I want to write about something serious, something which – I think – is one of the most serious problems facing mainstream classical music today.
And it’s this. Classical music organizations are eagerly doing outreach and education, trying to rebuild the audience and cultural clout that they used to have. These efforts are passionate, intense, and deeply committed. The people engaged in them love classical music with all their hearts, and believe – again with all their hearts – that other people can love it, too.
But there’s one step they don’t take. They don’t ask what the world outside is like. They don’t ask about the people they’re trying to reach. Who are these people? What culture – what tastes, interests, commitments, longings – do they already have?
This doesn’t make sense. It’s like launching a marketing campaign in France, and forgetting to notice that the people who live there speak French. No large commercial company would make that mistake. Big commercial concerns do marketing research, trying to define the markets for their products, so they won’t launch campaigns that are doomed to fail. Which of course doesn’t mean they’re successful all the time.
But classical music institutions, from what I’ve seen, don’t do much to guarantee any success at all. (See an addendum at the end of this post for my comments on the research they do sometimes manage.) What they miss – in my view – is gigantic. They don’t understand that our culture has changed, and that classical music (as it’s presented in the classical music mainstream) can’t have the same meaning, or the same appeal, that it used to have.
In particular, the people engaged in all this outreach miss some fundamental truths. Or, at least, truths that no one who wants work with cultural problems in today’s world can afford to ignore: Meaning in our world today is largely expressed through popular culture.
Popular culture is no longer shallow, brainless, or trivial. Some of it is, but much of it isn’t. In particular, popular culture long ago evolved its own form of art, its own forms of expression – movies, music, TV shows, much more – that ask probing questions in a serious, artistic way.
Smart people involved with popular culture have a highly nuanced, often dark (or at least partly dark) view of the world. They thrive on complexity, and fine, textured detail. In fact, they demand these things. (Just look at three of the nominees for best movie, in this year’s academy awards: Juno, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood.
And here’s a brief story, which I’ve told many times in conversation and public appearances. Years ago, when I’d defected from classical music and worked as a pop music critic, and later as music editor for Entertainment Weekly, I had a girlfriend with no high art background. But she’d often say she wanted to hear classical music. One morning, while we ate breakfast, I put on some Handel. She listened for a while, and then said, “Why isn’t classical music more noir?” Referring, of course, to film noir, the complex, dark, and morally ambiguous crime films of the 1940s and ’50s, whose aesthetic now lies near the heart of our culture, though you won’t find much of it in the classical music world. Some of it, though, did slip into classical music, and so in response to my girlfriend, I put on the suite from Berg’s opera Lulu. “You mean noir like this?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Like that. Why doesn’t more classical music sound like that?”)
In popular culture, people make art for themselves. They play in bands, make films, design clothes, write fiction, make mashups of other peoples’ art, and much, much more. They take that for granted. They want to participate in culture, to make culture themselves, not just absorb it passively.
Smart people in popular culture are culturally curious. They want to find things they haven’t known before. They’ll try almost anything, and, very often, if something’s not popular, if it’s a niche taste that few people have, that’s a plus. (See, for instance, the vogue for curling after the last Winter Olympics, and the comment of a new curling fan, interviewed by the New York Times: “This is so cool. Plus it’s a very obscure thing to say you do.”
There’s more, but that’s a good start. Most of the lovely people involved in classical music outreach – and I really mean “lovely,” as a compliment to them – don’t seem to know the things I’ve just outlined, or at least they don’t talk about them, and don’t seem to bring them into their work.
Which leads – again in my view – to mistakes. The first mistake is to put down popular culture, not necessarily by mounting any overt attack, but by making casual remarks: “People today have short attention spans.” “We live in a culture of instant gratification.” “Our culture doesn’t encourage curiosity, or thoughtful reflection.” Classical music, of course, is offered as an alternative, or, even more strongly, as an antidote. We need classical music (or so the message goes), because it requires serious listening, and serious study, and because it encourages thinking, curiosity, and inward reflection.
But then what happens when you talk that way to the kind of people I’ve just described? They’ll think you’re crazy. Or – which in a way is even worse – they’ll readily agree, thinking that you’re down (just as they are!) on people who listen to pop music crap, or go to see the kind of empty blockbusters that play in the multiplexes near my country house. Imagine how they’ll feel when they find out you mean them, that their taste for Bjork or Grizzly Bear somehow proves that they don’t know how to think, that they can’t pay attention to anything for very long, that all they care about is instant gratification.
Though there’s a more nuanced way to make the point. You could say, more expansively, that these people, these people whose home base is popular culture, do have intelligent taste – and that this means they’re ready for classical music! Which, in a way, is true. They like intelligent music of all kinds, so why not classical?
But there can be problems.
Problem one: You keep telling them, or at least implying, that classical music is better than other kinds of music, so if they follow your lead, they’re upgrading. They might not think that.
Problem two: When you talk about classical music (and I’m sorry for this), you don’t sound smart enough. This is an endemic classical music problem, and it seems like a paradox. Classical music is supposed to be artistic and brainy, but discussion of it – except by scholars – is often less intelligent than the best (and, again, non-scholarly) discussion of pop. Read any good rock critic to see what I mean.
So (continuing with problem two) I’ve heard an irresistible man in the opera education biz, one of the most delightful public speakers I’ve ever heard, introduce a short concert of opera excerpts, sung by singers in his company’s young artist program. One of those excerpts was “O mio babbino caro,” not exactly a profound piece. The irresistible man unfortunately made himself resistible, by carrying on about the aria as if what it’s about – a girl doing a number on her father, playing dumb but stubborn, to get permission to marry the guy she loves – was endlessly charming and remarkable. As if, maybe, it was something out of Noel Coward.
But it wasn’t. It’s just a simpleminded Puccini aria. (Nothing against Puccini, whom I love, but he’s not exactly profound.) And if the now all too resistible gentleman was talking to people whose home turf in culture is something like The Sopranos, he’d lose them. He’d lose them, in fact, after two or three sentences. They’re used to art that’s more complex and layered. If he introduced Puccini as something adorable, like an adorable old movie (something, maybe, like Grand Hotel) – and, most important, if the singers sang it that way, with as much style and class as those old movie actors had (which, no coincidence, is more or less the class and style that graced opera singers of past generations) – then he could have made his case. But I’m not sure he sees the distinction. Like many good people in classical music, he thinks that classical music – of course including his opera excerpts – is just wonderful, and that its artistic status lies beyond question. So the unfortunate fact that, as people in today’s culture would see it, he’s presenting classical music as middlebrow entertainment, something not too far above Celine Dion in Las Vegas (but a lot less showy), doesn’t occur to him.
It’s such a shame. And, to go back to where I started, it’s a real problem. How can we bring smart new people to classical music, if we present it in a way that’s far beneath their culture and intellect?
Next: This problem isn’t limited to classical music. It infects more general discussions of the arts, and especially shows itself in otherwise eloquent calls for arts support. So in my next post, I’ll take apart a much-circulated speech by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to show why his mistaken assumptions about popular culture lead him down a dangerous path.
,***
Footnote: Some smart classical music marketers in fact do market research. And there have been studies, quite beyond any immediate marketing need, of why people do or don’t go to classical performances. But the studies ask the wrong questions, I think. They focus too much on specifics. One common thread in the backgrounds of people who go to classical concerts is that many of them studied a classical instrument.
(Whether there’s a cause and effect relationship is of course a more complex story.) Or people who don’t go think ticket prices are too high, or can’t get childcare. Missing in much of this, maybe most of it, are larger cultural questions, the cultural profile, so to speak, of people who go to classical performances, and people who don’t go. What cultural assumptions do both groups make? What are they looking for when they choose their art and entertainment? What would a concert of Mozart and Brahms mean to someone whose normal culture is films like Sweeney Todd and No Country for Old Men?
Greg, this is a great post. I think you have identified a very important stumbling block for the classical music marketing and education people. Most of them are totally unaware of the underground culture in their cities, and they can’t tap into the enthusiasm that so many young people have for indie music, art, and film.
Apropos of this, one of the great advertising howlers I’ve seen in a while is (or was a couple of weeks ago) currently up at Lincoln Center. The Chamber Music Society has/had a poster up that says: “There’s more to American music than Copland – and we can prove it!”
So…first, evidently they have decided to cater to the miniscule demographic sliver that is the “by music of COURSE I mean classical” crowd. Then among them, they are evidently aiming at those who don’t listen to much American classical music besides Copland…I guess because they’re content to listen to the same Beethoven and Tchaikovsky pieces over and over and over? Do they think people like this actually walk the streets anymore? The mind boggles at who would come up with this poster, and who would sign off on it.
But there’s one step they don’t take. They don’t ask what the world outside is like.
Here’s my question — do these people not live in the same world as everyone else? Do they not watch movies directed by P.T. Anderson and the Coen brothers? Do they not follow HBO programs like The Wire and The Sopranos? Do they not tune in to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report? Do they not read books by Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon? Or do they live in some kind of bizarre hermetically sealed bubble where popular culture never, ever permeates?
Hi Greg,
I’ve been a real fan of your writings for some time, and this post reminds me of a concert I went to recently at the Whitney Collection.
For readers who have never been to the Whitney (I had never been prior to this concert), the concerts are held in an open space slightly below street level, in front of a big glass wall that looks up onto Madison Avenue. There are no walls on the first two floors, and visitors who were unaware of the concert would definitely hear all of it in the main entrance and gift shops. They could even gaze down on it from the first floor. Many people stopped on the street for a few moments to watch.
There were about 60 seats, all full, when the concert began. By the time the first piece (a very cool “remix” of Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood) was over, a sizable crowd of obviously not-classical-music-people hhad gathered behind the sseats. By the time the cconcert was over, the overflow crowd stretched all the way through the gift shop that occupies the rest of the floor. These people were brought in by the sheer experience of the music, which was modern and fresh–and a bit noir–and viscerally exciting, but still unlike anything they had ever heard. That concert probably introduced more newbies to classical music than many bigger-budget audience-development campaigns from the big ensembles in town. Did I mention that the audience was about 90% in the 20-35 age group, and very hip looking?
By the way, the concert was a joint effort of SO Percussion and the avant-rock band Kneebody. All the music was either by the ensemble members themselves, arrangements of indigenous music from Africa and the Middle East, or firmly in the Downtown tradition. The musicians played in street clothes and regularly spoke with the audience the way a rock band would.
I would also like classical music to be more “noir.” I think a lot of people feel this way and would respond positively if they only knew that such classical music existed. The problem is that this music does exist but the average listener thinks that classical music is all Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms. What if they knew about Berg, Bartok, Ives, Janacek, Philip Glass, Per Norgard, George Crumb, Alfred Schnittke, or Allan Pettersson? Sure some people would hate this music but others would think “wow this is cool, where has this been all my life.”
What if Hollywood promoted only Disney movies and said “this is wholesome entertainment, it’s good for you, and everyone should like it.” I don’t think that would go over very well with the majority of people. Of course there is an audience for Disney movies but people also want to see thrillers, dramas, comedies, horror movies, and quirky independent films. It seems like that the classical music world should go take a basic marketing class and learn that you can’t make people want what they don’t like but also that people can’t want something if they don’t know it exists.
On a related note I have been listening to the listener request program called Friday Favorites on Minnesota Public Radio. The usual daytime MPR programming is pretty much baroque and classical fluff so I was surprised to hear Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, a piece by Philip Glass, and other “edgier” works in the middle of the afternoon. I think the music that the users have requested shows that some people want and actively seek out this type of music.
What a great post and very thought-provoking for me! I ended up writing a lengthy response (http://jonas-aie.blogspot.com/2008/02/response-to-serious-problem.html) but I’ll take a quick shot at summarizing… The main thrust of my post is that along with the history of education in the US, arts education by arts organizations has often been in this teacher-as-expert frame. “You should learn this because it’s good for you.” I think this is in ample evidence in the Puccini-Irresistible Man example.
But I think that we are exposed to so much information now that the teacher-as-expert model is being challenged. Instead of tastes and sensibilities being developed by adult/authority figures, we are increasingly under the influence of peer groups and what is found in the general media.
So, basically, what I’m trying to say is that the balance of power has shifted. In-person consumption of the arts (performances or attendance at exhibitions of visual arts) is not a given for people who have so many ways to spend their time. Arts organizations cannot just expect people to show up because it’s “important” music. In order to maintain relevance to our current, and hopefully future, audiences, arts organizations must better define what it is what makes their art form compelling, but most of all, inculcate a sense of curiosity–a sense of why the art form is worthy of further exploration.
Arts education should not be about disseminating information, but it should be about allowing an audience to develop it’s own conclusions. Development of a deeply engaged audience member is the ideal method to increase the arts audience–they will not only attend more events, but an inspired audience member can also serve as the most effective advocate for the art form.
Dear Greg,
This is certainly the best discussion on these issues I have found on the Web. And you make me question my own assumptions about music in a way that I appreciate. With respect to this post, I think that you are right that the efforts of classical music organizations to reach new audiences are often hampered by mistaken assumptions about “pop culture.” There is an exciting and vibrant “pop” artworld out there with all of the qualities you attribute to it (though I am not sure that it is as “mainstream” as you suggest). Certainly, its audience is on the whole not the same audience that classical music has drawn from in the past, and its members are much more open-minded and intellectually curious than often assumed.
At the same time, I am unsure what you are claiming about recent popular culture becoming “smarter”. When you write that popular culture is “no longer shallow, brainless, or trivial”, do you mean that it once was but is not now? Are you suggesting that contemporary popular culture is on the whole more intelligent than the pop culture of the past? If so, when, precisely, did that begin to change? To start with the example of film, are the Coen Brothers really smarter than the Marx Brothers? Is contemporary indie rock obviously more intelligent that 40s jazz or 60s rock?
Your fellow Arts Journal blogger Martha Bayles published a book called A Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Culture, in which she argues that contemporary popular music suffers from a lack of contact with and appreciation for its own roots in the African-American idiom. Her thesis with respect to the relative merits of past and current pop-worlds is basically the reverse of yours: the pop music of the past is richer in humanity, intelligence, and awareness of its own history than most of today’s music, which she characterizes in terms of “perverse modernism”. I am not sure where I stand on this question, but Bayles makes some fascinating points in developing her argument.
I was also thinking about the “dark” worldview that you attribute to today’s indie rock crowd. Doesn’t this “darkness” include precisely the complaint about mainstream popular culture that you seem at such great pains to deny; namely, that it is intellectually shallow, lacks substance and depth, is materialistic, fosters a short attention span, and, despite great its technological achievements, lacks a basic humanity and decency? And isn’t this part of what draws people to this music? Perhaps the problem with the classical music world’s overtures to the youth is that it fails to capture the sense of desperation that they feel, their unhappiness with the overall state of things. Not “noir” enough would be about exactly right. As I type this, I am listening to Radiohead’s Amnesiac, which, like most of the band’s output, isn’t exactly optimistic about the current state of popular culture. Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet, Dylan’s Modern Times, Joni Mitchell’s Shine, and recent albums by The National, Steve Earle, and the New Pornographers share in this mood. Indeed, I would be hard pressed to come up with a single indie rock band, well-known or otherwise, that does not seem to share to some extent in this bleak assessment of the state of things. So maybe one way to connect with the desired new audience is to highlight the extent to which classical composers were (and are ) themselves worried about the overall culture, and the way that their music reflects this anxiety. I think Alex Ross does this well in The Rest is Noise, and this is perhaps one reason that his book is reaching such a wide audience. Thanks once again for continuing to post on these issues.
Jay
There is a simple way of looking at this. It is that the strict cultural gap between popular culture and the classical music culture has been created by the history of “educating music”. By breaking down the divide at the grade school level the ideology of post enlightenment culture – i.e the downgrading of popular culture as a moral issue – the change will be seen at a later date. Here in Australia college enrolments in classical muisc are plummeting and yet jazz studies are growing. Why? Because the
proponents of classical music both in perfotmance and media are still “embedded” in a morally superior value system without realising that popular culture has evolved not only over the past 50 years but over the past 500! Kids today want more and they are taught that classical music is dull, uninteresting and a universe populated by OLD people, which is in itself an ideology of negative morality. By bypassing this at the pre school and grade school level one can always override the battle between the two cultures…Remember Schubert was once a popular culture hero.
To Greg’s point about talking down to non-classical consumers, it frustrates me to see orchestras use the term “Masterworks” as the moniker for the classical series, and “Pops” for almost everything else. As if there aren’t masterworks in pop music. That’s more then just a casual remark about the value of popular music.
Some might say it really doesn’t matter. After all, that’s how it’s always been, the public gets it, Pops are Pops, and there are without question classical masterworks on all orchestras’ main concert series. On one level those terms are very clear. But what I hear being said in this ongoing discussion, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that it does matter quite a bit. If we want to turn on more audiences to the power of classical music then we have to stop marketing (educating) with a message that is mired in an old-world model of what classical music is or can be. And most importantly, we need to be fully engaged with how the rest of the music world can inform and enrich the experience of classical music.
A bit of a contrary view – The Chicago Symphony sent me an invite to a web-based survey. Survey had a number of activities they were trying to “cross-tab” to, including art galleries, NPR, etc. As I finished the survey I was sure I was a peg that didn’t fit into ANY of their predefined holes.
Just as “classical-world” may be missing the “downtown art-scene” class, they’re also missing the late 30’s into 40s / married with kids / suburban couples who have to pick and choose from other committments and find that event scheduling, logistics are barriers; let alone surveys (and other elements) that convey the message that because I have priorities beyond tracking nuanced changes in the avant-garde poetry scene that I am unwelcome to hear the CSO. I may be over 30, but I’m still a generation younger than the average seatholder at Orchestra Hall.
Enough whining – let me be prescriptive for a moment (and agree with you from the other side). Blinders need to come off – on respondent selection, cross-tab attributes. Less closed end queries, more focused open-end queries.
One more penance for my whining – what works is the Grant Park Symphony outdoor series in Chicago. Accessible to get to, interesting programming, even the ability to make it part of kids lives. Pull down the barriers and I’m much more willing to listen to an atonal piece that otherwise couldn’t justify the investment.
So… Greg… I guess you’re not a big fan of Susan Jacoby?
From what I’ve read here it sounds as though the marketing departments of symphony orchestras are pretty unsophisticated. They sound like the missionaries of old going out to convert the natives.
The gulf between the new culture and the old culture seems so wide that I can’t imagine how the inhabitants of one can even communicate with the other.
In This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin writes, “There doesn’t seem to be a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music, but most people have formed their tastes by the age of eighteen or twenty.”
Is it really possible to win converts to classical music? I’ve only met one person in my entire life (I’m 64) who came to appreciate classical music in adulthood and I’ve heard of a few people who became opera-lovers in adulthood. I understand that economic survival is the motivation behind these efforts at audience building but I just wonder how productive they could possibly be.
Dear Mr. Sandow,
By juxtaposing two musical cultures – the “classical” and popular – you touch an extremely important theme. I agree with you that these two musical fields dwell in two different worlds and activate two different mindsets. The problem is that the actual difference between these worlds is very rarely discussed.
I think the inclination to listen to classical or popular music depends on listener’s general perception of the world and on his or her self-perception as a participant in that world. It is some kind of emotional foundation that richly buttresses the verbally-formulated world-outlook.
With your permission I would like to propose some kind of interpretation of these mindsets.
I think the tonal world of the classical music – with its popular core centered roughly between Handel-Bach and Rachmaninoff – cumulatively expresses the dream of the traditional Europe-centered listener for a society led by heroic, wise, courageous, magnanimous and caring elite. The domain of the tonality is in fact an emotionally sound metaphor for the just and noble life-framework run by people of above-mentioned qualities with universal consent.
The XIXth century development of harmony towards ever greater sophistication clearly projected another value: the intellectual prowess of the ideal hero, dealing with ever more complicated tasks.
For the general concert-audience this all ended with the ascension to institutional power of the avant-garde.
In other words, the traditional concert-going public to this very day longs for music that speaks to its innermost personal-cum-social ideals, based on the instinct that the world must be led by worthy, noble, just and caring meritocrats. The longing for such a world – with actual emotional and mental involvement into the ways to build it – depicts in my mind the mindset of the traditional concert-goers, whatever their actual social position would be.
However, people who attach themselves to the various manifestations of non-concert “popular” music display a feature that makes them definitely more contemporary. They do NOT dwell in longing for some kind of collective ideal order, instead feeling much more acutely their own current problems and experiences. They are not ready to subjugate neither their love, nor their desires and dreams to the collective, or to the universally-accepted-as-honorable. They are deeply skeptical towards any power – however democratic and formally flawless it might be. They detach themselves from the concept of power, and feel themselves proud about it. They detest “empty talk about social responsibility” as hypocrite intrusion into the world they keep for themselves and for their beloved alone.
These people detect very well the inner nature of the classical music and its social essence, especially as expressed in the historic examples of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Romantics. And it causes them deep resentment: they detect there a powerful thrust for tyranny.
On the other hand, for those classically-oriented this “tyranny” represents an ideal world populated by heroes with whom they can blissfully identify for the duration of musical performance, and beyond, in the cherished memory. There is no much in common among those two worlds. One way to bridge the gap would be to discuss these themes in non-musical terms (as you so successfully do): that might neutralize animosities…
I’d like to respond to the last question posed in this intelligent and provocative post. My 11 year old daughter is an aspiring violinist, whose musical tastes and cultural exposure span far beyond the classical repertoire. Nonetheless, classical music is her medium of choice for exploring emotions, relating them to her burgeoning sense of self, and ultimately expressing them in a way that communicates deeply to her auditors. Why? I think it is because she feels that classical music is a from that she can make resonate–at least presently–with her own sense of the world. Interestingly, the way she makes sense of the world is very much informed by J.K Rowling’s oeuvre. Without going into the literary merits–or lack there of–of the Harry Potter series, there is no doubt of its status as a (popular) cultural phenomenon. For my daughter, the work serves as a rich source, indeed a canon, if you will, of emotional contexts, which she consistently (and creatively!!) draws on to make sense of the classical repertoire she learns and performs. Thus, whether the piece is slow and introspective such as Ernest Bloch’s “Nigun,” or whimsical and playful like Wieniawski’s “Variations on an Original Theme,” or dark and menacing like Oistrakh’s cadenza for the Khachaturian Concerto, my daughter’s understanding of the piece emerges from her emotional connection to the characters in the novel. In other words, she seamlessly connects classical repertoire with popular culture. Mozart and “No Country for Old Men” are not necessarily mutually exclusive once we transcend our perceptions of the them as distinctive art forms necessarily adhering to prescriptive modes of appreciation, (popular or not, intellectual or not) rather than as manifestations of emotional contexts, just as my daughter has easily connected her experience of Harry to her experience of Mozart. Just another perspective. I truly appreciate the level of discussion represented on this blog, and plan to be a frequent reader.
All very interesting.
I’ve often thought that one of the biggest problems in classical music is simply the use of the umbrella-term “classical” to describe an incredible range of music. It makes blanket dismissals all too easy: “I don’t like classical music.” When I hear that, I always say: “can you be more specific?”
I come from Britain and live in Japan. In both countries I can’t say that I know many culturally-sophisticated people who DON’T like classical music. I know a lot of young people (more in Britain than Japan) who won’t give it the time of day, but that’s in no sense an informed judgement. In fact, I see nothing wrong with calling it an ignorant one. Responsibility for that ignorance is another matter. In Japan music is taught FAR more seriously in schools and I think that leads to a much more widespread appreciation of “difficult” music even at an early age.