Suppose in 10 years all problems that orchestras have will be solved!
Suppose that orchestras have a vibrant young audience, that people all over the country are talking about what orchestras do. Suppose there aren’t funding problems. And that all of this has been accomplished without the slightest artistic compromise.
How — looking back now from this imagined 10-year perspective — would we have gotten there? What would have changed?
That was the conversation I led four years ago at a League of American Orchestras national conference. You can watch the entire session, if you like, since the League filmed it, and put the video on YouTube. Thanks to everyone there for that!
And thanks to my invaluable assistant for transcribing the workshop. You can read the transcription here.
But I thought I’d share the outline I made in advance — my script, if you like (though I was more than ready to toss it away if discussions erupted that were better than anything I’d planned).
I’m sharing this — recycling (though with a few changes) — a post I did just after the conference, because the session was a great success. Because the questions it asked proved to be very useful.
And above all because I’d like to do this workshop again. As an internal discussion for an orchestra, or any other classical music institution. I could even do it long distance, via Skype, though it’ll be much stronger in person.
Here’s what happened at the League.
Outlining the dream
I started by laying out my premise. Imagine, I said, that your orchestra 10 years from now has solved all its problems.
It has a large, new, excited young audience. College students go to your concerts on dates. Not a crazy idea. I’ve seen reports of Philadelphia Orchestra concerts being hot items for date nights back in the 1950s.
So your orchestra builds on that. You have special nights for area colleges, and students turn out by the hundreds.
Again not crazy. A century ago, the Boston Pops had college nights. MIT students snakedanced through the streets — all the way from Cambridge, across the Charles River — to get to their evenings.
When it was Harvard night, the Pops asked for extra police, because the Harvard students were rowdy, loudly demanding to hear the Academic Festival Overture. (These priceless details come from a 1940 book, Our American Orchestras and How They Are Supported, by Margaret Grant and Herman S. Hettinger.)
In 10 years, your community talks about everything you do. The buzz is amazing. You measure it — people are tweeting about your orchestra every day, whether they go to your concerts or not.
Though of course people do go to your concerts. They also listen to them online. They buy your recordings. They buy your merchandise, which isn’t just sold at your symphony store. They can buy it in stores and shops all over town.
You have no funding problems, and, as I said, you’ve done all this with no artistic compromise. In fact, you’re in a better artistic position than you’ve ever been in, more able to play whatever music you want. That’s because your support is so solid, and also because so much of it comes from younger people, who welcome hearing new music.
Why aren’t we there now?
I freely admitted — as of course I’d have to — that this is a dream. But dreams can be useful. They offer goals that, for all anyone knows, just might be achieved. They help us think in new ways. They jog us loose from preconceptions that, we might discover, are holding us back.
I quoted “Happy Talk,” a song from South Pacific:
You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
And then I moved on to the first exercise of the session. I asked the participants — more than 80 had signed up, and the room must have held around that many — to quickly write down three reasons why the dream wasn’t true right now. Why, I asked them, isn’t your orchestra having this kind of success?
To be honest, I was expecting some difficult replies. Attacks, maybe, on popular culture, how it’s destroying appreciation for any kind of art, classical music included. Or maybe orchestra staffers would blame their unionized musicians, given the ugly labor disputes we’ve seen this year. Or maybe musicians (a few were there) would blame orchestra managements.
Being positive
I was ready — gently — to resist negativity, to suggest we put problems aside for the hour the session would last. To suggest, also, that if we put them aside, we might come up with solutions. That we should be wary of blaming others for our problems, not least because that might blind us to things our orchestras could do on their own.
And I had examples of success, most of which will be familiar to faithful readers here.
- The Toronto Symphony, which really does have a youngish audience, one-third of it younger than 35.
- The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, in London, where a large young audience comes to specially-branded late-night concerts.
- Present Music, a new music group in Milwaukee, which for decades has had (if what they told me some years ago still is true) a subscription base of 200 or so people, with as many more, sometimes, showing up for their concerts.
But I didn’t need any of this. When I asked what people had written down — either waiting for hands to be raised, or else descending on people who hadn’t raised their hands, because I’ve learned from long experience (I do this each week in my Juilliard classes) that their thoughts are as valuable as those coming from people eager to speak — people just about universally blamed their own orchestras. Blamed them for not doing enough, for being stuffy, for not reaching out to their communities.
Here’s some of what they said:
- We have a dysfunctional board and an absentee music director
- We embody the classic definition of insanity. We keep on doing the same things, and expecting different results.
- We have a limited staff, and we’re not involved enough in education or in the community
- We operate day to day in crisis mode, and don’t do enough long-term planning
- We don’t have any risk capital — money to spend on new initiatives that may or may not work out
- We’re afraid we’ll offend subscribers and long-time supporters, if we do something new
So the people at my session were ahead of the game. They thought (hope they don’t mind me putting it this way) that they themselves were the problem. Which meant they were ready to change. Orchestras aren’t where they could be, because they haven’t done the things that would take them there.
Though I’d add one more reason. We aren’t in the bright place I imagined because we don’t really believe we could be there. Which then means we don’t put muscle behind major changes, because deep in our hearts we don’t believe they’re going to work out.
That’s enough for today. I’ll continue this post tomorrow.
The biggest current problem in getting most American kids interested in classical music- and the Fine Arts in general – might be that their parents aren’t much more knowledgeable than they are. I have served on fine arts boards for over 30 years and nowadays a lot if the ” and business and community leaders” on these boards – at least the ones in communities away from “the Coasts” or away from our other largest metropolitan areas – went to local colleges and regional “directional” state schools that recently have been upgraded to “university” status and are a distance from cultural centers. and have few on-campus cultural offerings of their own.
I know this might be an unpopular and upsetting thing to say but after a ton of watching and listening at various boards over the years, and being in the concert hall/opera house hundreds of nights – as both a season ticketholder and also a former orchestra member – I am absolutely convinced this is true and I think the arts consulting, producing, and consuming communities have for the most part missed it. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours go into “youth education”, but far too often for naught, sorry to say, with the boards on which I’ve served. I have seen a whole generation of kids – from the supposedly “best and brightest” homes – in my community of about 450,000 metro area get a decent helping of the fine arts through the schools K-8 and then it stopped, just as it did for their parents, and all the way back through the post baby boomer generations. So now you have professionals and business owners in their late 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s , who serve on let’s say the symphony board and they “kid” that they “don’t know Bach from Beethoven” – and they aren’t kidding ! Almost every time I go nowadays -once a week on average – some guy in a responsible position in town is rolling his/her eyes during intermission and fidgeting with his watch and “Hey meet us in the bar later if you’re staying; we’re gettin’ outta here NOW”. That sort of thing. I could go on and on. I know a very bright professional , does very well , who said he hadn’t been to an opera or symphony since a school trip 20 years ago. It was not stressed in the home growing up, either. “But we have a kinda neat family tradition; our annual cultural ‘thing’ is we go to the Symphony Pops’s Annual Christmas Concert ” !
That’s what we’re up against. Jazzing up kiddie “classical” concerts with rap, or rock, or Randy Newman ain’t gonna solve the problem, either. Whether one agrees with all of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” or not ( about what breeds success, or at least proficiency, if I might oversimply the book a bit) his premise about good things beginning at a young age, regardless of race, religion, or economic status) is exactly what I’ve observed in 30-plus years of fine arts board service , and a few years in the classical music business before that. So realistically the kids and their parents right now are kind of a lost cause. Sorry. Now : Don’t get rid of K-8 cultural education – but it needs to be expanded through 12th grade AND a required part of college curricula. It’s not impossible. The way you do it is through the credentialling – a big business today to put it bluntly – process that goes into school accrediting. People have come up with standards for “cultural sensitivity” that are now mandated in many schools. If we paid the same attention to cultural LITERACY , in 15 years time the number of parents and students who know and follow classical music is going to increase significantly. Hope people will think all of this through before reacting. I gave it a ton of thought before I wrote this and have been thinking about it for years. I guess it’s like golf and a lot of other good things: for most of us mortals it takes years to learn it correctly and then there’s still always something more to learn.
“Kids right now are kind of a lost cause…” Maybe… But education is NOT the answer. If only it were that easy.
At the risk of exposing “classytroll’s” identity (no racist rants in my inbox, please), I will say that I’m an “insider” too. I once served as the education director for a major market orchestra, a position I resigned after receiving board pressure to pivot away from inner city youth (“there’s no money there and they’ll never come to the concerts” etc.) and instead provide foundation funded musical babysitting for the trustee’s own kids (Gee, wonder why people hate the rich?).
Rather than abandon my at-risk students, I split the program off as a new venture. We burned through a lot of my cash but eventually attracted several major brands, foundations, etc. We had a good run until the financial crisis forced hard decisions. After mentoring my last student off to college, I shut it down determined to address the REAL problem:
OUR CONCERTS SUCK!
We can’t “educate” our way around this. At no other time in history has a cover band survived 150 years on the same tired playlist. Sure, Rain can still tour Beatles songs, but does anybody expect baby boomer nostalgia to keep that going for another 100 years? Of course not! Cultures move on. So called “classical” used to do the same. Only composers can keep it alive, and only in part. They do so by recycling the best musical DNA into new works targeting their own generation.
And why is this so scary? Even Bach was forgotten by the time Mozart found his musty fugues on a shelf and, recognizing at once the work of a genius, copied them out by hand. This is how art evolves. Popular and engaging new skins get draped over influential old bones. Composers, not administrators, are the evolutionary filter. Yet our “scene” is so stale young composers won’t touch it. They start bands, or write scores for movies or video games instead.
Let’s take a broader view of written music’s 2,000-year evolution. What we codify as “tradition” within the classical cult is relatively new. Is frozen in 1890 instrumentation “traditional”? Of course not! Berlioz and Wagner spent their lives on a quest for increased volume and expanded tone color… The best way to honor THAT tradition would be to plug in (metal strings are already 4X louder than Baroque gut anyhow) and to integrate FX pedals (fastest growing gear segment).
The first thing Bach did when testing a new organ was literally pull out all the stops. He liked it LOUD! So did Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, etc. Yet we berate amplification’s advocates as “uneducated”, “lazy”, or worse. This only compounds the problem. You can’t force the masses to like something. You must attract them the same way Mozart did, with competitive entertainment value (he lived for operatic spectacle, after all, sonatas just paid the bills). A Beethoven symphony sounds anemic in today’s 2,500 seat halls. Duh, it was composed for 400 seats. Today it should be amplified.
So what does this have to do with “the kids” being a lost cause? Well, they aren’t the lost cause… We are.
The inner-city youth I trained love ALL music, and several even presented their compositions in concerts I organized. But, like most rational people, they avoid the stench of death, and duh, sexy beats sell. So did I try to “purify” them when they wanted to work hip hop beats into their counterpoint exercises? Of course not! I like Bach’s dance tunes too.
The kids will show up if we program something cool. But Frankenstein stitching beats onto a 200-year-old corpse doesn’t cut it. We need fresh music. We need to re-embrace the craft standards that successfully trained every genius composer in our canon, then empower the next Beethoven to do what the first one did (make the orchestra louder, integrate new instruments to achieve that, add beats, etc.). But we must also clear the high bar of modern A/V production (amplification, video mapping, etc.). Some brave orchestra needs to make an artistic venture capital bet. Years ago an old friend offered one million dollars to a “Big Five” for this… They turned him down! Too risky… That orchestra recently went bankrupt.
As for me, I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is soon, but I won’t be paying to rearrange the Titanic’s deck chairs. Innovation amongst administrators, marketers, and educators is well meaning, but classical’s propaganda arm has failed for one simple reason, OUR CONCERTS SUCK. You can’t run the world’s most expensive tribute band forever. Symphonic music has abandoned the real traditions at its core (targeting young people, being as loud/impactful as possible, embracing new tone colors, and as early as Scriabin, integrating visuals). Instead, it has devolved into a refuge for cultish elitists eager to enforce made up purity standards. Only young composers can save it now, but they usually start bands like Muse instead. So don’t blame culture and don’t blame the kids. Blame the music. Then fix it if you dare!
Brava, brava, brava, brava, brava!!!!!
You’re so right about all of this. I often say it in more genteel ways, and I’m thrilled to see you just lay it all out without holding back. We — those of us in this cursed (at the present time) business — so often assume that if we only can get people to come to classical concerts, they’ll be won over by the glory of the music, and keep coming back.
Doesn’t happen. And to be honest, if someone from the outside (maybe, let’s say, the mom or dad of one of the kids at my kid’s school) tells me they’d love to go to a classical concert some time, and should they go to our local orchestra? Sure, I’ll say, try it. But you may not like it, and if you don’t, don’t think it’s your fault. Apart from a professionally skillful rendering of some established masterworks, with of course nuances a professional might appreciate, there’s in the larger sense not so much going on.
About composers loving noise — Handel and other Baroque composers loved large orchestras. There’s a painting in the Louvre showing an 18th century performance with 70 musicians playing. When I first heard a Handel opera at the Met, with a discreetly trimmed-down band, 30 musicians or so, I tried to imagine Handel’s reaction. “Thirty musicians in this giant space? Ridiculous! Give me 300!”
Also no reason to assume singers in the Baroque era all had small voices. They didn’t know they were singing Baroque music. I’d assume their voices varied in size just as singers’ voices do now.
Finally about boards and inner-city performances…they really think there’s no money in it? There are funders, foundations and individuals and government agencies to start with, who yearn to fund classical music diversity. Not to mention the funders you previously didn’t know who’d come out of thje woodwork once you were doing something big in the inner city. The mantra in the 2000s about foundation funding for orchestras is that it was increasingly hard to get, because foundations had shifted their emphasis to social justice. Put two and two together…
Your board was very short-sighted. Though there’s a stronger word.
My board knew the foundation’s cultural priorities, their “reverse Robin Hood” move required that! They wanted to use my earnest grant writing (on behalf of my inner-city composition students) to siphon off some cash for their bottom line… I expected that. But when they started twisting my arm to apply ALL funds I’d raised toward programs for THEIR not-so-needy kids (with some free tickets for urban youth to keep up appearances), that was my breaking point.
I was young and rash (25) and had ON MY OWN brought in more than enough funding to cover the newly created Education Director position, so I wasn’t about to cower. These (insert profanity here) people who cheat on their taxes also cheat on their grant accounting (DUH!). Not on my watch!
That was when I decided I didn’t need any existing classical “brand” to legitimize me. All I had to do was put up the money myself (or raise it) and I could tell them all to F-OFF… Which I did with GLEE (the way only a 25 year old can).
I’m a bit older and wiser now, but this story isn’t over… I took about five years off to focus on investing and it turns out the tricks rich A-Holes use to stay rich aren’t that hard to master if you’ve got a head for math. Buy some houses at the bottom, place some leveraged bets when the charts justify, blah, blah, blah… Not even that interesting really. Playing the markets allowed plenty of time for deep thought on the future of our art, and my current war chest now makes me mostly invulnerable to the industry’s BS. I’m well positioned, and I’ve got several decades left to bend the arc of history, but as you know, Greg, this is no small task. If I manage to have a better “end game” than Robert Schumann, I’ll be satisfied.
So now you know the “origin story” of “classytroll”… Money where my mouth is coming soon…
As I learn more of your story, it gets better and better. I think I’ll be discreet, and not offer my own thoughts about the people you had to deal with. But good to tell them NO!
E pluribus unum: and yet we live in our own reality, in our own time, with our own values.
Examples of popular date nights from 70 years ago are useful to illustrate a dream, but such examples need to be understood in the context of their time. No one knew who the Beatles were then, or what rock and hip hop would become. It was simply a different world of possibilities and choices for the human spirit to “choose-your-own-adventure” and exist within. Statistics clearly show that in 2017 a sexy groove wrapped in the skin of an earworm will trump aural complexity in the taste of most young listeners. But then, it also seems pretty obvious that the modern experiences the average classical music champion and pop music devotee desire to receive are -generally speaking- two totally different things. A primal groove tends to make bodies physically move in all but the most puritan among us. Classical structure engages and challenges the mental experience of the brain in a different way. What experience are we attempting to have when we “listen to music” or “go to a show?”
I think it is necessary to consider population increase and technological advances when discussing what worked in the past vs. what can work in the future. We have twice as many people on the planet now as we did during Woodstock, not 50 years ago. We also now have cell phones -essentially pocket computers/external hard drives of the mind- that are far more powerful than the computers that helped land us on the moon. Given the convenience of technology and the overwhelming sensory overload that accompanies the modern human life experience, is it really any wonder that the deep, focused training required to truly understand and appreciate classical music structures is a less popular pursuit, given the sheer diversity of ways that a modern human can engage with life, entertain themselves, and have personally satisfying human experiences?
I say this as a student of classical composition who came to the field after many years of playing in rock and pop bands. I love pop music and I love classical, but what got me interested in classical music in the first place was the tradition’s respect for structure and counterpoint. After years of hearing the same repeated pop progressions (in my experience, often poorly executed due to a lack of training despite natural talent), my musical sensibility wanted to be challenged further. Studying classical music and our system of tonality has served to increase my enjoyment of ALL music – at least, what I consider to be music. Taste and opinion are value judgments. People will use different words to describe the same thing, or use the same words to circle around different arguments – an inherent limitation of using objective symbols to represent and communicate subjective phenomenon. For what are we using words for, if not to describe a personal state of mind, a state of consciousness, to manifest a point of view once hidden and now revealed? An author writes from a single point of view and it is true that there is no collective without individuals. Music and art -on the cultural level- do not exist in a personal vacuum. To perceive depth in any subject requires multiple points of view and so we are all in this experience together, whether we can effectively communicate and learn from each other or not.
Is the attempt to save classical music narcissistic marketing, or is it really what a modern audience in 2017 cares about? What is “classical music”, and why should people care? What resonates in the hearts of the people? Where is the common ground that can be gained? Which answers are hidden in plain sight? I think if classical music is to have a bright future, we need to tap into the spirit of what past audiences found compelling about classical music and engage that part of the human spirit in new artistic ways that are relevant to a modern audience. Fresh concerts are past due. The only way out is forward!
Maybe not so helpful to compare the best things that happen (as you see them) with the worst things that happen in pop. After a long professional life in classical music, I “defected” (as I like to say) to pop, and found so many things that were better — more musical creativity, for one thing, and kinds of complexity that had nothing to do with harmony or counterpoint. So many years I spent in classical music, losing brain cells to routine performances and routine new pieces that on the whole broke no new ground, and also had no audience. Compared to that, what Prince (just to cite one example) was doing in the late ’80s was a great artistic improvement.
I’m not the only who’s found a similarity between indie rock these days and what younger classical composers are writing. And I’ve seen that indie rock fans can go for new classical music.
I’m not saying, by the way, that all classical new music is bad. I’ve been made speechless with joy by a number of composers — Reich and Glass, for a start, but also Meredith Monk, David Del Tredici, and, very recently, Caroline Shaw. And of course when I covered pop music as a critic I heard a lot of bad stuff. But very tricky to judge classical and pop against each other. Easiest thing in the world to load the dice, and make the comparison come out the way you want it to.