Timothée Chalamet and Music Miseducation, Part 1
Timothée Chalamet dropped a truth bomb during a town hall with Matthew McConaughey back in late February 2026. He casually declared, "I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like ‘hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore.”
Meant as commentary on cinema’s struggle for relevance, it instead ignited a firestorm — proving, ironically, that some people do care about those art forms that have been performed for centuries.
But let's dive deeper into the educational backgrounds of people who - like him - ACTUALLY DON'T.
With the help of music educator Jarrod Richey.
Jarrod Richey — along with a battalion of other music educators in classical Christian charter schools across the USA — operates under the radical notion that education isn’t just about stuffing facts into brains like Thanksgiving turkeys. It’s about formation, molding young minds like warm Play-Doh into something resembling musical humanity.
Now, while some educators are gleefully diving into the neon-lit trenches of pop, hip-hop, rap, and EDM — as well as those AI-generated trap remixes of the digital age — this isn’t some sad consolation prize for those who missed their big break at the Grammys.
This is the contemporary cinematic arts of sound, where short, musical equivalents of the "loud and proud" cultural titans like Barbie and Oppenheimer reign supreme, and where Chalamet’s crusade against bloated "act ones" finds its musical parallel.
But Richey? Oh, he’s over here playing 4D chess, whispering to Christian music educators via The Classical Music Thistle, "The Christian educator who wants to live big must die to self and take up a cross."
Because why follow the crowd when you can lead a hymn sing-along - or rather, teach the choral parts of a masterwork via the Kodaly Method (most effective when used alongside Soft Mozart) in a quiet rebellion of your own making?
Richey's vision of music literacy isn't just about deciphering those little black dots on a page. His definition ambitiously stretches to include the "formation" of students into fully-fledged "musical beings." Richey makes the case that music education should aim for nothing less than "cheerful music literacy for all God’s people."
And this, my friends, is where poor Chalamet stumbles into the conversation, guffawing on CNN about opera being a "dying art." The tragedy here isn’t so much the supposed death of opera, but rather the fact that he — and, let’s be fair, most of us — are tragically under-formed musical beings.
Blame the school boards and administrations who, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that school budgets were best spent on… well, not arts and music.
"We’ve lost sight of the big picture and how music is actually central to the flourishing of man as he seeks to be whole," Richey lamented, "Additionally, many of our schools are blind to the galvanizing effects that music making can have on our culture and growth of the school as a whole.
And even before our children could spell "metronome," their tiny eardrums had been being assaulted (lovingly, of course) by the autotuned warblings of pop stars, the bass-heavy thumps of hip-hop, and whatever unholy fusion of the two is currently trending on TikTok.
Richey once posited that most people are simply too content wallowing in the shallow end of the musical gene pool. Why strain your ears with the soaring crescendos of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida when you can bop along to lyrics about breakups, sparkly dresses, and the existential dread of being 22? (Looking at you, Messr. Swift.)
The masses, bless their rhythmically challenged hearts, have traded the intricate harmonies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni for the primal satisfaction of a "drop." And let’s be honest, nothing gets the dopamine flowing like a bassline that sounds like it’s being played by a robot with a grudge.
The modern music star isn’t built on vocal acrobatics or compositional genius. Their empire is erected on relatability.
Did your boyfriend ghost you? There’s a song for that. Did you finally embrace your villain era? There’s an anthem for that. Are you questioning your place in the universe while simultaneously craving a blended coffee drink? Believe it or not, there’s a Spotify playlist for that. Emotional expression trumps technical excellence every time, because let’s face it: nuance is exhausting.
And thus, the "liturgy" of contemporary culture has become a never-ending loop of instant gratification. The slow, deliberate beauty of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme? Too much commitment. The moral weight of a Francesco Cavalli's Giasone? Too heavy.
Give the people beats, give them drama, give them lyrics that rhyme "Karma" with "drama" (again, Messr. Swift, I see you), and watch as the beauty in slow art forms dissolve faster than a sugar cube in espresso.
C.S. Lewis nailed it in The Abolition of Man: “We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
And oh, how easily pleased we are!
Why subject yourself to the grandeur of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen when you can mainline the adrenaline rush of the soundtrack from Marty Supreme? Why ponder the existential depths of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes when you can lose yourself in the cinematic chaos of Barbenheimer?
Chalamet, for all his brooding charm, is no exception. He’d rather make those mud pies in his glittering slum in Hollywood — where every plot skips Act I like it’s an unpaid bill and where storytelling is measured in decibels — than take that metaphorical holiday by the azure seas of high art.
But can you blame him? The sea is vast, it’s deep, and frankly, it requires swimming lessons. Meanwhile, mud pies are fun, messy, and—most importantly—immediately satisfying.
And Richey is neither wrong NOR alone.
Enter Veronica Greenan — harpist and the mad genius behind Magical Music Method — who, like some kind of musical anthropologist, has traced society's indifference toward opera back to the same roots of the opera (and classical music) indifference that Chalamet pointed out on CNN (and Richey lamented).
Greenan’s theory? Modern culture has been "slowly duped into thinking that popularity and wealth equals relevance and worth," a belief so pervasive it might as well be sold in vending machines next to the Diet Coke. It starts young, she argues, during the "critical window" for aural development — that magical time when children’s brains are sponges, eagerly soaking up whatever nonsense we throw at them.
Instead of filling that window with the rich, complex harmonies of Mozart or the soaring arias of Giacomo Puccini, we’ve crammed it full of the "liturgy" of brand logos, influencers hawking detox tea, and celebrity gossip so vapid it could float away on a light breeze. The result? What Greenan dramatically calls "neural neglect" — basically, brains so understimulated they might as well be binge-watching paint dry.
But here’s where Greenan parts ways with Chalamet’s defeatist logic — the idea that if "no one cares," the art form is effectively dead. Oh, please. That’s like saying a diamond loses its value because a toddler would rather play with a plastic spoon.
Greenan’s method boldly asserts that beauty "does not lose its value because it is overlooked," a statement so profound it deserves to be engraved on a plaque and hung in every middle school music room next to the dented xylophone.
Opera, ballet, jazz — these art forms, "will always be relevant… Even if not one person sits in the audience," because their worth is intrinsic, untouchable, and impervious to the whims of TikTok trends.
And Chalamet? According to Lewis, he is in ways a snob.
A "chronological snob."
In his essay "On Reading Old Books," Lewis delineated what Chalamet's comments revealed in the first place: every age is "specially liable to make certain mistakes," not because we’re dumber than our ancestors (though the existence of TikTok turn challenges might suggest otherwise), but because we’re all marinating in the same cultural Kool-Aid.
Call it the "contemporary diet" of ideas — a buffet where everyone’s reaching for the same intellectual (and musical) junk food, utterly convinced it’s haute cuisine.
The cure? A literary detox. Lewis prescribes "old books" like some kind of literary physician, arguing they’re the antidote to our era’s myopia. Why? Because the past’s mistakes are blessedly obvious to us now — like powdered wigs or the belief that leeches cured depression — while our own blunders remain invisible, hidden under the veneer of "progress."
The beauty of old art is that it doesn’t just whisper, "You might be wrong;" it affirms, "Let's see how we can make the present RIGHT." Which brings us to Chalamet’s unfortunate "12-second spot" comment — a confession that he, too, has chugged the zeitgeist’s energy drink.
Imagine, for a moment, a world where he’d traded his date at the movies for, say, a performance of George Frideric Handel's Rodelinda. With period instruments. With countertenors playing the roles of Bertarido and Unolfo. (Seriously, Michael Chance CBE did a MEAN ROFL in the Bavarian State Opera 2003 production!)
Not only would he have discovered that it lasts longer than some relationships, but he might’ve inhaled that "clean sea breeze" Lewis promises — the one that blows away careerist panic and replaces it with the humbling realization that art isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon run by snails with impeccable taste.
Lewis wasn't wrong when he wrote: "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones."
This principle isn’t just bibliophilic gospel — it’s, for instance, practically encoded in the DNA of every decent wind ensemble conductor worth their salt.
Picture it: a sweaty high school auditorium, trumpet players fidgeting, the percussionist accidentally dropping a mallet mid-rehearsal… and yet, the programming philosophy remains steadfast. Three flashy new works balanced by one old warhorse like Alfred Reed’s Bach transcriptions.
Or Lucien Cailliet’s arrangement of Wagner’s chorus being sung as Elsa processes to the cathedral in Act II of Lohengrin into something a slightly inebriated euphonium section can manage after three energy drinks.
The ratio is sacred: three parts "look what we can do" to one part "remember where we came from." It’s the musical equivalent of eating kare-kare after mainlining Lucky Me! instant pancit.
Now, before my fellow Disney adults start lighting torches and storming my metaphorical castle, let me as an emeritus Walt Disney World Annual Passholder clarify: nobody’s suggesting they torch their MagicBands.
But imagine, if you will, a life where "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" isn’t the only sacred music you hear annually. Central Florida boasts wonders beyond animatronic presidents — like the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe, where its 2019 Schoenstein pipe organ (4 manuals of pure bliss) turns every Sunday Mass into a legit E-Ticket experience.
Richey posits that classical Christian charter schools cultivate students who don’t just recognize virtue when they see it, but actively crave it like a Bach cantata addict chasing their next fix. In an era where school boards slash arts budgets with the reckless abandon of a tone-deaf lumberjack attacking a Stradivarius, Richey’s educators toil away like tireless gardeners, irrigating the cultural deserts of young minds.
To borrow Lewis’s delightfully botanical metaphor, these teachers aren’t just sprinkling — they’re flooding the Sahara (and building stormwater permaculture catchments to capture said water "irrigating their students' deserts") with the musical equivalent of an Alpine spring.
Richey himself puts it rather elegantly: "If your family playlists seem dry, decide that you’re going to water them with richer, deeper music."
Dr. Jeff Lee similarly wrote on Seattle's Child, "I don’t think you need to fling all your Raffi CDs out the car window. I just think we should introduce our kids, right from the beginning, to music we really love. And that same principle applies to more than music. Just because they like McDonald’s, can’t they develop a taste for great gumbo, too?"
"Even though they love video games, does that mean they won’t love kick-the-can? Our job is to do more than give them the stuff that the childhood industrial complex is marketing to their demographic. Our job is to introduce them to the wonderful things in the world."
Now, before anyone assumes I’m advocating for some kind of musical Jacobinism — where we storm the Spotify accounts of innocent parents and purge all traces of Pinkfong's "Baby Shark" like revolutionary censors — let me clarify: this isn’t about prohibition. No one’s suggesting you hit "delete" on "Opalite" from a playlist of a devoted Swiftie or force-feed a toddler Wagner's "Parsifal" before naptime.
This is about balance. A harmony, if you will.
Consider Lewis’s "old books" principle but applied to music. My modest proposal? For every three children's music tracks (or g-rated pop tunes if children are old enough), why not treat your children's and your eardrums to something from the classical repertoire?
After enduring "Baby Shark’s" relentless "doo-doo-doo-doo," wouldn’t "Aquarium from Camille Saint-Saëns's Le Carnaval des animaux — with its shimmering, otherworldly arpeggios — feel like plunging into a cool, celestial lagoon? Or follow up 3 tracks of Hap Palmer’s bouncy didacticism for the sweeping drama of Bizet’s L'Arlésienne Suite No. 2, and suddenly, snack time feels like a scene from a French period film.
And let’s not overlook the unspoken influence of classical music in the unlikeliest of places — video games. Would Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games carry the same grandeur without Princess Rosalina doing a perfect ring pivot with a hoop in her hands to "Farandole?" Unlikely. That piece turns rhythmic gymnastics into high art, proving that even Ninty's CGI athletes deserve a soundtrack worthy of the Vienna Philharmonic.
Speaking of unexpected venues, who could forget Konami’s slot machines? The moment you hit a mega win on Lotus Land, what greets you? Not some tinny electronic fanfare, but the fiery, triumphant overture from Carmen.
It’s as if Bizet himself is cheering you on from beyond the grave, shouting "Viva les richesses!" (Or at least, "Viva les quarters!") Ask any casino regular with a fondness for nickel slots — they’ll confirm that a payout feels infinitely more glamorous when underscored by operatic brass.
Richey makes an observation so profound it could shake the foundations of the Thomaskirche itself: Bach wasn’t composing for casual elevator music enthusiasts who just want something pleasant to drown out the sound of their existential dread.
No, dear reader, Bach was engaged in something far more subversive — crafting divine puzzles in D minor, hiding theological Easter eggs in fugal structures so dense they make Riemann’s head spin. This man didn’t just write music; he encoded the mysteries of the universe into partitas, like some baroque Dan Brown but with infinitely better wigs and zero questionable Latin.
Take St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, where Christ’s agony unfolds in a chromatic descent so wrenching it makes Wagner sound like Raffi.
Bach’s genius lies in his refusal to spoon-feed meaning. Like Jesus dropping parables that left even the disciples scratching their heads, Bach composes multilayered labyrinths where the more you listen, the more you’re haunted by the sneaking suspicion that there’s still another hidden canon in the bass line you missed.
It’s the musical equivalent of that moment in Inception when you realize the top was never the real totem — except Bach’s totem is a chorale tune buried under twelve invertible counterpoints, and Hans Zimmer wishes he could soundtrack half as intelligently.
Bach didn’t just read the Bible; he marinated in it like a theological sous-vide, extracting flavors of Lutheran doctrine so rich they’d make Calvin blush. His Clavier-Übung III isn’t just a collection of organ pieces — it’s a liturgical year in miniature, with fugues that unpack the Trinity more eloquently than any seminary textbook (and with better cadences).
This is why Richey’s students at Geneva Academy in Monroe, LA, don’t merely admire Bach because he wrote “SDG” ("Soli Deo gloria," because almost all his works signed with those initials were dedicated to God and nobody else).
No, they revere him as the ultimate overachiever: a man who could simultaneously write a six-part ricercar and raise twenty children without losing his peruke. As the Good Book posits: "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to fathom a matter." (Proverbs 25:2, NABRE.)
Similar things ring true for other classical music, opera included. Greenan chimes in: "If you teach your children about (classical music), expose them to the music, sing along, show them art, and read books, get excited about it, an make memories, then you are setting the stage."
"And one day when you can finally bring them to see The Magic Flute, it will be the most magical night of their life because they will know it, understand it, and love it already. And every child deserves to know great art and have the chance to be shaped by it, inspired by it, moved by it, and strengthened by it."
And she’s right. As Cherubino Ferrari gushed after seeing the premiere of Claudio Monteverdi's L’Orfeo in 1607, "Both poet and musician have depicted the inclinations of the heart so skillfully that it could not have been done better… The music, observing due propriety, serves the poetry so well that nothing more beautiful is to be heard anywhere."
So here’s the takeaway, served allegro con brio: classical music - opera included - isn’t a relic. It’s the secret sauce — the umami of sound. And if Richey’s vision holds, maybe, just maybe, the next generation won’t need a YouTuber to explain why "Forêts paisibles" from Rameau's Les Indes galantes slaps even 50 years later.
They’ll already know.
