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June 15, 2007

Audience as Orchestra?

by Laura Jackson

To Sasha:

I promise to continue marinating on your comments over night but I must say that at the moment....I don't get it.
I agree with you conclusions that we need to respect audiences and see them as partners rather than ignorant consumers. However, when you say the following I am left confused: "I realized that we musicians were most emphatically not the orchestra. The orchestra was plainly those folks in city after town all around the state whose eyeglasses reflected stage light from the darkness of the house night after night. They were the orchestra. We - musicians, managers, stagehands, conductors - were the hired help ....Why is this paradigm important? Because we are always talking about how we can sell what we have to them, but they are not them - they are more us than we ourselves."

Sure we are hired help but we have to be careful about who we identify as "boss." The art we create needs to be intrinsically connected to the community in which we live and our audiences need to be among the constituencies from whom we carefully weigh feedback of all sorts. We mustn't forget, however, that our primary service as artists is to the composers and creators of art moreso than audiences. An audience may hate what we do from time to time, and although this can't be our goal, it can't and shouldn't be completely avoided.

Posted by ljackson at 9:44 PM | Comments (1)

On the proper identification of meteors

by Robert Levine

I believe, as a general rule, that the past is not so different from the present. No doubt that could be seen as a defensive posture on the part of someone entrenched in the orchestra industry. It may also be a by-product of spending most of my working hours with guys that have been dead for 200 years. If a transporter glitch were to materialize me into the viola section of Mozart's "Magic Flute" orchestra in 1791 at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, I'd be back to work in no time. Not many workers in any field could make a statement like that. Living in that kind of tradition has definitely colored my thinking about many things.

I also tend to the contrarian, so that the above belief is likely also a reaction to the tendency of "big thinkers" (and we have several in our midst) to emphasize change over continuity. Change is far more interesting to think about than is continuity, it's impossible to deny that there's a lot of it going on, and refusal to deal with change is a very poor survival strategy. But our job as analysts is not to think only about change, but to figure out what's really happening. That means, in part, making sure that what looks like change really is change, and not simply old phenomena in new clothing.

Few institutions in our society have the longevity of our major orchestras. That doesn't make them invulnerable. But when people call orchestras "dinosaurs," I remember that dinosaurs had a pretty good run - a few hundred million years or so (or maybe longer; some scientists believe that what you had for lunch was Kentucky Fried T. Rex Junior).

Some specific quibbles with what Greg Sandow wrote:

... Opera, we've long assumed, is important. Steampunk is curious,weird. And probably won't stick around as long as opera did, right? So opera is worth more, right? (Not that I'm posing those rhetorical questions in my own voice.)..First corrective to this: look at Billboard, the trade paper of the recording industry. Look at their charts and commentary for innumerable musical genres. See how classical music shows up as one of these -- as one of the lesser ones, in fact, a genre they don't feel they need to touch base with every week.

However, on iTunes, classical has done very well - much better than it's doing in CD format. And conventional wisdom is that the iTunes audience is younger and more hip than the CD audience. So put a hold on those assumptions about how badly our canon is doing with Gens X and Y.

And then Robert Levine: there's still a place, he says, for the canonical arts. I agree. But that place, in the future, will demand (at least as I see it) that they get stripped of their canonical status.

That's what I get for using a term without defining what I mean by it. Our canon is music that has not only stood the test of time but is the basis for our musical culture, both high and low. It's no accident that John Williams writes film scores for huge blockbusters that sound an awful lot like Elgar and Holst and Vaughn Williams, or that commercials still use music from the canon or derived from it.

That doesn't mean we devalue them. Mahler, who's been with us a long time, deserves some deference. But only because of what's actually in his work, and what it actually means (and has meant) in our culture..

Again, that's not news. Mahler has had his ups and downs, depending on how audiences perceive him, based on what's actually in the music. Music that consistently doesn't speak to audiences is not going to get programmed by an orchestra concerned with selling tickets.

. ..Some people, of course, will find that horrifying. These artworks are special. ... They need to be nurtured, funded, protected...But why? How does anyone argue for that? How do we justify, to our fellow citizens, all the money that goes for high art? These aren't academic questions...

High art has always required subsidy in a way that popular culture doesn't. But I don't think that Beethoven per se has ever needed protection. There's a reason why there are, say, revivals of 19th century popular art, but not of Beethoven. Beethoven never went away and never needed to be "revived."

I've seen some figures on the proportion of the population of certain major cities that the orchestras in those cities reach on a regular basis. ... I can't quote these figures, because they were told to me in confidence. But I can tell you that they're shockingly low.

But weren't they always pretty low? They might be somewhat lower now, but that doesn't mean the numbers have fallen off a cliff in the last decade or so.

As Mark Twain might have said, there are lies, damned lies, statistics.. and historical audience data about orchestras.

Posted by rlevine at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)

Phone Salesman's "Nessun dorma" Leaves Them Crying In the Aisles

by Molly Sheridan

Earlier this week, Alex drew my attention to this clip from Britain's Got Talent. The singer was a phone salesman by day. His performance was clearly not Corelli, but the powerful combination of the piece and the situation stunned the audience, the members of which seemed to have forgotten that opera existed. They were clearly engaged. Why are professional opera productions not attracting them? Do they only want 4 minutes of opera before they move on to the next thing? Are they afraid of the art form because otherwise their only association is a badly produced PBS (or in this case BBC) concert special?

I consistently wonder if (and unscientifically find to be true that) it's simply a question of the presentation, not the art and performers themselves. It's so simple it's scary, but the Wordless Music Series in New York this season finally made a success of that idea we've been tossing around at conferences for the past few years but haven't truly implemented. The shows mixed up great performers from both the new music and the indie rock/experimental sides. They were held in rented churches and played to consistently sold out houses. There was wine and the tickets were hand stamps, but there were also programs and pin-drop quiet because everyone seemed to sincerely want to hear what the musicians had to say (not because that was some kind of rule).

If the audience isn't engaged (and engagement doesn't require the audience to necessarily like/agree with what you're doing--ever been to a play at the Fringe Festival that pushed you too far in a direction you did not what to go, but still left you feeling engaged with the experience?), doesn't that signal a serious flaw in the art or in how it's being performed? I mean, it's a performing art. What is it without the audience? Isn't a major piece of the performance missing for both sides?

What has set apart the most affecting performances you've experienced in the last couple of years? Can any of those elements be implemented by other institutions where such audience enthusiasm is lacking without harming to the artistic purpose of the creators?

Posted by msheridan at 1:04 PM | Comments (1)

Not so Different, Yet All The Difference

by Douglas McLennan

Robert: How it's different from the past 50 years is the amount of control people now have over the experience. Yes we've had recordings for a long time, but the ease of access and portability now makes it different. Yes we had Walkmen and portable CD players, and before them the radio and record player. But being able to find the things you want and access them whenever you want is different I think.

I also think that (particularly in visual culture) there's been more of a separation of experience between live and recorded. In other words, as long as the video experience was a pale representation of a performance - second best except for its accessibility - there was no question as to the supremacy of live. But as video has evolved it stopped trying to recreate/mirror/represent the live version, and created something of its own that is increasingly different from live.

I would say, for example that the Met's moviecast operas in movie theatres is a different artform than staged opera. It's based on the staged opera, but by virtue of its ability to reinvent the visual language in ways that in some cases are much superior to what you can see in the theatre, it has become a different artform.

What I'm arguing that is new is that there's a separation of experience that's taking place. There are concert halls where you just can't hear an orchestra as well as you can in a well-done recording. If what interests you is aural clarity, it's not at all certain that the concert hall is the best place to experience that. Again - nothing particularly new about that. But my ability to control most of the aspects of how I'm going to encounter art might mean that I'm less willing to give up that control to somebody coughing or a bad seat. And I would argue that encasing the live experience in temple-like garb is also a turnoff for many people. There's much about the temple experience that is wonderful. But there's also something about the physical experience that can seem arid, too.

Yes we live in a visual age, and I'm not arguing against live performance or for spicing up the visuals. What I'm trying to question is what is the essence of the live experience and why performers think its charms are so immediately obvious. The list of inconveniences associated with being an audience member at a live performance is long - from ticket cost and transportation to the things I mentioned above. What is the essence of live that is going to keep me coming back, especially if I encounter a string of performances that cost me much to participate but failed to deliver on my heightening demands for "peak" experiences?

Don't get me wrong - I love live experiences when they work out. There's no substitute, to my way of thinking. But I do seriously want to know: as my calculations about how I spend my time get more and more complicated, what's the indisputable can't-get-anywhere-else ingredient of live performance I just have to have? Or (I worry), perhaps there isn't any such a thing?

Posted by mclennan at 12:22 PM | Comments (1)

Ars longa, vita brevis (visual or otherwise)

by Robert Levine

Doug McLennan wrote:

" If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises." I think that this largely used to be true. But I think for many people the recorded experience might now be preferable to the live one. Live pop for example almost never delivers in purely musical terms. The sound isn't mixed well, the crowd is noisy, and the acoustics are terrible. I suspect the attraction of these events has more to do with having an encounter with someone famous or plugging in to the energy of a crowd than it does an appreciation of the music.

But why does it matter? In purely musical terms, a recorded performance by artist X of concerto Y with orchestra Z is almost bound to be superior in many respects to any live performance they'll give together, but people come to see artist X etc. anyway. It's a superior experience in some ways and not in others. And it's been like that for a long time.

Doug went on to write:

Not to say that isn't important, but it's very different. Watching sports on TV is also a different experience. With replays, multiple camera angles and constant stats and analysis on the screen, one can participate in a deeper way in the pure game.

Except you can't. ... most people would identify an essential "being there" experience that generally trumps the comfort of your own living room.

Opera and baseball (and movies like "Titanic") are best experienced in their native habitats rather than at home, purely on the merits. One problem that orchestras face is the absence of a similar level of spectacle.

Okay - I realize I've just argued against my initial point. But perhaps not. I think the recorded experience - one which we increasingly have more control of (think Tivo, iPods, etc) - is increasingly different from the live experience, and speaks to entirely to different needs. No more is the recorded experience a shadow of the live version; it offers different things, speaks to different needs. Most people's encounters with artists these days comes not from a live experience, but through a screen or speaker. Even if you're a big music fan, your bulk relationship with music is through recording. Live has largely become the boutique experience.

But how is that any different from the past 50 years?

I have a friend who's an audiophile. For him the sound is everything, and witnessing his fanaticism about the minute placement of expensive speakers and super special wiring sometimes makes me question what he really finds important in music.

As my wife once said, audiophiles are people who listen to the hiss.

At the other end, I know music critics who seem to be quite content listening to music in crappy MP3 files on lousy equipment. For them, the sound is not so relevant as the ideas or artistry expressed in those ideas. Sound be damned.

We live in a visual age. One of the things that has happened with computers and video in recent years is that the sophistication of our video language has moved away from the visual language that can be employed in real life on a stage...live linear story-telling is increasingly a foreign language (the theatre audience is much smaller than the TV or movie audience)

Again, how is this different from the past 50 years?

I can buy an argument that the live musical experience is about participation and being involved. But if that kind of involving experience is increasingly a foreign experience for someone who's used to using recorded music to accompany their day, how do you convince them that it's important? Their experience of music in the recorded world might not require them to have the live experience to be a music fan.

There is a school of thought (made famous by the monumental James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians through the 1940's and 50's) that, for a musician, making a recording is like playing for one's own funeral. I think the problem is more that, as Doug said earlier, we live in a visual age. That's the one shift above all others that TV has brought us. And orchestras aren't visual experiences.

Posted by rlevine at 9:32 AM | Comments (0)

Steampunks and the world we live in

by Greg Sandow

Fascinating.

I'm much in sympathy with Vanessa Bertozzi (as if anyone would be surprised by that). Opera fans...steampunks...both showing up, in a new kind of cultural map, as subcultures that can seem very strange to anyone outside them.

Which is a big surprise, according to official -- canonic -- notions of high and low art. Opera, we've long assumed, is important. Steampunk is curious,weird. And probably won't stick around as long as opera did, right? So opera is worth more, right? (Not that I'm posing those rhetorical questions in my own voice.)

First corrective to this: look at Billboard, the trade paper of the recording industry. Look at their charts and commentary for innumerable musical genres. See how classical music shows up as one of these -- as one of the lesser ones, in fact, a genre they don't feel they need to touch base with every week. From a culture-wide point of view, then, the canonical arts can easily look like just one activity of many, with their own demographic, it's true, and their own rules, but easily viewed as part of the larger (and definitely not high-art) culture.

Second corrective: A group of twenty-somethings (to judge from their appearance), overheard talking as they came out of a performance of Tosca at the Met. "I didn't like it," said one of them. "I could tell he was really going to get shot at the end. That was dumb!" Popular culture, to make this point quickly, has gotten so smart that some things in high culture look dumb by comparison. We can't assume the superiority of high culture, just because we always have.

And then Robert Levine: there's still a place, he says, for the canonical arts. I agree. But that place, in the future, will demand (at least as I see it) that they get stripped of their canonical status. That doesn't mean we devalue them. Mahler, who's been with us a long time, deserves some deference. But only because of what's actually in his work, and what it actually means (and has meant) in our culture. We need to take away the aura, and let canonical artworks fend for themselves in the modern world.

Some people, of course, will find that horrifying. These artworks are special. They can't be understood without special preparation. (That thought is endemic in classical music, and goes a long way toward killing that artform.) They need to be nurtured, funded, protected.

But why? How does anyone argue for that? How do we justify, to our fellow citizens, all the money that goes for high art? These aren't academic questions. We're actively fighting those battles, as the arts studies I mentioned in my last post demonstrate. (Along with many others.) So supporters of the canonical status of traditional high art can huff and puff all they want (sorry; got a little carried away there). But they're still facing the present-day reality, which is that high art needs to show why it still matters -- and why its high status should still be maintained -- in the present=day world.

A thought. I've seen some figures on the proportion of the population of certain major cities that the orchestras in those cities reach on a regular basis. We're not talking now about the people who show up for Fourth of July parks concerts, but the people who come regularly to the core subscription concerts these orchestras give. I can't quote these figures , because they were told to me in confidence. But I can tell you that they're shockingly low. So low, in fact, that it becomes hard to justify the amount of money and prestige that these orchestras have. Opera companies, I don't doubt, would show the same disparity. So, opera and steampunk. Opera gets special care and feeding. Steampunk takes care of itself. That's a virtue in steampunk, a defect of opera. (Though I'm not closed to the argument that opera has been with us a long time, and plays an important role in the history of western culture. But does that really mean -- just to be devil's advocate here -- that we need live performances? Maybe we should just archive all the opera DVDs.)

Finally, Steven Tepper, so cautiously wondering what proportion of kids actually do create culture on their own. Studies haven't been done, he says. And I certainly should be sympathetic to that caution, because I so strongly said that we don't base our pontifications strongly enough on facts.

Still, I wonder if there's not a double standard here. Steven hopes that a majority of young people, maybe all young people, will participate in the ways Vanessa Bertozzi and her collaborator described. But we don't need that level of participation before it's clear that a major trend is at work. Rolling back the clock a few decades, did anyone ask -- when Andy Warhol was getting big -- how many people actually cared about pop art? Or saw Warhol's films? (That last was surely a small number.) Nobody asked. It was clear that something new was going on, and because it happened in the area of high art, we had a model for the emergence of new styles. We'd been clocking that emergence for centuries.

Or here's an example from the history of rock. The Velvet Underground (a Warhol connection there, parenthetically) is now ranked as one of the greatest of all bands, and certainly as one of the most influential. It's also understood that not many people heard them when they were new. In fact, there's a hoary old rock joke: "When the Velvet Underground came out, 12 people bought their records. And then all 12 started really important bands."

Why can't we have a model like that, at least provisionally, for current developments in culture? It's odd, I think, that we might not even think of it. At the same time, by the way, that most of us here are in the business of supporting the canonical arts, which are definitely a minority enterprise.

Besides, it seems hard to doubt that participation -- creating your own cultural stuff -- is a huge trend right now, whether or not any large number of teenagers are making the kind of really interesting art Vanessa and her collaborator described. Have we forgotten the hundreds, or maybe thousands, of Brokeback Mountain mashups? Have we forgotten the three commercials shown during the Superbowl (I think that's the right number), that were made by customers of the companies that showed them? Certainly the New York Times, in its business section, has run many pieces about how advertisers now solicit their customers to create or help create the ads.

Have we forgotten Time's person of the year -- who, precisely because of these participatory trends, was all of us? (Symbolized by a mirror on the cover of the magazine, instead of a picture of someone.) I'm all for studies, but while we're calling for them, let's at least grant that the conventional wisdom currently says that participation - creating your own cultural stuff -- is a big, big thing.

My final thought. We in the arts often don't have a clear sense of what people who don't participate in our kind of art are actually like -- what they think about, what they do. That's certainly true in my own field, classical music. The many smart, educated people who don't go to classical concerts might as well be on Mars, we understand them so poorly. And studies aren't the answer, I really must say. You have to know these people (who, after all, are our families, friends, and neighbors). You have to live among them. (As in fact we do, if we'd only open our eyes.) The reasons they might give for not going to classical concerts are only the slightest tip of an enormous iceberg. These people don't really know enough about classical concerts to know why they don't go. But when you can feel in your gut -- because you know it from your own experience -- what they actually do like, the reasons for their non-attendance start to seem very clear.

Posted by gsandow at 9:26 AM | Comments (1)

No just "reviving" art...

by Andrew Berryhill

Lawrence Kramer's New York Time's article was also one I found of great interest as an orchestra administrator (who like Robert mentioned in his piece) looks forward to a number of years of continued employment in this field. However I'd like to offer a slightly different take on Mr. Karmer's idea. I believe we are already, especially when we do our job's well, acting in some ways as the best museums do and doing so in a more challenging manner than just as a institution dedicated to "reviving" art.

We, like museums, we have a vital role to serve as the best curators of our art. When you visit a great museum, you usually only see a fraction of their collection at any one time. Similarly, at any given time, we in the orchestra business have out for public consumption only a fraction of our collection.

But the comparison also goes deeper. What sets great orchestras and museums apart from others is how well they present their collection for the public's consideration. What is the context? Monet and Manet created beautiful paintings and are often hung together. Similarly there are plenty of good reasons to play Beethoven and Brahms on the same concert. But don't we do our curatorial job a little better when we challenge our audience to think a little more? The Chicago Art Institute is currently presenting a show that explores the Islamic world's role as an intermediary between the East and West. It isn't just the presentation of the art itself, but the context of that presentation that makes this show compelling.

My orchestra here in far northern Minnesota just finished its concert season with a unabashedly exuberant staging of Porgy and Bess. It was insanely expensive and challenging for us to present, but even more wildly successful. And the reason we did it was because we loved the idea of presenting to our substantially homogeneous Scandinavian-descended audience the idea that Catfish Row had a compelling story worthy of their consideration. It was this juxtaposition of context that I believe made this show so special for us in Duluth (aside from the wonderful music!).

So in response to Mr. Kramer, I would say yes, we happily accept the challenge of engaging our audience with our art. And perhaps we've been doing it already for some time now and see it as more than just a practice of revival.

Posted by aberryhill at 8:32 AM | Comments (0)

The Infinitely Recordable Me

by Douglas McLennan

To Laura: I was with you when you were describing differences between live performances and recordings. But then you had to go and say this:

I would argue that our access to recorded music makes listeners want live performance even more. If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises.

I think that this largely used to be true. But I think for many people the recorded experience might now be preferable to the live one. Live pop for example almost never delivers in purely musical terms. The sound isn't mixed well, the crowd is noisy, and the acoustics are terrible. I suspect the attraction of these events has more to do with having an encounter with someone famous or plugging in to the energy of a crowd than it does an appreciation of the music. Not to say that isn't important, but it's very different. Watching sports on TV is also a different experience. With replays, multiple camera angles and constant stats and analysis on the screen, one can participate in a deeper way in the pure game.

Except you can't. You might know more about what's going on in the game. You might be able to hear the layers of the music better in a recording, but I think most people would identify an essential "being there" experience that generally trumps the comfort of your own living room.

Okay - I realize I've just argued against my initial point. But perhaps not. I think the recorded experience - one which we increasingly have more control of (think Tivo, iPods, etc) - is increasingly different from the live experience, and speaks to entirely to different needs. No more is the recorded experience a shadow of the live version; it offers different things, speaks to different needs. Most people's encounters with artists these days comes not from a live experience, but through a screen or speaker. Even if you're a big music fan, your bulk relationship with music is through recording. Live has largely become the boutique experience.

I have a friend who's an audiophile. For him the sound is everything, and witnessing his fanaticism about the minute placement of expensive speakers and super special wiring sometimes makes me question what he really finds important in music. At the other end, I know music critics who seem to be quite content listening to music in crappy MP3 files on lousy equipment. For them, the sound is not so relevant as the ideas or artistry expressed in those ideas. Sound be damned.

We live in a visual age. One of the things that has happened with computers and video in recent years is that the sophistication of our video language has moved away from the visual language that can be employed in real life on a stage. If our primary visual language is now that of the screen, and live linear story-telling is increasingly a foreign language (the theatre audience is much smaller than the TV or movie audience), how do you hook people on the live experience when they have less and less encounter with it and may no longer find the language familiar?

I can buy an argument that the live musical experience is about participation and being involved. But if that kind of involving experience is increasingly a foreign experience for someone who's used to using recorded music to accompany their day, how do you convince them that it's important? Their experience of music in the recorded world might not require them to have the live experience to be a music fan.

Posted by mclennan at 8:14 AM | Comments (0)

Is it the Art or the Artist?

by Ed Cambron

In thinking about what's been written so far, my thoughts turned to the stage. If we are on a path where audiences need to be more engaged with the creation of the art, does that mean they need to be more engaged with the artists onstage too? Are we treating our orchestra musicians like artists? Do they treat themselves and organize themselves like artists?

It wasn't so long ago that orchestras debated the simple act of having a musician speak from the stage. That says a lot about how we view the creative process and the role of musicians. If you think about it we have opportunities few other performing arts disciplines have; a large collection of artist who commit to the creation of art for an institution, day in and day out, usually for a lifetime. Imagine the power of exploiting their individual musical talents to engage audiences, their power to engage in musical discourse with audiences, one on one, on the stage, off the stage, online, and in our communities. Imagine for a moment if they viewed their role primarily as an individual contributor to the art form, and not as part of a collective contribution. Imagine for a moment if orchestra administrators viewed their role as encouraging and facilitating the work of individual artists. Would this create a more open and creative environment with greater opportunity for audience engagement? Would it allow us to be more flexible in a changing cultural landscape? Maybe.

Posted by ecambron at 8:06 AM | Comments (0)

A Brief History of Dropping In and Dropping By

by Lynne Conner

I know I'm setting myself up as the history geek in this conversation--but I just can't help pointing out yet another connection between present and past. Steven Tepper identifies an important truth about today's audiences: "People want convenience; they want to leave their options open; they want to 'drop in and drop by,' they want to be able to customize their play lists rather than trust someone else to curate their experiences." This is also an important truth about audiences of the past, who from the ancients and up through the 19th century consistently curated their own cultural experiences as a normal course of action. And, they did it without apology. In the prologue to his play The Brothers, the Roman playwright Terence (whom we revere today as among the greatest ancient comic playwrights) made a plea to his audience to for the gods-sake please stay for the whole play this time. He did this because during the first production of his play Mother-in-Law the audience left in the middle of the performance to go see a rope dancer and to watch the gladiators. We know that Elizabethan theatre-goers routinely moved from one playhouse to another over the course of a day--a little Hamlet at the Globe, a round of bear baiting next door at the sporting ring, a comic dance and a cup of ale at a tavern, topped off with yet another revival of the gloriously bloody fifth act of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy at The Swan. And what about the first concert and opera audiences? It's the same story, as is pointed out in Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh's Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain: "An individual would often attend several theaters in an evening, arranging to see favourite scenes, players or singers or meeting with people in different halls and boxes . . It was not though obligatory to sit through it all."

Posted by lconner at 7:59 AM | Comments (0)

Of zombies, freaks... and the other 90%

by Robert Levine

Vanessa Bertozzi wrote:

For those who live inside the looking glass of classical music, what brings the music back to life for you? What are the expressions of identity from this subculture and what do its participants value? Maybe romantics are different from modernists, and opera freaks are different from chamber music fans. I can't quite say, though I'd be interested to hear from those of you who would know.

Opera fans are most definitely different than chamber music fans. But most people who attend concerts, and even operas, are not hard-core fans. I think the problem of engaging audiences (or, in management-speak, putting butts in seats) is less about the hard-core fans than about everyone else.

The question of "what brings the music back to life" is both interesting and hard for me to answer in a way that's helpful to answering the "butts in seats" question. I know why I go to concerts (aside from the ones I get paid to perform, of course). It's not why most people go. Generally I go either to see friends perform or to pass judgment on another orchestra's technical proficiency. I find myself constantly frustrated at not understanding why normal people go to concerts. That makes it hard to figure out what changes in presentation or content could make more of them want to go.

One thing that I have noticed, however, is that people do seem to want, in the live experience, things they can't get in the recorded version. When I watch the Vienna Phil play every New Year's Day, for example, I'm struck both by the physical intimacy of the situation - with the audience practically on top of the orchestra - and the evident mutual engagement between the performers and the audience.

Laura Jackson wrote:

... our access to recorded music makes listeners want live performance even more. If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises.

That's only true because the live performance is a very different (and in some ways better) experience than the download. In some respects that's often not true in our business. For example, most concert halls, even the new ones (and I am speaking about you, Frank Gehry), just don't sound very good as compared to live recordings made of the same orchestra, sometimes in the same hall. It's positively embarrassing how much better my orchestra sounds on recordings made in concert than anywhere in our hall except on stage.

That sure doesn't make it easier to sell tickets to come see my orchestra.

Posted by rlevine at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)

Brave New Inconveniences; same old people

by Robert Levine

Steven Tepper wrote:

...the greatest barrier for many students when it comes to attending the arts is the notion of "opportunity costs" - many students don't want to commit to an event because they want to wait and see if something better comes along. People want convenience; they want to leave their options open; they want to "drop in and drop by," they want to be able to customize their play lists rather than trust someone else to curate their experiences.

Isn't the last statement called into question by the great success that at least some museum exhibits seem to be having these days? They are as much "curated by someone else" as were exhibits 100 years ago.

The issue of potential concertgoers wanting to keep their options open is not restricted to students. Nor is it new; it seems to be behind the near-universal trend away from the subscription ticket model (which has been going on for a couple of decades now).

There is a trend amongst "big thinkers" to believe that people want different things in the 21st century than they did in the 20th ("people want to 'drop in and drop by'" and such). I'm very suspicious of that notion. People don't change. But what's available to them does. If, for example, 500 channels of cable had been available at the dawn of the TV age, people would have subscribed in droves. The three-network model only existed because of lack of alternatives.

There have always been people creating music, and other forms of art, in their garages (or stables). We used to call it "folk music," among other things. But now it's both easier to create (or to cobble together from pre-existing art) and to distribute new art (although now we call it "content").

Steven Tepper also wrote:

There is probably a place for certain organizations to focus only on artistic innovation, with little regard for audiences. These organizations might be doing critical R&D which has little day-to-day relevance. Good for them. In the end, some will be serving a public interest if their innovations take hold and animate a new generation of audiences and artists.

The problem is that it's hard for orchestras to take those risks. And the non-orchestral organizations that can afford to do so provide models that aren't really "on point" for orchestras. So we get stuck in old models (of concert presentation, for example) that seem to be working less well, but we don't have the resources to take the risks to innovate our way out of the old models.

Posted by rlevine at 7:01 AM | Comments (0)

Inconvenient Entaglements

by Steven J. Tepper

I love Alan Brown's parsing of the word "engage" (see entry "So you think you can dance?") And, I think he has, in his typically perceptive way, identified a core set of concepts that help clarify our thinking (at least mine). What perplexes me is the contrast between Alan's notion of "commitment" - common cause; collaboration; shared risk; interlocking - and the concurrent trends of individualization, personalization, and self-centered media consumption. As Alan's own research on college students has shown, the greatest barrier for many students when it comes to attending the arts is the notion of "opportunity costs" - many students don't want to commit to an event because they want to wait and see if something better comes along. People want convenience; they want to leave their options open; they want to "drop in and drop by," they want to be able to customize their play lists rather than trust someone else to curate their experiences. How do we square these new habits with the notion that true engagement sometimes requires inconvenient entanglements. If you play in a string quartet, your fellow musicians expect you to show up to rehearse at the scheduled time. You must make a social commitment, which, while reaping social benefits, might be personally inconvenient at times.

In an article I wrote several years ago with Jason Kaufman on the benefits of group membership for social capital in the 19th century, we found that not all groups spurred social capital and civic participation. Rather, those groups that seemed to require mutual commitment and "entanglements" had the greatest positive consequences for democracy. I think the same is true for culture. The challenge is to get audiences and participants to move from convenience to commitment.

Posted by stepper at 6:07 AM | Comments (0)

Should we all care? No... But...

by Steven J. Tepper

I like Lynne's framing of the question - "who cares if audiences are engaged?" And, I agree with her that many more organizations need to see themselves as part of a larger cultural operation in which the quality of the audience experience is as important as the quality of the art. Nonetheless, I think there will be some organizations and some arts leaders who will read the book and will opt out of the "engagement" mandate. And, that will be o.k.... for some. There is probably a place for certain organizations to focus only on artistic innovation, with little regard for audiences. These organizations might be doing critical R&D which has little day-to-day relevance. Good for them. In the end, some will be serving a public interest if their innovations take hold and animate a new generation of audiences and artists. But, we likely do not need 30,000 such organizations in the country, most of whom make some claim on public money. If you have access to enlightened patrons, then ignoring "engagement" is a reasonable strategy. But, for the vast majority of organizations, this is not possible and "engaging" audiences will be the only way forward. And, engaging, as Conner suggests, is not about marketing or simply getting people to attend an event. It is about co-authoring meaning.

Posted by stepper at 6:02 AM | Comments (0)

New cultural divide?

by Steven J. Tepper

Sandow's post -- "The New World" - is very provocative and, I think, correct on most issues. He celebrates the critical, engaged, and inventive young people who are blogging on the IMDB movie Web site and the teens in Jenkins and Bertozzi's chapter who find and create their own forms of art. But he is also right that we do not yet have the data and research to know how pervasive this "critical" engagement is, nor how pervasive the negative consequences are that Schwartz speculates about in his chapter about the paradox of choice. The best data we have comes from the Pew study of teen media creators, which demonstrates that a majority of teens are posting, remixing and creating content online. My concern, and the concern of many in the book, is that the type of critical engagement that Sandow celebrates may not be evenly distributed across the population. I suspect that for many Americans, Schwartz's cautions might be appropriate - we know that the majority of Americans buy their music at the big box retailers - Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy; many still watch network television in spite of the availability of hundreds of cable channels; and still others are tuned into Clear Channel radio stations that have very narrow playlists. I think the purpose of the book is not to try to come up with yet another argument to justify the arts; but rather to examine how policy can and should respond to the potentially transformative changes in our midst. We can stand by and do nothing and have faith that enterprising kids will figure it out. Many will. But, can we be more deliberate about ensuring that the type of participatory culture described in the book is available to every citizen?

Posted by stepper at 5:58 AM | Comments (0)