I am a 33-year-old classical music critic. In my 25 years of going to concerts (and since my 20s, writing about them), I am almost always the youngest person in the audience. Everywhere I go, from Bournemouth to Inverness, concert halls and opera houses resemble conventions for the blue-rinse brigade. Another thing: I've noticed that bus and train stations now pipe canned classical music, day-in, day-out, through their speakers as a way of stopping young people hanging around. So toxic have the associations become, that this experiment actually works: there is evidence that playing Beethoven and Mahler has reduced antisocial behaviour on the transport network. An entire generation, aged between 10 and 30, seems radically disenfranchised from classical music. How, and when, did this happen?
You can experience this void at the heart of our musical culture through the things that aren't there, the sounds you can't hear. There are the performers who didn't have the chance to realise their talents because their primary school had no money for instrumental lessons; the talented children who are under-served by the school system because there are no proper instruments for them to play, or orchestras to play in; and there are the musicians you're not hearing in our professional ensembles, because their parents weren't rich enough to pay for a specialist music education or independent school. Successive governments have failed schoolchildren when it comes to classical music. One of the world's leading soloists, 31-year-old viola player Lawrence Power, told me he is indebted to a chance encounter with a viola as an eight-year-old at his state school in Buckinghamshire. Without his school's peripatetic viola teacher, his career would probably never have got off the ground.
The same is true for hundreds of British musicians in their 30s who play in our orchestras all over the country. Like the generation before them, these players benefited from the network of local authority Music Services in England and Wales, set up between 1950 and 1975. The idea was simple, but brilliant. Music Services were responsible for the provision of instruments and instrumental teachers, as well as high-quality singing teaching, in state schools in their county. Because there was a requirement for the local authority to fund its Music Service, that provision was largely free for everyone. The flagship for each Music Service was its county youth orchestra, the training ground for the vast majority of the professional British musicians you see and hear in concert halls today, and the first real exposure many would have to the repertoires of classical music. And most of it cost children and parents precisely nothing.
In the private sector, music education was always an extracurricular activity you had to pay for. At a private school in Glasgow, I was lucky that my parents could afford piano and cello lessons, and that the school let me take A-level music, despite the fact that I was the only pupil in the class. But had I been in the state sector in Scotland in the 80s, I would have found similar opportunities to the Music Services: each of the 12 regions of Scotland had at least one crack youth orchestra, and each co-ordinated instrumental teaching from your first day at school to your last.
The genius of the Music Services scheme was the way you were plugged into it at an early age. If you had the talent, you could pursue a path from primary-school recorder band and secondary specialism, through the hothouse of a conservatoire such as the Royal Academy of Music in London, and on to professional musicianship.
More importantly, for the vast majority of children who experienced it (today's 30 to 70-year-olds), classical music was something that was theirs - not a foreign and forbidding culture. Music Services didn't just train performers: they created listeners and amateur participants in the art form. It's not rocket science: audiences for classical music today are older because they are made up of people who played it as children; younger generations have never had that chance.
Ironically, it's the supposedly "difficult" new music of Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis that is now pulling in younger people: the BBC Symphony Orchestra had its biggest crowd of the season for last month's concerts of Xenakis's thrilling, elemental music at the Barbican in London. A younger audience of contemporary culture aficionados - engaged by the connections between the musical avant garde and pop, film, art, and architecture - is willing to experiment with new music. Far from blue rinses or an over-privileged elite, this is the kind of trendy, youthful crowd you would also find at an experimental electronica gig or performance-art happening. Meanwhile, audiences for the core classical and romantic repertoires just keep getting older.
If the Music Services idea sounds familiar, that's probably because it reminds you of El Sistema, the much-admired scheme that has given free music education to half a million children in Venezuela. Two small-scale, El Sistema-style projects have recently got off the ground in Scotland and England, but in principle there's little about these that is genuinely new. In effect, each of the 150 local authority Music Services in England was a mini-El Sistema. What went wrong?
It all started to curdle in 1988, with the Conservatives' Education Reform Act. This deemed Music Services "non-essential", so that local authorities in England and Wales no longer had a statutory imperative to provide the service at all. A handful of Music Services folded completely. (In Scotland, there was a similar, if not quite as seismic shift in 1996, when 12 regions were divided into 32, resulting in a loss of musical co-ordination whose effects are still being felt.)
From 1988, local authorities delegated the money that would have gone to Music Services directly to schools, who could choose what they did with the cash. Faced with a choice between buying a few trombones and painting the ceiling, buying maths text books, improving sport facilities, many schools drastically reduced their music provision. While Music Services continued to exist in England and Wales, there was now a crucial, crippling difference, in that they charged parents more for lessons.
The effects have been devastating. Classical music, always freighted with the misconception that it is music for an audience of toffs and geriatrics, became the preserve of an economic elite. If your parents couldn't afford the huge expense of a childhood of instruments and lessons, you had a vanishingly small chance of making classical music part of your life. Yes, there has always been a thriving system of specialist music schools in this country, and yes, there are scholarships available for fee-paying schools for the most talented children, but these are the exceptions.
There's an easy way to take a litmus test of where we are with classical music among schoolchildren today. Of the members of the National Youth Orchestra this year, who are all 18 or younger, just 32% are at state schools; 30% attend specialist music schools, while the majority, 38%, come from fee-paying schools, most with some sort of scholarship. To put it bluntly, the NYO is a musical elite, made from a social and economic elite. (Notice how, in the run-up to 2012, the government is keen to champion its National Sports Centres for "elite athletes", but much less comfortable with the idea of "elite performers" in the arts.) This social makeup is not the NYO's fault: it's right that only the most talented young musicians should play in England's flagship youth orchestra. Later this month they will play the Royal Festival Hall in London, the day after Gustavo Dudamel's Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra finishes its residency there; the two orchestras bear comparison. The private-school provenance of so many NYO players is testament only to systemic failures in government when it comes to providing musical opportunities for all young people.
But you don't even have to look as far as Venezuela to see how different it could be. A couple of years ago, I saw a class of seven-year-olds in Helsinki enthusiastically learning Finnish and maths by performing sophisticated little songs with astonishing tuning and rhythm. And this wasn't a music school - just a typical Finnish state primary. Finland only developed its curriculum in the postwar period, but it works: today, the Finns are classical music world-beaters, and their education system has produced more great instrumentalists, conductors and composers per capita than any other country on earth.
Yet if you look at the statutory requirements for music in schools in England and Wales, things shouldn't be so different here. Since 1988, music has been part of the National Curriculum. That means there is a requirement for primary and secondary schools to give music lessons to all children up to the age of 14. But it's still not happening, not in every school. If your headteacher happens to like music, and there is money for specialist teachers, you might be lucky; but it's equally likely that music will hardly feature in your timetable. Teachers are lumbered with the government's numeracy and literacy targets, so music and the rest of the arts and humanities are squeezed out of the school day (a conclusion confirmed by damning Ofsted reports published this year, as well as an independent Cambridge review of primary education).
The Labour government knew things were bad by the late 1990s, and they have initiated a raft of schemes over the past decade to try to fill the gaps: the Music Manifesto, Wider Opportunities, In Harmony, Sing Up! - a project that aims to make singing part of everyday learning in every primary school in England and Wales. In 2001, David Blunkett, then education secretary, said that "over time, every child should have the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument". But over quite a long time, as it turns out: it took the government another six years to announce any money to buy new instruments, as part of a £332m settlement for music education, to last from 2007-11. That might sound like a lot of money, but the £40m earmarked for new instruments won't go very far - not when you divide it between every child in the country.
I won't deny that there is a lot of good work going on out there. At a recent music education conference in Manchester, Abbott Community primary school showed what singing can achieve. Children aged six to 11 led each other in songs about every aspect of school life - with the whole school singing, not a specially chosen choir. But at the moment, these are isolated schemes rather than nationwide policies.
What the government hasn't done is effect the most obvious solution of all: a national revitalisation of the Music Services. Here is a ready-made answer to the problems of renewing classical music's role in society. Make them statutory requirements for every local authority, and give them the responsibility for rebuilding the network of classical musical possibility that used to resound throughout the country. Classical music will always be perceived as an elitist art form so long as we continue to deny children the chance to make it their own. It needs real political will to reverse that poisonous perception, and we need to get a move on. We've already lost one generation - we can't afford to lose another.