© Felipe Esquivel Reed
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown, Timmy Fisher and Hartmut Welscher
Not long after the last global pandemic, in which some 50 million people died from Spanish flu, a social change began to take place in living rooms across the world. With the dawn of radio, and later television, the parlor gatherings and upright pianos that had once been the focus of evening entertainment were gradually phased out. A century later, with a new pandemic sweeping the globe, classical music has never felt more under threat. “I think it will tectonically change the industry,” says Andrew Ousley, a publicist and concert promoter based in New York. When the curtain finally lifts on concert restrictions, a new world will start coming into focus. And while it’s impossible to predict the future, here are 19 things we think will be different—based on over a dozen conversations with people across the music world.