This one is going to turn into a rant. I can already tell. Which isn’t ideal, because I think I actually have some coherent ideas behind what I’m about to write, but I’m having a lot of trouble organizing them into anything more focused than general explosions of frustration and irritability.
But here goes. I read a lot of articles, both in mainstream publications and in your more insider-y blogs and magazines aimed at those of us in the music business, all purporting to detail either what’s wrong with the orchestral business model, or what should be done to fix it, or why it can’t be fixed at all. Every once in while, I find an article claiming that there’s actually nothing systemically broken in what we do, which you’d think would be reassuring, but is usually just frustrating in a new way, since I’ve never read anything on the subject that couldn’t be directly and succinctly contradicted by something else I’ve read elsewhere.
Basically, to hear the self-styled experts tell it, orchestras are utterly doomed to eventual extinction (or not) because we don’t play enough new music; because we play too much new music; because we wear tuxes and have formal concert rituals; because we dumb down the concert experience and try too hard to be casual; because we don’t talk to the audience; because we insist on talking to the audience; because we fail to put our music in context; because we force context no one asked for on our audiences; because no one under 60 cares about what we do; because we’re far too focused on attracting younger audiences; because we’re too market driven; because we stubbornly refuse to give our customers what they want; because the musicians are paid too much; because we’re too incompetent to properly capitalize ourselves and pay our employees a reasonable wage; because ticket prices are too high; because ticket prices aren’t high enough to pay our overhead costs; because we haven’t figured out how to use the internet properly; because we’re more focused on our websites than we are on getting people into the concert hall; because our CEOs and music directors are grossly overpaid; and because we’re too provincial and small-minded here in City X to realize that the salaries of our CEOs and music directors are set by what the market will bear in what is, truly, a global industry.
You can see how this sort of “advice” would start to drive you up the wall after a while. And what’s really infuriating is that these screeds tend to come either in the form of snarky, condescending reports from consultants or analysts who usually seem to think that they’re stating wildly original ideas (they aren’t) that should shake the orchestra business to its core (they don’t,) or from some supposedly hyper-creative and dynamic think tank made up of individuals from wildly different corners of the business, all of whom usually came into the process with exactly the same set-in-stone opinions that they’ll leave with after writing their final report.
And then, there’s the most pointless, misleading, and utterly unhelpful article prototype of all: the kind in which some journalist discovers that there’s something called “crossover classical” in the world, goes and interviews someone who’s made a lot of money playing it, and then asks whether this sort of utterly groundbreaking thing could “save” traditional classical music. Which absolutely does (or does not) need saving. (See above.)
It’s not just that so many of these supposedly helpful analyses are self-evidently dead wrong (some of them have to be, since they all contradict each other!) It’s that, for those of us working in relatively healthy organizations (which, contrary to what many would have you believe, most major symphony orchestras in America are,) who spend several nights a week staring out at the literally thousands of people who have paid quite a bit of money to sit and watch us perform week after week after week, all the dread premonitions and proposals to overhaul the entire industry from the ground up start to ring awfully hollow. Yes, there are things that need to be fixed. Yes, there are some outmoded traditions that could stand to be kicked to the curb. But for the love of God, could all the Chicken Littles just shut the heck up for even a week and stop trying to help us into our professional graves?!
(See there? Ranting. Told you it was gonna happen. Apologies – I’ll finish up with something positive.)
I was actually quite happy to read a piece that popped up on the Wall Street Journal‘s site this weekend. (Aside from its truly bizarre editorial pages, I happen to love the WSJ, read it regularly, and think its cultural coverage, while sometimes maddeningly inward-looking, is quite impressive given that it’s primarily a paper about finance.) The story was written by a guy who seems mainly to write about rock and hip-hop, and in writing an article about the sort of classical crossover music that “serious” music writers are forever wringing their hands over, he seems to have immediately latched onto an obvious truth that eludes so many others.
Basically, he took what could have been a fluffy little interview with Dutch showboat Andre Rieu about his attempt to bring his waltz-based dog and pony shows to the US, and used it to point out that, far from driving new audiences either towards or away from traditional concert music, Rieu represents an entirely different genre with its own audience base. Which is obviously true. Everything we know of people who adore Rieu’s schmaltzy, over-the-top (and, truth be told, not terribly skillful) concerts tells us that they’re the same folks who loved Yanni at the Acropolis, John Tesh at Red Rocks, and it’s probably not a reach to suggest that most of them have a few Barry Manilow records at home, too.
Basically, Rieu’s crowd is the lite-rock crowd. He just happens to play the violin and have an orchestra, but there’s nothing remotely classical about him. In fact, I’d argue that the kind of audience we attract to Orchestra Hall has far more in common with the sort of people who pack indie-rock shows at The Varsity than with what I’ll call the PBS Pledge Drive fan base. Our crowd (and the Varsity’s) tends to be passionate about music, pretty seriously engaged with their local scene, probably goes out to see live music quite a bit, and is maybe just a bit snobbish towards genres of music that they consider less than serious.
That doesn’t even begin to square with the PBS crowd, who likely consume most of their music at home, from TV, radio, or recordings, and consider a concert ticket to be an occasional splurge for special occasions such as Andre Rieu making an appearance in their town. In other words, the consumer behavior these fans exhibit is the exact opposite of the behavior that would make them a good candidate to come to one of our orchestra concerts, a fact which the WSJ‘s pop writer spotted immediately, even as so many others steeped in classical culture fail to see it.
And maybe that’s what’s really ailing the orchestra business. We’re so inundated with consultants, commentators, and other self-styled experts, each with his/her own highly specific agenda, that we’ve started to miss the larger (and fairly obvious) truths of how people decide what music is worth their time and money. Maybe it’s time for us as an industry to start tuning out all the internal babbling (and yes, I realize I’ve just added 1300 words of babble to the pile) and just look around our immediate surroundings to see how others are creating the passion and loyalty that every musician needs in our fan base.
Between Andre Rieu, Yanni, John Tesh, Kenny G, Celtic Woman, and Celtic Thunder (I’ll leave Lord of the Dance out because that’s mostly dance), I maintain a pretty steady diet of live music and cultural awareness, because in any given year, at least one of them comes to town. Oh, who am I kidding?! Attending these shows is just a thinly-veiled excuse for going out on the town to eat somewhere fancy (Olive Garden YUM!!!!)
PBS 4 EVAH!!!
::the above was written with tongue firmly in cheek, except for the PBS shout-out, which I actually love, but change the channel anytime Celtic Woman comes on::
I’m strangely fascinated by Celtic Woman. It’s like watching a concert of authentic folk music, if authentic folk music were composed by a roomful of rich WASPs from Connecticut.
(I love PBS, too, whenever there’s not a pledge drive on. The Newshour and Frontline are two of the best hours on TV, and I couldn’t live without America’s Test Kitchen and This Old House. But the pledge week stuff just mystifies me…)
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Sam increasingly reminds me of this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08&feature=related
Sam, you are so on the button with all of this. Instead of “what should we give to our audience,” perhaps a question we can all think about is “what do we expect from our audience?”. The PBS crowd is indeed a tough draw, and tougher, I would argue, than people in our age bracket. If I hear one more damn penny whistle…
So how about a future blog entry that has your own take on that? Who do we want to get in our halls and how do we get them? I’d love to see your thoughts.
In the immortal words of Sid Hartman when asked what it takes to get crowds to the ball park, the hockey game, the football stadium, the basketball arena “Win Baby, Win.”
If the Minnesota Orchestra isn’t winning right now I don’t know what else could be done. Worldwide acclaim for its Beethoven cycle, Pullitzer Prize winning critics praising the sound of the Orchestra, repeat performances on the world’s stages – not to mention the wonderful local audiences shouting their lungs out at performances.
Give the people what they deserve – quality, honesty, integrity, the hard work of skilled musicians conductors, guest soloists, staff, contributors – not just what they want.
Regarding Sam’s complaint about too many shouting voices: This is made possible largely by the Internet, where anyone can can have a platform, including violists
. But the same thing is happening in any number of troubled industries, such as media (for everyone not named Google and Facebook), education, autos, banking, health care, offshore oil exploration, immigration, etc. etc. So, don’t take it personally; you really are missing most of the shouting. BTW, Public TV has its own very deep problems; I’m sure that they wouldn’t be pushing Andre Rieu unless they felt they needed to. Roy Orbison, unfortunately, can’t make any new videos.
Responding to the Orchestra Staffer: Yes indeed the M.O. is on a high right now. I’ve followed it for 35 years and it has been thrilling to see it develop from a good regional orchestra to world class. One expects to hear outstanding performances now. I hope the management can leverage this artistic prosperity to address the rather obvious problems facing the orchestra the intermediate and longer-term. Just what to do and how is not obvious–but it usually isn’t for most businesses or organizations.
The pop/rock/hip-hop musical universe contains countless subcategories, each of which appeals to a niche audience. This is obvious on an intuitive level to all participants, and bothers no one. One can hardly imagine Jay-Z worrying about how to attract country music listeners, or the members of Metallica deciding to put down their guitars and turn on the synthesizers for a few songs in order to broaden their appeal to fans of ambient electronica. Yet this is exactly what classical music organizations who chase after the crossover audience are hoping will happen. (Do we really think pops concertgoers have NO IDEA what it’s like to experience a straight-up classical concert? Of course they know, and most of them simply aren’t interested.)
Post-Internet, all marketing is niche marketing, and the niches are becoming ever more clearly defined. This is great news for classical music. It has never been easier to find and communicate with those people who care about what we do. We should be focused on giving them the best possible products/experiences, not on converting fans of other musical genres.
I started feeling this way, too. I can see that there may be a problem with some institutions and declining tickets sales, but after a while it struck me that a lot of these discussions of “can classical music be saved by getting enough kids with purple hair to come to the symphony” starting feeling seriously lathe-of-heaven to me, and the commentators all of whom had the Secret Formula to saving it were like that doctor dude (Haber?) in the book who wanted to save the world, but saving the world always seemed to involve him having a limousine.
It’s just so lathe-of-heaven. Rhetorical-you can try to anticipate it, rh-you can try to avoid getting run over, but rh-you can’t steer. You aren’t even at the wheel.
And a lot of the solutions seem to be both invented by and targeted toward the same audiences that everyone thinks of as the standard symphony audience, anyhow — German cars, Italian shoes, and three houses. Only now they’re all being hip at Poisson Rouge instead of hanging out at the concert hall — same audience, though.
I also started to resent the attitude toward the working classes needing classical music given to us like bibles and trousers to the natives, and that if they would just move slowly enough, they could lead us to John Cage eventually. There’s a real attitude that the working classes can’t figure out what we like on our own, and that if they wrap it in enough of the natives’ simple garb, we’ll eventually be singing the praises of atonal music. Damn it, if people don’t like a certain form of music, it’s not because they haven’t been gently and patiently taught at a sufficiently simple-minded level how to listen it. It’s because they decided for themselves that they don’t like it. We know who our own damned bards are, thank you.
It’s just a control thing disguised as an attempt to “save” something that doesn’t really need saving because it’s in the process of adjusting on its own. Plenty of dot-coms went bust, but we’re all still using computers. Even if Symphony #1,366 tanks, “classical music” will still be here.
A few more data points — I go to more than my share of live classical stuff. Operas, the local chamber orch (okay it’s LACO, but still it’s local), etc. Over the past year and some, I’ve heard David Daniels, Andreas Scholl, gone to LACO, gone to the LA Opera, taken my mom to two ballets, heard Tf3, and will be going to the LA Phil this summer.
In every case the audience was very nearly a full house. Maybe more than the amount of grey hair than I typically see at work, but grey hair isn’t the kiss of Uncool Death. They just have the money and the free time with no kids to take care of. Older types, people with young teens who play the music, and DINKs and SINKs are the only people who can come to a concert in the middle of the week. Everyone else finds a different delivery mechanism more convenient for them.
I do a lot of handcrafting — knitting and crochet and that sort of stuff. There are more than a few crafting clubs who worry about their favorite craft being a “dying art” because no young women are doing it.
They typically hold their club get-togethers at 2pm on a weekday. *sigh*
Big ups to Janis who said “…We know who our own damned bards are, thank you.”
As an aside, it is interesting how so many LA peuple are active on the MN Orch’s blog/forum! None of our big performing arts orgs have anything like this.
— RN from LA
I’d add Joel Osteen and the other mega-church pastors (and praise-music performers) to the list. It’s really the same audience as Rieu’s, isn’t it? Give me a cathedral choir any day, whether the music is classical or modern!