Norman Lebrecht is a desperate doom-spreading protagonist for the future of Classical Music, and in this piece from earlier this month he tries to persuade himself that it is doing okay. I, on the other hand, note Classical Music's travails, confident that nothing this huge could possibly disappear without trace or subsequent influence.

And classical music does remain enormous in its cultural presence. Says Lebrecht:

… According to three Classic FM surveys, 15m people in Britain have a liking for orchestral music. About half of them listen to classical radio ...

Lebrecht is desperate to entice some of these millions into concert halls to sit through concert performances. Why? Don't know. He just is. Doesn't want his orchestral pals to have to switch to tele-marketing, presumably. And, live music is good for you, presumably. Drums and guitars bad, like carbohydrates in the Atkins diet.

Me, I'm coming to regard the future of Classical Music not as a desperate struggle, but as an obvious fact. It may not be a fact which keeps five London Symphony orchestras is permanent business, in fact if it did I'd be amazed. And rather disgusted, because that would be bound to involve a hell of a lot of subsidies from unconsulted taxpayers and shareholders. But survive it will, in some form, and since it will survive, it is bound to have creative consequences.

Perhaps the most interesting immediate after-echo of classic Classical Music is to be found in film music. While the official classical composers disappear into their various never never lands of atonalism, and then minimalism, and now … I can't remember, but I had it written down on a scrap of paper and I'll let you know … While the official classicals are off, you know, doing their feeble feeble things, and giving their first and last performances of each other's feeble feeble pieces, the ancient voice of the symphony orchestra continues to blare forth in the background of epics like the Lord of the Rings and Matrix movies. Those moments when classical music is at its most rock and roll, so to speak, such as the Dies Irae in Verdi's Requiem (or for that matter the Dies Irae in Britten's War Requiem), or the rhythmic string patterns of the more aggressive tank warfare music in Shostakovitch's symphonies, have resulted in a whole new epic style of film music making. I hear it every time I browse through the DVDs in EMI Oxford Street. Guitars do not jangle. Drums are often quiet. No, that's an orchestra doing that. Strange creatures with funny ears say portentously platitudinous things, and fifty violinists and violists and cellists are fending off the dole in the background.

I prefer listening to Verdi's actual Requiem, Britten's actual War Requiem, and Shostakovitch's actual symphonies, to listening to all the various film scores that have been influenced by such music, so I'm probably not the best person to be discussing the nuances of the work of John Williams or … all the other guys who write rather like John Williams. I can only offer small snatches of musical recollection from among my years of movie watching.

Consider 2001: A Space Odyssey. You really don't have to be very musically well informed to know that the music Kubrick chose for that was classical. Who could forget the rocket slowly inching its way towards the huge space wheel to the sound of the Blue Danube? But by the time I heard that, I had already been transfixed by the music Kubrick had already used at the beginning, that amazing thing with the drums and organ and brass. Wow, I thought, that was really something. It turned out, of course, to be Also Sprach Zarathustra, by not-Johann Strauss, that is to say by Richard Strauss. The music for 2001, or more precisely the feeling about music that 2001 tapped into, was crucial to the future of Classical Music because what it said was: Classical Music has a future. It will go to the stars in our space ships, alongside drinks machines, video-telephones and the boredom of interplanetary travel. (In the Alien movies, they hibernate. Me, I'd stay awake for longer, and listen to the complete Haydn string quartets or the complete Bach Cantatas.)

Or consider another movie from long ago, called The Lion in Winter, the one in which Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn played Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. The music for that was done, I just happen to remember, by John Barry, who cut his cinematic musical fangs on early James Bond movies. Twang twang bang bang doo-wop doo-wop. But faced with the job of evoking the dynastic rivalries of twelfth century Anglo-France, Barry resorted to a more classical idiom. It had the rhythmic insistence of pop, but he got a chorus and an orchestra to actually play it. I am not claiming that this was any sort of musical landmark, with ripples spreading onwards and outwards I'm just saying that this is typical of what happens when cinema composers want to step beyond the pop they got started in, or the contemporary action adventures they then move to when they get too old to do pop. When they want to evoke a bigger, older, more universal, more future-proof world, they reach for the classics.

Although, I just did some Lion in Winter googling, and the film is now held in higher regard by others besides me than I realised. So maybe it was a musical influence, and not just a musical symptom. Not much is said about John Barry's music in the stuff I've seen, but I remember it as having a huge effect on the atmosphere of the film, and accordingly a huge influence on the success of the film as a whole. And if that's so, then the other musicians will definitely have noted this.

And hello (googling "John Barry" as well as just "Lion in Winter" this time), what's this? Apparently John Barry got an Oscar for it. That would definitely have been noticed by the other musicians.

Whatever. What I'm saying is that thanks to Lions in Winter, Star Wars, Matrices and the rest of them, the basic musical grammar of classical music will go on being pounded into new generations. It won't go away. Universality equals Beethoven, is the subtext of all this. And since when did people ever turn their backs on universality.

There's a lot more going on with the non-death of Classical Music than mere film music, but that will do for today.

Expect comment from Michael Jennings, who really does like his film music, but oddly, has no fondness for traditional Classical Music itself.