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Huge surge in Millennial and Gen Z-ers streaming classical music. Picture: Derek Bremner/Getty

With the rise of streaming services, young people are listening to more Mozart and Bach than they did 10 years ago. And during lockdown, classical music has experienced a second boom.

Classical music is becoming more popular among young people, according to new joint research by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, streaming service Deezer, and British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

Of those streaming classical music in the last year, a third (34 percent) were 18 to 25 years old. Over the same period, classical streams by listeners under 35 rose by 17 percent.

A decade ago, data published by BPI showed just a tenth of classical listeners were under 30, while the vast majority (70 percent) were over the age of 50.

Classical had a second 'spike' when lockdown hit in March, as both modern classical artists and more traditional composers were suddenly a hit among younger listeners. The report, which looks at official streaming data on Deezer, a competitor of Spotify, shows that over three months, global plays of classical music among 18 to 25-year-olds grew by 11 per cent.

Mozart and Bach are the platform's most popular classical composers, while streams of female pianists including Khatia Buniatishvili and Martha Argerich soared during that three-month period.
Read more: Classical music boosts mental wellbeing in isolation, study finds >

Mozart is Deezer's most popular classical composer. Picture: Getty

According to an earlier report from the RPO, more than a third (35 percent) of respondents under 35s felt listening to orchestral music during lockdown had helped them relax and maintain a sense of calmness and wellbeing.

The joint research also reveals how classical music habits are changing among young people. Young classical talent and crossover playlists, like 'Classical Goes Pop', are proving popular.

Playlists linked to mood, like 'feel good', 'calm' and 'sleep', have also been well-liked during the pandemic, as young people turned to classical music as a means of finding solace, reassurance and relaxation in an uncertain time.

Calming piano music is a favourite among young listeners. 'Calm Piano' continued to be classical music's most popular playlist in March. And those under 35 listening to the 'Classical For Sleep' playlist shot up by 10 per cent. Streams of this playlist also spiked by a huge 284 per cent across all age groups during this time.

Among the top performing artists and composers of 2020 worldwide, were Italian artists Einaudi and Andrea Bocelli, and Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi.

Albums are seeing a resurge too, as classical listeners streamed more in full than fans of other genres, despite previous research showing that fewer people than ever are listening to whole albums.

Female pianists, such as Khatia Buniatishvili, are increasingly popular. Picture: PA

Classical artists have been voicing their support for the positive findings, including Max Richter, Ray Chen, Jess Gillam and Alexandre Desplat.

Oscar-winning film composer, Desplat, said: "It's heartening that the appeal of classical music is clearly expanding and connecting with a broader and younger audience.

"The ease of discovery and connectivity through streaming must be playing its part, but so too is the global reach and power of film soundtracks, which draw such inspiration from classical composition."
Read more: Vote for your favourite film soundtrack, and you could win £500 >
Renowned composer Max Richter added: "It is wonderful that new audiences are coming to classical music during this time of anxiety. Streaming offers listeners the chance simply to follow their enthusiasms through the musical universe without any boundaries, and I'm really happy to hear that many people are turning to classical music for the first time.

"As well as being a historical art form, classical music is also part of what is happening now and it is great to see more people embracing it."

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Research shows huge surge in Millennials and Gen Zers streaming classical music

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With the rise of streaming services, young people are listening to more Mozart and Bach than they did 10 years ago. And during lockdown, classical music has experienced a second boom. Classical music is becoming more popular among young people, according to new joint research by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, streaming service Deezer, and British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

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In order to begin the rebranding process, ThoughtMatter began by having intimate conversations with all stakeholders of the foundation. The design team listened to stories and experienced the power of the performances - albeit through Zoom, they mention - in order to paint a clearer picture of the future of the foundation.

Unsurprisingly, music played a key role in the creation process. Listening to music together and sharing musical experiences, the team were able to catalyse conversations around using the body as an instrument, understanding how powerful posture and breathing can be when projecting one's voice. Through this process, ThoughtMatter's design team were able to mirror a "visual representation of joy" by using an exclamation point. This symbol went on to become an "anchor" for the rebrand.

Elsewhere, the symbol of an arched window represents the church's influence in the city's borough. "Harlem is my neighbourhood," says Ben Greengrass, creative director at ThoughtMatter, "so I know firsthand that when you walk around on a Sunday morning, all you'll hear are sounds of celebration coming from behind those windows. These windows provide a view into the history, the advancement, and the joy in Mama's house." These elements, along with bold colours and the use of photography, became powerful graphic devices for the company to use across signage, the website, show posters and other branding materials.

Managing director Jessie McGuire at the brand design studio claims that "Through design, symbolism and language," the design team at ThoughtMatter hopes it's able to introduce audiences to aspects of Mama Foundation they may have not otherwise been familiar with - "their Harlem legacy, commitment to preserving and presenting Black musical art-forms, goal to catalyse collective healing and aim to create space for communal belonging. The end result is a brand that is an authentic representation of the Mama Foundation and its singular spirit."

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In a new rebrand, ThoughtMatter asks if design can help bring gospel music to new generations

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In order to begin the rebranding process, ThoughtMatter began by having intimate conversations with all stakeholders of the foundation. The design team listened to stories and experienced the power of the performances - albeit through Zoom, they mention - in order to paint a clearer picture of the future of the foundation.

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Brand consultancy Brandpie has launched a brand refresh for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO), modernising the orchestra's appeal through a new logo, updated typography, enhanced layout applications and a fresh colour palette. The rebrand for the orchestra, which was founded in 1968, is aimed to appeal to a new generation of music fans and to spark new interest in classical music in the wider Los Angeles area.

The orchestra's new core positioning - "the invigorating power of classical music" - was developed through Brandpie's extensive consumer research that tries to highlight the emotional impact of classical music that has the power to refresh its audience.

The new logo incorporates the stroke lines of the music manuscript, with the fluid movement of the lines acting as a motif across the branding that expresses the emotive nature of classical music. "We've not only created a new visual component - we've helped reinvigorate the power of classical music," states MaryLee Sachs, Brandpie's New York CEO.

"With our new music director Jaime Martín coming to town, it was time to make sure our brand was as full of life as he is," states Justus Zimmerman, the orchestra's director of marketing and communications. The orchestra wanted to present a more forward-thinking and digital-first identity without alienating their dedicated audience base. "Brandpie's sophisticated read of the situation on the ground and their keen sense of style have created a truly differentiated, truly beautiful brand to mark this new era in LACO's history," he concludes.

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Brandpie rebrands the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for a new generation of classical music fans

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The brand consultancy looks to focus on classical music’s power to invigorate and refresh in an increasingly stressful time.

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Fatboy Slim Suite - Kaleidoscope Orchestra

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Pete Tong, The Heritage Orchestra and Jules Buckley - Ibiza Classics - Live at The O2, London 2019

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The beauty of variable fonts in the service of classical music needs to be experienced via a project that aims to bring a symphony of multimedia arts on and off the grid.

aka the independent strategy, design and communications company stays true to its core philosophy -mixing creativity and technology to build brands- in its latest partnership with the internationally acclaimed San Francisco Symphony. The outcome affirms that classical music is "a relevant and evolving art form - completely reimagining the organization's brand and mission as a model for the future."

The new vision for the 108-year-old San Francisco Symphony aims to redefine classical music for modern audiences as the org transitions from the old Music Director, Michael Tilson Thomas to , a very progressive and modern successor.

"Classical music has always been hurt by perceptions of elitism and irrelevance -especially during the pandemic, which has devastated the arts" notes COLLINS of its effort that hopes to challenge that.

The identity work is experimental, animated and kinetic, using responsive type to represent the movement of classical music.

Part of the effort is also an online platform called the Symphonsizer -- an audio responsive digital platform that allows users to immerse themselves in the themes of the rebrand and also re-engage with their love of music in a uniquely digital way.

"Music is one of humanity's most powerful creations - it meets us at our emotional center. Like all great art, it both inspires and reflects the times we live in. However, 'classical' music also suffers from an ongoing and ruthless PR problem: it is too often perceived as an unchanging, dusty, old-world music for elite audiences only" reads the press release of this impressive project.

"Facing this challenge was The San Francisco Symphony, a 108-year old cultural legend with international acclaim and a deep legacy of rewriting the rules to advance the relevance of the orchestral arts.

At a crucial moment to reimagine its future and broaden its reach to diverse audiences, the organization subverted the hierarchical nature of both itself and the industry through a DEI-focused organizational overhaul. In addition, the symphony's famed maverick Music Director, Michael Tilson Thomas, closed out his extraordinary 25-year tenure and passed the baton to visionary conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen in the midst of the global pandemic.

COLLINS was invited to help clarify, define, and express this new vision for the Symphony, and help them re-assert classical music as a crucial, global contemporary art form - all while staying rooted in our community and strengthening the bonds that have made them so successful for over a century.

Beginning by collaborating with the Symphony musicians, audiences, staff, executive leadership, and board members, COLLINS defined a new, shared vision for the future which became a foundation for creative and design experimentation.

This inspired an ever-responsive, evolving visual system that brings to life the dynamic qualities of classical music itself.

Starting with traditional typography that speaks to the art form's heritage - they used responsive and variable font technology to add an unexpected contemporary behavior - giving each typographic character the ability to immediately change form in reaction to sound and music.

COLLINS also crafted a more expressive voice that juxtaposes the timeless formality of black and white with a contemporary palette inspired by the unique colors and landscape of the Bay Area."

As previously mentioned, central to this new take in visualising music at its best is the .

With concert halls around the world remaining closed indefinitely, the online platform uses responsive and variable font technology to give users the experience of enjoying a classical concert from the comfort of their homes with an added interactive, visual dimension.

"At its heart, classical music is an interactive experience," explains COLLINS Creative Director Louis Mikolay.

"Because there are no lyrics, every listener is open to interpret the music in their own way. The Symphosizer enhances this idea by inviting you to explore a completely personal emotional journey during a performance. The motion of the letterforms symbolizes the emotional expressions of the piece itself, uplifting layers and details in the music which may have previously gone unnoticed. This brings a new depth to that personal journey."

"It's true that the origins of classical music are hundreds of years old, if not more," Mikolay continues, "but the general population doesn't tend to realize that it has been in a constant state of flux since its inception. It has been defining and redefining itself with each generation - even woven into movie scores, video games, and beyond. Classical music has an incredible amount to offer all of us, especially in such a stressful time. We have been honored to work with the multi-talented teams at The San Francisco Symphony to help broaden its relevance in the modern world."

Listen to this symphony of variable typography and more .

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A symphony of type: COLLINS reimagines a variable San Francisco Symphony experience - TypeRoom

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The beauty of variable fonts in the service of classical music needs to be experienced via a project that aims to bring a symphony of multimedia arts on and off the grid. aka the independent strategy, design and communications company stays true to its core philosophy -mixing creativity and technology to build brands- in its latest partnership with the internationally acclaimed San Francisco Symphony .

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want typeface to have curves and roundness while feeling modern - perfect round o

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holes of light

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red velvet seating
curves, ornate
golds?

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what kind of printing relates to music? ink on paper, lines,

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moon
sun
orchestra seats
musical notation

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keep it weird
start collaging
conservatoire?

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allegro
staccato
da capo
nocturne
sympho

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identity needs to challenge preconceived notions of 'classical'

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combination of classic typefaces and modern imagery?

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classical x trance crossover?

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the theme of night, Skies, the atmosphere and the earth, rhythm

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young people seeking out classical music - connection between music without words eg techno, house, steady rhythms and focus. making classical more accessible and appealing to young people, less formal setting, helps anxiety the same way dancing does

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SYNTHONY - Darude Sandstorm by Auckland Symphony Orchestra

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'If classical music does indeed have an image problem, what image ought it adopt? What must classical music now pretend to be?'
This is an edited transcript of a talk given by Philip Clark last week at the Swansea International Festival...
Let me open with a confession. This is my first visit to Wales for forty-two years and until earlier this year I didn't actually realise I'd been to Wales before. When my mother died in January amongst her things I found a book of Dylan Thomas poems that my parents had bought during a holiday to Wales in 1972. Inside she inscribed my age - and so I can tell you that I was six months old the last time I was in Wales.

But I do have a connection-once-removed to Wales that feels pertinent to the subject under discussion tonight - about the classical concert experience, its relevance or otherwise, in the 21st century. I was a friend of the music writer and critic John Warnaby who lived in Port Talbot in a terraced house which, against all the odds, he transformed into a Welsh hub of the European avant-garde. I met John, who died in 2007, when I was a music student at Huddersfield University in the early 1990s. He made the pilgrimage once a year to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and indeed spent most of the year footslogging between new music festivals around the UK and central Europe.

Our friendship was largely transacted by cassette. Every few weeks a jiffy bag full of them would drop through my letterbox which contained the latest must-hear premieres from festivals in Germany, Austria and Holland - composers like Rihm, Spahlinger, Kagel, Dillon and Globokar. And when I said that John transformed Port Talbot into a hub of the European avant-garde, I wasn't joking. Long before high-speed broadband and, I suspect, using a less than pristine PC, John managed to wire and worm his way into European radio stations and make very high quality recordings of live broadcasts. Then he would send me copies. And, although I might be deluding myself, I like to think that John and I were the first people in the UK to hear many premiere performances of new pieces by the likes of Kagel and Lachenmann.

But there's one thing I haven't told you about John that, thinking about what some people want the concert experience to be, is significant. John was blind. As far as I could tell, and we never talked about it, he had no sight in either eye. He travelled around the world dependent on his partner, and with a contemporary music lover in every port, to help him negotiate transport. And often I wonder what John would have made of schemes designed to sex-up the classical concert - to broaden its appeal and cleanse its image.

Because we live in a culture, I think, where visual stimuli are in the ascendant, sometimes at the cost of sound. Sound is no longer enough. That sound can be judged as sound - that music is a worthy pursuit in and of itself is, in the most extreme cases, being casually dismissed. Classical music now must aspire to offer spectacle - whether a particular piece can take it or not.

In his keynote talk at this year's Classical NEXT festival, the Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, offered his thoughts about this same subject. Nézet-Séguin is a fine musician who is entirely sincere about his art, but his recipe for how to 'revitalise' classical concerts felt disappointingly prosaic. For decades, all the talk has been about how musicians dress; about the timing and duration of concerts; about the historical distance that audiences feel from classical music, whether it be Bach or the premiere of a new piece completed last week. Nézet-Séguin reiterated that musicians need to speak to audiences, to explain how a 90-minute Bruckner symphony hangs together. 'It's all about communication,' he said.

Worthy stuff, but where Nézet-Séguin's words fall down is that orchestras and ensembles have been experimenting with these strategies for years. I arrived in London in the mid-1990s at a point where you couldn't go to a London Sinfonietta concert without the senses being assaulted by an array of embarrassingly bad shirts. Orchestras have experimented with the length and timing of concerts - with bite-size gigs designed not to frighten the horses; with rush-hour concerts; with late night and lunchtime concerts. And no one could object to any of that.

As Nézet-Séguin talked about experimenting with the format and repertoire of concerts, my mind turned inevitably towards the Bristol Proms, the early summer season of concerts, now in its third year, promoted by Universal Music, who own classical record labels Deutsche Grammophon and Decca. The Bristol Proms are built around audience interaction. Artists are encouraged to talk to audiences, the spin given that this represents a new idea. If you want to text or email during a Bristol Proms concert, that's fine; if you want to instigate a conversation with a fellow audience member during a concert, no problem.

But one concert at this year's festival showed how the Bristol Proms can sometimes privilege the event - the feel-good of the spectacle - above the music. Music writers like myself received an excitable email about 'immersive Beethoven ' - which turned out to be a semi-lit performance by the Sacconi String Quartet of Beethoven's Op 131 String Quartet. Darkness became a metaphor for Beethoven's deafness, and individual quartet members were wired into various camera angles which beamed images of their faces around the hall so audiences could see the emotional expression of the performers.

Tom Morris, who runs the Bristol Proms, is a distinguished theatre director and perhaps you might expect him to dramatise and 'stage' music. But you gerrymander the format of a classical concert at your peril. The audience could see the performer's faces emoting as they played; but they might not wanted to have heard what they were playing. Reports suggested the performance suffered numerous slips of ensemble and intonation because the players couldn't see each other. The audience attending that night heard less of a performance than had the concert been played under normal conditions. Beethoven's piece suffered.

Here's a radical thought for Morris to chew on. The fabric, the sound, the structural daring of a piece like Beethoven Opus 131 tells you everything you could possibly need to know about Beethoven, about his deafness, about his increasing sense of isolation, about the way that deafness transformed Beethoven's internal hearing and mapping of sound. It's all there in the music. And I would argue that the Bristol Proms - by consciously dramaticising emotion - actually took listeners further away from the core emotional and sonic resonance of Beethoven's music.

As far as the mainstream press is concerned, this ongoing debate about the classical concert experience has been distilled into a single question - is it acceptable, or not, for audiences to applaud between movements, a question I consider to be as relevant as asking whether one should vote for Jeremy Corbyn, not because of his world-view or policies, but because he's the first Labour leader since Kier Hardie to have a beard. Would we really want our politics framed around the question: 'Is it acceptable for a leader of the opposition to have a beard?' Applause has become the default subject of classical music blogs. But I've never heard a single person - not one - say they won't go to a classical concert in case they clap in the wrong place. All this stuff - plunging string quartets into the dark, worrying about what shirts to wear or applauding between movements - speaks of a poverty of ideas. If you have nothing to say about content, talk instead about procedure.

Recently on Twitter I bumped heads with the BBC Radio 3 presenter Suzy Klein who, during a Radio 2 programme designed to introduce listeners to classical music, said 'Classical music still has an image problem' - which is a statement well worth breaking down.

When did this image problem start to show itself? Did Mozart suffer an image problem when he premiered the Jupiter Symphony? Stravinsky when the premiere of The Rite of Spring was kicking off around him? Did Stockhausen and Boulez care about image when they were unleashing their 12-tone revolution? Or Reich and Glass during the Salad Days of minimalism? But classical music's alleged image problem has become the mainstream media narrative - a misinformed opinion continually reported as fact. Classical music is elitist, stuffy, obscure and lacks relevance. But if classical music does indeed have an image problem, what image ought it adopt? What must classical music now pretend to be?

For a moment, I want you to suspend your disbelief as I flip the argument on its head. Try it this way round: there is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music. It cannot pretend to be anything other than it is. And perhaps it's the wider cultural environment which surrounds classical music that has a problem.

In a culture increasingly obsessed with ephemeral celebrity, fed by a spin drier of rehashed PR trivia presented as 'news', where sport is the new religion, where Saturday night fluff like Strictly Come Dancing is analysed seriously and given acres of press coverage, then a cultural landscape invested in supporting all that activity damn well ought to have a problem with classical music - with its difficultly, with its emotional ambiguity, with its allusiveness, with its celebration of individuality, with its refusal to conform, with its ability to move our emotions beyond something that can be controlled and manipulated into turning a profit.

The Channel 4 News journalist Paul Mason, who as it happens trained as a composer, said in a recent interview: 'Music - I mean the classical music I studied - taught me above all: no act of imagination is futile. Music is the imagination running wild, through a landscape that is only colour and emotion. Its mere existence refutes the demand of neoliberals for us to be acquisitive, selfish individuals.'

Which sounds like a ringing manifesto to me - and as we think about the future of the classical concert, we need to be far sharper in our definition of what classical music actually is. Just as the word 'jazz' has become an envelope term applied haphazardly to all points between Frank Sinatra and the wildest frontiers of free improvisation, 'classical music' has come to symbolise everything from Machaut motets to the musique concrète of Pierre Henry, from André Rieu to Pierre Boulez - it's all, somehow, 'Classical'.

Julian Lloyd Webber, now principal of the Birmingham Conservatoire of Music, spoke recently of how we should consign 'classical music' to the dustbin of useless phraseology and - again - his use of language is revealing. 'Musicians need to think outside the box and push boundaries, to work cross-genre with rock or jazz musicians, or be experimental,' he said.

Putting aside that middle-management speak about thinking outside boxes, the very idea that suddenly you can 'be' experimental as a lifestyle choice is as dubious as the notion that you could suddenly have a sense of humour - or speak Japanese. Because to experiment with music in any meaningful way, you need to have a deep understanding of how it operates technically and emotionally.

What I've called in my writings 'pretendy' classical music serves up the spectacle of classical music - you see an orchestra or an ensemble on stage, you see opera singers producing vaguely operatic sounds as they open their mouths. But invariably tepid cross-over projects exist precisely because musicians have failed to grapple with the big questions at play here. Fusions of minimalism, ambient electronica, pop structures drizzled with world music 'flavas' - Karl Jenkins, Max Richter, Ludovico Einaudi, Roxanna Panufnik - have become a ubiquitous sub-genre with relevance to the future of classical music only in the sense that EL James is relevant to the future of the novel. No boundaries are being pushed at all. Instead, this is a corporate, boardroom idea of music designed specifically to shift units of CDs.

I agree with Lloyd Webber in one sense: classical music is not a particularly useful term with which to describe this activity of musicians playing and singing music written over the last 400 years. But let's never allow that tradition to collapse into beige crossover fusion. Rather than think outside boxes, musicians need to understand what's in their own box before considering what might lie beyond them.

If you're familiar with my writing - from magazines like Gramophone and The Wire - you might find that statement rather surprising. Since I started writing professionally in 1999 I've been obsessed with tunneling inside music and trying to discover points of technical and aesthetic connection between, for instance, the practice of free improvisation and various strands of the avant-garde. The 'English' music I feel closest to is not Elgar or Vaughan Williams, but the visionary Blakeian pop of The Kinks and the improvised music of AMM and Derek Bailey. I admire the music of Michael Tippett and Michael Finnissy because it gives a damn that English schools of composition too often look inwards.

Yes, music is at its best and most creative when it refuses point blank to exist in the stylistic world it already knows. But, no, that is absolutely not the same thing as this nebulous world of major label crossover music currently being dished up as 'classical' music. When recently I read the blogger Norman Lebrecht say in connection with the Bristol Proms that labeling music as 'classical music' is missing the point - 'It's not classical. Music is music. The moment you start putting categories to things, you diminish them' - a little part of me died. Because exactly the opposite is true.

An example: if a composer wants to work with jazz, what can that mean? You could, of course, concoct a score that deals superficially with the surface cliché of jazz - those melodic hooks, stock chord sequences and wah-wah trumpet sounds that evoke classic Herman Leonard photographs of smoky jazz clubs populated by drug ridden, down on their luck musicians.

But categorising jazz begins to make sense of it creatively. Is this piece you want to write riffing off ideas from early 'Classic jazz', from the jazz of Jelly Roll Morton or Louis Armstrong? Or is interested in bebop? The journey between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker is long and complex; but even if your piece is commenting on bebop, do you mean the purist bop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, or the bop of Thelonious Monk, with its references to stride piano that crash at the very brink of Modernity - or with the so-called 'Hard bop' of Lee Morgan and Art Blakey? To compose with this material you must know the difference. And perhaps your composed response might want to subliminally imply that the harmonic and rhythm techniques of bebop were mirrored in the music surrounding it - the rhythmic smack in face typical of Stravinsky's music or the harmonic smoke-and-mirrors of Messiaen. Only when engaging with music rigorously can you start to look beyond categories; only then do you realise that Monk was rooted in bop but actually had little to do with it; only then can you understand how far Tippett's vision of the symphony moved outside any idea of what an 'English symphony' could be.

That music is now post-genre, that with their bullet-proof techniques musicians can play Haydn with the same facility as they can play Jimi Hendrix or improvise, is dangerous nonsense. Music is more subtle and nuanced than that, and the major problem with 'classical music' as it is being sold and marketed in concert halls is that the term has too often come to mean a very carefully controlled repertoire that begins somewhere around Haydn and ends with Mahler and Stravinsky. Earlier music and later music are occasional interlopers. The Classic FM Hall of Fame shuffles around the same handful of 'masterworks' each year. The Lark Ascending or Elgar's Nimrod - which is it this year, pop-pickers? As if it mattered.

This is a big ask I know, especially as it sails directly against the prevailing cultural wind, but we need to be more musically articulate than that, and refuse to accept the doublespeak that any of this pretendy classical music represents any future at all. We need to speak up for classical music, and defy the idea that video game music is, as I once heard a classical music exec say, 'the new classical'.

In the past few weeks I've interviewed two remarkable musicians whose work illuminates what I'm talking about. The Baroque violinist Rachel Podger has devoted her life to Baroque music - to exploring Bach, Vivaldi, Biber, Telemann et al with hairline clarity. She's thought carefully about appropriate tuning systems for Bach's music. Which tuning system is appropriate for Bach? Is the tuning appropriate for a Brandenburg Concerto the same as for the B Minor Mass? And playing Bach using Baroque tuning systems and on period instruments opens up a whole can of stylistic worms, requiring a radical rethink of how rhythmic flow and ornamentation operates. When I interviewed the Hilliard Ensemble, they spoke of their problems with performing Lassus. They couldn't get the tuning to work until the realisation dawned that the keyboards with which he would have worked were tuned with slightly sharpened fourths - and when they sharpened the fourths it worked beautifully.

Which is why soundbites suggesting that 'music is music' are nonsense. Music is carefully codified by the conditions that surround it - and these you must to respect.

Last week I spoke to the singer Elaine Mitchener whose new piece Industrialising Intimacy will be touring the UK later this year. Mitchener has a background in modern composition, but is known as a free improviser - a vocalist who improvises with her voice. She recently became interested in how body movements affect her voice as she's improvising and has worked with the chorographer Dam van Huynh to invent a rigorous practice of movement that will alter the colours and tone of her voice. Her new piece is anchored around compositional frameworks composed by herself, George Lewis and David Toop around which she will improvise.

Had I been talking to you next month, I might well have hit you with different examples. But Rachel and Elaine - who could hardly orbit more different musical worlds - have filtered their art down to essentials. They have reinvented their idea of what a concert can be through sheer belief in what they do. And rather than impose gimmicks onto a Beethoven string quartet, or trying to fool people into believing that the musical equivalent of fast food contains any nourishment, they start with the music. They build concerts from the music up. Podger's take on Bach finds an expressive world too often lost when he is played on modern instruments; Mitchener's piece forces our idea of what a musical experience can be to shift through the breadth of her interests. Boundaries crumble because they have no choice.

Deconstructing genres means you can dive forever deeper, cutting into styles and finding endless nuances until music becomes a malleable putty which with you can work. The great thing about putty is that it can be easily mixed - nobody particularly notices the joins, but individual strains of colour retain their identity. That classical music 'still has an image problem' I find chillingly dystopian, the implication being that classical music will only stop having its image problem when it learns to conform to the fickle whims of fashion and of the market.

And that really would mark the death of classical music and of the classical concert.

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What's wrong with the classical concert experience in the 21st century?

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'If classical music does indeed have an image problem, what image ought it adopt? What must classical music now pretend to be?' This is an edited transcript of a talk given by Philip Clark last week at the Swansea International Festival... Let me open with a confession.

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It feels familiar and alien at the same time. Many Berliners have stepped inside the towering walls of Berghain, the most famous nightclub in Germany, but it is different this summer. Its halls are not yet again filled with strobing lights and beating techno music. Instead, filling its empty dance floors is a glimmering, two-story art installation featuring an unusual soundscape of flora and fauna. The club has been re-wilded.

Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen's ambitious installation, Berl-Berl, which opened this month, delicately transforms the notorious nightclub into a swampy 3D ecosystem using innovative technologies and gaming software. The artist, who is based in Berlin, stitched together masses of archival and original images to create a fluidly moving filmic landscape that twists and turns across vast and microscopic panorama.

"Berl," the first syllable of Berlin, is actually an old Slavic word for swamp, a testament to the Slavic populations that used to reside in the region (some still do), and to the landscape's former state, before it was drained in the 18th century. All the moving imagery used for the show was culled from around the German capital's traces of remaining wetlands, or from the Nature Museum's extensive archives. It immerses viewers in a fictional world of nature that feels impossible and infinite, but very much stems from the real-a realization that feels particularly harrowing in a summer of back-to-back climate emergencies, including Germany's worst-in-a-century floods.

The sophisticated imagery is splashed across nearly a dozen screens over two levels, with reflective flooring creating a watery slick that doubles the vibrant imagery. It's a unique take on immersive art that is tactile and contemplative-soothing, too, at a time when the theme of climate is wrought with anxiety.

The show is being organized by a unique Berlin-based non-profit art foundation called Light Art Space, which focuses on light-based media art that intersects with scientific research. Its helmed by Bettina Kames, an art historian who is its founding director, and backed by collector and business mogul Jan Fischer. Its nomadic program presents a major show at least once a year, when it takes over a large space in the city.

"It has been a great privilege to curate for Light Art Space," said Emma Enderby, the chief curator at the Shed in New York, who curated the show at Berghain, in a statement. "They have a visionary, experimental, and open approach to thinking about the role an arts foundation can play within society."

Steensen, a recent resident at the Luma Arles Foundation in France, often focuses on the environment and harnesses technology to achieve a supernatural result. He tapped the acclaimed musical artist Arca to collaborate on the soundscape. She will have a performance at the exhibition in September.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen's installation Berl-Berl, commissioned by Light Art Space, is on view until September 26 at Halle am Berghain in Berlin.

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An Artist Just Transformed Berlin's Berghain Nightclub Into an Eerie, Immersive 3D Swamp-See Images Here

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It feels familiar and alien at the same time. Many Berliners have stepped inside the towering walls of Berghain, the most famous nightclub in Germany, but it is different this summer. Its halls are not yet again filled with strobing lights and beating techno music.

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Is classical music having a millennial moment? In March 2019, the streaming service Deezer reported a 270% rise in the number of subscribers to its most popular classical music playlist, with 43% of those new listeners being millennials. BBC research also shows that young people are increasingly seeking out classical music online to relax, focus and energise.

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2. Classical goes well with other genres

Is it OK to add classical tracks to your regular playlists? "Yeah, definitely!" says Jess, "I think it's something that needs to happen MORE! As humans, we seem to be wired for categorisation. We'll try and shoebox everything, but for music that just crushes breadth of experience and open-mindedness."

So, not only should classical musicians not set themselves apart from other genres, but us listeners should be making more of an effort to build diverse playlists for ourselves. And don't assume that classical music isn't for you just because you didn't like it the last time you heard it...

"It's actually OK not to like a lot of classical music," says Jess, "because 'classical' is such an insanely broad term, and not always that helpful." This Classical Life always showcases a range of music, giving classical newbies the chance to find out what they like (and what they don't) and build it into their own playlists.

3. It's great for capturing a mood

BBC research has shown that people of all ages seek out classical music when they want to relax, but that younger people in particular use classical music to help them focus and to give them energy.

"That makes sense, because I always listen to minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Michael Nyman when I need motivation," says Jess. "I think it's something to do with the constant beat that kind of music has, and this sort of relentless drive. When you listen or play it, it's like you're joining in with an energy that's already there."

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BBC Radio 3 - This Classical Life - Why are more young people listening to classical music?

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Is it OK to add classical tracks to your regular playlists? "Yeah, definitely!" says Jess, "I think it's something that needs to happen MORE! As humans, we seem to be wired for categorisation. We'll try and shoebox everything, but for music that just crushes breadth of experience and open-mindedness."