Recently, I stumbled upon a YouTube video that was suggested to me, entitled “No Seriously, Classical Music is Dying”. The video was not particularly viral, nor the author is massively followed. The content was created by someone who actually has a bond with classical music but feels frustrated that it needs artificial means to survive.
She has some interesting points of view; nonetheless, we should dive into the arguments where the concern is raised. For example, why is it not popular or accessible, and why do patrons need to keep classical music alive, and why don’t they let it die because of “elitism”? All of those points are valid, but they don’t hold if you take into consideration the history of music itself: classical music always relied on the elite to survive and to be developed, as the universities and intellectuals of the world also did. Those things don’t rely on popularity for full development; they need a few people with money and vision. The best example of that was made in the Renaissance by the Medici. They not only supported music but also art in general, and because of people like them, we could further develop culture and science.
If we let the mob decide whether one style of music should live or die, we would end up regressing toward the most primitive forms of musical expression. This isn’t a moral judgment about anyone’s taste—it’s a structural observation about how cultural evolution works. When accessibility becomes the only criterion for survival, music optimizes for instant comprehension. But instant comprehension favors the familiar, the repetitive, the immediately graspable. Over generations, this creates a ratchet effect: each iteration must be understandable by ears trained on the previous iteration’s simplicity. There’s no mechanism for complexity to enter the system—no pathway for forms that reward sustained attention, no infrastructure for music that reveals itself gradually.
We can already observe this trend in contemporary popular music: the diminishing importance of melody, the simplification of harmonic structure, the reduction of song length, and even the decrease in instrumental variety. These aren’t accidents but adaptations to an attention economy that penalizes anything requiring more than a first listen to appreciate. The issue isn’t that simpler music is morally inferior—it’s that if we dismantle every institutional support for complex forms, we don’t get democratic complexity. We get only what survives without cultural scaffolding, without mentorship, without the time to develop ears capable of hearing what isn’t immediately obvious.
If we just “let classical music die,” we are letting go of music’s capacity for depth. We’re not preserving this tradition because it’s “better” in some absolute sense, but because it represents a pathway to experiences that require preparation—earned transcendence, revelation through training. That’s not an elitist movement; that’s a humanist movement. It’s defending the human capacity for growth, for the delayed gratification of understanding something that once seemed opaque. Without preserving forms that demand apprenticeship, we eliminate the very possibility of such transformations.
The Myth of Classical Music’s Popular Past
When people claim that classical music is “dying,” they usually imagine a golden age when it was popular, when concert halls were packed and symphonies were a shared civic ritual. But this is a modern projection. Classical music was never popular in the democratic sense — it was always the music of a minority, sustained by institutions, courts, and patrons who could afford the space and leisure to cultivate listening. Its apparent exclusivity was not an accident of privilege but the necessary condition for its depth. Classical music wasn’t accessible; by an unexpected turn of events, it’s more accessible today than it was ages ago.
Roger Scruton would say that beauty requires “disinterested attention” (Kant’s view) — something that cannot arise in a commercial environment where every sound must justify itself by numbers. The salons, chapels, and aristocratic courts of Europe were small, but they were listening communities, bound by reverence rather than market demand. Adorno called this the “autonomy of art”: the right of a form to develop according to its own logic, not the logic of the crowd. What sustained that autonomy was precisely its distance from popularity.
Schopenhauer, who believed music expressed the inner structure of the world itself, saw in this distance something metaphysical: only those freed from the immediate struggle for existence could fully surrender to the Will revealed in sound. Access, therefore, was not simply economic; it was existential — it required quiet, contemplation, and an inner discipline that most of life discourages.
When the public concert finally emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it didn’t democratize classical music in substance, only in form. The bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy, but the function remained the same: a small, cultivated public acting as custodians of a complex art. The present obsession with “accessibility” forgets that every art form that endures does so through apprenticeship — through the few who carry the knowledge for the many. It was during the Romantic period that classical music became more introspective and took center stage. Before that, music was part of something else: a ceremony, a party, liturgy, background noise to anything else.
So yes — classical music was never popular, nor was it meant to be. Its power lies in its resistance to mass consumption. What made it valuable was not its reach but its refinement — the density of form, the intricacy of its inner life, the demand it placed on its listener. To expect it to thrive on the same terms as pop culture is to mistake a cathedral for a shopping mall.
Elitism versus Consumerism
Classical music never asked for a crowd; it asked for a congregation. As Roger Scruton reminds us, beauty is not an opinion but a demand—the demand that we learn to attend. The aesthetics of Classical Music rely on contemplation, not consumerism. Beauty creates obligations: to listen with patience, to refine taste, to make cognitive sacrifices for meaning. Elitism, in this register, is not snobbery but structure: an acknowledgement that some goods require apprenticeship. Adorno, writing from a different angle, calls mass culture production a machinery of regression. The “culture industry” trains the ear to crave the easily repeated and the instantly known. When the ear is trained downward, patronage becomes scandalous and difficulty becomes “elitist.” When the ear is trained upward, patronage appears as what it once was: the practical mechanism by which high forms survive periods of low appetite.
However, some degree of self-judgment among the classical elite must be revised, as pure intellectuality bypassed moral judgment and relativism emerged as a wild card. This prompted the decay of virtuosity, and the beast of emotions was loosened in the scene. Contemporary classical music paid more attention to its form than its content. This is where the sublime lost its place. Even Stravinsky reflected on that when he shifted his compositions towards neoclassicism.
The Medici were not merely pursuing a pastime; they were establishing a symbolic monument (maybe even greater than what they actually envisioned). Scruton is clear: high art grows where there is a conception of the sacred—of things before which we stand, not things we use up. Patronage concentrates resources around the holy so that difficult goods can appear in the world at all: cathedrals, fugues, instruments that require decades to master. Perhaps the sense of death in classical music reflects the refusal of the sacred in this Gestalt.
The Sacred and the Profane
Perhaps what we call the death of classical music is not an aesthetic crisis at all, but a spiritual one. It is the symptom of a civilization that no longer acknowledges the sacred — or rather, that refuses to admit the sacred as a legitimate category of experience.
In the classical tradition, music was never merely entertainment. It was an anamnesis, a remembering of order. From Pythagoras to Bach, sound was bound to number, number to cosmos, cosmos to God. Harmony was not a style; it was a metaphysical statement — that the world had a hidden architecture and that the ear, properly trained, could perceive it. In that sense, every fugue, every symphony was a small enactment of the sacred: form imposing itself upon chaos, proportion rescuing sound from noise. Kant and Hegel were fond of this notion of virtuosity and the sacred, as Rudolf Otto points out, as well as of music as a reflection of the numinous.
Roger Scruton repeatedly insisted that beauty is a “glimpse of the transcendental,” a way for mortal beings to perceive something eternal. To experience the beautiful, in his words, is to stand “in the presence of the sacred without needing theology.” When we lose the sense of the sacred, art loses its vertical axis — its striving beyond itself. It becomes horizontal, functional, flattened to the level of consumption.
Adorno, from a different temperament, diagnosed the same pathology: the “administered world,” where art’s aura decays because meaning itself has been instrumentalized. In such a world, the concert hall becomes just another leisure venue; silence becomes awkward; and transcendence is confused with branding. The sacred — that sense of something before which one stands — becomes alien to the social order, even offensive to it.
Schopenhauer would have seen this as the victory of the Will’s lowest expressions: endless striving, restless distraction. The contemplative dimension of music, which once offered temporary deliverance from the Will, now competes with background noise. The “death” of classical music, therefore, is the death of contemplation — the death of the listener who could still experience music as metaphysical deliverance.
When you write that if we let classical music die, we let music as a whole die, this is what you are really describing: the loss of the sacred gesture itself — the bowing of the soul before form, the recognition that sound can be more than sensation. Classical music’s disappearance would mark not the extinction of a genre but the completion of secularization — the total refusal of transcendence.
The Death of Music
If we acknowledge that Classical Music is dying, we might as well say that music itself is dying. Music became a commodity, and a really worthless one, as the mass production of its production, enhanced by today’s artificial intelligence, makes us lose the connection to what music really is: “The beauty of music is the beauty of the world itself, revealed to the sense of hearing.” (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music).
Somehow, though, music will find its way out of this hyperrealism where nothing satisfies the soul anymore, as the abuse of technology and the market will turn things around and make people cultivate the purity of music created by humans for humans, as a way of transcending the sublime. Or we might head towards a time when people take their auditory version of SOMA and become numb. I rather hope for the opposite.
Core Philosophical Foundations
Roger Scruton – The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Scruton argues that beauty demands “learning to attend” and that music reveals transcendence without theology. His chapter on tonality and meaning is crucial for the “sacred architecture” argument.
Roger Scruton – Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2011) More accessible summary of his aesthetics. The section on “desecration” directly addresses what happens when the sacred dimension is lost.
Theodor Adorno – Philosophy of New Music (1949) His critique of the “culture industry” and defense of art’s autonomy. Warning: dense, but the sections on Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky illuminate the “contemporary classical paid attention to form over content” point.
Theodor Adorno – Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962) More approachable. His typology of listeners (expert, good, culture consumer, emotional, resentment, entertainment, indifferent) maps perfectly onto the accessibility critique.
The Sacred and Music
Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, Book III (1818) The section on music where he argues music expresses the Will itself—the metaphysical foundation for your “music as deliverance from striving” argument.
Rudolf Otto – The Idea of the Holy (1917) Defines the “numinous”—that sense of the sacred you’re invoking. His concept of mysterium tremendum explains why beauty creates obligations, not just preferences.
Cultural Patronage and History
Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) The definitive account of Medici-style patronage. Shows how cultural forms require institutional support, not popularity.
The Crisis of Contemporary Culture
Christopher Lasch – The Revolt of the Elites (1995) Argues that contemporary elites abandoned their custodial role—directly relevant to the point about “pure intellectuality bypassing moral judgment.”
George Steiner – Real Presences (1989) Argues all serious art and literature are predicated on the wager that transcendence exists. When culture loses this wager, art becomes mere commentary. Essential for your sacred/profane section.
On Listening and Attention
Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise (2007) Accessible history of 20th-century music. Shows how classical music’s relationship to audiences transformed.
Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Maps how “cultural capital” works. Helpful in understanding the infrastructure of taste without dismissing it as snobbery.
The Populism Question
José Ortega y Gasset – The Revolt of the Masses (1930) Classic argument that mass society threatens cultural excellence. Controversial, but articulates the concern about “letting the mob decide.”
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America, Volume II, Part I (1840). Chapters on how democracy affects arts and letters. He predicted exactly the tension describing between democratic equality and cultural refinement.
Contemporary Diagnosis
Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism (2009) Short, sharp analysis of how market logic colonizes all cultural space. His concept of “depressive hedonia” (can’t enjoy anything but can’t stop consuming) illuminates the sense of “nothing satisfies the soul” closing.
Jonathan Haidt – The Anxious Generation (2024) On how technology destroyed contemplative capacity in young people. Directly relevant to the “tyranny of immediacy” point. A very popular book by Haidt.
Counterpoints Worth Engaging
Richard Taruskin – The Oxford History of Western Music (2005). A Monumental work that challenges romantic myths about classical music’s autonomy and purity. Reading him would strengthen your argument by forcing you to address his critiques.
Lawrence Levine – Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) shows how the classical/popular distinction is historically constructed, not natural. Engaging with this would make essentialism more defensible.
