Replace BBC Radio 3 by the names of various ARD radio stations (MDR Figaro and NDR Kultur being the worst examples and WDR 3 the most recent one for dumbing-down). Classic FM by Klassik Radio. Classical Brit Awards by Echo der Stars (yupp, they avoid the term “Klassik” now!).

Then take aside the references to certain politicians and some other particular details, and the article applies to Germany as well. The match is so perfect that it makes me shudder.

But doesn’t the real headline here rather be “is radio dead”?

Concerning the term “classical music”: It is in Germany now routinely used as substitute for “serious music”, a term considered no longer suitable. Rightly so I think. There is an urgent need for “education” and “outreach” due to the horrendous clichés which are so intimidating that people simply do not dare in and see/hear by themselves. Trouble is how often this is misunderstood as a need for dumbing down. This almost first of all applies to the broadcasting organizations, and it is meanwhile my (perhaps radical) opinion that they are rather murders than supporters of “high culture”.

‘May I give one warning to the BBC Governors? If they persist in giving the public what it is supposed to want, that same public may one day turn on the Governors and demand something better, and the Governors will not be able to supply it. Then, indeed, BBC music will die a well-deserved death. To all of us, audiences and performers alike, the Third Programme has been of inestimable benefit. Let me repeat, it has been the envy of the world. Is something worthy, something splendid, something which we should be proud to claim as unique in the world, to be sacrificed for the sake of the kind of standardised entertainment which is already being mass-produced in every country? Surely we can do better than that; surely we should defend to the last this service which maintains the highest standard of art and scholarship in our midst.’

My six-year old granddaughter attended her first concert the other day. It took place at the Bridgewater Hall and featured the magnificent BBC Philharmonic in Britten and Beethoven. She didn’t like Les Illuminations but loved the Pastoral Symphony. She admitted to coughing a fair bit in the second movement. My suggestion to her mother that daughter should have been thrown out at the end of the movement was not regarded as an act of encouragement to go back.

2. American radio stations have call signs begin with W east of the Mississipi and K west. Peter Schickele played on this pattern by inventing the classical radio station WTWP: wall-to-wall Pachelbel. One does or did get an awful lot of baroque on US classical stations, in part I think because of the number of short pieces that are easy to fit in.

3. Years ago in The New Republic someone argued that the problem was that the groups that listened to classical music had ceased to play it. As one who can play no instrument and can hardly carry a tune, I really can’t say.

And I don’t think that classical music is dying, but it is evolving. Many people don’t enjoy sitting in a stuffy concert hall, on an uncomfortable seat watching a man waving a stick in front of the stage. There are new approaches, like the less formal concerts at Village Underground in Shoreditch, where people don’t have to sit still. This may open up the world of classical music to the masses rather than maintaining it as the preserve of the high-brow intelligensia.