bunny Road Runner hour.
I don’t think the explanation that there’s more dead composers than living one works – there’s 6 billion or so people alive today, add in still copyrighted people who haven’t been dead for 50 years yet and you’ll get a few more billion. If you compare that to the number of people who lived between 1400 and 1950 the numbers are not that far off – especially once you eliminate people who didn’t have access to instruments, pens or paper.
On Ian Curtis – U2?
I had forgotten about population growth. Plus higher real incomes, meaning we can afford to have a higher percentage of the population working as composers? Yep. Maybe as many alive (or alive minus 50) than dead plus 50.
“On Ian Curtis – U2?” Oh dear. Don’t let D read this. Joy division. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Curtis
Nick, Peter Hook apparently said that if Ian Curtis had lived he would have become U2. Me, I don’t think he had the mental toughness (well, that’s pretty obvious). There’s actually a blog to be written on the movie 24 Hour Party People, factory records and the effect of ecstasy on the economics of music.
U2? Yeah, I don’t see it either. Becoming the next Morrissey (or more accurate, Morrissey before there was a Morrissey) maybe.
Any fans of Porcupine Tree, Sigur Ros, King Crimson and similar on the board? All alive and kicking. Perhaps an acquired taste.
Frances: sorry. I misunderstood the U2 comment. See it now. Dunno though.
King Crimson still going? Wike says they are (more or less). I must have been 15 when I first heard them. I assumed they were long gone.
Oh dear, we are wandering off-topic.
A few additional possible explanations:
– Conductors are risk-averse. They choose pieces by old dead guys that have been performed a bajillion times because they know it will go over OK with the audience. Going with a new piece is much more risky — the benefits are great if you can debut a new piece that takes off, but if the song bombs then you might lose patrons.
– Old music is cheaper to produce. If you’re pulling out a famous piece by Bach, Beethoven or Mozart, your orchestra is going to be pretty familiar with it and not require much practice time. If it’s a piece no one has ever seen before, it will require significantly more practice time. Similarly, time costs are less for the conductor when choosing a piece; they know the repertoires of the famous composers, whereas finding a good piece out of the more unknown pool of modern composers could take more research time.
– Another take on explanation 1: all the good stuff has been written. Or put another way, decreasing marginal productivity from composers over time. In a lot of industries, you have rapid improvements in a short period of time, followed by very small improvements thereafter. It could just be that modern composers are having difficulty coming up with pieces that are significantly better than what’s already been produced.
And Nick, you forgot to take into account not only population growth but life expectancy gains.
Bruce Bartlett: “I’ve always hoped that technology would advance to the point where composers could easily have their music played through some sort of software that would fully reproduce a full orchestra. When that day comes, I think you will see a revival or classical composition.”
There is plenty of classical composition around today. We just do not listen to it live. Much of it is electronic from the start. It may not fully reproduce the orchestral sound, but neither did the Romantic orchestra reproduce the sound of the Classical orchestra. Nor did the Big Band reproduce the sound of the orchestra. Babbitt loved the synthesizer, because he could control the sound better than having humans play his scores. Orchestras are expensive.
From Frank Zappa: A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
So he is making the argument for synthesizers.
The economics of music have been winner take all for a long time, phonographs were almost the first scaling technology (telegraph was first, which launched the grain traders).
Plus there is the whole fashion thing. I don’t really get fashion. I’m not sure what analytical tools you need to cope with it.
Six billion, give or take a few hundred million, are jealous.
1 a is the answer. Or as Bernard Levin (pbuh, RIP) put it, “the sieve of history”.
It’s a corollary of Sturgeon’s Law, that 90% of everything is crap. But give it a century or two and we can sieve the good stuff from the crap. Which is why we play a lot of Mozart these days, Salieri not so much.
I’m learning new stuff every day: Sturgeon’s Law; that Theodore Sturgeon was not an invention of Kurt Vonnegut. (Before I went to America, I used to think that Holiday Inns were also an invention of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction.)
Excellent points on the cost of figuring out what’s good, the cost of learning new music, recording v. performance and electronically-assisted classical composition.
All of these things could be true, and copyright laws might still might influence what’s played – surely on an econ blog it should be easy to persuade people that relative prices matter?
Frances – I think there’s a different economic interpretation. The ‘golden composers’ depended on the market to support themselves. The composers of the classical era, unlike the previous Baroque, relied on subscription concerts and music publishers at least as much as they did on aristocratic patronage, if not more. By the early Romantic period, composers wrote mostly for the market, something that continued through the early to mid twentieth century. Contemporary composers receive grants from funding agencies such as the Canada Council and so write music that will appeal to the academic musicians found on such funding bodies. The same is true in Europe and the US. They don’t really write for a mass public. Many will tell you they write ‘music for the eye, not the ear’. Composers who rely on the market, such as film composers, write tuneful music that people enjoy listening to. Twelve-tone music, following Schoenberg, never found a listening public, but is alive and well in the academy even today.
Vivek, interesting thought – so that’s hypothesis 1b – the listenable composers (with the exception of John Williams and other similar who write for the mass market of film scores etc) are the dead composers. Because there’s no incentive to write listenable music for live performance by orchestras any more since – as others have pointed out – orchestras are a relatively high cost form of musical production.
Frances – That was my attempt to give an economistic aka philistine explanation. I think there is a cultural explanation (that may have an economic element as well) – classical music in the West has become essentially a curatorial form – music by dead white European males played by living white Europeans (and a few Asians) to an audience of live (sometimes just barely, but usually there’s a pulse) white Europeans, Asians, and a few crackpot Indians like me. And for a curatorial form something new just isn’t Kosher. You go to a contemporary art gallery for new art, but at an art museum like the NGC you want to see the ‘old masters’. Perhaps I should quote Gramsci here on morbid forms emerging or some such to solidify my po-mo, po-co, or other credentials?
Frances: yes, I agree that copyright probably has an effect too. Although collecting that data could be onerous, it’s definitely a testable hypothesis that would be interesting to test.
Vivek Dehejia: “The ‘golden composers’ depended on the market to support themselves. The composers of the classical era, unlike the previous Baroque, relied on subscription concerts and music publishers at least as much as they did on aristocratic patronage, if not more. By the early Romantic period, composers wrote mostly for the market, something that continued through the early to mid twentieth century.”
I think that the role of the market is a bit exaggerated. Wagner was the first composer who made a living without patronage, and he almost starved. He was a late Romantic composer. Liszt, another late Romantic, did well, but he was a very popular performer, as well as composer.
Min: Better check your facts. George Frideric Handel was a Baroque era composer who made a good living in 18th century London as a freelance musician, i.e., relying on the market, not royal or aristocratic patronage (his “Royal Fireworks Music” being a notable exception). True, his contemporary J.S. Bach relied largely on aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage, so for that time period Handel was an exception, and London was different from the Continent. Fast forward to the end of the century. W.A. Mozart survived on a mixture of patronage and the market: his “Academies” at which new piano concertos were premiered, and for which he sold subscriptions, contributed significantly to his livelihood. Ditto for Haydn and Beethoven, and on into the Romantic period. By the way, Wagner isn’t a good example for your thesis – since he relied heavily on the patronage of the King of Bavaria and other aristocratic patrons, so in some ways was a throwback.
@Vivek: The mix of patronage and market was precisely what I had in mind. Perhaps I was misled by your opening statement.
Actually, there are lots of classical music concerts that feature the music of living – or relatively recently dead – composers: they are the Pops concerts, and for many orchestras the Pops concerts are one of the most reliable revenue lines in their Statement of Accounts. If you can fill the seats in the concert halls, the cost of performance rights is absolutely not a consideration at the margin. Those concerts are full of Broadway and jazz standards that often meet the requirements of the classical canon – e.g., Berstein’s ‘West Side Story’, or works by Sondheim, or much of the output of Lloyd-Webber, etc. Also, smaller ensembles will often program contemporary classical music that is not ‘scary’ – such as the program of tangos that 13 Strings put on a couple of years back. And I think that it’s quite different when one looks at what is going on in the choral music world: one often hears composers such as Harry Somers programmed, and my sense is that if one is hearing a chamber choir performing, it will very frequently be the case that the programme will include work by a living composer.
What one hears much less frequently is the ‘orchestral art music’…but I think that this is mainly because the audiences just aren’t there, and you can’t afford to program music that will drive away subscribers. I also second the observation that a lot of contemporary music is often very expensive for orchestras to perform, because it requires them to hire lots of extra musicians, which they can’t afford to do. Smaller orchestras, such as the NACO, can’t even afford to perform the big romantic works, because this requires far too many extra musicians: if you look through their programming, you’ll notice that it is very carefully organised so that when they are hiring lots of extra musicians for one of the bigger works, they use those same musicians to do some other expensive pieces. (The cost of hiring one extra musician for an orchestra such as NACO is probably not very different from the cost of performance rights for a piece by a contemporary composer.)
Personally, I find that the current crop of contemporary composers are writing music that is a lot more accessible to most ears than what was being written twenty or thirty years ago…but when patrons see a name on the list that they aren’t familiar with, they often decide to turn in their tickets in favour of something more familiar. Whereas I have to admit that when a concert has started with a contemporary work, and then moves on to Haydn or Schubert, I am often bored stiff by the golden oldies!
Great comments Vicky – thanks so much!
I think it’s survivorship bias, and it’s also visible in Classic Rock. There was a lot of stuff on hit radio in the 1970s that is gone now. Only the Zeppelin remains.
re: Porcupine Tree and King Crimson… love em. Rush is still going strong too (two sold out shows in Toronto a few weeks ago…20x the number of people in the Roy Thomson hall).