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Everything Old Is New Again

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I’ve written ad nauseum on this blog about the various woes and financial afflictions that plague American orchestras during economic hard times, and honestly, even I’m getting a little sick of the subject. But I wanted to seize the opportunity to offer some clear evidence that, as dark as things often seem for non-profits in times like these, a glance at the history of our industry appears to show that we all tend to perceive these things in the moment as being more dire than they actually are.

The ray of hope, in this case, comes in the form of a decidedly pessimistic article about just where orchestras stand at a moment of economic peril. It’s from TIME magazine – go check it out, then come back here. I’ll wait…

…

Pretty dismal, eh? Sounds like the Detroit Symphony’s dangling over the precipice of insolvency, a bunch of smaller bands are either talking merger or bankruptcy, and even the Big Five are commissioning studies that make them seem pretty darn vulnerable. There’s barely a bright spot to be found.

Unless, of course, you were to check the date at the top of the article.

Yup, 1969. America was mired in an unpopular war in Asia, things at home had turned decidedly nasty on the political front, the economy was stuck in a major slump, and government had been forced to cut way back on funding for arts and culture in the name of austerity. Sound familiar?

On top of that near-perfect mimic of the conventional 2010 assessment of orchestras, check out this paragraph:

“Even though symphony-going is not dominated by the rich to the extent that it was 40 years ago, it is still a formal experience that most turned-on youth regard as static, outmoded and irrelevant. As the conservative, 19th century-oriented programming of most orchestras proves, the institutions are trapped into patterns of pleasing the wealthy patrons who support them—and by and large, the patrons like Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. This does not mean that the orchestras would automatically attract larger audiences with avant-garde programs. The real problem is attracting the young today so that there will be an audience tomorrow.”

Gee, how many times have you read something that sounded exactly like that in the last few years? It would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating. I guarantee that a little research would turn up multiple articles from the 1920s and ’30s expressing this exact same (citation-free) sentiment, begging the question: for exactly how many decades do we plan to allow the prophets of doom to continually shout from the mountaintop that orchestras are withering on the vine before pointing out that their dire predictions have been consistently, unceasingly, 100% wrong?

Bottom line: there’s not a single orchestra said to be at risk in the TIME article that doesn’t continue to exist today. Buffalo and Rochester never merged, and both are still model regional orchestras. Neither did Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and many would place both of them in the nebulous “major orchestra” category. That’s not to say that recessions don’t hurt orchestras (Detroit always struggles badly in tough times, for obvious reasons,) and certainly, some smaller ensembles that were already being mismanaged in a good economy tend to fold their tents when the seas get rough. What I’m saying is that the chattering classes are just monumentally, staggeringly bad at accurately assessing how a localized crisis applies (or doesn’t) to the wider industry. (Also, most of them never seem to learn anything much from crisis periods of the past.)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t talk about the problems we have as an industry, or what changes could be made to our overall business model to make us less vulnerable. There are some quite reasonable things being written these days by orchestra managers, veteran union types, and others on the subject. I just think that we’d do well to take a step back whenever the drumbeat of bad news approaches soul-crushing levels, and remember just how many times this has all happened before.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dominant 7ths?

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Obsessing over food and where it comes from seems to have become this era’s answer to previous nationwide fads like blogging in the early ’00s, Bill Clinton’s sex life in the ’90s, and  chasing the almighty dollar in the ’80s. I’ll admit, I’m an unashamed participant in this foodie thing. I bake my own bread, tend a good-sized backyard vegetable and herb garden, and probably spend almost as many hours cooking as I do playing music in an average week.

I also, and here’s the shameful part, am totally addicted to the Food Network. I can’t really figure out why, since I’m all about learning and perfecting new ways of making food, and the Food Network as it exists in 2010 is primarily about watching minor celebrities eat food that someone else has prepared, usually either on closed sets that you’re not invited to, or in restaurants hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live. Sure, there’s still a smattering of shows where knowledgeable people actually show you how to cook things, but they’re few and far between. Strangely, this does not seem to have dampened my interest in the channel even a little bit. I really have no excuse for this – it is what it is.

The other night, I was writing a blog post while watching an episode of one of the most polarizing shows on the Food Network. It’s called Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, and it’s hosted by a frost-tipped hipper-than-thou California freakshow named Guy Fieri. (For some reason, he pronounces his last name “Fietti.” I’m assuming this is an attempt to sound Italian. It doesn’t.) There are foodies out there who despise Guy Fieri. They hate his laugh, they hate his catch phrases, they hate his hair, and they particularly hate that his show celebrates big fatty slabs of American-style comfort food – heavy on the meat and dairy, please – at a time when most of the foodie culture is centered around rediscovering healthful eating and worshiping Michael Pollan as a minor god.

Figure 1: Why Foodies Hate Guy Fieri

I am not one of these people, partly because I just don’t get that worked up about other people’s eating habits, but mostly because I don’t see any reason that Guy Fieri and Michael Pollan can’t coexist. Pollan is all about balanced diets, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning America off our factory-farmed, high fructose corn syrup-soaked, genetically modified supply chain. Fieri is all about guilty pleasures, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning us off the endlessly generic and tasteless fast food chains that have replaced mom-and-pop diners across the US. (No, really, he is. Go read this if you don’t believe me.) That’s a lot of common ground, and let’s face it, Michael Pollan probably enjoys a tasty burger on occasion, too, so…

Yeah, I know. Music blog. Not food blog. Get to the point. Fine. In a minute.

See, there’s pretty obviously a disconnect right now between the hardcore world of seasonal-eating, corn-fed-beef-eschewing foodies who know what kohlrabi is, and the larger American society where most people want to eat healthier and have no interest in destroying the environment just so they can have a cheeseburger, but don’t have the time or inclination to devote huge chunks of their lives to changing everything about their food supply. (There are various class, race, and geographic issues at play here, of course, but in the interest of not boring you to tears, I’m not going to get into them just now.)

I see a very direct parallel between the food disconnect I’ve just described, and the gulf that exists between hardcore classical music lovers who refer to Beethoven String Quartets by their opus numbers and have definite opinions on Karajan vs. Bernstein, and the wider populace that, for the most part, has nothing against classical music, but doesn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over it and consequently feels completely alienated by the clublike atmosphere that pervades its core audience. And while I don’t think there’s a blessed thing wrong with knowing Beethoven’s opus numbers, I worry that the primary exposure most outsiders get to classical music these days is the same kind of exposure they get to the idea of a sustainable food system: that is to say, earnest, overly intellectual pleas and lectures from upper middle class white folks who shop at a coop, adore NPR and Al Gore, and get a CSA box delivered to their house every week.

If I’m right, that’s a shockingly limited demographic of advocates, and, I believe, one which doesn’t begin to represent the broad swath of people who actually come to Minnesota Orchestra concerts every week. And in the same way that I think the local/sustainable food movement will only really gain traction in a global way once it allows a whole lot of non-purists in the door, I think classical music needs a whole lot more advocates whose exhortations sound a lot less like this and a lot more like our friend Emily Liz from a couple of weeks back.

Figure 2: Nobody cares what this guy thinks anymore.

We’re living in the age of Ultimate Word of Mouth, where a lot of the cultural and intellectual discoveries we make come from hearing or reading someone else’s enthusiastic endorsement in some far-flung corner of the internet that we happen to frequent. Restaurants, rock bands, video games, and orchestras sink or swim based on how many well-connected people we can get to talk us up, not just to friends and neighbors, but to the much wider circle of Facebook friends, blog readers, and Twitter followers.

A lot of that sort of thing is beyond our control as performers, of course, except to the extent that we generate interest by visibly and audibly giving our all every time we step onstage. (No small consideration, since far too may orchestra musicians still seem to think looking bored or irritated while performing is okay.) But other industries are way ahead of us in using the good will and enthusiasm of our existing fans to draw in new ones, and like Guy Fieri making a point of visiting a greasy spoon that grinds its own grass-fed beef and tops it with locally made cheese, we could do a lot worse than welcoming in as many non-experts as we can find, and finding out what it takes to connect with them on a deeply personal level.

Posted in audience participation, food, marketing, state of the art | 7 Comments »

Austerity Measures

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

An article on budget cuts, layoffs, and salary cutbacks in Portland, Oregon’s arts scene this past weekend was a sad, if unsurprising, thing to read. This is happening all over, including here in Minnesota, of course, and while those of us here like to talk a good game about how much worse things could be if we weren’t lucky enough to live in a place where so many people care deeply about what we do, the frightening reality is that, based on everything we know from past downturns, the arts will be one of the last sectors to fully recover.

So yeah, we’re cutting, they’re cutting, everyone’s cutting. But hang on. There’s this guy Michael Kaiser – runs the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., became a legend in the arts biz by dragging orchestras and dance companies  back from the brink and making them solvent again – who’s running around the country telling everyone that we’re doing this exactly wrong:

You can’t save your way to health. You don’t get healthy by getting smaller, by doing less… [Also,] focus on today and tomorrow not yesterday. There’s no time for blame. When things are bad many people sit around talking about where it went wrong. That’s not healthy.

Hm, okay. I guess that’s more or less what Joe Dowling was saying last week when he told MPR that it had been a mistake to cut the Guthrie’s rehearsal schedule to save money this past season.  Still, that kind of broad pronouncement is easy to make in a speech, but harder to implement in the real world. If you’re not supposed to cut your way back to fiscal stability, but you have 33% less in your endowment than you did last year (and everyone else is in the same boat,) how can you possibly survive as an organization?

You have to plan your art. Most organizations plan their art too close to event. You need to plan four and five years out. First, you can make art better if you take more time. Second, you can do a better job fundraising. “I listen to the funder, find out what do they like to fund. I have a menu of five years of projects, so I can choose best event for funder.” Finally, “It helps me to educate my audience to want to see something that is not so accessible. I’m excited about projects that are transformational. But this requires some education of the audience. And with time, you can educate in advance. Creativity has been beaten out of so many arts organizations. Planning ambitious work four years out, creating big vision is what’s needed.”

Now, that makes very good sense, and it’s also demonstrably true – Kaiser will be happy to reel off the evidence for you. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. What he’s talking about is a wholesale shift in how we run our industry, and a much higher level of competence than a lot of arts leaders currently have, quite frankly. (Please note that I’m not talking about a lack of passion, or commitment. But the sad truth is that far too many American arts managers are thrown into the deep end of a very big pool without ever having been taught anything more sophisticated than the dog paddle.)

Another hard truth is that, when arts leaders who are competent and do have new ideas start talking about massive systemic change, a lot of the people who work under them (orchestra musicians, say) get very, very nervous, and even angry. Because change is scary, and to be perfectly honest, it’s very hard without the benefit of hindsight to tell the difference between a leader who’s genuinely trying to do something fantastic and new that will benefit everyone in the long run, and one who’s just in way over his/her head and has started babbling about “unsustainable business models” when what s/he really means is “My job is way too hard, so you’re all going to have take massive salary cuts to make it less hard.” (The orchestra world is littered with the carcasses of ensembles that cut and cut and cut in the name of some sort of ill-defined “transformation,” then discovered too late that they’d cut themselves out of all relevance to their community and ceased to have a reason to exist.)

Throw in the additional wrinkle that most large non-profit arts boards are made up of very wealthy and generous people from the decidedly for-profit world, and you have a recipe for combustion when times get tough. Since for-profit companies exist to make money, and to preserve capital, it can be very difficult for people used to that world to remember that cultural groups exist for entirely different reasons, and that they therefore need different strategies to weather fiscal storms. Likewise, it’s easy for those on the receiving end of a board’s largess to forget that we quite literally wouldn’t have careers without their continuing generosity. It’s a very understandable disconnect, but it does lead to a lot of frustration on all sides.

Chaos is frequently the enemy of progress, and my take on why so many orchestras, in particular, flounder in tough times is that too many of us don’t find a way to pull on the oars together when we need to most. Faced with a crisis, some musicians dig in their heels and insist everything will work itself out, some managers see an excuse to make the massive cuts they’ve been wanting to impose for years, and some board members feel caught in the middle of it all and eventually do what they would do at their for-profit firms – find the route with the least apparent risk and set a course down it.

But if Michael Kaiser and an increasingly audible chorus of others are to be believed, that less risky route might actually keep us with our heads barely above water for far longer than we can afford.

Posted in money, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

Ending radio silence

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Can I just say, it’s been a manic few weeks. I had 11 days away (which included 6 concerts with two orchestras of 3 different programs), a couple of days at home to rehearse and perform with Josh Ritter; meanwhile there comes a call from the NSO about their American Playlist concert (which I was slated to conduct in a few days) – John Mayer wants an orchestral chart for a Bob Dylan song, could I crank one out? In 48 hours?? – which I did, and after a quick 3 days in DC I was back home to rehearse and perform a premier of a jazz/orchestral with Evan Christopher and the Minnesota Orchestra last Friday and now…I’m in Maine for a week at a music festival to work with my favorite duo, Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson.

Yup, July tends to be a oddly jam-packed and tiring month. As I catch my breath here in my room in Waterville, ME, listening to an epic thunderstorm raging outside, I’ve finally uploaded from my phone a video I took while at the New Hampshire Music Festival a couple of weeks back. The program for the evening was an interesting combo: Ives/Three Places in New England (v. 2); Copland/Appalachian Spring; Beethoven/Piano Concerto #5.

Morgan came to find me after the concert; she’d been assigned to usher the first of two evening performances, and liked it so much that she switched with a friend and came back to usher the second night as well. As she put it, “The first night I was just going to stay for the first half, like we’re supposed to, but I ended up staying for the whole concert because I wanted to hear more.” I’ll let her do her own talking:

Morgan

It was a thrill to encounter a first-time concertgoer who exuded such enthusiasm and had, self-admittedly, become a classical music convert. Which was a potent reminder to me why every performance matters; there are those out there encountering orchestral repertoire for the first time in their lives, and it’s contingent upon myself and my colleagues in the orchestra to make the music come alive.

Posted in Uncategorized, contemporary culture, philosophical musings, state of the art, the young people | Comments Off

Music vs. Decorum

Monday, July 5th, 2010

One of the great things about living and working in Minneapolis/St. Paul is the staggering popularity of the live music scene. I tell people that a lot, and I’ve found that lifelong Minnesotans are often surprised to hear me mention it. They’re aware, of course, of the rich history of the local scene that spawned Prince, Dylan, The Jayhawks, and countless other legendary performers, but they’re often unaware of just how rare this is in 21st century America. I’ve lived in and around five good-sized metro areas in my life, and MSP is the only one of them to have a seemingly ingrained tradition of thousands of ordinary folks going out to see live music, regardless of genre, on a very regular basis.

That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, either. Someone had to lay an awful lot of groundwork for a populace the size of ours to be willing and happy to support as many live venues as we do. And while we’re not alone among American cities in maintaining such a commitment, the club is getting smaller, as the Internet and other homebound hobbies take their ever-increasing toll on industries that depend on getting people out of the house.

And that brings us to New Orleans. When you think of authentic American Music Towns, New Orleans would have to come in pretty near the top of everyone’s list. Not just for its incredible proliferation of musicians in what is actually a very small city; and not just for the immediately identifiable jazz sound that has served as the backdrop for every Louisiana-based film or TV show for decades. What makes New Orleans a music destination is the pure joy that so many of the city’s performers seem to take in their craft, and their willingness to break into song, or bebop riff, or brassy fanfare at the slightest provocation, indoors or out, at any hour of day or night.

And that exuberance, sadly, seems to be running afoul of the post-Katrina reality, in which overworked and understaffed officials are trying desperately to keep New Orleans functioning, sometimes at the expense of the city’s legendary freewheeling style…

“Effective immediately, the New Orleans Police Department will be enforcing the below-listed ordinance”—Section 66-205, which says, “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.”

Yup, that means just what it looks like – musicians who have been plying their trade on the famously lively streets of the Big Easy for years, sometimes decades, are now being arrested for it. Jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld, who’s working on a book about the city’s attempts to recover culturally from the hurricane, has been following the story:

None of this is new stuff: There’s a rich history of musicians being arrested while making music in New Orleans. When I first began interviewing musicians, I was shocked to learn that just as surely as the horn players I spoke with had soaked up musical tradition from authoritative sources like Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a beloved musician and bandleader who died in 2004, so too had they been introduced to this other legacy—arrest while playing—by badge-wearing authorities. Even Tuba Fats got arrested. More often than not, the way musicians tell it, the police tasked with enforcement knew him. They’d take him in to the station, show him a bit of hospitality, send him off 30 minutes later. It was as much a game as a show of force. But it served a purpose.

Now, being the champions of decorum that Minnesotans are, I’m sure many of you are thinking that there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with enforcing a noise ordinance after a certain hour of the evening. Minneapolis has such an ordinance, and I’m pretty sure St. Paul does as well. And I’m not really suggesting that anyone living in New Orleans should have to lose much-needed sleep just because I like the image of New Orleans as a town where the music never stops.

But it does seem a shame that some of a city’s defining character might fall victim to an overabundance of law enforcement twitchiness. I mean, if I chose to live in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District, I’d have a hard time claiming that the noise and congestion associated with Twins games was an unfair burden to my quality of life. Likewise, if I set up with my viola and an amplifier on a deserted street corner in Eden Prairie at 11pm, I wouldn’t really have a leg to stand on when the cops came along wondering just exactly what I thought I was doing. (Amplified viola, of course, is considered at all times a disturbance of the peace in at least 39 states.)

Larry Blumenfeld sums up the tricky dance between New Orleans as a place people live and New Orleans as a place people love with an important warning…

Beyond practicality and promotion, there’s a deeper read to all this. Michael White, a clarinetist who began his career in brass bands and is now a Xavier University professor, told me: “There’s a feeling among many that some of our older cultural institutions are in the way of progress and don’t fit in the new vision of New Orleans. That they should only be used in a limited way to boost the image of New Orleans, as opposed to being real, viable aspects of our lives.”

Decorum aside, that would be an awful shame.

Posted in all music is local, contemporary culture, state of the art | 1 Comment »

Another Round Of Navel Gazing

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Veteran arts observer Terry Teachout had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, in which he looked at the fiscally troubled Pasadena Symphony and used their situation as a springboard to ask a very loaded question:

What, if anything, justifies the existence of a regional symphony orchestra in the 21st century? Many people still believe that an orchestra is a self-evidently essential part of what makes a city civilized. But is this true?

Quick timeout to define a term here: within the orchestra business, a “regional orchestra” is considered to be one that has a relatively small annual budget, pays its players an hourly wage rather than a salary, performs a limited concert schedule, but is nonetheless made up of professional musicians, many of whom play in several of these regional orchestras in order to scrape together enough money to live on.

(The term “regional” is sometimes used in an entirely different way by the press. The New York Times has a bizarre habit of referring to any orchestra that isn’t in either the Northeast or California, including ours, as “regional,” even when the orchestra in question is pretty much universally agreed to be a major international ensemble. I suspect this probably happens because New York writers are used to referring to all theater companies outside New York, no matter how prestigious, as “regional companies,” and they just assume that it works the same way for orchestras. It doesn’t.)

Anyway, Terry’s using the term correctly, and he’s asking a very important question. He also makes several other good points that I’m not going to get into here, but I highly recommend reading the whole article. It’s just one of a slew of pieces that have been popping up in recent weeks questioning how sustainable orchestras are, just how much we need to change to adapt to modern realities, and whether some orchestras might not be better off just blowing the whole thing up and starting over as  a Different Kind Of Organization.

It’s not a coincidence that so many analysts are jumping on this particular meme just at this moment, either. It just so happens that the League of American Orchestras, which is a group comprising orchestra management types from around North America, is currently in the middle of a huge online/offline brainstorming session they’re calling Orchestra R/Evolution. Catchy title, and one that might just make a number of musicians nervous.

Anyway, the LAO is basically encouraging anyone and everyone interested in the orchestra business to weigh in with their ideas for the future, and to do so in as many different ways as the social media universe allows. I suppose the idea is that crowdsourcing has been effective in some other industries, and besides that, anything that gets more people on the interwebs talking about orchestras has to be a net positive, even if most of the ideas are either unworkable, unrealistic, or contradictory. I can get behind that, in a general sense.

But what tends to take me from a place of genuine interest in a project like this to a place where I find myself rolling my eyes at 90% of what gets said/written/posted/tweeted in the course of the project is the realization that most of the big ideas are coming from people with only the vaguest grasp of how orchestras actually function from a business point of view. And that includes a scary number of people who call themselves experts on the subject.

I started thinking about this last night after reading a fascinating blog post by a venture capitalist in California named Bill Gurley. He was writing about the cable TV business, not music, but his broader point struck me as awfully relevant to a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading lately…

More often than not, we here in Silicon Valley are prone to idealism. We see a scenario the way we want to see it, and make predictions that fit our view of how we think the world should work, or perhaps even how we would like the world to be… Outsider “luddites” who do not immediately grok the remarkable disruptive power of our latest and greatest technologies are doomed to the business trash heap – driven there by obsolescence and an obstinate refusal to accept their fate. Often times, our version of them “accepting their fate” would require them to abandon everything they know, walk away from the majority of their revenue, and terminate 80% of their employees. But hey, that’s their problem, not ours. We love disruption. It serves our purpose.

Now that, in my opinion, is just an excellent description of the disconnect between those who think about orchestras for a living and those who actually make our living by them. Which is not to say that the outsiders are always wrong and we’re always right – the whole point of bringing in a consultant is to get a fresh take on your company’s situation from someone with no internal baggage. It’s just that so many of those wringing their hands about the future either seem to be suggesting that we magically conjure a massive new audience for orchestral music that absolutely adores both Brahms and Stockhausen; or that we slash overhead to a point where the constant fundraising that keeps orchestras afloat can cease to be so difficult. Both of these are completely bubbleheaded notions that cannot be achieved in the real world, and they are therefore unhelpful, no matter how prettily they’re packaged.

So here’s my contribution to the din: All Music Is Local. I’m utterly certain of this, and I’m further convinced that the reason so much broad-based thinking on “the orchestral model” hasn’t been terribly helpful to individual orchestras is that each of  us is a completely different beast, with different challenges, different strengths, and entirely different constituencies. The National Symphony is not a model for how to run the Minnesota Orchestra, and we’re not a model for Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.

In fact, I’d venture to say that a far better way to evaluate orchestras is against other large non-profit organizations in our own cities. In our case, MPR and the Guthrie can tell us far more about what’s realistically achievable in Minneapolis/St. Paul than a horror story from some orchestra in crisis 1500 miles away. Is there a thriving theater scene in your city? A lot of philanthropic money pouring into higher education? Is yours a company town, where one or two high-profile bankruptcies could throw the entire local economy (and your funding base) into chaos? These are the relevant comparison points that matter to an orchestra, not whether someone in another city programmed 50% more pops last year.

I’m not saying that I don’t think there’s value in orchestras getting together to share information and swap strategies for the future. I am saying that, in my experience, there’s no shortage of people within the industry who think they have all the answers (but have strangely not yet managed to implement them,) and a startling shortage of people looking outside our cloistered subculture for ideas.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 2 Comments »

Stop Helping. Please.

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

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.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, stirring the pot, the business of music, the media | 12 Comments »

You Say Tomato, I Say Rutabaga…

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

As everyone knows, times are tough for the newspaper industry. Most of their traditional revenue streams are drying up fast thanks to the online world’s profit-confounding “information wants to be free” meme; their subscriber rolls are dropping sharply because a new generation of readers (myself included) doesn’t see the point of having a paper version of stories we read online twelve hours earlier dropped on the front steps every morning; and corporate owners seem unwilling to sustain the high overhead costs of maintaining a massive newsroom staff if the huge profit margins the industry is used to continue to erode.

That having been said, it’s somewhat remarkable that the Twin Cities have continued to sustain not one, but two major dailies. Yeah, go ahead and insert your own joke about the current quality of whichever paper you think is too thin, or too liberal, or too whatever, but the fact remains, we have two comparatively huge print newsrooms that continue to be the primary drivers of what gets reported on in Minnesota.

Not only that, both of our dailies continue to cover the arts, and specifically, classical music, at a time when far too many American papers have decided that the culture crowd just isn’t big or spendy enough to be worth their time. Now, true, neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press employs a full-time classical music critic anymore – those positions were victims of seemingly endless budget cuts that reach into every corner of the newsroom, save sports – but it’s notable that the arts editors at both papers have made a point of not missing many beats in actual coverage. Yes, they now use freelance writers to review our concerts, but both papers make a point of consistently using the same writers week to week, which from a reader’s standpoint, is nearly the same as still having a full-time critic.

The upshot for us is that there is, on any given week, a diversity of opinion available on whether one of our concerts is worth the cost of a ticket. And that’s not something to be taken lightly – I grew up in and around two big East Coast cities where a single critic and paper dominated the classical music scene, and too often, that critic’s opinions were read as the final word on any issue.

That’s a far cry from what a Minnesotan could read about our concerts this week: the Pioneer Press hailed our guest conductor as an exciting new talent, while the Star Tribune, reviewing the same concert on the same day, pretty much hated her. Which is the kind of thing that gets some musicians’ (and concertgoers’) blood boiling, but when you think about it, it’s exactly what’s supposed to happen with arts criticism. Musical taste is a highly personal thing, and on most weeks, you can find a wide diversity of opinion on the conductor’s approach just within the orchestra, let alone in the audience, so why should critics be any different?

Any artist, musician, conductor, etc who chooses to take chances in front of an audience is running the risk that some people might not like the results. Even Osmo, coming off that string of incredible reviews in New York, ran into a critic with a stack of Eugene Ormandy recordings in his head last week, and got taken to task for (as nearly as I could make out) daring to take different tempos than Ormandy did. Personally, you couldn’t pay me enough to play a Sibelius symphony the way Ormandy liked them, but that’s just me.

And whether or not we like the stuff that gets written about our performances on a weekly basis, it’s the sign of a vibrant and healthy arts scene when intelligent people can disagree on something as basic as whether a conductor was “a leader of charisma, confidence and imaginative interpretive ideas,” or “seemed interested in achieving an almost metronomic precision; the result was dry and bloodless.” I’ll take impassioned debate over groupthink any day…

Posted in conductors and conducting, state of the art, the media | 2 Comments »

All together now

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Marin Alsop conceived of and presented some unusual concerts this week, featuring nearly 600 amateur musicians playing alongside the professionals in the Baltimore Symphony in a program called “Rusty Musicians with the BSO“. The requirements? Simply to be over the age of 25, play an orchestral instrument and be able to read music.

In terms of community-building, I don’t think it gets much better than this. I keep harping on the fact that people crave experiences in which they feel involved in the process, and this kind of thing is a fantastic example of how orchestras can be inclusive of their audiences (current and potential). The logistics of this particular program sound daunting – 600 amateur musicians signed up – but instead of a single mammoth concert, the amateurs were broken up in groups over several days. It’s some good outside-the-box thinking.

Although a Washington Post article claims that only the Pittsburgh Symphony has tried anything similar, many smaller orchestras (mostly regionals) have experimented with these types of concerts (for instance, one of my ex-orchestras, the Richmond Symphony, has been doing one for several years). It’s always fascinating for me to see how the higher-profile orchestras often pick up on projects that smaller orchestras produce, and also how mainstream media rarely give credit to those smaller organizations. The regional and small per-service groups that make up the backbone of the network of American orchestras most often work in relative anonymity, but they are where much of the creative thinking in our field comes from.

What I particularly love about the whole amateurs-playing-with-pros idea is that it touches on the fact that most people who play an instrument in their youth don’t then go on to become professional musicians. But that’s not to say they ever lose the enjoyment of playing an instrument; in fact, I would venture to say that it’s probably more “fun” for amateurs to play, at whatever level, because their livelihood and sense of self aren’t bound up in it.

In a not-so-distant past, people gathering for impromptu amateur chamber music parties was a regular occurrence; even in my childhood, I remember how much fun it was to gather around the piano to sing songs (admittedly, my family was a little…old-fashioned). But how wonderful to maintain a childhood hobby into adulthood, and then be able to share the stage with a top American orchestra! It’s empirically and good thing…and it doesn’t hurt an orchestra’s PR either.

Posted in all music is local, orchestras not named minnesota, state of the art, the business of music | 2 Comments »

Dorothy Gale, Meet Catch-22

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

This past Thursday, we played the first concert in our Sounds of Cinema festival, which consists primarily of the orchestra playing complete classic film scores while the films play on a huge screen behind us and the audience (hopefully) marvels at the power of live music when applied to a prerecorded movie.

But that opening concert, which featured The Wizard of Oz, earned us a decided pan from Star Tribune critic Graydon Royce, and his review brings up a broader issue that I want to get into. Before I do, though, I want to say from the outset that I found Graydon’s review to be a near-perfect model of how to criticize a performance without being a jerk about it. His assessment was specific in its critique, consistent in its focus, and notable for its lack of a single ounce of vitriol or smugness. He thought the concert was a noble experiment that partially failed, and he said so, which is his job. I’ve got no complaints.

So, what was it that Graydon thought didn’t work about our collaboration with Judy Garland and the Munchkins? Well, here’s the money ‘graf…

“The film often sounded horrible — as though the voices were forced through a tin megaphone. Also, the orchestra overwhelmed sweet moments that define the film, such as Dorothy’s goodbye to her three companions; and iconic signatures were somehow lost. How, for example, can you have the witch’s guards marching about without hearing them sing “oh-ee-yah; ee-OH-ah?” Was this just a problem Thursday night, or a function of the process that split instrumental from vocal? Yikes.”

This is a perfect example of the challenge that symphony orchestras face when trying to present innovative concerts that blend 21st century technology with our decidedly 19th-century way of performing. Orchestras are built to perform without amplification, in concert halls designed specifically for that purpose. Stick us in the Xcel Energy Center, and you’ll never hear a note we play, because those spaces are designed for amplified sound. Similarly, suddenly adding amplification to a concert hall can result in ear-splitting or unintelligible sound, even if you have extremely competent people running the sound board (and believe me, we do.)

The toughest challenge of all is blending amplified and unamplified sound in a space designed for the latter. This is a nightmare that our chief sound guy, Terry Tilley, lives on a regular basis. The sad fact is that, as good as Terry is at his job, budget constraints force him to regularly attempt seriously high-tech production tricks using sound equipment that would get laughed out of venues like First Avenue.

So, the obvious question is, why don’t symphony orchestras, which are massive organizations by arts standards, invest in cutting-edge sound and video equipment that would make shows like our Wizard of Oz less of a risk? After all, the technology does exist to make amplified sound at least somewhat workable in a space like ours, so why don’t we have it?

The answer is complicated, but it basically boils down to priorities and how you manage them. The primary mission of a symphony orchestra is to present unamplified performances of great concert music, and most musicians (myself included) believe that it will remain so for the foreseeable future. And since money is always extremely tight (yes, orchestras have big budgets, but we also have far and away the highest overhead of any type of arts group,) large expenditures for anything that falls outside that core mission tend to be a tough sell.

Musicians, in particular, are incredibly sensitive to any large-scale organizational plan that seems to be pushing us away from a concert music-based business model, and towards a model in which classical music is secondary to pops, or film music, or whatever. And since a first-rate amplification system (not to mention a permanent in-house digital video capability) for a venue like Orchestra Hall would cost millions to purchase, install, and calibrate, and since that system would be literally idle during the majority of our performances, it’s tough to convince musicians that this would be money well spent, especially when we’re seeing our benefits and pensions slashed, our contracts cut back, and our friends on the staff side laid off to save a few thousand dollars in the worst economy of our lifetimes.

This may well be a no-win situation. If we spend the money to bring Orchestra Hall up to 21st century A/V standards, we’re open to legitimate criticism that we’re not properly focusing on the core mission of a symphony orchestra and wasting the money of donors who prefer Beethoven to bells and whistles. If we stick with the technology we have, and make a point of never mounting any performances that push the limits of those capabilities, we’re essentially condemning ourselves to being the kind of organization that willfully ignores modernity and eventually renders itself irrelevant.

And if we try to split the difference, mounting ambitious programs that may not be up to the considerable technological standard that many consumers have come to expect in the age of HDTV and digital surround sound, the Graydon Royces of the world are going to feel rightly compelled to point out that our capability doesn’t always match our ambition.

Whenever I write a post about the challenges of the orchestra business, I try to at least throw out a few potential solutions. But try as I might, I haven’t been able to come up with a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve me winning the Powerball. So I’m punting this one to the readership: what would you do? The comments section eagerly awaits your creativity…

Posted in music and technology, state of the art, the media | 2 Comments »

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