In the latest issue of the BBC Music Magazine (November 2003), there's an article by the now 75-year-old Gary Graffman, who was a star concert pianist until injury cut his performing career short. For the last eighteen years he's been the head of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, which trains performers and composers. I'm not aware of this piece being available on the net, and I accordingly quote from it at some length.

When I started out as a pianist, in the late Forties, there was no such thing as an American orchestra that played – and therefore, was paid – for 52 weeks a year, and the salary of an orchestra player was not a living wage. And since there were far fewer concerts than there are now, opportunities for soloists were a fraction of what they are today. At that time there were only two major American concert management organisations with a total of about 40 pianists between them. This year's Musical America Directory lists over 600 pianists. And I can't even begin to compare the number of existing orchestra and arts organisations with those of 50 years ago. So perhaps we should be worrying more about glut than decline.

The audience for serious music has grown apace, too. Fifty years ago, New York had only one large concert hall and, aside from Horowitz, Heifetz and Rubinstein, very few performers filled it. I remember often sitting in a half-empty Carnegie Hall to hear New York Philharmonic concerts conducted by Bruno Walter, Artur Rodzinski and Dimitri Mitropoulos. In those years, though, nobody expected the world to beat a path to Carnegie Hall.

I wonder whether a good part of today's distress about 'declining' audiences has been caused by the unrealistic expectations of arts administrators. Do any of them actually remember what the music business was like in those longed-for Good Old Days? I think if they had been around then, they'd be a lot more realistic now. Meanwhile, greed rears its head: many administrators, carried away by uncharacteristic success in recent years, have come to believe that their potential audience is unlimited. As a result of this insatiable hunger for expansion – ever more performances in ever larger auditoriums – musical activities have gradually been stretched far beyond demand. And so the music marketers, chasing their tails in the endless search for the larger audiences needed to pay for the costs of the endless search for larger audiences, have begun to tamper with artistic matters. Pops music and potboilers, video enhancement, light shows and 'crossover' artists have begun to invade the symphony concert hall with results, I fear, that will succeed only in alienating true music lovers.

I think its crucial to understand that the demand for serious music is – and, in my opinion, always will be – quite finite. In any culture, at any time in history, interest in the arts has been shown by only a small minority of the population. It is neither a necessity for survival nor an instinctive human response. In most cultures this instinct has been an acquired taste. But I think we must also bear in mind that not every person, no matter how well educated, will necessarily become interested in what is known as 'classical music.' So what? Nobody is trying to get me to attend a wrestling match; why should I try to make someone who prefers wrestling to Beethoven attend a symphony concert?

I call that a breath of fresh air, don't you? You don't usually get perspective and sanity and sheer common sense like that from a performing artist.

The thing is, the classical music recording industry may be in all kinds of mess, but the appreciation of classical music is jogging along fine. And all those recordings, done by Horowitz, Heifetz and Rubinstein (and Gary Graffman) are out there working their magic.