Sacred entertainments

Abstract

Ever since the cultural watershed of the 1960s, predictions of the imminent demise of classical music, especially in America, have been rife. Its audience, undermined by the precipitate decline in public music education and decimated by defections to pop (respectable for aspiring intellectuals from the moment rock became British), was assumed to be aging, indeed dying off. Whether as a symptom of this process or as one of its causes, media coverage for classical music steadily and drastically diminished over the 1970s and 1980s (coinciding with the rise of serious pop coverage), as did the number of radio stations that offered it.