Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around?

Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.

The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.

As somebody with classical training and a brother in the industry, it pains me to read this misinformed opinion of yours. Top-tier symphonies world round are doing crossover concerts with pop artists, play pop songs, modern and experimental music, and regularly feature works by living composers. In my high school orchestra, circa '98, we played stuff like music from Star Wars and West Side Story -- not just the ancients.

Down the foodchain, it gets even weirder. The favorite gig I played involved interpretive dance featuring waterboarding, gallons of fake blood, a live chicken race, and more.

Where you certainly will find a subset of afficionados of any genre who scoff at anything but their extremely narrow definition of "good music," if you take the time to rub elbows with mature classical musicians you'll find many to most of them quite open minded.

Your experience with young artists, finding them to be idealistic and purist, does not extend to the whole field. I know people who only listen to a single narrow genre or decade of pop music. How are they different?

Edit to add:

> And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.

Oh, no. No, no no. I've been to a circuit-bent punk show. I recently went to an ambient music festival. I've heard glitch pop. Angine de Poitrine is blowing up because they use a semitonal guitar (though as a bit of a noise snob, I find their use of semitones milquetoast and rather uninspired).

Here you are, narrowly defining music, and excluding what you dislike. But it's not just "classical" living composers doing this.

I had a whole discussion with a German friend whose husband works in opera (this was after Chalomet's "opera as a dead art" comments) and their view was mostly that this view of the world does not hold for at least chunks of Europe. To their mind, there is still both active input into this space, support in this space, and there's societal support to some degree or another.

I don't know the realities on the ground, but that annecdote did make me wonder if I simply assumed that the world of classical music wasn't as dire if you leave the States, at least in terms of job stability.

The comparison to popular music is kinda funy too... plenty of pop musicians that don't live off of their music, right? Maybe we're not generating "Taylor Swifts of Oboe"s but I feel like the measure is more about the median (or even the 90th/95th percentile?) when it comes to art, rather than the top of the top.

Outside church settings, classical music of the Baroque, Classical and early Romantic eras was for the elites, and the masses had their own musics. This only changed gradually over the 19th century.

It's also weird to still be hung up on atonality in the contemporary classical world, when the pop-music world has for decades now had acts like Merzbow that are often farther out into noise.