The Non-Classical Music They Made

For the past five years, the New York Times Magazine has offered an end-of-year feature called The Music They Made — an audio collage of musicians who died that year. Lisa Hirsch was, I think, the first to notice that the magazine has a thing against classical music; with the exception of David Mason, the trumpeter who played on "Penny Lane," no Western classical musician has appeared in these compilations. The omission is particularly maddening this year, since we lost two gigantic figures: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elliott Carter. Almost every other genre has been represented at one time or another, including avant-garde jazz (in the person of Rashied Ali). If the feature were labeled "non-classical music," that would at least be honest. But the editors seem reluctant to admit their bias, which extends also to print: you won't find Fischer-Dieskau or Carter in the 2012 "The Lives They Lived" issue. This annual insult to people who love classical music deserves a protest. Here is contact information for the Times; those who are active on Twitter can mention @NYTmag.

Update: Hugo Lindgren, the editor of the Times Magazine, cordially replied to me on Twitter, explaining that classical music "lends itself less well to the montage approach" but adding that the feature "wouldn't suffer for being broader."