“This is definitely not the hey-day of classical music,” says James P. Ferus ’07 of the Bach Society Orchestra. “It’s something you can’t avoid, though there are still many dedicated people and musicians.”

For reference, while just under 600 Harvard students list the band Radiohead among their “favorite music” on thefacebook.com, Mozart and Beethoven each show up fewer than 200 times.

And those are just the obvious ones. Unless diehard classical fans are simply less likely to use thefacebook.com or publicly announce their interest, they appear to make up less than about 5 percent of the Harvard population. No matter how many posters they put up, HRO members know, chances are that the unconverted won’t be attending unless they’re there to support their friends or hear a piece they learned about in a Core class.

GOING OUT OF STYLE?

It wasn’t always such a struggle to stir up interest, according to HRO conductor James Yannatos, who has been leading then orchestra for 41 years. His musicians lovingly call him “Dr. Y.”

“This was the thing to do,” he says. “We’d give a Beethoven’s 9th at Symphony Hall, and everybody came across the river. The whole place was packed.”

In the early 1970s, he remembers, the orchestra played a midnight concert which also drew a sell-out crowd full of undergrads.

“I get the sense that classical music is less important, and that’s really tragic to me,” he says. “There’s so many things now really vying for the time and for the audience, and sometimes we really feel like we’re having some difficulty.”

According to Balliett, the problem does not rest exclusively on the shoulders of the disinterested audience—classical musicians who resist modernization should share the blame. Traditionalists have stigmatized modern orchestral music, he says, leaving only a limited canon of work that classical groups can choose from.

“Classical music concerts now are basically like museums,” Balliett says. Since most people listening already have some idea of what Beethoven’s 5th Symphony “should” sound like, the performance becomes about the interpretation, not the piece itself.

People who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of classical music can’t quite engage on that level, Balliett says, because all competent orchestras playing a given piece will sound roughly the same to the untrained ear.

When it comes to expertise, Yannatos says, the undergraduate population at Harvard is somewhat polarized—with a large portion completely unversed in classical music and the other somehow involved in playing it.

In other words, while pop music has fans among the youth, classical only has practitioners, which renders the scene rather insular and arguably stagnant.

Almost a third of every graduating class has been in some way involved in a classical music group in high school, Yannatos says, and it’s the other two thirds don’t know anything. Those are the ones that Balliett and his cohorts are trying so hard to win over.

It’s not just HRO, of course—other classical groups have similar difficulty getting to them.