The excellent Linda Shaver-Gleason, writing at VAN on why classical music isn’t cool.
All of these are efforts to convince young people that classical music is cool—because, after all, nothing is cooler than something you have to be told is cool.
This was shared widely last week on classical music Twitter, and Shaver-Gleason makes an excellent case. I’d argue that VAN’s headline is wrong. The music is cool, in the same way that design or typography or film is cool. Like all cool, it’s cool to those who like it.
But the nut of her argument—that pretending musicians from a couple of hundred years ago would be considered cool today is a dumb way of attracting new listeners—is absolutely solid.