Representing Classical Music in the Twenty‑First Century: Media Narratives and Industry Responses

Setting the scene: what does “classical music” mean today?

Defining “classical music” is far from straightforward. The term is context-dependent, flexible, and constantly shifting, with unique classical traditions emerging across China, India, Iran, and many other cultures. In everyday English, the phrase generally refers to several centuries of diverse Western “art music,” though this distinction carries implicit value judgments that deserve scrutiny. The implied divide between “art music” and “popular music” is often unhelpful or inaccurate, and the concept of cultural superiority wrapped up in the label “art music” is anything but neutral. Despite its problematic nature, the term enjoys widespread usage: commercial radio stations market themselves as classical, music retailers maintain classical sections, and numerous magazines and blogs cover classical music exclusively. The word thus harbours a peculiar double identity: both coherent and contradictory, stable and unsettled.

Alongside linguistic ambivalence, the classical music industry has been navigating major operational and existential challenges. The pandemic, Brexit (in the UK), and what many perceive as an identity crisis have amplified debates about what classical music represents socially and culturally, whom it serves, and whom it leaves out. Stakeholders are asking tough questions: who is absent or underrepresented, and why? These debates have spilled into the so-called “culture war” in mainstream media domestically and internationally, where classical music has faced criticism for being elitist, patriarchal, chauvinistic, and predominantly white.

While such blanket assessments are not uniformly true, especially internationally, expectations about equity, inclusion, and representation remain urgent. Data from the sector underscores the scope of these issues, as illustrated by Arts Council England’s November 2021 report “Creating a fairer and more inclusive classical music” (Cox and Kilshaw, 2021). In response, the council proposed partnerships between prominent music organisations, university partners, and music educational bodies in the English Midlands, all closely tied to Western art music traditions (LCE# Arts Council England, May 2021).

Many forward-thinking initiatives have emerged, particularly in the past decade. Audiences have expanded through outreach, programming has diversified, and performance formats have seen technological experimentation. Nonetheless, perceptions of elitism and obsolescence remain prevalent in media coverage, casual conversation, and other spheres. These perceptions are not universally fair, but parts of the problem may be branding alone: the descriptor “classical” all too easily reinforces associations with privilege and aging. However, the challenge goes deeper. Representations of classical music in art and media play a crucial “circuit of culture” role—shaping ideas of identity, production, consumption, and regulation—through which classical music gains meaning (du Gay et al., 1997). These representations can either ground or misinform public imagination. When inaccurate, they can sustain false divisions between classical and popular music, allow old stereotypes to persist, and affect issues of representation within the industry. The relationship between artistic portrayal and real-world inclusion is not yet clearly understood. How far do these media creats hinder or ease efforts toward change?

The Representing Classical Music network

To bring clarity to classical music representation in the contemporary media landscape, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded our research network “Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century,” which ran from 2019 to 2021. The network took an innovative dual focus on representation. It looked at how the media and arts depict classical music and considered who appears in the industry itself. Crucially, these two forms of representation are meaningful points of intersection that are theoretically interdependent yet seldom examined together. We brought together humanities and social science scholars, industry stakeholders, and participants to examine research, exchange experiences, fuel debate, and propose fairer and more constructive representational practice.

Among those contributing was our writer-in-residence, Dzifa Benson. She attended network discussions and later produced a play, Black Mozart, White Chevalier, staging imaginary encounters between Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and his far more famous contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her script foregrounds a classical musician of colour—something that ought to be unsurprising, but remains both unexpected and rare in drama across radio, theatre, television, and film. Asking audiences to contemplate how the popular conception of classical music’s circuit of culture might shift if stories like Benson’s gained equal traction to traditional tales underscores the need to diversify the classical narrative itself.

Alongside and intersecting with our AHRC-funded network, the Swedish Research Council supported a project titled “Classical Music for a Mediatized World.” Swedish colleagues joined an online networking event in May 2021, examining how classical music’s cultural and mediatised phenomena coexist. Articles in this collection stem from both that project and our AHRC network. This colocated body of research expanded the collection’s global stake.

The collection aims to catalyse simultaneous investigation of representation both inside and about classical music. We invited studies that engage either viewpoint and—if the authors wished—to further dialogue and connect the two. The resulting works investigate part of a vibrant range: film, dance, theatre, literary and graphic novels, social media, online streaming. The collection might look eclectic, yet ties appear that bind it together.

Artistic innovation as intellectual pattern

Each article here appears to amplify thematic clusters rather than rigid disciplinary gates. The RNT network’s editorial impulse determined progression not by whether its subjects were about classical music or about representation within it; we would instead pursue holistic correspondence. Patterns of artistic invention linger, connecting discourse. Ways in which historically inspired classical stories recently found new renditions illuminate underlying reconsideration. Adrian Curtin revisits the 2016 National Theatre production of Amadeus, starring innovative direction alongside Lucian Msamati—the first BAME Salieri in a professional run. While Msamati’s casting overtly offers a move toward addressing hidden African-descended contributions to Western art music, Curtin finds the execution somewhat subdued—neither completely meeting demands freshly enunciated in surrounding reform talk.

Adam Whittaker turns to The Cellist (2020, Royal Opera House, choreographed by Cathy Marston with music by Philip Feeney). Drawing inspiration from Jacqueline du Pré’s life, the ballet juxtaposes traditional classical subjects against an innovative conceptual conceit: the cello appears embodied as a companion figure. Whittaker shows how bodily movement re-articulates musicianship’s entangled elements with persona and instrument affiliation—1960s–’70s highly gendered culture being further considered.

From graphic novel territory, Michaela Weiss and Miroslav Urbanec probe P. Craig Russell’s two-volume adapter’s treatment of Wagner’s Ring (2000–2001). Investigating transmediation between opera and comics performance, they illuminate how words and stills may sonorously move without sound. Importantly, Russell works around Wagner’s anti-Semitism and actively connects to American popular visual language, generating unpredictable openings.

Michael Pinchbeck and Kevin Egan probe how actors might devise wholly anew drawing musical materials instead of pure original production. They each note two case formulations: de-musicking Traviata (2010) and the Concerto (2016) extraction of Ravel’s one-handed Piano. Both pieces interweave biographical artefacts, live performers learning to occupy musician personas, between stage speakers closer than operatic norm.

Sharanya Murali aligns with cross-fertilisation paradigms examined earlier—positing “speaking back”. She particularizes: can performance that straddles live acoustics and digital capture transform canonical dominance? Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holí spurs she in commemorating Rite’s 1913 ascent by way of compositional reading partly executed through Prashant Bhargava’s filmed Hindu Holí documented alongside Vijay Iyer’s recent lines—embodying intercultural rebuttal of White-notions in hegemonic orchestration space. Her reading shows alternative principles finding root not apologetically corrective but co-constantly present as eximious voice itself among Western classical form.

Repetition and rupture across modern treatments

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Åsa Bergman’s article investigates promotional texts and visual materials on websites, mobile apps, and social media associated with live-streaming symphony orchestra concerts, highlighting how longstanding concepts continue to be voiced. Bergman examines

empirical evidence drawn from live-streamed performances by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in 2020, a time when pandemic restrictions closed concert halls to live audiences. She observes that Romantic aesthetic ideals—such as focused, attentive listening to musical structures, the notion of “absolute” music, and musical transcendence—persist in justifying symphony concerts within the contemporary digitized concert hall. She also notes how promotional materials help perpetuate a biased and inaccurate view of Western art music as universal.

Outdated stereotypes about classical music, repackaged with a contemporary sheen, form the focus of Sverker Hyltén-Cavallius’s article examining pandemic-themed classical music memes circulated on social media platforms during 2020. Hyltén-Cavallius suggests that this online visual discourse served as a “social safety valve” for classical music enthusiasts building community during a stressful period, reinforcing bonds while simultaneously upholding conventional beliefs about the integrity of the canon and value judgments comparing classical music with other genres. He finds minimal political consciousness or activism in these memes shared on sites like Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, and Tumblr; instead, he observes how classical music memes function to preserve group norms and boundaries. The article shows that popular discourse about classical music frequently reverts to defending the status quo or a nostalgic view of the past.

The collection’s final article confronts political discourse about classical music directly. Christina Scharff analyzes eighteen interviews she conducted with women who are early-career classical musicians, exploring whether recent debates about insufficient diversity in the profession have resonated with them. Scharff notes that participants were aware of ongoing inequalities and discussed them candidly—a positive shift—even though some dismissed white and middle-class privilege. She argues that “inequality talk” can become an end in itself, acquiring a fatalist tone that may reinforce the normativity of whiteness and middle-classness in the field, making demographic and political transformation seem unattainable.

The Bigger Picture

Key distinguishing features of this special collection include: (a) examining a wide range of contemporary artistic and media representations

of classical music, alongside articles probing issues of demographic representation in the classical music industry, and (b) underscoring the importance of connecting these different representation types across disciplines. Rather than being isolated scholarly compartments, the articles together form what, to our knowledge, is a previously unmapped network of integrated, multi-perspectival investigation.

No prior scholarship has attempted this comprehensive look at representation in/of classical music, nor does it happen systematically in professional practice across the arts and media. While the term “classical music” faces scrutiny in academia, cultural media, and the wider industry, understanding the ecosystem that preserves and reimagines classical music through various means and voices can move us past purely oppositional critiques. Encouraging cross-disciplinary thinking and examining representation from multiple angles enables gaps between discourse and orthodoxy to be recognized more clearly, potentially bridged. As the authors of the executive summary ‘Creating a More Inclusive Classical Music’, commissioned by the Arts Council of England, conclude:

There is a job to do … in putting what is known about classical music into a wider context and considering how the causes of inequality can be examined within this wider perspective. Acknowledging this context is not a way to remove responsibility from the classical music sector or its constituent parts in considering how questions of presence and absence might be addressed, but it is an important element of considering what might need to be done in order for things to change. (Cox and Kilshaw, 2021: 28)

Determining how representation of and representation in classical music influence each other arguably belongs to this “wider context.” It is a complex task, one this collection has only initiated. It requires a collaborative approach drawing on multiple scholarly disciplines, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, forms of evidence, and epistemologies. We contend that failing to connect different types of representation has produced an impoverished grasp of how the “circuit of culture” (Du Gay et al., 1997) operates regarding classical music and has hindered opportunities for positive cultural change, such as more accurate artistic and media representation and a fully inclusive, demographically diverse industry. Integrated thinking among scholars from diverse fields, artists working across varied media formats, and industry professionals holds the potential to re-imagine outdated and reactionary cultural narratives about classical music, enabling the art form to evolve and flourish. Classical music might thus be re-presented—presented anew, presented differently—for the twenty-first century across the arts, media, and industry. We have only begun to glimpse what this future-oriented, critically reflexive re-presentation could look like. This special collection lays the groundwork for the work we hope lies ahead.