When you watch your favourite professional sports team, they are a group of elite sportsmen. These elite athletes are paid millions. Wikipedia lists the top paid professional athletes today in which most of the top 50 players of the world at paid over 10 million dollars per annum.
Next, let's look at the highest paid musicians in the world:
1. U2 ($195m)
2. Bon Jovi ($125m)
3. Elton John ($100m)
4. Lady Gaga ($90m)
5. Michael Bublé ($70m)
6. Paul McCartney ($67m)
7. Black Eyed Peas ($61m)
8. The Eagles ($60m)
9. Justin Bieber ($53m)
10. Dave Matthews Band ($51m)
11. Toby Keith ($50m)
12. Usher ($46m)
13. Taylor Swift $45m)
14. Katy Perry ($44m)
15. Brad Paisley ($40m)
16. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers ($38m)
17. Jay-Z ($38m)
18. AC/DC ($35m)
19. Sean "Diddy" Combs ($35m)
20. Beyoncé ($35m)
21. Tim McGraw ($35m)
22. Muse ($35m)
23. Rascal Flatts ($34m)
24. Kenny Chesney ($30m)
25. Rihanna ($29m)
This comes from Forbes (2011).
Now, let's ask ourselves what the commonly repeated accusation against Classical Music being "elitist" really means.
Classical musicians are definitely better musically educated. Professional musicians mostly have a degree in music, if not a higher degree. It is easy to demonstrate that the music they play is harmonically, contrapuntally, rhythmically and structurally more complex, as well as technically far more challenging to play. Paul McCartney is musically illiterate - he can't even read or write music. Yet despite this, you could count the number of classical musicians who have broken the million dollar barrier on the fingers of one hand. In general, you are doing extremely well in the highest percentile, if you earn around 100 000 dollars per annum. The highest publicly available recent figure for a classical musician was that of Lorin Maazal being paid $2.2 million dollars for the New York Philharmonic in 2006-7, and that is really exceptional. This is still less than a tenth of what the 25th highest earner pocketed in the 2011 Forbes list.
So why is it then, that in addition to being paid an order of magnitude less, do classical musicians have to put up with the insult of being part of something that is elitist? Nobody complains about elitism when professional sportsmen are paid $27 million dollars per year.
If you talk to people who grew up in the old Soviet bloc, it is fascinating how so many of them are so well read. They all know their Shakespeare, their Dostoevsky, their Beethoven etc and are more likely to discuss them, whereas the average person who has grown up in the West seems to be more likely to discuss "classic" TV shows—and commercial popular music. Composers like Schnittke used to be very popular in Russia, like a well loved novelist.
It is a little reminder that there is something possibly far worse than elitism, which is about striving for the highest standards irrespective of the endeavour, and that is petty capitalism which pays out a ridiculous price for this populist pre-fab musical confectionary manufactured by the music industry juggernaut. It is a sad inditement of the world in which we live, which values musical education so little, and in which we have had our minds and hearts polluted by the endless stream of mind numbing commercialised fodder we are continuously force-fed. Perhaps elitism is a petty and ignorant invective against it. The better term is musical education. Nothing is more liberating than education, including musical education—as El Sistema has shown.
Isn't it time you rebelled against the capitalist pop industry too that keeps you ignorant and enchained to them?
¡Viva la Revolución!
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