In her YouTube video “[No Seriously, Classical Music Is Dying](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OWl5ZdlfJ4),” Cait Frizzell argues that [[Western art music|classical music]] is dying because it stopped producing new music, records and films itself poorly, and depends on wealthy patrons who have made it a marker of status (Frizzell 2022). Her remedy is to make it behave like popular music: become “relevant,” then follow the money. Much of her criticism of classical institutions is warranted, and I am no acolyte of the Romantic ideology these institutions so often perpetuate. But her diagnosis rests on three misconceptions, which together suggest that she is attacking not classical music but a version of it sustained by Romantic ideology—one she never names and, in places, reproduces. ## The museum is older than recording Frizzell dates the turn toward old repertoire to the twentieth century, blaming recording, electronic music, and the patrons left behind. But the Western art music canon had already taken shape by the 1870s, when Brahms was competing for a place on concert programs where three-quarters of the works were by composers of past generations, chiefly Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn (Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca 2019: 633, 715–16). Recording may have intensified this museum culture, but it did not create it. Bourdieu calls this kind of error “the illusion of the constancy of the nominal,” in which recent categorical definitions are read back into the past (Bourdieu 1993: 162). Foucault’s genealogical critique would ask how “classical music” was assembled from such practices, rather than treating it, as Frizzell does, as an organism that is dying (Foucault 1984). To misdate the museum, then, is to misidentify what sustains it: the ideology of the autonomous masterwork, a concept that emerged only after what most people would identify as classical music had been flourishing for centuries. ## Performance is not covering One of the cornerstones of Frizzell’s argument is the comparison of classical-music performance to the popular-music practice of covers. Modern classical musicians, she argues, don’t produce anything original, as if Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber, and so on only released covers of Elvis. This comparison, however, grossly flattens the reality of both practices. In popular music, a song is usually identified with its original recording, so a cover is heard against a fixed point of reference. In a score-based tradition, by contrast, the work is notated rather than recorded, and it must be realized anew in every performance; interpretation is not a copy of the work but the way the work comes to sound at all. Two orchestras playing the same Beethoven symphony are not covering each other. Even a recording of the premiere, had one survived, would not be the work in the way a hit record is; it would be one performance among many. The same holds for a composer’s own recording, where one exists: performers tend to treat it as one reading among others rather than as the work itself. As Gadamer reminds us, “the artist who creates something is not the appointed interpreter of it. As an interpreter he has no automatic authority over the person who is simply receiving his work” (Gadamer [1960] 2013: 198). For him, the performance of a musical work “is something essential, and not incidental to it” (135). Frizzell’s claim that these works are “played in the same way that they would have been 200 years ago” fares no better; the historically informed performance movement alone has transformed how much of this repertoire sounds. Derrida’s critique of the opposition between origin and copy goes further: the “original” exists only through repetition, and every repetition differs (Derrida [1967] 2016). Popular music is full of covers and samples, and no premiere is free of inherited genres. Frizzell thus reverses the hierarchy between popular and classical music without questioning the opposition itself. Indeed, her demand for originality is itself a Romantic value. ## Success is not market share Frizzell’s most fundamental misconception concerns success, which she seems to equate with relevance. Relevance, in turn, she measures by popularity, and popularity by revenue. But to measure classical music by the standards of popular music is to judge it by aims it has never pursued, and so to guarantee that it fails. Bourdieu describes restricted cultural production as “the economic world reversed, a game in which the loser wins” (Bourdieu 1993: 169). Orchestras and opera houses, however, sit closer to what he calls “bourgeois art,” consecrated by the dominant class (Bourdieu 1993: 50, 127). Their dependence on wealthy patrons, then, is not the corruption Frizzell takes it to be but a condition of their prestige. Her error is to treat legitimacy as a single currency. Bourdieu distinguishes recognition by fellow artists, by the dominant class, and by the broad public (Bourdieu 1993: 50–51); her formula trades the second for the third without weighing the first, thereby flattening a field of competing capitals into a single economy. Frizzell sums up her formula in a single line: “It’s the act that’s going to sell first, then the music.” This is a textbook example of what Adorno calls the fetish character of music, in which exchange value, as he puts it, “deceptively takes over the function of use-value” (Adorno [1938] 2002: 296). Yet Adorno’s essay also attacks the fetishizing of famous works and star conductors. Both the institution Frizzell criticizes and the market she proposes treat music as something to consume. ## Concluding thoughts Frizzell is right about some things. Symphony orchestras and opera houses, for one, may alienate some listeners with rigid and apparently outdated norms, such as the insistence on complete silence and on withholding applause between movements. But many of these norms belong not to the music itself but to institutional practices shaped by a Romantic ideology that prioritizes the autonomous work, the attentive listener, and the mythologized creative genius. What Frizzell identifies as classical music, in other words, is not the category itself so much as a narrower version of it, one that emerged in concert with the rise of capitalism. Her remedy only serves to bolster the very system that gave rise to that version, a system that has increasingly commodified music. Yet the category itself is broader than the version she attacks: wind bands, choirs, and new-music ensembles regularly commission and premiere new works, and much of what the name covers never lived in the museum at all. Is classical music dying? A better question may be whether that version—ideological, commodified—was ever alive at all. ## References Adorno, Theodor W. [1938] 2002. “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” In *Essays on Music*, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie, 288–317. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. *The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature*. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. 2019. *A History of Western Music*. 10th ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Derrida, Jacques. [1967] 2016. *Of Grammatology*. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Fortieth-anniversary ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. *The Foucault Reader*. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Frizzell, Cait. 2022. “No Seriously, Classical Music Is Dying.” Scores Unstitched, December 21, 2022. YouTube video. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OWl5ZdlfJ4>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. [1960] 2013. *Truth and Method*. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. First paperback edition. London: Bloomsbury.