It’s 2025, and the world is facing a series of forces that are unprecedented in their scope and potential. Can music that draws on centuries of repertoire, much of it created in times very different than our own, still be relevant in the 21st century?
It’s a valid question — and we’ve got some answers.
But first, a caveat, in that the elements mentioned below don’t apply exclusively to orchestral or Western art music. However, as a genre, what we loosely call classical music incorporates a unique combination of elements that, together, give it a distinctive character.
Classical Music Has Beneficial Qualities
There is a growing body of research into the neuroscience of music, and increasing evidence of some of the ways that listening to classical music can affect your physical and mental responses — in a good way.
- Multiple studies have shown that audience members will synchronize with both the music and each other at a classical music concert.
- A recent study suggests that the way our bodies synchronize to a musical beat also promotes a sense of social cohesion, which has implications for treating depression, among other things.
- Even babies synchronize to the beat when they hear live opera.
- Another study found positive effects on both mood and blood pressure after listening to Beethoven.
- Classical music shows promise for language recovery in stroke victims.
That’s just scratching the surface. Orchestral music is often used for specific purposes like studying, relaxation — even calming police dogs when they’re not in action.
The rather unique environment of a traditional classical music concert hall makes it easier to study than most other genres — it’s silent in the concert hall outside of the music, dark, with little conscious interaction during the performance, in stark contrast to the average pop music extravaganza.
It’s An Out Of Time Experience
In an interview with LvT, Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos perhaps described it best. He was on an extended tour at the time where he performed J.S. Bach’s complete Partitas and Sonatas for Solo Violin over two evenings. When asked to describe the value that repertoire has for modern audiences, he pointed out that it was the ultimate lo-fi experience.
“Before you walk on stage, there is nothing,” he said. There is nothing but a musician and a violin — not even a chair or a music stand. “You just walk on stage, and you are alone. It brings a different dimension to our life.”
It’s an experience outside the usual highly fraught and overly hyped aesthetic of pop culture. “The time we live in is not a time of solitude or contemplation, or prayer,” Kavakos noted.
Western classical music, in its traditional home and venue of a silent concert hall, offers a bubble of escape from the bustle of contemporary life.
The Orchestra Has A Public Function
Modern orchestras recognize that their responsibility doesn’t end with filling seats at the concert hall. As a larger public institution, often funded at least in part by public funds, and representing a broad swath of Western musical history, orchestras have a public function, and one that they take seriously.
- Orchestra Toronto offers free seats to help welcome new Canadians to the community.
- Sinfonia Toronto has an extensive outreach program in the Toronto school system.
- The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has a multi-pronged community outreach program that includes school visits, concerts for young people, and other efforts.
- Among other such efforts by classical music ensembles at all levels…
With music education reduced to almost nothing in school curriculums, orchestras and other classical music ensembles offer an important lifeline. Acoustic orchestral instruments and ensembles themselves present their own specific qualities.
Orchestras present a unique opportunity when it comes to instrumental music education. It brings together a large group of people that has to learn how to not only play the notes, but play together — and sure, the first violins and flutes may lord it over everyone else, but in the end, everyone has a vital role to play.
Participating in youth orchestras offers a positive environment for learning and development. It’s an effect that has been studied by researchers, who found beneficial effects when it comes to social as well as musical skill development.
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Xenia Concerts have each created respective programs of concerts for neurodiverse audiences, filling a gap that is largely ignored by the mainstream music industry.
Orchestral Music Is A Fluid Form
There are classical music lovers who are educated, literary and erudite, and who can compare last night’s performance with von Karajan’s in 1966. There are also music lovers who wouldn’t use any of those words to characterize themselves, and who listen to orchestral and Western art music, both from the historical repertoire as well as the contemporary neoclassical superstars, as one of multiple genres they enjoy.
You certainly don’t have to be a scholar to feel the evocative power of orchestral music from a film score. Howard Shore’s music for The Lord of the Rings movies, considered by many to be the best film score of them all, uses leitmotifs and other techniques from classical composition.
There’s the traditional concert environment… and then there’s so much more than that to the world of classical music.
Classical music can survive quite well outside the concert hall, in casual dress. Opera Revue, Against the Grain, and other companies bring opera to casual pubs with great success. The Bicycle Opera Project took high brow opera onto bikes and on the road. Those candlelight concerts routinely sell out, and have spread from Europe across North America.
Orchestral music is a fluid format that can bring its unique combination of colours, enormous dynamic range, and many other elements to any genre.
Different Directions
According to a 2022 study by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the UK, the proportion of people under the age of 35 who listen to orchestral music regularly, at about 65 percent, is larger than that of their parents generation, who come in at about 59 percent.
Those under 35s who enjoy orchestral music may or may not be attending concerts in traditional presentations. As young artists, they may also be taking treasured music and Western classical techniques into new directions.
Purists may howl at what has been dubbed neoclassical music, but it has made international superstars out of artists like Max Richter, Ludovico Einaudi, and Alexandra Stréliski.
Today, orchestral music hits the music charts in the Bridgerton soundtrack, with orchestrated versions of pop songs, and classical music has become a TikTok trend more than once. Pop stars like Brandi Carlisle and Lauryn Hill tour with string quartets in their bands because of their expressive power.
Classical fusion can meld with the traditions of Western Europe with those of classical Indian or Chinese music, or the Caribbean, as in Stewart Goodyear’s Callalloo. Contemporary artists like Devonté Hynes turn easily from working with international pop stars as a producer to touring with their own contemporary classical compositions, blurring lines between genres.
Anatomy of the Recovering Brain, an album release of chamber and electronic music by Canadian composer Frank Horvat, performed by bass clarinetist Kathryn Ladano and special guests.
The Road Leads To Contemporary Music
Western art music can give you an out of time experience, but it can also respond to this era.
In his interview with LvT, National Arts Centre Orchestra Music Director Alexander Shelley talked about the odd way that new music has been pushed to the back burner of the classical music world for far too long.
“The way I try to frame it, there has been a moment in classical music, let’s say the last 90 to 100 years, in which, for the first time in the history of classical music, whatever that term means, we’ve moved to an industry where we don’t look at what’s being written now,” Shelley said.
After about the turn of the 20th century, new music dropped from concert programs.
“Where’s the new music?” Shelley wondered. “In the middle of the 20th century, it became more commonplace to experience the living museum in the concert hall.”
Western classical music carries a load of historical baggage, but the music itself is vital enough to survive an ideological transition into an inclusive modern world facing issues that weren’t dreamt of in previous centuries. New music can make the connections that weren’t possible previously — likewise, we can’t put “classical music” into a museum where it never changes, and expect it to thrive. Composers like Frank Horvat use the idiom of Western art music to address vital issues like environmentalism and mental health.
New music of any kind is a harder sell than the familiar, but where it’s being presented and supported, it’s proven its potential.
Opera on the Avalon, in St. John’s, NFLD, has grown their audience over the last few years by chucking the entire opera canon out the window to focus solely on new works that they commission. The stories and projects they support speak to their audience and community.
It also goes to the public role of an orchestra and classical music institutions, in that commissioning and performing contemporary work supports living and local composers. That’s true of larger organizations as well as grassroots community institutions like the Cathedral Bluffs Symphony Orchestra.
Final Thoughts
It’s an irony that it seems to be growing in popularity at the same time so many in the classical music world are facing enormous financial pressures. Art music, by its nature, does not operate in the same way as the commercial music industry.
It’s still a world where privilege undeniably exists, but the realm of classical music is also one where talent is paramount. No amount of money or connections will get you on stage if you can’t perform — and with a seemingly younger and younger crop of virtuoso competition winners emerging all the time, the bar is set very high.
Operating outside the mainstream music industry, it’s a genre where talented Canadians can and do leave their mark on the international stage.
Where pop music is written for marketing metrics, and where singers may or may not sing in an arena concert, art music is crafted outside the algorithms, in a space where performance can’t be faked.
A living and breathing art form; it is all of these things.
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