Classical music and orchestras in a rapidly changing world

Classical music can be a source of creative expression, entertainment, education, intellectual enrichment, social cohesion and well-being (Dollman 2023; Kolokytha 2023; Odena 2023; Sunderland et al. 2018). As part of cultural heritage, it also serves as a bridge between the past and the future. Classical orchestras are paramount in performing and transmitting music to audiences; they showcase teamwork, discipline, collective artistry, and artistic collaboration and communication. As cultural institutions, orchestras keep music traditions alive and evolving, inspire young musicians and educate communities, and provide spaces of creativity, inclusivity and artistic creation and experience.

In times of distress and uncertainty, such as the ones we live in, orchestras can take on multiple roles. Whether they are responding to natural disasters, a global pandemic or social unrest, these roles can go beyond that of simple entertainment. They can serve as communicative spaces that offer a sense of connection, inclusion, hope and unity; they can provide financial help through fundraising and benefit concerts, engage in outreach to help communities process grief and provide emotional support; and can serve as cultural diplomacy ambassadors, using music as a common denominator to promote respect, intercultural dialogue and peace. Numerous examples showcase the impact of orchestras in modern societies such as the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra benefit concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan (Nice 2011), the 2020 Berlin Philharmonic concert streaming for free from an empty concert hall (Ross 2020a), or the Los Angeles Philharmonic of the same year from the Hollywood Bowl (Ross 2020b) to name but a few.

A new three-year, large-scale research project aiming to highlight the roles of orchestras as cultural vectors during challenging times and to examine the various facets of their contribution to European societies has provided the inspiration for this editorial conversation. The project, funded by the Department of Science and Research of Lower Austria, started in March at the University for Continuing Education Krems with the European Union Youth Orchestra [https://euyo.eu/] to be the main partner. Its focus is on skills and artistic development, cultural diplomacy, regional cultural policies and European values, but it will also examine issues related to gender and mental health.

Marshall Marcus is Executive and Artistic Director of the European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO), CEO of the International Youth Foundation of Great Britain, Founder and President of Sistema Europe, and a Europe 101 Leadership Programme ambassador. He has also served as Head of Music at London's Southbank Centre and Royal Festival Hall (2006–2011), and as Co-founder, then Chairman and CEO of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (1985–2006). Our conversation started with a question on what the value of classical music is today.

Marcus: I think there are a number of areas to point to in classical music. I don’t think we should underestimate its power as simple entertainment in a complex, challenging age. There are millions of people who come to concerts for classical music because they get base enjoyment. I’m talking specifically about concerts now, sitting in a live concert, listening to music — recorded music also, but that’s a different area. I typically home in immediately on the idea of live performance, classical music. People derive an incredible value simply from the act of coming together and joining together in a cultural experience such as music, and not just classical music. We know this from so many areas of research — that going to a live cultural event and being with other people in society is actually a tremendous vehicle for well-being.

Music can also be a healing agent. We’re involved in a fantastic project in Finland with a neurologist where we’re looking at hospital patients who might have Alzheimer’s, stroke problems, accidents, people who can’t travel to the live experience. And if you can take the recorded experience in a very vivid way, with 360-degree recordings into the hospital, it has been shown by muscular research that this is aiding the rehabilitation of patients. Classical music may be something particularly important for this; although obviously different genres of music have been tried and many of them are very valuable, the results show particularly that they work for stroke patients when it’s a genre of music which the patient is already familiar with. It might not be classical music for some people. I mentioned this research because it is an example that analyses where in the brain responses to classical music happen. What the research has shown is that music and classical music touches a broad spectrum of parts of the brain. It seems to be something which has a very strong resonance with the older, animal parts of our brain in particular. We all know that music is powerful, and classical music is particularly powerful, because these experiments seem to show that it is actually getting into the areas of our brain that are about very fundamental, profound ways we act as animals, not just as enlightened, thinking people. Classical music is one area of music which is very valuable in that way.

Some people try to define what classical music is, and they say it’s complex music. What’s meant by that is that you can have pop music, you can have rock, you can have whatever — pieces which are often quite short. Classical music is a type of music which is structured in a very complex way. There is definitely something that we get as human beings from interacting and working with complex systems. This probably relates to classical music anywhere in the world. We haven’t defined what we mean by classical music, but there is an interesting book, The Other Classical Musics (Church 2015), which talks about this. I like to think of music like the way that liquids operate. Liquids search out anywhere there is space. Music is more like a liquid than a rock: a rock will only fit into the space which shapes it; liquid will go anywhere. And music has that effect with us; it drips through into so many areas of our being.

Kolokytha: classical music was performed in the time it was composed. Nowadays this is not so much the case if one considers the repertoires of orchestras or opera houses. What do you think has changed and why?

Marcus: You go back to the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, and music functioned like that [meaning performed in the time it was composed]. 20th century bebop jazz, and late Renaissance, early Baroque music, had a popular kind of reach. And the question is, what’s happened? Why is classical music not the popular music of today, if it’s not? The answer is changes in society. When I look at what those changes are, they are probably very strongly correlated with changes in the structural hierarchy of society. There’s a wonderful book by James Johnson called Listening in Paris (Johnson 1996), which looks at listening habits from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. What’s quite interesting if you look at, say, Venetian 17th century opera, is that people are not interested in going to anything that’s old. It’s like, why would I go to last year’s opera? I want to know what’s fashionable now. That’s why a lot of it functioned in a particular area of society. Of course, there are a lot of other areas. If we go back in time, classical music has its origins in church music. And the church functioned essentially in a completely different way. Every person probably went to church on Sunday in certain parts of Europe, and they would hear the choir singing, great music performed in a church setting. Also, people in taverns and hostelries might have listened to music which two, three centuries later, might be played in a concert hall.

There’s this massive drive between the 1750s and say 1850s, in which classical music suddenly opens in a concert format to the middle class. Haydn is composing these amazing classical music symphonies to begin with, fundamentally for the court. And as you move forward in the 18th century there is this extraordinary change in which there are actual public concerts. Haydn, who was operating completely in a court setting to begin with, then comes to London in the 1790s and he’s giving public concerts. So, the way that classical music is consumed varies massively, depending on how society structures itself.

I remember doing a tour with Ivan Fischer to Australia in 2006. One of the pieces we were performing was a set of Mozart Dances. And he said to the audience, we’re doing Mozart Dances after the break; some of these dances are written for the common people, some of them are written for the middle class, and some are written for the aristocracy. We’re going to play them in that order. And we would like you to decide who you want to be. If you see yourself as the kind of working peasants, you can come in straight away as we start. And then if you’re more middle class, you can come in when we do the more civilized ones, and then the aristocratic ones at the end. The concert promoter thought this was a nightmare. But it’s a very good example of the fact that, you look at Mozart, he is composing music for different parts of society.

Kolokytha: What changes do you see in audiences through the years and what are the possible misconceptions that audiences and non-audiences have about classical music and orchestras?

Marcus: Let me start with one misconception and then go on to two different areas of audience. I was involved many years ago in an audience development project in London called Not for the Likes of You, in which many different arts were involved. The idea was to analyse who your audiences are, identify which audiences don’t think that what you do is for them, and what to do about changing that paradigm. Johnson’s Listening in Paris analysed all of this and one of the things he said is that at the beginning of that period in the mid-18th century, audiences were going to hear classical music as a kind of entertainment. People dined during concerts, they did all sorts of things behind the walls in concert halls, it was well known as a place for all sorts of goings on. There was a multiplicity of social behaviours in audiences, which meant that it was a thing for everybody.

By the time of Wagner, people are going into darkened auditoriums and sitting in the quiet and listening. That’s a completely different audience behaviour. It’s very interesting that Johnson talks about the fact that actually the really interesting period for this change in audience behaviour and who it’s for, is in the early 19th century in Paris when the middle-class audience comes in seriously, and that’s where he found a handbook of rules for how to behave in a concert. So, something fundamentally different is going on here. In the pre-18th century, there is a far more intuitive response to music for an audience. But by the 19th century onwards, it’s become quite sophisticated. There are a lot of places you go and hear classical music; there are rules. And of course that is why you have audience development projects saying okay, let’s look at who doesn’t think this is for them and why? One of the great tasks of classical music is to try and break these barriers down. Because we, the classical music echo-chamber, think classical music could appeal to many more audiences than it currently does. And we think that, probably, throughout the 19th century we grew a kind of classical music prison, which meant that many people didn’t want to go in there because it didn’t look very pleasant.

Issues regarding audiences and attendance to cultural events have been among the major areas of concern for both cultural organizations and academia. The importance of audiences for the cultural and creative sectors (CCS) but also the impact of CCS on societal challenges are areas that have produced a lot of research (Gustafsson and Lazzaro 2021; Hadley 2021). The adaptability and resilience of CCS, their capacity to act as drivers of awareness, inclusion and change can instigate the development of solutions, positive change and more equitable futures. The dynamic relationship and interplay of orchestras and audiences provides a creative space in which the work of orchestras as cultural institutions can address societal challenges and remain relevant in a constantly changing world. The engagement of audiences is what enables orchestras to resonate with and reflect contemporary societies. Orchestras are also, nowadays, working more on how their work can address societal challenges. The next question to Marshall Marcus was about the biggest challenges for managers in the music sector with reference to all these changes in society, audiences, barriers to attendance, and the like.

Marcus: When the European Union Youth Orchestra put in its first Creative Europe application in 2014, we decided to do an audience strategy. We decided to identify three audiences: the current audience, the potential audience, and what we call the non-audience. One of the great obsessions for classical music in the last quarter of a century or more, is a worry that there aren’t enough people coming to concerts, they’re going to get old, and nobody will come to concerts. Incidentally, there have been studies done in the past which showed that this worry is unfounded. It’s not just that this generation is getting older and once they’re dead nobody replaces them, it’s that older people will go, but there’ll be a new set of older people. That’s one theory. So, when we did this tripartite strategy, the first thing we decided to really make sure about, was that whatever we wanted to try as new initiatives for new and potential new audiences, we had to remember to take care of the current audience. One of the great ways of doing that is if you’re presenting classical music, you’ve got to be really careful and clear which audience is it for and how you signal that to them.

I’m thinking back to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. We decided to make two different concerts on one day. But we were very careful to market them in a very different way. The first one was one of our main concerts in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, for our loyal, upmarket audience. Then later that night we started the Night Shift, a one-hour concert for which we said that when you come to this you can bring a drink into the concerts, the players will be in informal clothes, the players will talk to you and by the way, there’s no printed programme. You can talk during the concert, and you can walk in and out during the concert. In a way we had all the other rules, and that was waving a massive flag at the audience saying if you need to have quiet in the dark don’t come to this. What was fascinating is that we had quite a lot of audience that came to both those concerts. The important point here is that if you want to encourage new audiences and take care of your old audiences, you have to be really careful that you market and that you talk to your audiences in a mature, honest and transparent way. It’s a bit like there was this theory at one point that said, I will just shove a contemporary piece in. And that way we can do a bit of contemporary music, and the audience won’t notice. And of course, the audience does notice. So, if you’re going to do something that’s challenging for the audience, be honest with them about what the concert is.

Apart from, but also related to, audiences, another important area for cultural policy and management is digital transformation. Although the implications of digital transformation on the music sector were already visible (Brusila et al. 2021), the COVID pandemic and the sudden shift to digital accelerated the impact of technology. Outcomes including accessibility to cultural content that would otherwise be unavailable (Kolokytha and Rozgonyi 2021) and the development of virtual performances (Holst et al. 2025) have changed the creation and experience of the performing arts. Digital recording and streaming, crossover projects, media and online platforms have contributed to a renewal of interest in classical music (Alencar de Freitas 2025) impacting how it is composed, performed and experienced. Research has focused on topics such as the effects of classical music concert streams on audiences (Wald-Fuhrmann et al. 2023) and the impact of digital transformation for classical orchestras (Salvaggio 2025). Artificial intelligence has also started to impact music composition, performance, and experience (Miranda 2021), transforming how music is perceived in our times.

Kolokytha: How do you see the relationship of classical music with technology and what do you think are the challenges in terms of music management and policy?

Marcus: It’s really important that classical music is not a kind of high-tech process in itself. I put the violin on my shoulder, and I play. I’d much rather use a 300-year-old Italian instrument than the finest thing done today. How unusual is that for many objects we use? I’m not going to get the latest phone; I’m going to use a 200-year-old one because that’s much better. So, we’re not working initially with that technical stuff. However, it is vitally important that we keep our ears to the ground. We look at what there is, and we try and exploit it because that’s where we are. We are in society.

The characteristic of modern culture, of modern society, is that we have all these new challenges and problems and issues we have to deal with. But on the positive side, we have far more opportunities than we ever used to have, so we’ve got to exploit the opportunities. There are two sides to it: one side is you’ve got to have somebody, or some people, or do it yourself to become really skilled at knowing what's on the market, what's possible, what I can try? And on the other side, which is tremendously important, is that you’ve got to get out of the box to think in lateral creative ways about how to use the technological opportunities. Many people are in management of music. They haven’t come to it because they’re experts in technology. So, what does that say? It probably says you need to make contact with some people who are.

But again, necessity is indeed the mother of invention. I am thinking back to March 2020, when COVID hit, and how we were forced to be creative about how we could use technology because we couldn’t bring people together physically. During that period, with the European Union Youth Orchestra, we did all sorts of stuff. One example is that we were trying to work out how we could get a whole orchestra playing and we decided to record Ligeti's Atmosphères and John Adams’ the Chairman Dances, when people were still in lockdown. Everybody did the recording from wherever they were living and an alumni did the mixing of this with Vasily Petrenko [Chief Conductor of the EUYO between 2015–2024]. We had over 100 players in 30 countries who recorded and sent in their music. And then we managed to get permission for one person and one cameraman to go around an empty Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and we made a film of it called A Visit to the Tower of Babel. For us this was completely radical ground. Even if you watch this now, what's interesting about that film is that we did the recording, and I was thinking how could it be used? I think I wouldn’t have done anything remotely like that if we’d not been forced to think about something new. This is a really important area. If you want to use technology, you almost have to force yourself into a kind of COVID lockdown mentality, look at the technology and then just say, what could we do today that's different? That's one way of looking at this.

In another way, I’d rather go down the kind of creativity route to think about how you can do something different. The music rehabilitation project I’m involved in is a typical example of this because there's a guy who developed a new form of 360-degree recording. He's got cameras in different places, and he's found a way in which a patient in a hospital will be able to manoeuvre around to different cameras to listen to the music. So, you’ve got a recording of a concert, and people will be able to actually walk in the orchestra or the audience and hear what is heard at that point. Or they could go and sit and stand, they can lie on a bed and look at what the conductor sees in the audience, or they can go to the audience and see what the audience sees.

These are just two examples of really unusual usages of technology. And surely that is the point. Technologies offer new possibilities. I’m talking specifically now about different performances, different types of performance. That leads us backwards into our previous question about audiences, because they are for different audiences. If an organisation, orchestra, or group presenting classical music just did a kind of audience audit to ask: who am I hitting now? And who do I want to hit in the future that I haven’t? Look at who they are and then say OK, how can technology take me to them if I’m creative? There's also a whole other area, which is the much more functional. It's like if everybody in the string section would be using an iPad of some sort for the music stand, the leader only needs to put the bowing in, and everybody's got it. The conductor could write something in his score, you know, “non rallentando here”, and everyone would have it in their part. It's an almost infinite universe there.

Kolokytha: Nowadays AI is one of the keywords related to technological change. What kind of impacts could AI have in music, also in terms of management and policy? Are there going to be any differences from where we are now?

Marcus: There are dangers, clearly. Plagiarizing performance is going to be a huge problem. But let's look more positively at it. AI can be used to really help shorten the workflow on program notes. So maybe that works, that you would ask AI to write program notes, and it will do the program notes probably 20 times faster than a person writing them. However, checks would be necessary to make sure the information is correct. I don’t use ChatGPT or any of those things. But I’m sure many people will do, and it probably could be quite useful. AI is going to provoke some very interesting situations and again, you could turn this to your advantage. What about doing an AI concert at which you ask the audience to come and say, some of the music we’re going to play is by composer X, Y, Z, and some is generated by AI to be like X, Y, Z; I want you to vote afterwards. Ivan Fisher does these things where the librarian brings tons of music to the concerts and then says to the audience okay, we can now play A, B, C or D, which do you want to hear? And the audience votes and then they play that. And people love that kind of thing. This tells us there's always an opportunity for a new kind of approach to the audience. There are all sorts of ways of doing things like this that could really appeal to new audiences in different ways. How Well Do You Know Mozart? could be the title of a concert — Mozart versus AI.

Apart from technology, sustainability is an area that has gained considerable attention in the past few years (Lalvani 2023), with the acknowledgment of the role of culture for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Hosagrahar 2017) [for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals see https://sdgs.un.org/goals]. At the same time, a growing number of actions, initiatives, guidelines and resources have been introduced in the CCS (Kruger and Feifs 2023). The urgency of the environmental crisis and climate change have brought about acknowledgement of the responsibility for greening the performing arts and CCS (Rodrigues and Ventura 2024; Voices of Culture 2023), and of the integration of sustainability in cultural policies (Rodrigues 2024).

Kolokytha: Sustainability and climate crisis are two areas of preoccupation in the cultural sector. How do you think they influence the music sector, and orchestras in particular?

Marcus: I see two versions of that question: how does this relate to orchestras and how should this relate to orchestras. How does it relate? It's like any area that you work in. The EUYO has an online learning program that we started during the COVID lockdown; it's called EUYO Frontrunners. There is a fantastic German orchestral network called Orchester des Wandels, the Orchestras of Change, by individuals in different orchestras in Germany who think that climate change is important. They come together as a network, and they think of things to do in their work to help generate environmental awareness. The EUYO is organizing a network called Young Orchestras of Change for youth orchestras, and orchestras of young people who want to also think how they can seed environmental sustainability in the work they do. I think the EUYO is one of the few orchestras that has taken the time to write an environmental sustainability policy signed off at the board level, then written a sustainability plan and set up a green team. So we are standing up and saying we think this is important and we are doing this.

There is this incredible organization in the UK called Julie's Bicycle [https://juliesbicycle.com/], and they’ve been working on environmental sustainability in the arts for decades. I remember them working on a project when I was at the Royal Festival Hall at Southbank Centre; we did this project where we sent artists to the Antarctic to look at how climate change is actually happening and to make artistic work around that. There are many other examples, such as a project we did in the last few years, which was started in Australia, called The Uncertain Four Seasons [https://the-uncertain-four-seasons.info/]. The project posed a question: it said if we don’t do something about climate change, what would the Four Seasons sound like? If Vivaldi was composing it in 2050, and by then we’ve done nothing about climate change, how would nature have changed and what would the sound of nature be? It was really imaginative. And they got scientists to generate an algorithm which produced a score, potentially for any place in the world. They just had to put the coordinates in and then a composer worked on it and there was a score. The first place we did this was in Venice. The Italian composer Carmen Fizzarotti wrote a version of Autumn from the Seasons called Floating Autumn. We performed that in a number of places and first did it at the European Cultural Heritage summit.

I believe there should be much more done. Funders should make their funding more dependent on what you are doing in your organisation, your orchestra, in your chamber group, in your concerts, in your venue, as well as to think about climate change and environmental sustainability. I think Naomi Klein, who's written a lot about climate change, had this great idea, which was if you can persuade large numbers of people to do the easy small things and you get lots of them doing it, you’ll get massive change. I’ve always taken this approach: not the coercive, moralistic, preaching thing to the audience, or the orchestra, or whatever, which is you need to, you must do this, you’re a bad person if you don’t. But I take the positive side, which is what can you do, which you actually can do that's not so difficult, and which will help. If we could get several billion people to do that, we’d make a bigger change than if there are one or two hundred thousand doing something major. When we do our residencies [https://euyo.eu/projects/tours-residencies/] we’ve managed to persuade our orchestra that if you don’t eat meat twice a day, you won’t die. So often when we’re at home in Grafenegg in the residency, we’ll often have one vegan and one normal meal. To begin with, there was a lot of resistance to this. But people got used to it and actually realized they could probably live a longer life. These are all tiny things.

My belief is that we should be really doing things about this. And the funders should be leading, but leading in a way that is responsible, because our lives are difficult enough as it is as managers. One easy way would be that whenever you have any funding from any public funder there is a necessity to write a green report. That green report might say we had a chat about this last week, or it might say we now no longer use airplanes, ever. What's more important is the change in thinking. What should happen is that for everybody it should become like a form of breathing.

Classical music is a constantly developing field of enquiry (Dromey and Haferkorn 2018). Whether it is new composition styles, new music genres, crossing boundaries, or new formats of music creation and consumption through media and digital technology, classical music has always provided a space for innovation. Innovation may present challenges, particularly in the case of technological applications to a sector that is seen as more traditional (Kavanagh 2018). As spaces of collective expression and creativity however, orchestras can be arenas for experimentation and reinvention that can lead to more accessibility for audiences and to expansion of the art form, showcasing how classical music can remain a developing and dynamic art form.

Kolokytha: What do you think innovation means for the music sector, but also for an orchestra?

Marcus: I talk often about the Venezuelan El Sistema method, the social action music. Often what came up was the question: would you want access or excellence in classical music? Somebody from Venezuela told me this and I’ve used it—that actually it's not access versus excellence. They’re just different sides of the coin. I’ve never talked about it with tradition and innovation, but for me, classical music has got to work in exactly the same way, which is you need tradition and innovation, not tradition or innovation. Those of us that live more in the traditional end of classical music should not be afraid of innovation. And those who live more in the innovation area should remember not to lose the tradition, because it is a tradition. The tradition is tremendously important, but you don’t have to just be that. You just have to work out for the occasion you’re working for: when does it need to veer towards the tradition? When does it need to veer more towards innovation? And when do they both marry in a way that it's both? Many examples I’ve talked about today are about just that. Is innovation the opposite of tradition? In some ways it may be. Tradition is the positive thing we’ve built up that we’ve always done and that we sit on top of. Innovation is a departure from what we’ve always done. On one level, tradition and innovation are in opposition. But in another way, they can be in synergy. My own mantra has been tradition and innovation.

Kolokytha: How do orchestras stay relevant in a fast-changing world? And do they have a role to play outside the cultural sector?

Marcus: There are so many different ways that orchestras can be relevant. They start from simply being court entertainment to actually saving your life and everything in-between. There are all sorts of different ways to be relevant. And if you ask any orchestra: okay, what's your core work? Probably the answer is, we go into concert halls, and we play concerts. And then there's everything else. Regarding the second question, does classical music have relevance outside of the concert hall? The answer is, absolutely. I worked once with an incredible dance ballet teacher in New York. In the States people would know her well. The first thing she said to me about the way that work happens, is that we don’t do outreach, we do in-reach. And furthermore, what we do is to respect our communities. We think with great care about how we enter the community, and we think with even more care about how we exit the community. I think what is really important here is these massive amounts of work that orchestras can do outside of concert halls. But orchestras have to remember that they’re probably not as expert at that as they are when it comes to playing in a concert hall.

Classical music, as I said, is a liquid. It can go anywhere in society. But you’ve got to think carefully when you leave your comfort method, you’ve got to think carefully about how to do it for that audience. We had an anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. We were invited by the European Commission in one of the Medici palaces in Rome, and they wanted a programme with a bit of talk. I thought this is a chance to completely reinvent how we do a concert, so I did a concert in three parts. The first was about challenge, the second about memory, the third part was celebration. I programmed it in a completely different way. Sometimes it was five minutes of music. I put odd pieces together and that really worked for that audience. The Uncertain Four Seasons I mentioned earlier really worked for the European Cultural Heritage Summit. And I think that's the point. There is almost nowhere classical music can’t go successfully. But the further you stray from the area where you have expertise, the more care you have to use to make it successful, and the more likely you are — and this is very important — to be working with partners who know nothing about what you do. Then it can be very challenging.

Kolokytha: How do you see the future in the classical music sector?

Marcus: One thing is crystal clear: money is getting increasingly difficult. And the automatic subsidy mechanism is getting increasingly difficult. So clearly, those people who are fantastic entrepreneurs are going to be one step ahead. If you could find a way of doing what you do but invent, or use, or gain a new income stream, well done. Working successfully with different audiences, that's tremendously important for people who are going to be successful in the future. Those who’ve grown up in an age of entitlement, if they don’t change, they’re going to have trouble. If I look at our work with the EUYO from 2013 and 2023 for example, the change is unbelievable. We’ve not stopped our tradition, but we try to add to innovation. Lead with innovation if you want to survive, could be the thing. And Helen Leitner, our Head of Communication and Advocacy, says that in an age of uncertainty those who try, and think that knowledge will get them through, will fail. They’re going to be worse affected because they come with a kind of set learning; they think they’ve been doing this for years and know how this works. You’ve got to temper that with an understanding of where you are and what can you learn now that's new. The new learners will survive and the old people with lots of stuff they can’t change will probably fail.

Challenges related to funding and relevance are a reality across the cultural and creative sectors, and it seems they will continue to be. The future of these sectors is also closely tied to technological advancement, which brings new tools and opportunities for development and innovation. Classical music is nowadays distributed by streaming services and virtual platforms, and traditional concert halls are no longer the only places where it is performed. Its future, however, is not only shaped by technology, but by a dynamic balance between tradition and innovation. The way music organizations are responding to both the digital shift and new sociocultural realities plays a paramount role in increasing engagement, fostering inclusivity and democratizing access. In a constantly evolving sociopolitical landscape, the future of classical music lies not in an abandonment of its core values but in their meaningful recontextualization to embrace the future.