Courtesy of Slate.

The past week or so, I‰’ve been pondering the prosperity and subsequent decline of trends in music. Without exception, it seems, today‰’s hot trend will be tomorrow‰’s object of mocking nostalgia. Think of tunes like the “Macarena” or the wave of early ‰00s boy bands. There seems to be an eerie relationship between world and cultural domination in one year and near obsolescence the next.

How long exactly will it be until dubstep half-time and shiny folk instrumentation sound as dated as ‰80s synthesizers?

In this consideration, I‰’m drawn to perhaps the most extreme case of cultural dominance to complete irrelevance: classical music. Granted, “complete irrelevance‰” is a bit misleading. There are still professions devoted to playing classical and countless extravagant concert halls that house them. However, in the eyes of “the people,‰” I doubt that the form could be much more archaic or unappealing.

As my titles normally go, stagnant or outgrown is a false dichotomy. I think it‰’s parts of both and other factors, but here‰’s the case for each‰Û_

Stagnation: When‰’s the last classical release that you‰’ve been anticipating? What‰’s the last concert hall that you attended? If you‰’re anything like me, it was in elementary school and the outing was little more than glorified nap-time for students and teacher alike.

Even in moments of fleeting consciousness, I don‰’t remember hearing anything new. The repertoire was solely comprised of pieces that even my brain of single-digit age had long ago internalized: Ode to Joy, Moonlight Sonata, the Star Wars theme, the Indiana Jones soundtrack.

From this limited experience, it feels like there‰’s little being done in classical that really sounds new, but upon further investigation, this is hardly the case. There are plenty of geniuses in the field and plenty of experiments at play, some of which make Arca and Swans sound like traditionalists.

Outgrown: Perhaps the simple arrangement of it all is just boring. String arrangements don‰’t hold the sway that a guitar does, black and white sit down performances can‰’t hold a candle to the fireworks and lightshow of a sold-out stadium.

There‰’s also the cynical Frankfurt argument that the general public has just become too stupid to tolerate anything more than three minutes of three chords. Regardless, classical music still has an intensely devoted base, drawing many of music‰’s most talented like an prosperous siren song.

In the end, I think it‰’s a variety of factors: technological changes in listening, an unhealthy fetishizing of the genre‰’s poster boys, and the root of most issues anymore: bad PR. A symphony doesn‰’t lend itself well to a quick walk between classes and its soft and delicate features are quick to be overrun by traffic noise.

As for fetishizing: Beethoven doesn‰’t need any more exposure, the genre isn‰’t going to wither away without 95% of performances being those composed by the masters. In fact, its influence is probably waning because of that narrow overexposure. I honestly wouldn‰’t be too surprised if the majority of the population was unaware that new classical pieces were still being composed.

Lastly, the PR: just as there‰’s your dad‰’s idiot friend still trying to convince you that rock music died with Bon Scott, there‰’s also the pretentious classical autist that denies any validity in other genres. Unfortunately for classical, that stereotype seems to dominate a public imagination. That, and most people seem to genuinely like AC/DC.