Is it because people only develop a taste for classical music as they mature, or will audiences dwindle as the current generation dies off? This is a question which has been occupying my son and myself, as regular attendees of classical concerts. You can count the number of teenagers on the fingers of one hand, and my son can feel rather out of place amidst the sea of grey hair.

Any thoughts?

I guess it is probably a mix of finances / time, and social influences - I would love to go to more concerts, but the cost adds up (I appreciate there are free ones but they're often through the week when I'm working!) and I have lots of other things to get done after work....add kids into the mix and most young families would have to be pretty dedicated to get to concerts regularly (you clearly are).

Also I think the general trend amongst secondary age students is that it's probably not cool to go to classical concerts, though of course those keen / not bothered what others think, or those in musical schools and families will have greater exposure than the general non-muso population, who rely on 4music and X factor for their musical education (sweeping generalisation I know).

There will always be a core of people who will go to classical concerts throughout their life - is there any evidence that audiences are dwindling generally? As a radio 3 listener I really don't know, to me classical music is alive and well, but I'm probably out of touch with the rest of the world.

Maybe it does seem more appealing with age, as your general insight to the world grows and you realise how flimsy the prejudices you had as a youngster were. Maybe more people have the emotional depth to appreciate the music as they get older, or maybe they go because there is a coach load going!

Although I think going to a classical concert probably doesn't occur to most secondary age students and they wouldn't therefore get to the point of considering whether it's going to be thought of as uncool by their peers. They have their own music (as I did at their age), specifically targetted (i.e. marketed) at them. What could possibly entice them to listen to classical music?

I've been attending classical concerts for about 30 years now. The average hair colour has always been grey - over time I'm starting to blend in more.

I was just thinking this the other day when I wast at the RFH. There was a large elderly contingent but also a noticeable amount of 16-20 year olds. I was livid though because I was sat two rows in front of an elderly group who constantly opened and rustled plastic wrappers. I have no idea what container the sweets were in but the noise went on for a solid ten minutes and this happened more than once. It sounded like someone was opening and then crushing a plastic bag. I never thought when I went to a classical concert that the audience would be so disrespectful and selfish towards their fellow audience. I mean, why does anyone need to eat in a concert - we're not 5 years old?!

I'm not sure if it's that we only develop taste in classical music at a later stage in life but that the elderly generation become less tolerant or interested in other forms of entertainment. One week I may go to a comedy club, the next a controversial play and the next a classical concert. It may be that elderly people, on the whole, avoid the former and only choose the latter. I may not choose the latter again if I experience another "sweet" incident. I never expected to have to buy a box in order to hear the orchestra!

Rant over!

Grey and/or blue up in Manchester. I attended a meeting at the Halle years ago hosted by the new Maestro, Kent Nagano. It was set up just to engage with audience members to get some views across and receive some. I was almost 40 then and definitely the youngest there.

It descended into a "discussion" about which specific pieces should be performed. I don't think anything post 19th century was mentioned and in the end it wasn't very illuminating.


Ah yes. Audience participation. Competing to see who can cough loudest in the quitest passages. Wonderful.

I'm not that bad - coughs can't always be helped - but a chewing gum in the pocket is all that's normally required to keep a cough at bay! Said group were not coughing at all!

Indeed not, but they can be attenuated.

My observation of the phenomenon over many years of concert going leads me to feel there a certain amount of lack of consideration for others.

Being 24, I too have noticed how concerts attract the older generation.
Then the majority of this generation like people who make themselves known.

Lang Lang being a great example of this in terms of classical music!
Most classical musicians keep themselves quiet.. it appears unpopular.

Another reason for grey heads is because I mostly go to Lunchtime concerts. Many people are at work, however its not a rare site to see a couple of dozen music students.

I'm going to have to do my rant again, aren't I?

If I go to a concert where members of the audience sitting close to me wearing strong perfume or cologne it triggers my asthma. And an asthma attack for me is a cough which gets worse if I try to suppress it and often ends up with me in a panic attack because I can't stop the cough and can't get out of my seat. And the panic attack tends to be caused by my worrying about disturbing the people around me.

I was thinking exactly the same at the last concert I went to.

Out of an audience of about 1000, I could only see a handful of children, a few middle aged people and everyone else was 80 plus.

I think the coach trip comment is a valid one. I don't think the elderly like classical music more than others - my grandparents certainly didn't. I think it's just an outing that's easy to do with wheelchairs etc. The man next to me snored the entire way through so wasn't there for the music! And it's not just sweets, they also get their sandwiches out!

There are plenty of free concerts at all times and days. I don't think money is the issue on the whole; have you tried getting tickets to a pop band at the O2?

I go to a lot because I like music. I always have done. The best ones were when I was in my 20s when we used to sit at the back of the Festival Hall in the cheap seats with all the music students. The atmosphere at the back of the hall was incredible.

I suspect the situation is better in London than in the provinces. Certainly the Proms attract a wide range of ages, and people like the OAE are doing their very best with their Nightshift concerts.

Maybe eventually this sort of attitude to classical gigs will filter through to the rest of the country.

It is. Average audience ages throughout London tend to be lower for most sorts of classical concerts.

Yes that indeed looks very interesting. Certainly a lot of orchestras seem have become aware of the fact that are a "product" which they need to market effectively. I think outfits like OAE and some of the contemporary ensembles such as Ensemble 10/10 in Liverpool have a more even age spread amongst their audiences than most symphony orchestras.

There is a need though to actively engage with younger people to attract them to classical concerts and on the whole, I don't think that is being done. Why should a 17 year old go to a classical concert as opposed to a rock or pop concert? Discuss!

Is that because there are lots of university and college students around? One of the many nice things we noticed in Prague was that there were a lot of younger people at the classical music concerts. Maybe capital cities attract young people looking for culture?

Well, probably because they like classical music better We go to all sorts of concerts - generally the jazz ones have a more mixed audience in terms of age group (and colour), although that does depend on the type of jazz. Some pop concerts have quite an aging audience, it depends on how long they have been around. I once went to see a band with my then 13 year old son, and I don't think there were many people over the age of twenty there - apart from other parents of young teenagers, that is.

My eldest son seems to have got used to the elderly people at classical concerts, but at the last one someone looked askance at his longish hair and tatty jeans, and remarked loudly to her friend: "let's go upstairs and get away from the hoi polloi".

This has been pretty much the same for the last 45 years (I am 48 and have gone regularly to concerts since about age 3). We used to laugh about this in London in my youth but London had much younger audiences than anywhere else big where I have lived; Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and now exceptionally geriatric Adelaide. You get a smattering of last minute reduced price music students and a smattering of musical families (never all of them together, a few at a time) and the rest are near retirement or over it.

Looking at the price of subscriptions you can sort of see why. Two adults could dine out at the poshest places in the city with good wine for the price of 2 tickets to one concert. If you go to 12+ concerts the price comes down a bit for subscribers but thats a lot of money overall. No one goes to 12 massive pop concerts a year (also v expensive) so you cant really compare the two. I am comfortably off by comparison with many others and we are a very musical family. But we only subscribe for 2 for the symphony orchestra, 2 for Musica Viva and 2 for the state opera and ballet. and we share those tickets between us so we rarely all go at once. The big name concerts sell out quickly so if you dont subscribe you have to scramble for one off tickets as they open to the general public. If you subscribe and want to change dates it is a massive saga that is very offputting.

I will say that Tim Minchin and the ASO was one of the first concerts to sell out first this year here and the audience was younger for that. If you program the "right" stuff you can get the younger ones in - I see next year we have a Lord of the Rings concert, a distant Worlds thing (some video game plus orchestra I am told), a Beatles extravaganza, an Ennio Morricone Live thing, a Martial arts trilogy by tan Dun and several outdoor things where you can bring a picnic and the kids usually run riot so we avoid them like the plague .....they do try to get new bums on seats clearly.

Concession prices are very attractive - for the retired and for children. I am a bit surprised the retired dont take their grandkids more often - they do to the ballet all the time though. Ballet has a much younger audience than classical music - all those young girls.

They even charged like a raging bull the other day here for the Yamaha Young Pianists scholarship concert!! The performers ranged from 12-17. No wonder it was 9/10ths empty. And you had to find a parking spot in the middle of town on a bank holiday. It was free for under 14s but it certainly wasnt for adults. They should have made it far cheaper and they would have filled the very large hall and given the prize winners a decent audience. Funny though isn't it. When the state youth orchestra play their families all come out of hiding and the average age is suddenly well under 40. But they dont seem to go to much else.

My eldest son seems to have got used to the elderly people at classical concerts, but at the last one someone looked askance at his longish hair and tatty jeans, and remarked loudly to her friend: "let's go upstairs and get away from the hoi polloi".
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Aww what a sweet old lady.

Do I detect a crack in this class free society?

Last week went to a free concert at the Uni of Manchester - Danel quartet - in a sea of mostly fresher and returning music students I could see just one gentleman of very much post-retirement age who looked very comfortable, even a little smug, to be the only one of his kind. There's always one to buck the trend.

It might, here, be something to do with the fact that only around 2% of young people actually learn to play a musical instrument and not all of those instruments would come under the heading of "classical" in any case.
There isn't really any musical education in schools here which would encourage anyone to take an interest in classical music.

We have very limited opportunities to attend concerts because I live in a very rural area but there are some worthwhile local associations and choral societies who do put on quite good concerts. There are usually a small handful of teenagers (often my pupils) and two or three children in the audience.

On the whole the image of the classical musician here seems to be that such people are stuffy snobs. This is, of course not necessarily true, but since that is how the young perceive it then I don't think the situation will improve until the image changes. When orchestras stop always appearing in black, when at least some of their concerts can be done in smart casual attire, when student prices are available for at least some concerts, when publicity gets into schools, colleges and universities things might improve. I daresay this does happen but obviously not enough.

Another thing I think is the repertoire. If we want to build a younger concert going public then we have to explore the kind of repertoire that will appeal. i don't mean dumbing down - I mean doing the really exciting stuff - virtuoso concerti, short but imaginative works, varied programmes. Some of my pupils sat valiantly silent through a series of really boring French songs at the last concert I went to but they did love the Harmonious Blacksmith variations played by an excellent harpsichordist.

One thing I did notice was when I went to the opera in Toulouse the audience was much younger than I expected - "Prokofiev "Love in a Monastry" sung in Russian (ex-pupil of mine in the lead role - she moasts!). But then Toulouse is a lively university town.

I think this is the crux of the problem.

One of Kodaly's desires was to produce a musically literate nation who therefore understood the music they were listening to.

"I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time." (Zoltan Kodaly)

It is noticeable in Hungary, although the glory days of top quality music education across the country are waning, that there are large and mixed-age audiences for classical concerts.

I think the answer is simple: teenagers (generally) prefer pop music and most of them have no knowledge of classical music.
A more difficult question to answer is: how do we begin to interest young people in classical music and attract them to concerts? Only a very small percentage of children learn to play a musical instrument and by no means all of those go to concerts or have any desire to do so.

Even in London with the variety of discounts, costs are a primary factor for most but especially for the young. My children still go to fairly regularly to classical music concerts but they come from that background where they understand what they are listening to and appreciate the technique of the performers.

We used to take our children to the outdoor Kenwood concerts in North London when they were young but stopped when the sponsors put in the many bars and attracted a drinking crowd whose chatter got louder and louder so one could not to actually hear the music for as the young people drank more. But these concerts did have quite a generous audience of young people.

The proms are full of young people because they can afford the the proming tickets. All my kids still que for these regularly every year, with two regularly buying season tickets. They usually go in a group of a dozen or so. However the friends are usually all music students.

No 2 daughter has regularly taken non-music boyfriends to concerts and they have said how much they enjoyed it but its just not on their radar to actually think about classical concerts.

compare this to the many summer (pop) Music Festivals. I used to be horrified at the price of a ticket for 3 days in a field with basic facilities, using your own tent and subject to the weather. But when you consider how many bands and the variety of music therin it is incredibly cost effective for a three day bash! My youngest went to 7 music festivals this summer (having save all year for them), and said if she had to pay to hear each of many bands at individual concerts it would have been utterly astronomical and she couldnt do it. Not that I am advocating a Classical Music Festival in a Field for Three days but so much of it comes down to money.

My OH and I subscribe to many of the big venues in London but we calculate how much we want to spend on Concerts per annum and sometimes we are unable to eat out. If we, do we often dont have wine so that its not an expensive night out. But then we are in the "old" age group.

I think this gets to the point - you need to get them young, and by this I mean (pre)primary age. Secondary is already to late.

And at this point, the education system fails spectacularly. I find music education at school quite shocking these days. I am really not a classical music snob, as most people here will know (in fact, I consider myself more of a contemporary musician these days, but I haven't always been), but if I see the musical diet kids are fed at schools, I could quite honestly puke. Better don't get me started.

It's like food - if you never try it, you don't know what it tastes like, and you might even say "Bleurgh!" without actually knowing it.

Absolutely. I think this was the point I was trying to make above - so much of this boils down to education. People are not going to go to something they know nothing about and don't understand or appreciate on any level.

Kodaly had a lot to say about the inculcation of good taste and also about when music education should begin ('nine months before the birth of the mother').

Two years ago I saw these amazing 14 year olds in Hungary doing two demonstration lessons. At the end of one the teacher played them part of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand..and you could see them all utterly transported and singing with the recording. The teacher remarked that this was one of their favourite pieces. I'm not sure many of our 14 year olds would say the same... These teenagers attended classical as well as pop/rock on a regular basis - because they KNEW, understood and appreciated the music.

I think you are partially there, however I'm thinking how the boys have been treated when they've gone to concerts. Some of the older patrons are incredulous that they are there and expecting them to misbehave looking at me as if I have a screw loose even thinking that children could possibly enjoy string quartets!

This contrasted strongly with the members of the quartet who were delighted to see children in the audience.

Then there was the occasion when I was in my 20s when a previous boyfriend took me to Covent Garden to see Birtwhistle's Gawain. Some older bloke tried to show-off about the performances he'd attended. Unfortunately (for him) Huddersfield had and still has a Contemporary Music Festival that as an undergraduate I helped at. I promptly shut him up with the four words When I met Cage...

If younger people who do attend concerts come across people with these attitudes are they going to want to keep attending?

When I see children at concerts I want to know what they think was the best bit rather than demonstrate my prowess. Unfortunately many older audience members are not like that.

No wonder the children return to their comfort zone when it is a new experience and they are made to feel uncomfortable too.

I've never encountered anything but nice comments from the rest of the audience when taking Claudia to concerts which I have been doing since she was a baby, sitting at the back at first, just in case....

Maybe I have been lucky as she has always sat completely still mesmerised by the music! I've always wondered whether it had something to do with the fact that I took the radio to hospital with me and had Classic FM playing during her birth!

It's worrying to read so many negative and, frankly, age-ist comments here; as though if there is a sea of grey heads in the audience then the performance is a failure. I wonder if I am detecting an undercurrent of thinking that perhaps by scheduling specific avant-garde works, the older audience will be deterred and not offend the sensibilities, or worse, get in the way of, the young. Not likely to work.

Broadcasters and film-makers endlessly strive to attract the younger audience for some reason. Why? surely the advantage of youth is that one can find better things to do!

It is a fact of nature that one's expression appears more gloomy as one ages; it is due to gravity, hence the popularity of face-lifts amongst those with the dosh. I wonder if some of the disapporoving looks ascribed to the senior audience members is simply a relaxed face-in -neutral with no ill-will behind it. (I've been told to 'cheer up - it may never 'appen' more than once when I was perfectly happy.) Rudeness will be encountered in any demographic, unfortunately.

Let's be thankful for the grey pound swelling the coffers at concert halls; so what if they are in receipt of pensioners' rates? Students also enjoy discounts.

We'll all be there one day -get used to it.

We usually take my mum with us to concerts. She's eighty and is rarely able to get a discount, even though both my son and I can get students' discounts. It seems very unfair. My original question was not intended to be critical of older people who attend concerts, I was just wondering if it tended to be something people do as they get older. When I was a child my parents used to take me to light classical concerts at the seaside. The audience used to be predominantly elderly then, so I am assuming that as people get older, some of them start prefering classical music.

Why is there an assumption that young people would like more avant garde classical music? At the moment my son's favourite composers seem to be Elgar. Borodin and Ibert, while his least favourite seem to be Mahler and Mozart. He hates anything that's really avant garde and tuneless - he's walked out in the interval of some of those.

It is just experience. I will add I have lots of friends over 60, over 70 and over 80. I really value the pensionable community and find them lots of fun to be around. However there is a small minority who expect two lads to equal trouble. I find this a real pity.

Similarly when Peter was working in the Church the ladies of the Mother's Union absolutely adored my children and slipped them biscuits, sweets and all sorts of treats. The boys were lucky the number of adoptive 'Great Aunts they had as a result was lovely.

Back to the String Quartet Concert, the Quartet liked seeing children, and some of the older members were very impressed with my younger son who sat riveted to the performance. He now has violin lessons.

The concert was my 40th Birthday treat, and fortunately the boys loved it too as with the sparse texture they could hear everything. String Quartets suit mathematical boys as they like to hear how the parts move between the different instruments.

My boys also like Piano music, choral music, Baroque chamber music, song recitals amongst others. They do like popular music, but when I suggest they listen to some of the Classic Bands that I know performed well and wrote decent stuff, they can hear the difference between that and the drivel of the mass-produced stuff a lot of their friends listen to.

I wasn't being negative about the elderly. I was being negative about a group of people who happened to be elderly and because I hold this generation in high esteem I was very disappointed by their lack of manners. I agree that without this group the concert halls would be empty. Anyway, I have grey hairs too....sigh.

This I understand. It can be very upsetting for a mum who likes people of all ages to take her children to a concert and then feel all eyes are on her beloved children just waiting them to fidget of do something wrong.

Mums take their kids to concerts as they want them to enjoy music not to see the worst behaviour in a particular group. I also note MNW and I are both mothers of sons. Boys like Classical music too. It should not be the sole preserve of prim little girls.

My sons get a lot out of music. From other comments MNW has made it sounds like hers do too.

I don't actually think it's true that in order for one's children to enjoy classical music one has to take them to concerts from an early age. For years my son was more keen on classic rock artists, funk, jazz and soul than classical. It's only recently that he's really got into classical music and seems to have developed his own taste in it. He particularly likes early twentieth century music, wheras I prefer baroque.

Youngest son hates classical music and likes rap and indie bands.

Sorry - not sure what's going on with these quotes

There is a series of very good chamber concerts every year held near me - in our local church, which has excellent accoustics. I try to take my children to as many as possible - especially those involving instruments one or both play. They are free for under 25s in FT education, but the vast majority of the audience are over 60 (or possibly 70). We try and get there early so we can get a seat near the front as I want them to be able to see as well as hear (it's always a sell-out and seats are unreserved). The girls take books with them to read while they're waiting. I'm glad to say that I have never had anything but interest and politeness from other nearby audience members who have engaged my children in conversation (before the concert and during the interval, not during it!) asking them if they played any instruments, what music they liked, what they thought of it so far, they were reading etc.

Interesting that he likes rap. Does he also like any genre of MUSIC ??

The people who now are grey haired, in the audience, are most likely people who have been fans of classical music throughout their lives. When I was watching Led Zeppelin in the 70's there weren't many grey haired folk attending, but now watching Robert Plant we are nearly all grey haired

Indeed and as I said earlier, I like many others of my generation were deeply engaged in listening to rock as teenagers so that classical only got a look in much later. It was probably The Nice, ELP, Yes and Frank Zappa who inititiated my interest in classical.

I get the connections with Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Pictures at an Exhibition" but where is the classical connection in Frank Zappa and Yes (who I remember more for their incomprehensible lyrics)??

Genuinely curious

It's really down the the style and standard of the compositions. They are "structured" in a way that sets them apart from your run of the mill rock.

Yes, for example, definitely use theme1, theme2, development, recapitualtion, coda. Not that I knew it when I first listened to them. I just thought it was cool. Oh there is Rick Wakeman's reworking of part of Brahms' 4th symphony too.

Zappa - well where to start. Structure, use of instruments and there are nods towards classical composers. FZ was a great fan (and definitely influenced by) Stravinsky and Varese. "The Torture Never Stops" certainly owes a great deal to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. "Yo Mama" is a full scale orchestral piece (but played by rock group) - including a brilliant cadenza. No surprise to me that one of his pieces "King Kong" has had a proms outing or that after his death Radio 3 was suddenly full of closet Zappa fans wanting to acclaim his brilliance. He was really getting into his stride writing orchestral and chamber works too. A terrible loss that he died so young. Especially as I never got to see the bu88er live

Oh and back to The Nice - "Knife Edge" is Janacek's Sinfonietta and they also did "Karelia".

There were others too. Pink Floyd, particularly "Echoes" and "Atom Heart Mother". My mum reckoned Genesis sounded like Beethoven (well a bit of it did).

I was very keen on Genesis when I was a teenager - my dad, who liked Beethoven, rather liked them too

I was at the Barbican tonight - boy is that place ugly - and I would say the average age was 35. Lots of 14-16 year olds and the majority were around 30-45.

We lived in a concert hall building when my kids were very tiny, so took them along to hear music there from the beginning - at first maybe just tiptoeing past the open hall door when rehearsals were going on, with babe in arms until the first signs of restlessness, later on choosing short informal concerts or ones with dancing or other distractions in, later still half an evening concert.....

...the older one improvises on keyboards, drums a bit, likes listening to all sorts, the younger listens to radio 1 out of choice, sings and plays chords on the guitar now. Neither would chum us to concerts now, though the older has done us some recordings when I've been playing, for purposes of getting feedback. It's simply the wrong phase of life for them, and may remain the wrong sort of music, who knows? Alternatively they may come back to it later, on their own terms.


So kids don't go all that often because many parents are worried about them getting restless and disturbing the other audience members. My two were amazingly quiet and well behaved, but I knew not to overstretch their patience - I've sometimes had friends of theirs along too and found crowd control to be much more of an issue, so it does vary depending on the child. Students may go if they have a particular interest in music, and of course they get discounts. Many young adults are financially overstretched, and have to consider carefully how to allocate their budgets - we'd not have gone to concerts had we not been living where we did, but often got free tickets to events there as compensation for the annoyance of having to lock up after hours and put up with people coming back on Sundays to retrieve forgotten umbrellas.

Later on of course, after student years and the first chunk of working life, a wave of sprogs may well come along, and where it does, parents again begin to feel they can't go to concerts, because babysitters are expensive, and because they're tired from childcare/work/housework - again it's a time one tends not to go so much. And when freedom from those commitments arrives, and maybe the budget is a little healthier for a year or two once the kids flee the nest....why, that's when the silver streaks begin to show on our heads....

A lot of complicated theories have been put forward but it seems to me to be fairly simple. One issue is money. Teenagers won't want to spend money on something they know nothing about. The second reason (which follows on from the first) is education. The reason why large numbers of teenagers have no idea what fun "serious" music can be is because the state of musical education is rigor mortis in very very many so called places of education. The third is that pop musicians and the sets they use are lively and colourful and fun to look at. Classical orchestras, are by comparison, black and boring to watch and in many cases do not exploit a repertoire which would attract the young. I am not suggesting they all want to hear modern or avant garde stuff. There are plenty of attractive and accessible works in the repertoire which neither dumb down nor intellectualise up the programme.

Young people brought up in musical homes are a different kettle of fish and if they reject classical music will at least know what they are rejecting and the door to that music will remain open to them in later life. Those brought up in homes where no classical music is ever heard and who go to schools with some dreadful weekly apology for a class music lesson will never has this door opened.

When I played a bit of a Red Priest CD to a class of 6 to 8 year olds they asked for it again and again. When I played Ravel's Piano concerto for the Left Hand to my teenage pupils on Armistice day and told them the story behind it they were fascinated. When I played an extract of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra to a pupil studying concerto form she was mind blown - as was I years ago when I heard it for the first time. Last week two of my piano pupils arrived and explained that for once they had had a "real" music lesson and they had listened to "this piece that gets louder and louder." They could not remember what it was. I suggested Ravel's Bol?ro and they said that was it.

I have recently started introducing a "listening" time into my instrumental lessons. it is hard to find the few minute necessary but very worthwhile. So perhaps it is also part of our job to introduce pupils to the repertoire - give them a taste and make them hungry.

That's the one : I do this regularly with my pupils. And not just with classical either, but with jazz, world music and others : in fact pretty much anything that isn't of the Justin Bieber/JLS/Rihanna sort of ilk. And it's essential to start this early on...

I started listening to classical orchestral music (it all started with Ride of the Valkyries!) when I was sixteen. My first live concert followed a couple of years later and I was extremely impressed with not just the music, but the sound of the music - live concerts were my only opportunity back in the 50s to listen in Hi-Fi which nowadays is quite easy to obtain in the home. But unlike Aquarelle I was blown away by the appearance of the orchestra and how smart they all looked. Their harmonised appearance has always for me added to the feeling of unison in the playing. I loved the whole experience, visually, sonically and emotionally. I was not taken to concerts by my parents, in fact it was I who started taking them with me.

I don't think the cost of a concert then was for me any cheaper than it is for young people today. LP records were expensive for me whereas today's technology has made recorded music appear very cheap in comparison with live concerts. Young people will always have their priorities on how they spend their limited resources and the fact is that today few place classical concerts high on their list when they can download the latest recording on their iPlayer for peanuts (or less if they are prepared to bend the law a bit!) But then they have to pay a lot more for their car insurance, their drinks and their accommodation than I did so there is bound to be less to spend on "luxuries" like concerts.

I also blame Classic FM (and more lately some Radio 3 programmes) for the way they continually play short bits of classical music. Have a look at the latest Classic FM compilation and see how many extracts there are on the disc as opposed to complete works. The thought of sitting still and listening to over an hour and three quarters of music, consisting of maybe just three works, probably puts off many youngsters who are used to being fed lots of different music in short bits so that (a) they can dip in and out of the radio whenever they feel like it and (b) so that in the case of Classic FM the broadcaster can get the required numbers of irritating adverts in.

So that leaves the concert going to those who can afford it, those who have learned to love all kinds of classical music, those who want to go to be entertained with music they already know and with music they have never heard before, those who still believe that the sound of a live orchestra can never be reproduced in the home, those who want to enjoy the experience of making the effort to go and listen to famous performers and orchestras, those who want to hear the entirety of a composer's work not just the slow movement, and those who want to enjoy the whole experience of the occasion from the tuning up to the smart visual appearance of the musicians. Sadly not too many of today's younger people fit this description, but I hope they do as they get older so that they can take my place when I can no longer go.

When I go back to the UK I'm always struck anew by the quantity of grey heads at classical concerts. I was doubly surprised to find the same phenomenon at Dartington, despite the fact that there was a substantial proportion of young people - and most of them classical musicians or students, so lack of familiarity with or interest in the fare was unlikely to be the main reason. More likely they were in the pub or jamming somewhere else. Of the small group of young people who did attend the concerts a fair number were foreign - and also commented on their surprise that they were so few in number.

Here in Costa Rica for sure a lot of the audience will be middle-aged and older but you often see quite a few young people too. Mind you, I expect that the average age of the population is a bit younger than the UK too. Other factors that bring more young people to classical concerts are probably the growth of initiatives to bring more classical music into communities and the fact that quite a lot of professional classical (or classically trained) musicians also have other musical lives, so quite a few of the National Symphony and other classical groups are considered quite "cool"...