In my last post, I quoted an idealistic thought from Simon Rattle, that orchestra musicians should look like the people in the city around them. My point was to talk about how not very specific that thought was, how when we say things like that we don’t really define what we mean mean, or plan how we’d achieve such goals.
And in passing, I said we weren’t likely to see what Rattle imagines until classical music becomes a truly contemporary art.
But what would that mean? I put down a kind of IOU:
And yes, I realize that what I’m saying needs to be fleshed out. What would classical music be like, after it’s reborn as a contemporary art? When it involves people far more diverse than what we see now? I’m not going to address this now. But just to be clear — I know I have to.
Time now to do this.
Here, in outline, is how classical music woumightld look after it’s reborn.
The audience would be younger.
And yes, we need a younger audience to survive. But that’s not my point. My point is that the older audience we have now is an historical anomaly. Not seen in past generations.
I’ve seen studies from the 1930s up to the 1960s, showing a much younger audience in those years. Like the orchestra audience in Minneapolis in 1955 — median age, 35. Meaning that half of it was younger!
And then there’s endless anecdotal evidence. Like a New York Times report of teenage girls flooding the Met Opera for the farewell performance of a favorite diva. Or E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, in which we find people in their teens and early 20s at a symphony concert, one of them even following a score, with no one thinking that was unusual.
For more details, go here.
(And does anyone think the women swooning over Liszt in the 19th century were in their sixties?)
How the audience aged
As far as I know, our audience (at least in the US) only started to age in the 1970s. And that happened, I’m sure (I lived through those years, remember), because our culture radically changed in the 1960s. But classical music didn’t change in those ways.
So people growing up after the ‘60s came of age in a culture classical music didn’t fit. Classical music couldn’t tell them much about the world they lived in. So — more and more as the years went on — younger people didn’t care about it. In the ‘80s, the percentage of people under 30 at classical music performances just collapsed. Leaving the audience — and again, more and more as the years went on — made up of older people who fell in love with classical music before the culture changed.
So a younger audience for classical music would be normal, if the collapse hadn’t happened. So if we fix the collapse — if we bring classical music back to its former place as a central part of our culture — then the audience will be younger again.
I’m going to stop here, and save the rest for future posts. But, for anyone curious, here are the other things I’d expect to see. When classical music becomes a contemporary art:
We’ll play much more new music. No longer will a classical music performance most likely be of masterworks from the past.
Everything in how we present ourselves will to be contemporary The language we use when we market ourselves, the way we look when we perform. And much more. No more white tie and tails! And we’ll be far more diverse.
That’s a start. More to come, including one maybe radical thought.
Music outside our little bubble has a beat, these days. Which isn’t a trivial fact. It reflects the huge fusion of western and African music that African-Americans created after they were forcibly brought to the US as slaves. A fusion which — as anyone can hear — moved out from the American black community and changed the music of the entire world. In the past, classical music absorbed all kinds of outside influences. How do we come to terms with this one?
It would be needed to see some current volume data. Your quotes are pretty old and may well be on the mark but for instance while the audiences may be getting older are there more empty seats? I have been going to the NYPHIL for 30 years (I started when I could afford it) and the audiences for the 6 or so concerts I go to are definitely getting younger that they used to be and the house is probably 90 percent full unless A good soloist and great classical
Music is being played, then the hall is full! What are the actual numbers of seats sold for the Met and NYPHIL, not the recipes but the seats?
Hi, Stephen. You’re asking a good question, which I’ve addressed here before. Yes, there are more empty seats. Many more. Peter Gelb, for instance, has been very honest about the Met Opera’s decline in ticket sales. They’re far from filling the house, very far. Opera America, the organization that represents US opera companies, gave me a chart a few years ago showing a steady decline in ticket sales since 2000 at the biggest opera companies. You may know that my wife Anne Midgette is the classical music critic for the Washington Post. Opera America told her not long ago that the Santa Fe Opera was the most successful opera company in the US, because they’d had the smallest ticket sales decline.
Orchestras keep these numbers secret, because they’re afraid their donors would be scared away if they knew the truth. As one notable orchestra manager said to me at a party some years ago, “The public must never be told how badly we’re doing!” I’ve seen some of the secret figures, and they really looked frightening.
I’d suggest, by the way, not to trust what your eyes seem to tell you if you go to concerts. I remember a very well known critic writing some time ago that orchestras weren’t in trouble because, as he wrote, the halls looked “pretty full.” So consider this. If the orchestra sells 94% of its tickets, the hall looks pretty full. If in 10 years they lose ticket sales, and now just fill 86% of their hall, the hall still looks pretty full. But the orchestra has lost 8.5 percent of its audience, which is no small thing. It’s sure to have an impact on their bottom line. When the big orchestras began to run regular deficits, the marketing director of one of them told me privately that their deficit could be entirely explained by a loss of ticket revenue.
For classical music as a whole, consider this piece of information. My wife was told by the director of a major presenting institution that there were only five classical soloists who could sell out a hall — Josh Bell, Itzhak Perlman, Lang Lang, Yo-Yo Ma, and Renee Fleming. My wife checked with other presenting organizations, who confirmed this from their experience. This was a number of years ago, and we’ve seen Fleming give performances that weren’t sold out, so she may have to be taken off this list. By comparison, myt wife was told, 30 years ago there were 20 or more artists who could sell out a hall. The obvious explanation for the change is that the audience is now smaller, so much smaller that only the very most popular artists can generate interest enough to sell many tickets. Formerly, with a notably larger audience, people who weren’t the most popular still had enough fans to sell out a house.
This isn’t a pretty picture. The classical music field could do a better job assembling data — and making it public — but there’s no doubt that ticket sales have fallen. To end on a personal note, Two substantial classical music organizations with which I’ve worked as a consultant told me privately that they’d been losing q0 to 20 subscribers each year for more than a decade. From everything I’ve heard, they’re typical. As I said, not a pretty picture.
On the “beat” idea – I am not so sure. A story that doesn’t quite qualify as data, but here it is anyway . . . the community orchestra (the Redwood Symphony) that plays at our community college gave a concert of its typical fare last month: a Brahms symphony, the Britten Piano Concerto, and two pieces by Mason Bates. While not intending to run an experiment, I sort of accidentally did. I teach two sections of a music fundamentals class; I played examples of the Britten concerto for one class, and showed a video clip about the very groovy “Mothership” by Mason Bates to the other class. 5 people from the Britten class went to the concert; only 1 from the Bates class chose to go. (Both classes have about 25 students in them, nearly all not music majors.) Draw no conclusions from this one story, but it is consistent with my 25 years of experience of talking to college age students about new and newish classical music. For some students it is not truly groovy or heavy enough; other students are oddly conservative and want only white tie, tails, and music older than the Rite of Spring. I am all for groovy music (click the name link!) and alternative dress styles, but that is still somehow not the issue.
Mason is quite a good composer, but Britten might be a better one! That’s one quick explanation. But anyway, you need more data. Sample size, for this experiment: one. That is, one experiment with one class. Not enough to prove much. You need to control for many factors.
Anyhow, I wasn’t saying that music without a beat wouldn’t have any appeal in our time. We’ve got what must be the most polymorphous musical culture that ever existed. I was talking about something larger, more general — that there is in fact a general prevalence now of music with a beat, and that classical music won’t really be part of our wider culture until it’s able to acknowledge, absorb, and reflect that, in ways largely TBD. I certainly wasn’t saying that older classical pieces without any beat would disappear!
I’m right there with you, Greg. Three quick thoughts:
1. Another way of framing your push to make classical music contemporary is to borrow Wittgenstein’s concept of a “form of life.” His point was that the language we use is meaningful not intrinsically but only contextually and relationally, on the basis of a shared form of life. If that’s true of language (or language-games, as he put it to emphasize their embeddedness), it’s also true of art (art-games? music-games?). So you’re saying that the form of life in which classical music arose and made sense — had meaning — has since changed. But classical music hasn’t (much) changed, and therefore has lost some of its ability to mean. What’s wonderful about this framing is that it takes the emphasis off of the question of classical music’s “greatness” or “timelessness” and puts it on the relationship between how we live and what kinds of artistic and social experiences we seek. In other words, “contemporary” is a matter of alignment and relevance, not inherent or absolute value (which doesn’t really exist, and never has). Your point about having a beat is even stronger in that frame: the beat of EDM or hip-hop clearly has meaning(s) in relation to our current form of life.
2. Contemporary also implies present-tense, which runs counter to classical music’s ideal of preordained, pre-scripted performance of a score — in other words, of “composed” music itself. So in addition to your point about having to wrestle with the idea of a beat, I would nominate wrestling with spontaneity, improvisation, and present-ness in general. Oh, and amplification.
3. Re: your exchange with Stephen, I just want to remind us that the percentage of seats sold is the product not just of demand but also supply. It would be relevant if (as I suspect) orchestras played more evenings of a given program, played more programs, and/or played in bigger halls, during the decades you’re talking about. I share your sense that attendance has eroded, but empiricism requires us to acknowledge that seeing more empty seats could simply be telling us that supply has gradually been exceeding demand.
Thanks!
Great to see you here, Peter. We should catch up offline.
Kind of briefly right now, you’re of course right in your third point. Though what I think concerns the people who run classical music institutions now, and what concerns me, is the decline in the last two or three decades, when the halls have largely been the same ones throughout that time span. Though it does seem at least to me that if big orchestras in the ’60s sold 100% of their seats, there surely must be a decline in absolute numbers between then and now. Hall sizes couldn’t have changed all that much! Still, we’d need data to support that assumption, however plausible it might seem.
As for your deeper thoughts, thanks. Helpful. In my experience, though, there are people we might call classical music purists who’ll resist any attempt to frame cultural change in a neutral way, not implying any value judgment. That’s because they have a strong value judgment of their own, which is that contemporary culture is terrible. Shallow, empty, corrupt, commercial. In my experience, these people don’t know much about contemporary culture (and especially about pop music). And they skid right past problems with the culture of the past. But they’d resist what you and I are saying, no matter how value-free we might try to make it.
An excellent (meaning I had never thought of it) point about the African American influence on much music and indeed on other art forms.
I don’t know what the translation of this influence on what we call classical music would look like.
And that makes the potential quite exciting.
It almost certainly would not consist of just introducing jazz rhythms.
What would be great to see it many musicians and bands taking the idea and trying it out.
There would be many failures but probably many exciting discoveries.
A possible forum for experimentation might be a late night kind-of jam session after the main concert is finished.
Nice to hear from you, Ken. I think we have some idea of what can happen to classical music when an African-American beat (and general point of view) gets mixed in. For one thing, there are composers, most of them younger, who routinely incorporate the sound and feeling of current pop music of all kinds. Including the beat. I’ve done it myself, though I’m not so young. With the understandable result that some classical players can’t feel the rhythms I write when I’m doing that. They can play them accurately, reading the notation, but they don’t have the feeling.
Rick Robinson, who often comments here, writes music that incorporates blues and rock sounds and rhythms as if they’d always been part of classical music. That’s a real gift. He happens to be African-American, but I don’t think you have to be, to incorporate that music as he does. You just, I’d think, have to feel it deep inside you. As many people today do.
Then there could be an effect on performance. I once heard parts of the trio version of L’histoire du soldat played by people with a lot of tock feeling and experience. The rhythms came alive in a new way. And, for yet another view of this, a marvelous group called The Portland Cello project plays a version of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps for (I think) five cellos. Including a soloist who plays a version of Coltrane’s solo. One thing that intrigues me about this is that the playing doesn’t swing, rhythmically, the way jazz does, and yet it has an authentic jazz feeling. I think that comes from having internalized the music enough for them to play it their own way, without falsifying it. I can imagine things like that happening often enough in a future classical music culture in which the African-American influence was acknowledged as it is in our wider culture.
Thanks for the shout-out Greg! What an excellent discussion of what might or could be ‘universal’ or ‘contemporary’ in classical music. What classical music IS varies, dependent on where we are coming from. It CAN represent a time and place, but it can also reflect US here/now, individually or collectively. Focusing on sharing classical music as a tool with a wider public, CutTime® works to shift mindsets from the former to the latter. I don’t even care about art-for-art’s-sake anymore. What good is it if it can’t also work outside the sanctuary?
My thoughts, in brief, run that classical music (‘clam’ for short), being largely wordless (since choral rep is usually in a foreign language), needs three or more things to become instant hits with new audiences. 1) Strong or at least regular pulse (shifting barlines and mixed meters are confusing and ‘intellectual’). 2) A relevant context set by words (the brief setup WHY the composer wrote the piece is fine. Better is WHY we play this piece again and again.) 3) Outward signs of PASSION from the performers as defined by the pop-music audience, such as animated movements, utterances while playing, emotions worn on the sleeve. This is by no means exhaustive or exclusive; just something to consider. The performers need, at times, to be quite proactive and lead the classical revolution, rather than JUST play it safe in orchestras and traditional concerts. We can have both.
Now, compositionally, I reasoned that if Mozart, Beethoven and Dvorak would weave in occasional elements of folk music and exotic influences of THEIR time, we could do the same to reset the context for romantic-style composition in ours. The folk music of our time is urban pop and folk: Latin, gospel, soul, hip-hop, bluegrass, country, salsa, rock, etc. Here are two examples among several. Keep in mind, they are not intended to engage the cogniscenti, rather to acculturate or introduce ‘outsiders’ to the adventures of sonata form, counterpoint and simple development.
https://soundcloud.com/mrcuttime/highland-park-mi-city-of-trees
https://soundcloud.com/mrcuttime/robinson-pork-n-beansmp3
Thanks as always, Rick. Especially for the links, so people can hear what you’re talking about.
“So people growing up after the ‘60s came of age in a culture classical music didn’t fit. Classical music couldn’t tell them much about the world they lived in.”
But is that the nature of the art form, to tell people much about the world they live in? If this were true, the meaning of, for instance, the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin etc. etc. would evaporate somewhere in the decennium after their death. Did the music of Beethoven tell something about the surrounding world to audiences of around 1900, when that world had changed in a drastic way, probably much more so than around the sixties of the last century? The answer seems to be: yes – but not in a literal way. For instance, Beethoven was stirred by the revolutionary urges of the French Revolution, but what he conveyed in his heroic works was not ‘the French Revolution’ but the revolutionary spirit, which is a universal experience of humanity, not bound to a specific time and place.
Classical music as an art form is the distillation of life experience from reality into another category, which is non-conceptual, and which addresses the emotional areas of the listener in a non-conceptual way. Music does not express the real storm which was its inspiration, but the ‘storm-like’, how it feels to be in a storm. And so with all the ‘subjects’ of music, be them observations or experiences of the composer, or purely formal explorations. The dynamics of music touch the inborn perceptive systems in the listener, which are universal. An important essay on this perception framework is Steven Semes’ ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’ on the website of the Future Symphony Institute:
https://www.futuresymphony.org/le-violon-dingres-some-reflections-on-music-painting-and-architecture/
The conclusion can only be that the cultural schism of the sixties resulted in a regression of understanding on the side of the audiences, and not in some inherent flaw of the art form, a failing to ‘catch-up’ with the time. The misunderstanding that classical music should tell audiences something about their time, is the result of not understanding that this music reflects universal life experience and therefore can be understood by people in different places at different times, because it tells audiences something about their own life experience in a non-conceptual, non-literal way. Relating these experiences to the realities of the world around them, is a short-cut, taking the nature of the art form too literally.
John, this would be a long discussion. I’m not going to go into much of it now, except to note that I never said classical music’s _only_ meaning would be to express the culture of our time. Or of the time in which it was written. Of course artworks that stay in play past the eras in which they’re created would have new meanings as time goes on.
But, my second thought for now, our familiar classical masterworks most definitely expressed the culture of the time in which they were created, and the audiences of those times reacted to them that way. And therefore no one had to ask what the meaning or relevance of them was. It was obvious. As it isn’t today.
And then you ask what Beethoven communicated in 1900. Clearly it’s possible to have long spans of time in which artworks and other cultural expressions keep being relevant, in ways that everyone grasps without having to analyze. That was true of classical music maybe through the 1950s. And it was only after that, that our culture changed in ways that made the implicit and explicit content of classical music seem less connected to us. For something similar, consider the unquestioned relevance of Latin and ancient Greek in our culture throughout the centuries, right down to the start of the last one. And even in 1950, there was a book about James Joyce by a well-known scholar (I’m blanking on his name) that quoted passages from Greek classics with no translation, simply assuming that educated readers could read and understand them. But those days passed, and Latin and Greek don’t have the automatic relevance they used to have.
Finally, this: “the cultural schism of the sixties resulted in a regression of understanding on the side of the audiences.” I suspect there’s an implication here that the regression of understanding was a bad thing, rather than simply a shift of interest, with no value judgment implied, from one thing to another. And you realize that many people who have all of your knowledge and education would disagree with you, if that’s what you believe.
As for “this music reflects universal life experience,” we could talk about that one all night. Is this the only music that reflects universal life experience? And truly does it reflect the experience of all people in all times and places? Many, many assumptions are packed into that idea.
I’m right there with you, Greg. Three quick thoughts:
1. Another way of framing your push to make classical music contemporary is to borrow Wittgenstein’s concept of a “form of life.” His point was that the language we use is meaningful not intrinsically but only contextually and relationally, on the basis of a shared form of life. If that’s true of language (or language-games, as he put it to emphasize their embeddedness), it’s also true of art (art-games? music-games?). So you’re saying that the form of life in which classical music arose and made sense — had meaning — has since changed. But classical music hasn’t (much) changed, and therefore has lost some of its ability to mean. What’s wonderful about this framing is that it takes the emphasis off of the question of classical music’s “greatness” or “timelessness” and puts it on the relationship between how we live and what kinds of artistic and social experiences we seek. In other words, “contemporary” is a matter of alignment and relevance, not inherent or absolute value (which doesn’t really exist, and never has). Your point about having a beat is even stronger in that frame: the beat of EDM or hip-hop clearly has meaning(s) in relation to our current form of life.
2. Contemporary also implies present-tense, which runs counter to classical music’s ideal of preordained, pre-scripted performance of a score — in other words, of “composed” music itself. So in addition to your point about having to wrestle with the idea of a beat, I would nominate wrestling with spontaneity, improvisation, and present-ness in general. Oh, and amplification.
3. To your exchange with Stephen, I just want to remind us that the percentage of seats sold is the product not just of demand but also supply. It would be relevant if (as I suspect) orchestras played more evenings of a given program, played more programs, and/or played in bigger halls, during the decades you’re talking about. I share your sense that attendance has eroded, but empiricism requires us to acknowledge that seeing more empty seats could simply be telling us that supply has gradually been exceeding demand.
Thanks!
Good points, Peter. Thanks, and great to see you here! We should catch up offline. Regarding the simplest point you made, your last one, of course you’re right. Though what’s really concerning to the people running the field now, and to me, is the decline during the past couple of decades, when almost all the halls are the same ones throughout that time span. And even then, it occurs to me, if in the late 1960s orchestras could take for granted that they were selling all their seats, even without specific details of hall capacity I think we’re safe in assuming there’s been a decline in demand. Of course we should have the actual numbers to check that assumption, but surely the halls were approximately the same size.
Something I remember with amusement. When the LA Phil moved to Disney Hall, they bragged of selling a higher percentage of capacity. But of course the Chandler Pavilion, where they played before Disney Hall, had more seats.
Regarding your deeper thoughts, numbers one and two…I fear there are classical music purists, so to speak, who’ll put a value judgment on the contemporary frame, no matter how neutral we try to make it. They do that by thinking contemporary culture is terrible — empty, commercial, shallow — and so the idea that classical music could live in a contemporary frame means that we’re asking it to become worthless. Normally people with this view don’t know much about contemporary culture, and of course skid past things not so great about the culture of the past, but they’re firm in their belief. Probably not so many of them around, though, as there used to be.