There are two faces of the BBC Proms. The faces are somewhat at odds with each other. The one that everyone knows, whether they have an interest in music or not, is the Last Night of the Proms. It’s a concert consisting of a series of small musical items, or ‘lollipops’ as Sir Thomas Beecham used to call them. It culminates in a sequence of sea shanties, ‘Rule, Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

The other face, much more substantial, is the series of concerts that precede that last one, from mid-July to mid-September, still centred on the Royal Albert Hall. Surprisingly, many people don’t seem to know anything about that aspect at all. A year or two back, getting a taxi to a Prom, I was asked by the driver if I had my little flag to wave and a silly hat to sing along in. As I was actually going to the long-delayed UK premiere of Per Nørgård’s third symphony, it might not have been quite the thing.

The Last Night has been the subject of furious debate and public grandstanding over recent years. The patriotic element has been called racist, and populist posturing has demanded that it be dropped altogether. The fact of the matter, however, is that almost nothing about the Last Night, a concert totally unrepresentative of the whole enterprise, has or will be changed. What has utterly changed is the rest of the season.

I first went to the Proms 40 years ago, in 1983. I came down from Sheffield for a week and went to every single Prom in those seven days. For the first and last time, I stood up in the arena, paying (I think) £2 a go. All sorts of things are clear in my mind – Tennstedt’s magnificent Mahler 6, and the fleas I took home. The splendidly poisonous appearance, too, of the season-ticket Prommers, their hand-knitted garments in turquoise and maroon, and their habit of carrying their possessions in old Sainsbury’s plastic bags, glaring at any temporary interloper trying to claim a spot at the rail. I suppose that’s all much the same.

The thing that is different is the music on stage. Through a miracle of public archival access not at all in the general practice of the BBC, you can look at the specific programme of every Prom concert. It goes all the way back to 10 August 1895, an inconceivably tawdry sequence of 25 separate items.

The fascination in observing the changes of taste and policy is inexhaustible. William Glock, the most ambitious man ever put in charge of the Proms, changed it utterly during the 1960s, inviting glamorous overseas orchestras and exposing sometimes unwilling audiences to new developments in European music. It’s startling to see how the insistence on seriousness affected, for instance, the First Night, which had been a sequence of ‘lollipops’ rather like the Last Night. By the end of the decade, concert-goers were being presented with single epic works – Messiaen’s Transfiguration or the Berlioz Requiem.

Looking at the programme for that long-ago 1983 season, it is astonishing how much taste has changed, or perhaps been obliged to change. That programme now looks, I have to say, pretty staid. Most of it is in the overture-concerto-symphony format, though of course this underestimates just how thrilling a Beethoven concerto or a Brahms symphony can be, or must have been.

What has happened by 2023? New favourites have emerged – Ligeti is, rather surprisingly, a popular composer these days. But there are also conscious efforts to include previously overlooked contributors. In 1983, a grand total of one piece by a woman (Elizabeth Maconchy) was played all season, and no woman conducted anything. This season, nearly three dozen women composers will be played, and nine women conductors placed in charge. From previous experience, these may be perfectly good, or may be inept beneficiaries of social engineering. But as a musician friend of mine remarked: ‘There have been enough totally talentless male composers handed commissions by the Proms. Might as well commission some totally talentless women for a change.’

There’s no doubt, too, that there is a larger shift in the place of classical music in society. In south London Tube stations, classical music is often played in the entrance halls – not to ease the daily commute but to discourage people from hanging around. They just can’t stand Beethoven 7. Classical music is, in general, under attack. The Proms must be among the cheapest professional musical experiences to be had – this season I bought a pair of the best tickets for nine separate Proms for a combined total of less than £900, and could have got a ticket for most for £9 or £10. I’ve never noticed the slightest snobbery – you could turn up in your pyjamas and nobody would say anything. And yet the season is regularly attacked as ‘elitist’.

The programmers have, rather apologetically, tried to forestall these objections. There have long been Proms with pop musicians, and here are still more; the old all-nighters of classical Indian music have given way to a Bollywood evening; there are Proms explaining music to children and (I think very admirably) a ‘relaxed Prom’ where people unable to stay still and keep quiet will be made welcome. There is, too, an ambitious attempt to push out of the Royal Albert Hall and into the provinces, with concerts labelled as ‘Proms’ in Gateshead and Truro. I can’t see this experiment lasting without losing some of the Proms’ distinctive Kensington-summer flavour; it looks to me much like the short experiment in the late 1940s and early 1950s with an additional Proms mini-season in the winter.

A lot of these developments betray an apparent nervousness, a miscellaneous approach including some stuff done much better elsewhere. That first 1983 season was much more coherent. I can’t imagine anyone now wanting to spend a week going to every Prom, from Beethoven 9 to Portuguese Fado to a Horrible Histories Prom. These days, you drop in and out. The gems are still there, whatever you deem the gems to be.

The problem is a much larger one than one music festival. It’s that we no longer want to know about the same things, and western classical music has, in my lifetime, gone from being one of the supreme cultural statements of humanity to being just another curious musical genre, like hardbag, grime or jazz. How long will it continue? Well, I think you never know when a kid passing through Oval Tube station will think ‘What is that?’ and pause to listen to Brahms rather than be ushered onwards. How do you get that kid to come to a Prom? It’s something worth thinking about.