Listen to This. Alex Ross

they make a decent living.

      There had been a major change in music’s social function. In the Gilded Age, classical music had given the white middle-class aristocratic airs; in the Jazz Age, popular music helped the same class to feel down and dirty. A silly 1934 movie titled Murder at the Vanities sums up the genre wars of the era. It is set behind the scenes of a Ziegfeld-style variety show, one of whose numbers features a performer, dressed vaguely as Liszt, who plays the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Duke Ellington and his band keep popping up in the background, throwing in insolent riffs. Eventually, they drive away the effete classical musicians and play a takeoff called Ebony Rhapsody: “It’s got those licks, it’s got those tricks / That Mr. Liszt would never recognize.” Liszt comes back with a submachine gun and mows down the band. The metaphor wasn’t so far off the mark. Although many in the classical world spoke in praise of jazz—Ernest Ansermet lobbed the word “genius” at Sidney Bechet—others fired verbal machine guns in an effort to slay the upstart. Daniel Gregory Mason, the man who wanted more throwing of mats, was one of the worst offenders, calling jazz a “sick moment in the progress of the human soul.”

      The contempt flowed both ways. The culture of jazz, at least in its white precincts, was much affected by that inverse snobbery which endlessly congratulates itself on escaping the elite. (The singer in Murder at the Vanities brags of finding a rhythm that Liszt, of all people, could never comprehend: what a snob.) Classical music became a foil against which popular musicians could assert their cool. Composers, in turn, were irritated by the implication that they constituted some sort of moneyed behemoth. They were the ones who were feeling bulldozed by the power of cash. Such was the complaint made by Lawrence Gilman, of The New York Tribune, after Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall. Gilman didn’t like the Rhapsody, but what really incensed him was Whiteman’s suggestion that jazz was an underdog fighting against symphony bigwigs. “It is the Palais Royalists who represent the conservative, reactionary, respectable elements in the music of today,” Gilman wrote. “They are the aristocrats, the Top Dogs, of contemporary music. They are the Shining Ones, the commanders of huge salaries, the friends of Royalty.” The facts back Gilman up. By the late twenties, Gershwin was making at least a hundred thousand dollars a year. In 1938, Copland, one of the best-regarded composers of American concert music, had $6.93 in his checking account.

      Despite the ever-cresting surge of jazz and pop, classical music retained a high profile in America as the era of depression and war gave way to the Cold War and its attendant boom economy. Money was poured into the performing arts, partly in an effort to out-culture the Russians. Grants from the Ford Foundation led to a proliferation of musical ensembles, orchestras in particular; where there had been dozens of professional orchestras, now there were hundreds. Multipurpose performing-arts centers went up in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., their façades evoking sleek secular cathedrals. In the early years of the LP era, classical music made quite a bit of money for the major record labels; Decca ended up selling eighteen million copies of its pioneering studio recording of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.

      The real reckoning arrived in the 1960s, when classical music made a decisive and seemingly permanent move to the cultural margin. The advent of Dylan and the Beatles again jeopardized classical music’s claim on “high art,” and this time an entire generation seemed to come of age without identifying strongly with the classical repertory. The audience grayed, attendance declined. According to one report, the classical share of total record sales dropped from 20 percent to 5 percent in the course of the decade. The music now occupies somewhere around 2 percent of the market. In an ironic twist of fate, jazz now has about the same slice of the mass audience, leaving Duke Ellington in the same league as Mr. Liszt.

      All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a funny sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period: Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Second, the era of bourgeois pomp: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into “Salt Peanuts”). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis’s attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effort comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream.

      The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high modernists, rebelling against the bloated Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? In the first years of the new century there was a lot of Stage 5 neoclassicism going on in what remained of rock. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, the White Stripes, and various other bands harked back to some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Many used old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was quoted as saying, “I intentionally won’t use something I haven’t heard before.” A White Stripes record carried this Luddite notice: “No computers were used during the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record.”

      The original classical music is left in an interesting limbo. It has a chance to be liberated from the social clichés that currently pin it down. It is no longer the one form carrying the burden of the past. Moreover, it has the advantage of being able to sustain constant reinterpretation, to renew itself with each repetition. The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.

      In 2003, I bought an iPod and began filling it with music from my CD collection. The device, fairly new at the time, had a setting called Shuffle, which skipped randomly from one track to another. There was something seductive about surrendering control and letting the iPod decide what to play next. The little machine went crashing through barriers of style in ways that changed how I listened. One day it jumped from the furious crescendo of “Dance of the Earth,” ending Part I of The Rite of Spring, into the hot jam of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.” The first became a gigantic upbeat to the second. On the iPod, music is freed from all fatuous self-definitions and delusions of significance. There are no record jackets depicting bombastic Alpine scenes or celebrity conductors with a family resemblance to Rudolf Hess. Instead, as Berg once remarked to Gershwin, music is music.

      A lot of younger listeners seem to think the way the iPod thinks. They are no longer so invested in a single genre, one that promises to mold their being or save the world. This gives the lifestyle disaster called “classical music” an interesting new opportunity. The playlists of smart rock fans often include a few twentieth-century classical pieces. Mavens of electronic dance music mention among their heroes Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. Likewise, younger composers are writing music heavily influenced by minimalism and its electronic spawn, even as they hold on to the European tradition. And new generations of musicians are dropping the mask of Olympian detachment (silent, stone-faced musician walks onstage and begins to play). They’ve started mothballing the tuxedo, explaining the music from the stage, using lighting and backdrops to produce a mildly theatrical happening. They are finding allies in the “popular” world, some of whom care less about sales and fees than the average star violinist. The borders between “popular” and “classical” are becoming creatively blurred, and only the Johann Forkels in each camp see a problem.

      The strange thing about classical music in America today is that large numbers of people seem aware of it, curious about it, even knowledgeable about it, but they do not go to concerts. The people who try to market orchestras have a name for these annoying phantoms: they are “culturally aware non-attenders,” to quote an article in the magazine Symphony. I know the type; most of my friends are case studies. They know the principal names and periods of musical history: they have read what Nietzsche wrote about Wagner, they can pick Stravinsky out of a lineup, they own