Sandow: Classical music era ending

Greg Sandow has been putting up a series of posts on why he believes "the classical music era may be ending," including statistics on the aging and disappearance of the audience, the financial crisis at institutions such as our major orchestras and changes in the culture. He seems to see a shift in the classical music establishment similar to what happened to jazz in the 1940s, when the big bands largely went away and jazz lost much of its mass audience.

More evidence for such a shift: Phillip Bush notes in a posting late last year that no matter what is happening to the big, expensive orchestras, small groups are prospering. "But whatever your view is on the proper role of the American orchestra in the 21st century, it is undeniable that at the moment I write these words, in the United States today we are truly living in a golden age of the string quartet as a professional music entity. Never before have so many quartets made a decent-to-good living in this country, and never before have so many quartets existed who play at such a high technical and artistic level."