Today the League of American Orchestras opens the doors on its Orchestra R/Evolution site which, in the weeks leading up to their conference in Atlanta in June, will be looking at the classic “How do you solve a problem like the state of the symphony orchestra?” question. The kindly folks over at the League have invited me to kick in a few ideas, so if things get a little slow over here it might be because we’re having too much fun throwing sand around over there.
I actually got in the mood to chat about the orchestra world last week when a couple of pieces of online promotional material floated my way. To start, I want to give props to the folks over at the New York Philharmonic. On Thursday morning I received a mysterious email from “nekrotzar527” that contained a short note and a link to a YouTube video: “SPOTTED: Alan Gilbert with a shady character traversing the Upper West Side: http://www.youtube.com/breughelland”.
The video is short and charming–a little bit awkward, a little bit adorable. I was impressed that such a large, pro organization had embraced the lo-fi format and developed an appropriate idea for it, and that their fearless leader had rolled up his sleeves and was willing to play silly for his audience. While I didn’t feel the need to forward it to all my friends, I did both click through from the email and watch all three related videos on offer immediately, so it was a solid marketing score in my opinion and I look forward to their next production.
Over in Cleveland, they also tried their hand at some online marketing buzz, but this effort I found less successful. To begin with, I’m not sure that an organization that dubs its own video “viral” in the headline without the matching page views understands the medium well enough yet. The video is also more than two minutes long and plays for 10 seconds before it even fades in and gets going. When it does, I feel like the musicians are faking it (in their sentiments, not their playing, obviously). Maybe they really do care about LeBron and the Cavs and want to cheerlead for their home team–that would be awesome–but I don’t buy it in their delivery and so I think this piece backfires.
I know Cleveland is abuzz with LeBron drama and so the underlying concept isn’t a bad one, but for me the execution and expression didn’t rise to the challenge of engagingly communicating it. Cleveland may be a world-class ensemble, but somehow it’s actually this musical love letter to LeBron that gets the job done in a much better, if slightly off pitch, way.
America is about the only place in the world where the symphony orchestra is having significant “problems,†and it is the only major country in the world that lacks a comprehensive system of public arts funding. Gee, what a coincidence!
London, for example, has five fulltime, year-round symphony orchestras, and two large opera orchestras. Munich three major symphony orchestras and two opera orchestras. Vienna has three major symphonies and two opera orchestras. It’s largest Viennese opera orchestra has 149 fulltime members! (To meet demand, the house often has to do 8 performances a week so the musicians are rotated.)
In Europe, the only country where orchestras are having significant problems is Italy. Its Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is the richest man in the country and loves the American plutocratic cultural funding model. Gee, three coincidences at the same time: orchestra problems + rich politician + desire for American plutocratic funding model!
All the same, rest assured that the League and its bloggers will NOT put 2 and 2 together. America’s fundamentalist belief in the universality of the market as the arbiter of all human endeavor will not be questioned. The bloggers will hardly mention our lack of public arts funding, much less develop concrete plans for improving the situation. (Let’s see if they prove me wrong.) They will merely repeat the old tropes: cute video, fancy websites, new music, and Twitter, etc. will solve the problems. Market models will be applied to something inherently outside the market. It will be American parochialism at its usual. Gee, maybe they can make a cute video of Dudamel talking to Darth Vadar! Sorry, one loses patience.
Re the previous comment:
Dude, “bloggers will hardly mention our lack of public arts funding” because it won’t do any good.
Bloggers and critics and the League of American Orchestras and famous conductors and everyone else can gripe about a lack of public funding for orchestras until they’ve shouted themselves hoarse and worn the skin off their typing fingers. It won’t matter.
A Congress that won’t fund national health care or a decent national rail network or even up-to-date air traffic control equipment is not going to pay for a bunch of symphony orchestras.
We may wish they would, but they won’t. And unless, by November, we can get 55% or so of the electorate to agree with us and make their lawmakers fund symphony orchestras, the next Congress won’t do so either.
Better for the League and bloggers and the rest of us to concentrate on things that have a realistic chance of happening than to waste time yelling about things that don’t.
William, I can understand your frustrations.
But, the thing I take away from the ‘cute’ video by the NYPhil is, as a Gen-Y arts consumer, it’s grabbed my attention and I have a want to learn more about the concert.
Making symphonic music relevant for future generations is a hard task. And although I would agree that these new media marketing tools do not supply a holistic answer to this issue, they are much more effective than traditional means of marketing a concert.
I know the Symphony Orchestras in my country (note America) can’t be like Vienna, or London or Munich, because the people who care about the music are a dying breed. We don’t get a demand for repeat shows.
Funding, all though an issue, is not the only issue.
I appreciate these thoughtful comments. Public arts funding is a very relevant topic for blogging. People once said we would never have national health insurance, but it is finally happening. People never thought we would have an African-American President, but it happened. Progress was made because people were not daunted by the tasks before them. We need leaders in the League who can give us a vision of hope about public funding, even if the work will be long and hard.
Orchestras and Opera houses cannot function in a market system anymore than a hospitals, universities, or militaries. We Americans must remember that the market is not an all-encompassing paradigm. There is a vitally important common good that exists outside the market.
One of the reasons the League doesn’t adequately address this topic is because most of its administrators are MBA types who built their careers around America’s dysfunctional private funding system. They are like veterinarians for one-winged birds with a vested interest in maintaining a crippled private funding system because that is their professional expertise. The results are absurd and cruel.
Our cultural administrators are also often afraid to take a politically difficult stance about public funding, even though they know it is right. After all, if their ideas appear too progressive, they will lose funders who are typically conservatives. Here too we have an ironic situation where our administrators have a vested interest in keeping our cultural institutions tied to a financially crippled system.
The American system will never do more than limp along, but there is some hope we can eventually develop a public funding system. We need people to blog about strategies for building a public funding system. Or shall we let a bunch neo-cons vanquish our hope?
We will have to work around these deficiencies, as we always have. Until our symphony structure becomes a funded entity on a national level, everyone must work hard to keep it alive in their own creative ways.