Simon Rattle wants the musicians in his orchestra to look like the city they come from. Or so I read some time ago in the Guardian. Since he’s now music director of the London Symphony, he’s saying that he wants the musicians in his orchestra to look like London. “Why do our groups of classical musicians not look like London looks,” he said, “and what can we do about it?”
This sounds like a great goal. But it’s a heavy lift. Suppose I try the same thinking in the city I live in, Washington, DC. If the musicians in our orchestra, the National Symphony, looked like DC, half of them would be black.
And many of them — given DC’s growth as a destination city for younger people (even if they don’t work in politics) — would be millennials. Many with tattoos, some with pink or purple hair.
Could that happen?
I can imagine how a DC-like orchestra would look. And I love it (putting aside for the moment practical questions like what happens to the musicians already in the NSO; a thorough change would take a generation).
But what’s harder to imagine is how we’d get there. We know why the people I’ve just named aren’t in our orchestras. They don’t become classical musicians because, by and large, they don’t have a classical music culture. They like other kinds of art, art that’s more contemporary, that reflects the lives they live.
So to attract them, we’d have to do more than educate them (as many of us advocate) in classical music. Why would they want to be educated? They’re not interested! No, we’d have to become more like the art they love. Which means a giant change in what classical music would be, giant changes in the music that we play and in how we play it.
I think that would be a great leap into renewed artistic excitement. Raising our standards, rather than lowering them.
But how could it happen? Who’s planning for it, apart maybe from the many moves to create special concerts for younger audiences, and to create a few opportunities for more diverse musicians? But what we need isn’t to create something special. It’s to revamp everything we do.
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 to be more specific
So back to Simon Rattle. I admire him for wanting what he said he wants. A terrific goal for any classical music institution right now.
But it needs to be defined. What do we mean, exactly, when we say we want our musicians to look like the world outside them?
I tried to define what that might mean, when I talked about DC. But mostly, when people get excited about a goal like this, they don’t define it very clearly.
And if we’re not clear, if we don’t know in specific terms what the goal really is, how can we know how far or near we are to it? Or how to measure when we’ve reached it? Or what we’d have to do to get there? We’re saying something that sounds good, but what we say (and, I fear, what we think) is really pretty vague.
That doesn’t mean we’re doing anything bad. We’re taking a good first step. Starting to be upbeat, progressive, socially conscious, realistic, and future-oriented. But after our first steps, we have to get serious, and figure out exactly what we mean.
To finish…
One thought. Why should we think that classical musicians would ever look exactly like the outside world? Look at audiences. The audiences for other musics don’t look alike, and none of them completely reflect the world at large.
I noticed, when I was a pop music critic, that each artist, each band, sliced the demographic pie its own way. And some large divisions were obvious. To look only at race: I think I was the only white person at a Luther Vandross show. The only African-American I saw at Bruce Springsteen was Clarence Clemons, Springsteen’s sax player. At Prince concerts and at hiphop shows, the crowds were evenly divided.
So if pop music crowds can vary, and if the musicians in different kinds of pop acts vary, too, why wouldn’t classical music have its own kind of people? So yes, we have to be far more diverse. Can’t survive into the future as the ethnic music — and I’m saying this with an affectionate smile — of friendly, well-off older white people.
But exactly what our demographic mix can be is yet to be discovered.
And now a warning. I’d beware of any thought that classical music somehow is universal, that somehow it could or should appeal to everyone. Look around at everything else in our culture, and you’ll see the world just doesn’t work that way.
A story, told by one of my Juilliard students, some years ago:
Someone in his family came to visit him, someone who’d never been in NY before. This visitor loved the mix of people on the streets. A mix of races, cultures, nationalities, lifestyles.
Then my student took her to a Lincoln Center concert. She looked around, and said, dismayed: “Where is everyone?”
But the German government did exactly that, uh, ” diversifying”the orchestras, to make them hmnn, more ” representative”, beginning in 1934 !! One can look it up. Just sayin’.
Your articles can certainly be thought-provoking, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the points made in them. Thank you for that and good luck to you.
Thanks, Mike. I’m guessing that the German, that is Nazi government did was remove Jews from orchestras, so the orchestras would be more like what the Nazis thought Germany should be. No exactly what Simon Rattle was talking about! Exclusion vs inclusion…
You’re certainly right, Greg. But I take Mike’s larger point to be nearer to what you say above: that to achieve an organization that “looks like” the culture at large in which it lives (or even that looks like its particular consumer base) is not an inherently noble goal; the less so when “looks like” means some range of ethnic or religious or gender or “race” categories. Every performing arts organization needs to keep an eye on how it might better speak to the diverse sensibilities in its realm. But I’d hate to see an overly literal implementation of Rattle’s goal that recruited according to a “diversity” template. (and, no, I don’t suppose Rattle meant it that way either).
Thank you Greg for yet another incredibly pertinent article – sometimes I think you are reading my mind all the way down here in Auckland, NZ. As a manager I contemplate all the various aspects of presentation – venue, concert format, promotion (channels and language) but at the end of the day its the programme content that will lead the change in audience following. So we need brave and progressive programmers to bring appropriate content that resonate with those people we would like perform for i.e. we will have an audience that looks more like our general public – the people of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Hi, Vanessa. Thanks! Good to see you here again. I’d love to stay in touch, see how you and the trio are doing. Watching the trio’s video of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer — wow. First, what a terrific, totally workable, irresistible idea to do that piece with a piano trio. Totally works. And what a marvelous singer! Wonderful website, too. Welcoming, artistic. You may have cost me a day’s work with that link. So curious to see it all.
I really enjoy reading your blogs, every time.
Thanks!
Wonderful and thanks for taking the time to see what we’ve been up to recently. We’re in a time of transition as two of our founding members have moved on (after 15 years together) and we are working with guest musicians in the violinist’s and pianist’s chairs. Its an exciting and challenging time as we rethink the ways we work and communicate our information to those interested in NZTrio. A very relevant evolution though!
Always thinking of ways we could actually meet and share ideas beyond the digital channel. Will keep in touch about that. In the meantime, keep up your invaluable work and commentary – happy readership in NZ!
Vanessa
I have to laugh at myself. I didn’t recognize the singer! But my wife named him. Simon O’Neill — not exactly an unknown. Of course from New Zealand, and I see on Wikipedia that he’s active in New Zealand musical affairs. Still, I don’t know that every singer with a big international career would sing with piano trio, and seem so informal, so relaxed about it. Bravo for him.
Nice to see you blogging again, Greg.
Perhaps new music that both the base and the new audience would like is an idea. New music that is both accessible and sophisticated in its own modern way. I know it sounds crazy, but if you’re creative, anything is possible.
Hi, Liza. And nice to see you back in my comments!
I agree. The renovation of classical music has to start with what we play. If that changes dramatically, then everything else will change.
Worth pondering whether the new pieces need to be accessible, though. I’d say they should represent the range of what’s being created. Important also to ask accessible to whom. A lot of things in indie rock and dance music wouldn’t please the mainstream classical audience. And I’ve seen younger people have no trouble with some of the atonal masterworks from the last century. Younger people, that is, who don’t have a classical music culture. In general, I think there’s a lot of openness to music of all kinds out in the world. Maybe not in the classical music world, but outside it, where our new audience will come from. So we might do much better with a new audience if we play music that’s full of surprises and challenges.
I think my definition of accessible is very wide, aimed at a wide variety of audiences. I think we agree.
I hope folks click the link and read about Rattle’s plan. It is specific, targeted, funded, and sound. There are numerous local programs and projects, many initiated by young musicians, who are often more diverse than our major symphony orchestras, doing this work at the neighborhood and community level. On the national level, there is the Sphinx Organization.
Wendy, that’s an excellent point. Glad you posted that. Rattle’s plan, as I should have noted, is very detailed, very specific…except that it won’t do much to make the London Symphony look like London. It will get people who aren’t the usual classical musicians playing classical music. It’s hardly the only program aimed at doing that, as you implicitly note by mentioning Sphinx. (Which, by the way, has a new long-term partnership with Juilliard, where I teach.)
But these programs won’t by themselves change the look of our orchestras. That’s a long-range and really challenging project. Needs to have its own separate, specific goals. I could have been clearer. I could have said that Rattle’s projects are specific. But his larger thought of making the London Symphony more like London is couched in very vague terms, which won’t help achieve whatever that larger goal is thought to mean.
I might note that there’s a lifestyle component to this kind of change. Would be wonderful to have musicians of color in our orchestras, as Sphinx and others (Rattle is among them) would like. And as people running orchestras would like!
But what if the diverse people coming into orchestras as, within their demographic, somewhat conservative (as the majority-demographic musicians tend to be). Don’t clearly represent contemporary life in their demographic. Then orchestras will be more diverse, and bravo for that. But still won’t look like the cities they’re in.