The New Yorker informs us that the world’s greatest cellist brought his music to a poor neighborhood, Anacostia, in Washington, D.C. It went about like you’d expect. Yo-Yo Ma
. . . got out his cello to illustrate the point. First, he played a bit of Mark O’Connor’s wistful ‘Appalachia Waltz.’ It was not what the students needed at the end of a long school day. When Ma asked, ‘How long did that feel?,’ the skeptic answered, ‘Too long.’ Students guessed that the piece had lasted fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five minutes. In fact, it had been a little over a minute.
A family member who once worked for a symphony magazine recalls that the classical music world would expend considerable energy on the question of how to attract young people to performances. Her answer: “Wait for them to get old.” It’s no secret that classical primarily appeals to older, better educated, more affluent people. Luckily, we aren’t going to run out of any of those groups. Efforts to interest lots of young people in the cello are not going to be terribly fruitful, but some day they’ll be old. Maybe someday they’ll even find high culture to be worth pursuing. Classical is aspirational. It has snob appeal. It need not go out in search of new domains to conquer. It can in regal splendor wait for the audience to come to it.