Hi. My name is Marcus, and I have a problem: I’m a terrible concert attendee.

No, I don’t fall asleep and snore loudly. I don’t send text messages, do homework, or use my laptop when I’m in the audience, though I often scratch out a to-do list during performances. But as I sat in a saxophone quartet recital the other day, I found myself entirely disengaged from the music.

Let’s be frank: The only reason most students attend recitals is so that they fulfill their recital attendance quota. I’ll certainly admit that I would never be able to attend fifteen recitals in a semester if it wasn’t required of me.

I’m certain that MUS 021 (Recitals) only exists to ensure that performers aren’t met with an empty auditorium. Without MUS 021, recital attendance would be abysmal.

I’m part of the problem.

You could call it RADD (Recital Attention Deficit Disorder), perhaps. But it isn’t really a question of attention span; I simply don’t enjoy sitting in a recital hall listening to an hour of saxophone quartet music. Or vocalists.

Classical music, done well, shouldn’t be boring. But like chocolate chip cookies, you can have too much of a good thing — or someone can mess up the recipe, leaving you with a burned, bitter taste. Post-tonal saxophone music, then, is the boca burger of modern music. They took whatever ugly note combinations they could find, and crammed it into an emotionless three-movement saxophone work. The piano accompaniment is their napkin, wiped with whatever notes couldn’t fit into the saxophone part.

All things considered, I suppose it isn’t accurate to say that musicians have simply recycled centuries-old works for performance. They also include terrible twentieth-century music just to keep things balanced.

Today’s generation hasn’t learned the history of music; they don’t understand the evolution that brought us from Bach to Copland and beyond. Yet even for those of us who battled through a formal Music History course, recitals can be a drag if performers don’t set themselves apart with a phenomenal performance.

It’s a shame, then, that I found myself sitting in the auditorium the other night anxiously awaiting the concert’s end. Music should be enjoyable, and audiences should be engaged. Yet that clearly isn’t happening, and I see nothing to indicate that recital attendance will naturally increase. Today, we find university recitals filled with students who would rather be off playing Halo than watching a music performance.

Halo is more fun than a saxophone quartet, that’s for sure. Maybe music just can’t compete.

A more alarming thought: Our generation doesn’t appreciate classical music. When older generations die away, who will be left to advocate classical music?

Perhaps the future will be like Planet of the Apes, and hundreds of years from now a curious explorer may stumble upon recordings of Beethoven, wondering where that archaic music came from.

But then he’ll notice a Britney Spears recording, and realize that society was already dead at the turn of the millennium.