Orchestras have been experiencing a rapid decline in their attendance in the last few decades. I guess people just don't want to spend their evenings in a stuffy concert hall bored out of their minds. (Who would have thought?)

Classical music fans, on the other hand, are quite upset about this. They are the kinds of people who claim that young people these days are stupider than ever, just because, given the choice, they choose not to listen to classical music.

I don't know my history very well, but I'm guessing that classical music used to be popular among royalty because having an orchestra full of musicians performing for you was a sign of power. The bigger the orchestra, the more power you appeared to have. Because of this symbol, musicians like Mozart were hired to write symphonies that were to be played by large orchestras.

That's it. It had a role in history, and there used to be very few alternatives as far as choices for entertainment. Nothing makes classical music inherently better than any other genre. But it's persisted, so it's regarded as timeless. And because it's perceived as a sacred cow, people fidgeted uncomfortably when the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra decided to perform as accompaniment to Metallica at a live show.

It's hard to think of a modern heavy metal group like Metallica as "timeless", but as long as there are frustrated, angsty teenagers with access to music and purchasing power (things that only emerged in the last half-century), who can say what's still going to be around one or two hundred years from now?

Heck, angsty teenagers wouldn't even need money. I bet there'll be all kinds of Napster clones 50 years from now.