We hate new music

I've been hearing a lot, in my meetings with concert presenters, about what projects and artists would and wouldn't work for them based on what they know about their audiences.  This is obviously very important, as I certainly want my projects and artists to succeed wherever they go, and I have no prayer of actually understanding all of the wildly different markets across the country at the same time, like some kind of Patrick Stewart X-Man of audience response.  But I do sometimes wonder if, through no direct fault of the various decision-making components that choose concert programming (artistic administrators in conjunction with music directors, executive directors, marketing departments, etc), this sense of what an audience will respond to becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy based on conception rather than actual content.  Believe me, I know orchestra marketing departments have a seriously tough job that many of them do fantastically-- but it worries me to hear that sometimes orchestra administrations are having to basically negotiate the Treaty of Versailles to program even rep that's vaguely on the fringe of the core, let alone new music.  Much has been said and will continue to be said about this, but as it is very late at night, I will paraphrase for now just one thing that came in part out of the Adventurous Programming panel this afternoon and relates specifically to new music: the admittedly important we-know-our-audience power is only effective when it is wielded as a response to actual music, rather than to the idea of a piece of music.  To say "our audiences hate new music" is patently ridiculous, since there is no actual musical notion that could remotely cover the humongous range of music that's being written or has been written in the last, say, even 30 years-- what they may hate is some aspect of the concept of new music.  If an audience legitimately hated a piece of new music that was programmed and the music director was flooded with hate mail, fine-- certainly no one likes everything, and no one wants to spend lots of money on a ticket for something they hate.  But I think the response to that should be not to say that we tried and failed on the new music front, but instead to address the actual musical response and program another piece of new music that is completely different, and certainly there are limitless choices, no matter what the starting point might be.  "New Music" is not a style or a format in itself; it's a realm of programming that happens to be exciting and essential.  To insist that whole swaths of people in a certain market hate new music seems to me like insisting that everyone in Kansas City hates paperback books or that everyone in Chicago hates food served on white plates.  I know it's not simple, but I would hope that framing the discussion around programming content rather than programming concept would allow non-core programming to become a valued and unquestioned part of every market's season (and several of the panel participants today have successfully done so), which will make the discussion of what each market's audience is looking for much more valuable and relevant to everyone involved in providing that content.

posted by James Egelhofer.