Stirring paeans to classical music are about as common in Australian public life as admissions of inferiority in political interviews. Yet with characteristic panache during an exchange with Kerry O’Brien, Paul Keating delivered both at once. Even as he prepared the budget papers, Keating said, he knew that government business was pedestrian stuff compared to the greatness of a Mahler symphony. Gustav and his ilk tread Olympus above us; next to their works, even the lucubrations of a federal treasurer are humdrum.

The former Prime Minister is right. But his insight is lost on an entire generation. Why does a Bach concert look like the three-o’clock bingo at a retirment home? One idea is that there is some kind of collective action problem; members of my generation actually itch for Shostakovich — they’re just waiting for another young’un to make the first move. Have we really developed a herd mentality that prevents us doing anything unless joined by others from the ranks of the wrinkle-free? Surely not. After all, we’re the ones who celebrate individuality in all things, liberated as we are from the stuffy conformism of the past — aren’t we?

Maybe, instead, the young are animated by historical awareness. ‘Spare us your Mozart Serenades — those pieces were only ever meant as background music.’ If that’s their beef, I’m with them. There’s no shortage of boring classical music, just as plenty of gallery pieces aren’t worth the canvas. Many a quaint divertimento was originally little more than a muzak accompaniment to the frolics of aristocrats. But I don’t think this explains youthful antipathy to Mozart.

Have young people been put off by the disagreeable noises that were passed off as music during the twentieth century? Do they think classical music is a vat of snake oil — John Cage’s ‘silent’ music (or rather silent ‘music’) or Karlheinz Stockhausen’s oeuvre for helicopters? Again, if this were the argument, I’d be on board. As it happens, though, I suspect Gen Y would flock to a helicopter music concert. It would be, like, weirdly awesome and, like, make for a totes cool Facebook post.

Here’s another possibility: concerts are just too expensive. Opening night at the Opera House is full of toffs whose wealth outstrips their actual desire to be there. And you can’t see the Berlin Phil on Youth Allowance. But since when do we settle for the best or nothing at all? There are countless ways to see classical music on the cheap. Or for free. It won’t be Daniel Barenboim, but it can be damn good all the same. There are youth tickets and youth subscriptions galore. For Musica Viva chamber concerts, ‘under 30’ gets you a youth concession price. Pretty soon it will be ‘under 40’.

Next, there’s the privilege argument. ‘If you’re into classical music, it’s because your parents introduced you to it. Not everyone has those opportunities.’ But young people discover plenty of things without parental assistance. Justin Bieber. Reddit. Online pornography. Why not Beethoven? At any rate, concerts are full of parents (or, more accurately, grandparents and great-grandparents), but their progeny are thin on the ground. Either the gerontocracy has simply given up trying to educate its offspring or else the offspring are unreceptive.

In truth, the problem with classical music is that it is anathema to the zeitgeist. Its enjoyment requires lengthy periods — sometimes whole hours! — of disconnection from one’s phone and all forms of social media. Its content cannot be expressed in 140 glib characters. Worse still, it cannot be conveyed in a photo or three-minute clip. It is Facebook poison.

Classical music is the very antithesis of all that is fast, easy and superficial. That’s what makes it great. It resists flippant paraphrase and sound bite. Its effects are neither easily explicable nor readily communicable. Its immediate utility is elusive. It defies the materialist, utilitarian spirit of an age in which we’ve no time for mystery or transcendence. In this sense, classical music is religion.

And as with religion, classical music affords no easy pleasures. Like good dinner conversation, it takes effort. It may be memorable only after many hearings. This is also true of much pop music, but radio does the songwriters’ dirty work by playing the same tracks ad nauseam until you can sing even the ones you hate. It takes less than five minutes to replay ‘Blurred Lines’ but over fifty for Paul Keating to wallow, just once, in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Even so, we know which one they’ll be playing in paradise.

Laments like this always end with Lenin’s question: what is to be done? We might be tempted, for instance, to make classical music trendier. Sign it up to Instagram. Hand it a cold brew coffee. Maybe give it a degree in international human rights law. Australia’s Matthew Hindson writes music for orchestras, but with exciting titles like ‘RPM’, ‘Boom-Box’ and ‘Headbanger’. An essay on Hindson’s website has him ‘leading a new musical crusade’ to bring classical music together with ‘the grunge/techno/heavy-metal music so prevalent at the raves and dance parties of Australian cities.’ Should orchestras be playing more Hindson, less Haydn? Doubtless it’s a question of taste, but to my mind this would be like introducing someone to the pleasures of dining out by hauling them into Hungry Jack’s. And rock musicians do rock music much better than orchestras. So if you want a rev-up, you’ll take the real thing: AC/DC over ‘RPM’.

Instead of popularising classical music by aping Metallica, how about giving decent education a go? We could start with school music pedagogy that doesn’t genuflect to the tastes of teens, as if they already know enough to know what’s worthwhile. We could also try purging the purveyors of this kind of bilge (contained in the draft national music curriculum developed under the former government): ‘students learn that meanings can be generated from different viewpoints and that these shift according to different world encounters.’ That sentence barely generates its own meaning, never mind the promised effects of world encounters.

Or there’s another, more sanguine approach: wait for Gen Y to grow up. Wait until ‘under 30’ is a thing of the distant past. Wait until the smartphones become walking sticks. Then, as Aeschylus prophesied, ‘in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’