You can learn a great deal about the cultural life of an era from its periodicals. Flick through the pages of BBC Music Magazine, Opera or Gramophone and alongside reviews and interviews you will find a great deal of subtle commentary about the state and status of classical music in contemporary Britain — a vital resource for the social historian of the future. Since music journalism first began in the UK over 200 years ago, countless periodicals have been founded and many have foundered, collapsing when the money ran out or when musical fashions changed. But one endured serenely from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first: The Musical Times, the world’s oldest continuously published periodical devoted to classical music. At least, that is, until now. 

Search for the magazine on the relevant subscription platform and you will find a note announcing that “The Publisher of The Musical Times is retiring at the end of December 2024, therefore this journal will be discontinued with the Winter 2024 edition”. Presumably there is no willing party with the ambition or funds to take it forward: these things happen. Nevertheless, the disappearance of a periodical of such longevity and historical significance is a loss, and seems symbolic of the broader malaise in which classical music finds itself in the 2020s. 

The Musical Times was founded in 1844, in the era of Schumann, Liszt and Chopin. Verdi and Wagner were writing their first major operas; Brahms and Tchaikovsky were just children. Here, the young Queen Victoria had been on the throne for seven years, and the establishment of the new magazine might well have caught the eye of her favourite composer, Felix Mendelssohn, who was visiting London that summer. 

Originally founded as The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular by the music publisher Joseph Alfred Novello, the magazine included a detachable score of choral music, and was aimed primarily at singers. Subsequent editors broadened its remit according to their personal proclivities, enlarging the magazine to include coverage of important performances and festivals and interviews with notable performers. 

All this takes place against the backdrop of a broader culture in which classical music continues to be disparaged as elitist

By the 1920s, the magazine declared itself to be a cut above the average music magazine, announcing that “This journal is not read by the kind of folk who like rubbish”. It devoted particular space to church music, the consequence of being edited by the organist Harvey Grace, who also (under the pen name “Feste”) wrote outrageously dismissive articles about opera, blithely declaring it to be “only completely satisfactory to undeveloped artistic tastes”.

Consequently, when writing my book Opera in the Jazz Age, which examines where opera sat in the dynamic entertainment world of the 1920s, I found The Musical Times invaluable. It was the place to go for lively, sometimes acerbic commentary about the audience for opera and its behaviours, singers, debates about why opera should (or shouldn’t) be funded, and much more. Anyone researching the history of music in modern Britain will have found rich pickings in the MT, and we must hope its back issues will remain available online as a vital historical resource.

In the modern age the magazine’s editors have included Stanley Sadie, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Andrew Clements, Chief Music Critic of The Guardian. Latterly, The Musical Times moved from being a monthly to a quarterly publication, already a sign of declining confidence, and occupied an uneasy half-way house between a magazine and an academic journal, focused more on the past than on contemporary musical events. Occasionally you would see it in newsagents, but it must have relied heavily on subscriptions.

As an academic journal, The Musical Times, with its articles on Bach and Howells, Mahler and Byrd, increasingly found itself marginalised, as the discipline of musicology reinvented itself, turning away from classical music to a large extent of late in favour of contemporary music and questions of social justice. (You get a feel for the discipline’s current preoccupations from the list of most-read recent articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society: “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse”, “Analyzing Gospel”, and “Billie Eilish and the Feminist Aesthetics of Depression”.) 

You could, if you were lucky, find copies of The Musical Times in better-stocked public libraries and perhaps it was here that it served its most useful role, in disseminating specialist yet accessible research on music history to a readership of Proms-going, Radio-3-listening music enthusiasts. An endangered species today, I fear.

It seems like a damning indictment of our times, and yet not at all surprising that The Musical Times should fold on our watch. For 2024 has been another relentlessly bad year for classical music in the UK, with prestigious musical institutions of many types under severe threat. Orchestras and opera companies are still reeling from the funding cuts imposed by Arts Council England in autumn 2023. ENO has laid off orchestral players and there remains much uncertainty about what its operation in Manchester will actually amount to. WNO has reduced its touring operation, is cutting staff, and fighting for survival.

We have seen St John’s College, Cambridge close its mixed choir and Oxford Brookes University scrap its music degree, singling out staff specialising in classical music for immediate redundancy. 2024 saw yet another specialist music shop, J. G. Windows of Newcastle, close its doors — and very few now remain. And, under Bridget Phillipson’s spiteful VAT raid, small independent schools — many of which cherish high-level music-making — are closing. Specialist music schools and cathedral schools, some of which date back centuries and have produced countless esteemed musicians, have much to fear.

All this takes place against the backdrop of a broader culture in which classical music continues to be disparaged as elitist. In these circumstances it should come as no surprise that the magazine that was once the barometer of musical life in the UK should cease to be. As I say, you can learn a great deal about the cultural life of an era from its periodicals, and their disappearance tells its own story. Unless drastic steps are taken soon to stem the tide, we will cease to live, insofar as classical music is concerned, in “musical times”.